My Entry into Fantasy and Magic: The Gathering® | The Hobbit™

Last week was the start of Magic: The Gathering® | The Hobbit™ card previews. In last week's Making Magic, I talked about how we do returns at large, specifically for Universes Beyond and Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit in particular. Today is going to be a bit more personal. The Hobbit has an important place in my life, so I wanted to discuss that in today's article. Along the way, I will show off a new preview card.

---

My love of reading began when I was very young. My parents taught me how to read before I even started school. And I read as much as I could. I would pick a topic, visit a local library, and take out every book I could find on that subject. In fact, when I was in kindergarten, I read something like ten percent of the books they had in the school library. I actually moved in the middle of the school year, and my old school's librarian called my new school's librarian to tell them I was coming. Suffice it to say, I love reading.

When I was young, I preferred to read non-fiction. I wanted to learn about the world, so I would go deep on a topic and learn everything I could about it. Once I read everything I could find on that subject (this was long before the internet), I would pick a new topic and go deep on it. Space, spies, robots, strange pets, ancient games—I loved learning about all sorts of things.

One of my favorite topics back then was mythology. I would pick a country and read all about their mythology—their gods, their heroes, their monsters. I was fascinated by the similarities that ran between cultures and the differences. A lot of cultures were answering the same questions about the world. (Why does the sun rise? Where does lightning come from? What happens when we die?) But they were all so different. The stories usually had splashy characters and epic events. I was enthralled.

I did read some fiction. My parents always read stories to me as a child, and I enjoyed escaping into new worlds. My absolute favorite genre was science fiction. Space exploration, time travel, weird science. I loved it all and read everything I could get my hands on. But I didn't read any fantasy.

In fact, I was pretty down on the fantasy genre. Interestingly, I didn't make the connection between mythology and fantasy. To me, fantasy was this lame type of story where every cool thing about the world didn't exist yet. Science fiction was about the future, and that was exciting. Fantasy was about the past, but not even the cool past. It was about people on horses with swords. Boring!

In hindsight, I think there were a couple reasons I felt like this. First, I grew up in the 1970s. Fantasy was mostly absent from pop culture, especially movies and television. There was a little bit, but it was fringe, and the quality level was pretty low. Back then, geekiness was still something that you kind of kept to yourself and your friends. Some popular films had made it okay to publicly enjoy science fiction, but fantasy didn't have anything on that scale.

When I went to Los Angeles years later, I would learn that the conventional wisdom in Hollywood, at the time, was that fantasy wasn't commercially viable. The few attempts they made at it had all done horribly, so the entire genre was written off.

Second, the creatures of fantasy, as I knew them at the time, seemed pretty lame. What was exciting about Elves with bows? In science fiction, I got aliens with laser weapons. That seemed infinitely more exciting. So, even though I was a voracious reader, I didn't read any fantasy books. If you had asked me if I liked fantasy at the time, I would have said no. That is, until sixth grade.

My school librarian recommended The Hobbit to me. (I got along quite well with school librarians.) I had heard of The Lord of the Rings but didn't know anything about it. She told me The Hobbit was a classic and that she thought I'd really enjoy it. I asked what it was about. She said it was an adventure story. Importantly, she told me there was a dragon in it. At the time, that didn't do much for me. The only stories with dragons I had read had been fairy tales, which I was familiar with but weren't my favorite at that age, so it wasn't the draw she had hoped it would be. But she had recommended a lot of other books I'd really enjoyed, so I decided to give it a shot. As a quick aside, become friends with librarians. They suggest excellent books.

I was not ready for how much I enjoyed The Hobbit. It was unlike anything I had ever read. And yes, it has a really cool dragon in it. My opinion of dragons went way up. But beyond that, it made me look at fantasy in a whole new light. It turns out that Elves with bows, when done right, can be very cool. Before reading The Hobbit, if you asked me about Elves, I would have said they worked in Santa's workshop, made cookies, and fixed shoes when the cobbler was asleep. That was my only exposure to them. Elves were tiny people that helped out humans. So, Middle-earth's Elves were something brand new. They weren't tiny. They were amazing, immortal fighters. It just completely rewrote how I thought about them.

The same thing happened with Dwarves. At that point in my life, they were just small people that lived with Snow White. I had no sense of their culture, habits, or what they could be as characters. That's one of the coolest things about The Hobbit. It took things that I was very loosely aware of and gave them this whole new context. I didn't realize that my attitude was mostly a matter of ignorance. No one had told me about the cool versions of this stuff. Getting to read it and experience it for the first time was like drinking from a mountain stream. It was exhilarating.

Bilbo was a great character, even though I'd never heard of a Hobbit before. But I had an instant bond with him. You see, in sixth grade, when I was reading The Hobbit, I was the smallest kid in my school. There was a tiny girl in my grade named Tracy who I believe to this day is under five feet tall, and she towered over me. I dreamed of one day being as tall as Tracy. I was short, and I got picked on a lot because of my height. (In hindsight, I now realize they were just picking on my vulnerabilities, and I was sensitive about being so small, so that's what they picked on.) This was why reading a story about an adventurer that was tiny like me was such a big deal.

Then there was Gandalf. Other than fairy tales, I didn't read a lot of stories with magic in them, so reading a story about an actual wizard was pretty exciting to me. Interestingly, I was an amateur magician at the time. That is, I did magic tricks, mostly for children's parties. I went by Wiz Kid. Reading about someone that did actual magic resonated with me in a way I hadn't anticipated.

I mention this because it will become important. I hadn't ever made the connection between the fantasy genre and magic. I just thought of fantasy as people without technology doing boring stuff. I never realized the fantastical was at the heart of the genre. The idea that, just as science fiction had advanced technology, fantasy had magic was brand new for me.

