It’s been some time since ya’ll have met anyone brand new on the Journey. Today we’re going to change that! You met them all briefly in the latest big update, but I simply must present each and every one of them in their own section because of how important this group of guys are.
Above are the 6 main dudes in the “meta.” In this article I’ll tell you how I met each, a bit of how they approach our game of choice – Magic: The Gathering – as well as some things from their backgrounds. Something important to keep in mind with that middle part is something that Wizards of the Coast refers to as Player Profiles. Basically, they are how people enjoy or play the game and for what reasons.
In short: Timmy/Tammy likes big creatures, big spells, and big plays. Johnny/Jenny likes to build complex decks and aim for flashy creativity when playing. Spike wants to win, and they will do whatever they deem necessary to reach that goal. I will also be equating the five people covered in this article to the player profile I anecdotally observe in each.
Let’s get started, shall we?
FRANCIS
Early on in my time here in Seoul, sometime around April, I had been going to RollingDice every other weekend. There were a few people I met up with, but for the most part I just met who I could and played what I could with some decks that relied HEAVILY on my 10-year-old collection. In maybe the third time playing with two guys named Sean and Kevin (who actually went to the same University as I), a stranger appeared. Enter: Francis.
Us three were just messing around. In actuality, I was trying to teach those two the game and Francis shows up saying “Oh, this deck isn’t very good. I just really like the commander. It’s not too strong.” I, naively, think this will be a good learning moment for the other two as we square off against a unique but – at least in the advert – weaker deck.
Spoiler alert: Francis has a huge habit of doing this. Saying what he’s packing isn’t that good, but I don’t think I’ve ever played against a Magic deck of his that wasn’t well constructed. It’s entirely unmalicious on his part, but slightly aggravating when you bring low power and get wiped because he’s accidentally under-leveling what he’s built.
What ensued was one of the most legendary games of M:tG I have ever played. Playing Nethroi, Apex of Death at one point just about every scary creature of his was on the board because he’d dumped them all into the grave over the course of 20 minutes. We nearly scooped but resolved to try and eke out a win. In the end, after the other three people (myself included) at the table pooled their resources, we were able to defeat the mutating behemoth. Though not in the way I intended, it was in fact a teaching moment for everyone at that table.
Right now, Francis has been in Seoul since just after the pandemic began. He lives pretty far out, so we’re really only able to see him on the weekend, but it is nearly every weekend. Working backwards, Francis actually went to college and worked for a time in NYS closeish to where I grew up. Prior to that, he grew up in Singapore where he visits from time to time. He is ethnically Korean, but he’s existed in so many varied cultural spheres that we often forget that bit.
In our group he is somewhat of a double-edged sword. Criminally underrating his deck construction abilities – and thus his decks – he is also the one who is happy playing each game that we do, even when he loses, as long as he gets to play the decks he has worked so hard to build. Undoubtedly a Johnny. He smiles just as broadly while consistently threatening to win the game on turn 4 as he does when we band together to obliterate him. It’s the exact sort of personality I enjoy having in my gaming circle, and one I more and more often tell myself to emulate.
JAMIE
A few weeks later, Francis and I had been playing just about every weekend. Who we played with didn’t vary by that much. Sean and Kevin stopped coming really shortly after us two met up, though more and more we were playing against this other American and an Argentinian – Nick and Luke, respectively. It was originally who I thought would make up my play group. Those games were fun, but some people at that table didn’t quite grasp the concept of teaching people how to play without totally overpowering them and dominating the board.
During one of those games a man walks in looking somewhat befuddled. I notice him looking from table to table, intrigued, but not really saying very much to anyone. So, I piped up and asked if he wanted to watch. Enter: Jamie.
Turns out Jamie had played Magic before, just never commander. He’d gotten out of the game a few years ago and it was initially very difficult to place his skill level. Looking at his decks from before he fell out of the game, he had a VERY meta Eldrazi Modern deck.
A weekend or two later, Jamie shows back up eager to play! He’s built his first deck! Zombie tribal! “Alright!” we cheer him on. That’s a pretty classic beginner deck, and there are a lot of resources in the game to build something both fun and strong. We all agree, however, to take it a little easy thinking he had probably thrown a pile together based on a few cheap cards he probably had laying around, as you do when you first start. It was a mistake.
We joke about it, but we think of Jamie as the Seto Kaiba of our group. “The most powerful card is the credit card,” they say. His first deck had just about every expensive card in color he could get his hands on. This trend hasn’t abated by much, but certainly a little. I won’t say how much he has spent on the game, but he only buys the best and that alone was winning him games for a few months. He’s also gotten far better at the game than when he first came into it and is now a real threat we need to factor in when playing. And even with his seemingly limitless budget, Jamie refuses to “go combo” and play decks that are designed to win as quickly as possible if there’s no fun or social interaction involved. Clearly a Timmy. Price tags can be big and exciting too, you know.
