Archive Keeper | Trading Cards To Trading Games — Magic: The Gathering To Sorcery: Contested Realm

Written by Archive Keeper

Editor’s Note: The following is a lightly edited written transcription of Archive Keeper’s video published on April 8, 2025.

Some late weekend night in the fall of 2007, three teenage boys fresh off a successful marching band season were throwing a Warcraft 3 LAN party on custom-built PC rigs set up on cheap folding tables in an unfinished room of somebody’s basement. The night lingered, and time seemed to stand still as long as nobody watched the clock.

As the hours grew thin, the boys ran out of steam and left their keyboards and mice for other entertainment. Not yet willing to retire, they stumbled through a series of Xbox game cases.

My first experience with Magic: The Gathering (MTG) was reading the back of the “Magic: The Gathering: Battlegrounds” case — a well-animated, if mechanically simplistic, war game for Xbox. It was the catalyst for my obsession with trading card games (TCG).

Support Eternal Durdles on Patreon

Captivated by Battlegrounds, I couldn't set the controller down between games. I finally paused when a friend noted that it was based on a card game. I was happier than I let on when I replied, “Now is as good a time as any."

They pulled out two decks: Elves and Kithkin. The Lord of the Rings fan in me was immediately hooked. The art was iconic. The tribal (now typal) themes built a story and narrative in my mind. The gameplay presented me with challenges to overcome and creative avenues to explore.

When teaching new players MTG, I’ve always liked to start with “you are a planeswalker." An acknowledgement that every match begins with players suspending disbelief to become something they are not; that every game of MTG is an invitation to play not just a game, but a character.

For years, new set releases were exciting opportunities to meet new characters — comrades or rivals — to experience their stories. Pulling a planeswalker fresh from a pack felt like being assigned a role in a role-playing game (RPG); destiny had called: this was YOUR story, not just to read but to build, shape, and live.

I fell in love with MTG as a TCG for the same reason many of us did: its offer of a world of fantasy, power, and wits was an attractive escape from the pop culture surrounding us.

Over the ensuing decades, however, we all shared in the experience of that world slowly warping into something different, a classic boiling frog dilemma. MTG was the only card game I had ever played. Sure, I opened some Pokémon packs 20 years prior, but I was never moved to learn how to play the game. Pokémon as a TCG was a series of fond memories I carried with me. MTG was my passion. I convinced myself that the art and lore, the beasts and fowls, the mages and assassins were all I would ever need.

For so long, that was true. New MTG sets came out quarterly, new blocks yearly, each telling its own story, introducing its own landscapes, creatures, heroes, and villains. I was a comfortable frog in a broad and deep pot, where many other frogs, in fact, every other frog I had ever known, also comfortably swam.

But the temperature was rising. Our game was becoming diluted and distorted.

"A poor definition is worse than no definition at all."

—William James, American Philosopher

Twenty years ago, the scope of the planes in MTG seemed well defined. As with all pots of frogs, the temperature rose slowly at first, but over time, the proliferation of Universes Beyond (UB) products became overwhelming, and every line drawn as a promise to players was quickly erased and forgotten.

Even the Universes Within (UW) sets felt poorly defined within the game's broader scope. Turning high-fantasy characters into cowboys and pod-racers destroyed the carefully constructed veneer of planeswalkers as characters who interacted with their world and turned them into cut-rate sellouts.

That poor definition felt worse than no definition at all. After being promised an immaculate, top-tier, high fantasy trading card game, it was challenging not to feel let down by the current crop of UB and UW offerings.

As the frog's water warmed, I noticed cracking packs had become a chore. I was chasing a feeling I once had that opening packs could no longer provide. This became truly evident in 2021, when, briefly grabbed by childhood nostalgia, I was sucked into the COVID-fueled Pokémon craze. I remembered what it felt like to get not just cards, but joy from every pack I opened.

Cracking packs of Caterpie and Pidgeotto made me realize that opening packs of Ob Nixilis and Urza lost their luster. The pot had gotten significantly hotter. I realized that everything from draft to Commander grew progressively less appealing.

The broken promises, UB, and increasing mechanical complexity eroded what attracted me to MTG in the first place. The passion left was a mix of inertia from playing MTG for so long and nostalgia for the world-building of blocks that had been tossed aside in favor of endless hype cycles that demanded every new set move further into those aspects that push me away.

My dissatisfaction with MTG didn’t happen all at once, nor without significant resistance. Like a shelf with one book too many, finally collapsing after years of slow bowing, it was functional and intact, then, suddenly, totally broken.

There are several reasons to continue playing MTG. Formats like Old School and Premodern exist. Players can ignore the issues-riddled new products by playing old block-constructed. One could argue that the core MTG experience persists in draft and sealed as long as play boosters remain extant.

MTG is the juggernaut of TCGs with three decades of momentum. Commander remains a social experience that would likely endure even if no other MTG card were ever printed again.

All of those are true at face value. The broader problem is that while MTG will never be defined by its mistakes, it does suffer from them. It’s true that the cards Wizards of the Coast (WotC) printed 10, 20, or 30 years ago still exist and can be played with today, as they were then.

It’s also true that we exist in time. For a hobby like TCGs, primarily defined by the social experience it cultivates, the past cannot be resurrected — gamers in guilds or clans in massively multiplayer online (MMO) games are well aware of this. The cards still exist, but the social experience surrounding them is gone; replaced by what the game has become, tainted by being lied to and bullied by a suite of C-Level execs who twist and corrupt nostalgia as a stepping stone to higher quarterly profits.

Everyone has their breaking point, pushed to it by disappointment and betrayal, when the cons outweigh the pros, and they are dragged from apathy into ambition. Enough so to try something new, to consider that maybe the pot of water has, in fact, gotten too hot to tolerate.

I’m sad I don’t remember how I was introduced to Sorcery: Contested Realm. I am a jack-of-all-trades type who loves trying new card games and keeping up with the news across the TCG world. I do remember, however, the first Sorcery cards I saw: Truitt Parish’s Jihad and Crusade. Completely ensorcelled by the art and captivated by the promise of the game’s ambitious vision, I dove headfirst and ordered two Beta booster boxes.

In life, the key to happiness is often lowered expectations; advice that’s much easier to give than to follow. When the Beta boxes arrived, I was much in need of that advice. I had fully bought into the hype as I sat down to open my first booster box, intending to keep the second one sealed.

Opening that Beta booster box was an experience leagues above my already high expectations. No pack felt like a dud. Every card was a work of art that offered feelings that never dulled. Pack after pack, I was drawn deeper into the Realm and out of the boiling pot.

In that moment, I had a profound awareness that I was present in what would become a lasting, impactful memory. The art on every card did its job: it gave hope.

I felt like a floundering fish, long stranded on a beach, who had just been swept in by a high tide, able to breathe again for the first time in ages. I felt an overwhelming sense of camaraderie with folks I’d never met: the artists and designers who answered their quixotic call to do this, the players and collectors, fellow box openers who must have felt the same. All of us were standing on a thin ledge, developing and supporting a game that many in our social circles and playgroups dismissed as impractical.

But opening my first box of Sorcery filled me with conviction. These were Windmills worth tilting at. Sorcery is a clarion call to take up arms against apathy. For me and kindred spirits on a similar path, it is a call not to accept MTG's mediocrity simply because it is the path of least resistance.

It took another three hours for my willpower to give way and open the second  Beta box. I pulled a foil Ruby Core; a sign, if there ever was one. It was my invitation, my call, as a long-time mono-red enthusiast, to point my TCG passion in a new direction and see where the winds take me.

That strode, I stepped back from MTG and strode confidently into Sorcery to contest the Realm.