Juggling around your roles and resources has become more challenging with more juggling balls entering the battlefield.

Back in the days, the trifecta of time, money and health looked quite a bit different. While I can’t complain about my health in general, I feel like my energy level dropped quite a bit. Hard to tell if age or the kids are to blame. While playing a midnight preview tournament sounds more like a torture to me nowadays, I remember the joyful anticipation it triggered back then.

Money isn’t much of a restricting factor anymore, as long as I stay away from restricted Vintage cards. When I started playing in Constructed tournaments, I tinkered around my Dawnstrider control deck in Mercadian Masques block Constructed, trading for cards I still needed and wanted to add, nowadays I would probably just buy a Rebel deck if I wanted to play in a competitive event.

What remains is good memories, friendships and stories to tell.

How can I revisit that excitement Magic used to spark? I don’t think trading away money rares for bulk does. Well, cracking boosters somewhat still is.

My 7 years old son surprised me with a booster pack for my birthday. It was a somewhat holy moment to open this pack with him, and I got an old bordered Wurmcoil Engine out of it. Apart from that, I think returning to kitchen table Magic is one of the keys for me:

I’m not much into playing Commander, but I really understand the catch – tinkering around a deck and every single one of its components, meeting friends and having a good time playing Magic – the perfect Three-For-One (Editor’s Note: We see what you did there)!

And besides, who needs Commanders when you can just draft, right? And who knows, maybe my kids will escort me back to the innocent Neverland of Magic one day…

Those tournaments were a blast and a real reason to play Magic competitively. And while I enjoyed the Return of the Pro Tour, it still doesn’t feel the same as it used to. Switzerland had a very active competitive scene, and you would regularly meet the core at your Nationals, PTQs or GPs. Getting rid of those tournaments and replacing them with the Magic Pro League and not much else probably just destroyed more than just competitive play in Switzerland.

And yes, Covid didn’t help much either.

I still love travelling, and combining it with a juicy tournament to play with your friends?! Count me in! I really hope the competitive scene warps around into more interesting tournaments with a lower threshold to enter.

Besides, when can we finally play another high stakes Team Sealed tournament?!

MTG Arena and Magic Online are huge time sinks.

If you want to play competitively, you can easily sink a full-time job worth of time into various tournaments and their preparation. And you probably have to do so in order to get a realistic chance to convert your efforts into a qualification for a high-end event, which can be very demoralizing if you cannot achieve your goals.

Even qualifying for an RCQ can be a big grind. Last year, I chained together multiple Pro Tours and was nearly invited to Worlds. Now I try to spike RCQs. Without much success. And I’m not the only one – our current World Champion Nathan Steuer also just fell off the PT circuit – back to RCQs for him as well.

Some weeks ago, I got accepted for the MTGO creators program, for which they picked some creators they wanted to support with some goodies to regularly produce content.

So I tried to figure out what type of content I’m enjoying at the moment. I always loved writing, even though I’m not nearly as invested in the game as I used to be and therefore don’t have enough to write about. But my number one is still drafting, so I decided to record and stream drafts with the goal to go infinite (to make money) on Magic Online, which is quite hard these days.