Since I'm already talking about Gandalf, that seems like a great opportunity to show off a card preview. No, it's not a card of Gandalf himself (though the set does have a bunch of those) but rather something he uses.

There were a couple other creatures that had a big impact on me, such as the Ents. I'd never come across the idea of living trees before, and they fascinated me. While I had lackluster ideas of what Elves and Dwarves were, I had never thought of living trees as a thing. Looking back, I guess they were the creatures in The Wizard of Oz that didn't like Dorothy and the Scarecrow picking apples, but those were relatively small trees. I hadn't thought of the idea of huge redwoods being alive.

I was also very enthralled by the giant spiders in the story. I even had nightmares about them. I've never been a fan of spiders, so maybe the idea of super-large ones freaked out my subconscious. While I'm not 100% sure why they freaked me out, they did. I often talk about how creative works, including games, provoke emotional responses, and The Hobbit did that for me in numerous ways.

Looking back in the end, I was presented with the fantasy genre in a way I'd never seen before. What I had written off as a lame category of stories that I wasn't interested in was, in fact, something far cooler than I'd realized. Dragons and Elves and Dwarves and Wizards and Hobbits and giant spiders and Orcs and Ents (I could go on and on) were all pretty neat. Maybe I should give this fantasy genre a second look.

I went back to my school librarian and told her how much I loved The Hobbit. She said if I liked fantasy, that would unlock a giant reading list. I remember she printed the list out for me and walked me through the various books and series and what each had to offer. That would lead to me reading a huge collection of books, including, of course, The Lord of the Rings.

A year later in seventh grade, I had my bar mitzvah. (It's a Jewish coming-of-age ceremony that happens when you turn thirteen). My first-grade teacher lived on our street, so we invited her to the ceremony. As a gift, she gave me Dungeons & Dragons. It was Dungeons & Dragons Basic Set, and it came in a blue box (what's referred to as the "Holmes Edition").

It was a fantasy game where I could design my own campaigns. The influence of The Hobbit on many of my early designs was hard to miss. For example, one of my campaigns was built around a city of Elves, another was an underground adventure with Dwarves, and a third one ended with a giant Dragon hoarding treasure. All of them, I believe, had some number of giant spiders. They really freaked me out.

Thirteen years later in 1993, I was 26 and living in Los Angeles. I'd moved there to be a television writer. I'd had some success but was currently in between jobs. Because writing is a solitary profession, I decided to take a part-time job to start interacting with other people. That was a good life lesson: make time for face-to-face interaction. I chose to work at a game store as I was a huge fan of games. The game store I worked at was called The Game Keeper.

Years later, after I was working full-time at Wizards, the company decided they wanted to get into the retail business. Rather than start from scratch, they chose to buy a chain of game stores. Which one did they buy? Why, The Game Keeper, of course. So my old stomping grounds was rebranded as Wizards of the Coast Game Center. Wizards of the Coast owning game stores didn't last all that long, but it was a weird connection between my past and present life.

That summer people would regularly come in and ask me if we had "that Magic game." We didn't, so I would have them describe it to me. It was a card game with colorful pictures where you got to be a wizard. Each deck was different, so the cards one player had wouldn't be the same as another. It sounded pretty cool. A few weeks later, I was at San Diego Comic-Con and found someone at a booth who had a Magic deck. They weren't selling Magic, but they let me look at their deck. It was the first time I'd ever seen Magic cards.

The very first card I looked at was Ironroot Treefolk; the game had something similar to Ents. As I looked through the deck, I kept seeing creatures I recognized. I saw Ironclaw Orcs, Llanowar Elves, Dwarven Warriors, and Giant Spider. It was The Hobbit in game form. I was very excited.

A week or two later, I was at a game convention in Los Angeles, and for the first time, I found a place to buy Magic. I purchased a Starter Deck and three boosters, then I asked someone at the convention to teach me how to play. I got hooked immediately. I was soon waiting in line to buy booster packs of Limited Edition (Beta) and ended up purchasing two boxes of Starter Decks and two boxes of boosters. Before long, I would start driving to Costa Mesa every Saturday to play Magic with a giant group of people.

That would lead me to reading The Duelist (Wizards of the Coast's Magic magazine) and pitching my puzzle column, which would lead to me writing more articles for the magazine. That led to me starting freelance work for other sections of the company, which would lead to me taking a full-time position at Wizards. You know the rest of the story.

But one of the things I always wondered was what happens if The Hobbit didn't make me interested in fantasy? What if I continued to think of it as a lame genre that wasn't worth my time? What if when I first looked at Magic at San Diego Comic-Con my reaction wasn't one of joyful recognition but one of indifference? I imagine a world where my takeaway was "Eh, fantasy's not for me." And so, I would never buy the game, fall in love with it, start doing freelance work, get hired full time, and end up becoming head designer.

Maybe if I hadn't read The Hobbit, Magic wouldn't have flashback or landfall or hybrid mana or any of the many contributions I've made toward the game over the years. Maybe my school librarian making a suggestion to twelve-year-old me started me on a path that got me to where I am today. I owe The Hobbit a debt of gratitude because the path it sent me down has been an amazing one, even if giant spiders still freak me out a little bit.

---

An Unexpected Journey

Today's article was a bit more personal than normal, but as The Hobbit had such a big impact on me, I wanted to share my story with all of you. As always, I'm eager for any feedback, be it on my article, the card I previewed here, or Magic: The Gathering | The Hobbit. You can email me or contact me through social media (Bluesky, Tumblr, Instagram, TikTok, and Twitter).

Wizards of the Coast will be on vacation next week, but join me in two weeks for another installment of Making Magic.

Until then, talk with a librarian.