Jamie has been in Korea for two or three years, coming in just prior to the pandemic. He is also ethnically Korea, but again, it’s rarely something we consider or remember in our interactions. He lived in New York City, and went to school in Buffalo, NY. Even more interesting is the fact that he and I were both living in Shanghai around the same time. This took us some time to figure out because of a misunderstanding on my part, but eventually we realized we must have actually crossed paths more than once. There are only so many dance clubs with shark tanks as a feature.
Beyond being our Seto Kaiba, he is also an extremely generous person. As thanks for teaching him commander, he randomly bought me a rare precon I’d been eyeing for a month or two. He always wants to give input on decks, he willingly makes proxies for everyone if requested, and the one night we last went out he bought our group maybe four rounds of shots. He’s eager to socialize, and not only with Magic. He’s pushed for a lot of dinners, and always suggests alternatives so long as we get to hang. He’s a fantastic social force to bind us all closer together, and a strong reason, I am sure, that we meet up as often as we do.
THE FRENCH META
Now we’re getting into the part of the group lovingly referred to as “The French Meta.” It is so named because all three members are French in some way. Meta, for those who don’t know, refers to the strategic environment a gaming community exists in because of what or how people play. In MtG – and particularly commander – meta can range from casual (use what you got to build a deck) to competitive (pay to win to use the best cards and associated strategies for games that last 1-4 turns) and even weird or artistic (all my cards have a picture of a beard in them). What “meta” means varies from game to game and playgroup to playgroup, is influenced not only by what I just mentioned, but also by how the people in that meta react to others’ decisions or choices between games.
The point is The French Meta existed as separate from the one Jamie, Francis, and I had carved out by this point. While us three mostly played casually before we started crossing ecosystems, these three were far more interested and building around a competitive mindset. Both are fun but for very different reasons. Going from the former into the later generally means you get your ass kicked, though. And boy did we get our asses beat. Again, and again, and again.
This started an arms race. And in card games, that means money. If everyone is reacting to each other’s’ power or skill and spending time between games trying to figure out how to counter or overcome it, it leads to some ballooning costs to prepare before the next meet. At least there’s still fun to be had on the other side of the newly carved chasm in your wallet.
Enter: The French Meta
THOMAS
Thom was the first person from The French Meta that I recall meeting, though all three of them were met in quick succession. At the time (and based on my own perception, not necessarily true), Thom was the only one of the three who could fully embrace the idea behind bringing a purely casual deck and mindset to the game. He could, and does, bring high powered decks to throw down with the best, but is also happy to embrace a deck that just toys with a fun idea or strategy. Dude doesn’t even care much if he loses, just wants to play. I’d peg him as mostly a Timmy with a dash of Johnny involved. This is the exact sort of person I want to match with and play against!
Close to when we first met, Thom was really teaching us three more about high-powered strategies. We would generally bring a deck that was one or two levels in strength beneath his, but his excited demeanor helped us appreciate the fact we were losing. Those experiences let us see what kind of things can be done when your deck is focused more on a strategy with specific pieces filling the deck than the synergy a more casual meta is geared toward. The difference is subtle here, but for a comparison:
Imagine having a factory in New York City and needing to get products to Los Angeles. A Competitive EDH Company will build nearby the airport and hop across country quicker using air shipping. Their product gets there faster, more reliably, and in greater volume, but sacrifices the flexibility of having trucks in-house to ship to Kettleman City. A Casual EDH Company will build many logistics centers along the highway from NYC to LA. It takes longer and is prone to shortages or backups, but there’s a lot more to see along the way, and if you need to ship to Kettleman City, it’s not too difficult to factor that into a route.
Thom has some Vietnamese heritage but grew up in France in a – as he once said – pretty modest background. He’s lived in Seoul for roughly seven years and works as a financial risk assessor somewhere between here and Incheon. Prior to that, he went to school in Paris and even visited Shanghai, though long before my time there. He’s got family all over but is here in Korea for the foreseeable future; even drives and owns a car! He likes games of all kinds and is relatively new to Magic, but thinks it’s one of the best games ever after having left the toxicity of League of Legends.
Beyond all of that, Thom is a dude simply filled with excitement and positive energy. I can’t really recall a game I played with him in which he wasn’t smirking and bursting with joy at the shenanigans going on at the table. Even when everyone is playing nothing but stax (a strategy revolving around limiting play options and slowing the game down) he finds the energy to fervidly (but happily) denounce the strategy.
He doesn’t speak ill of people, does his best to make everyone he can satisfied, and is often pushing for the group to try new things simply because they sound fun. If I recall, he was one of the first in our group to suggest and orchestrate a group meeting outside of card games at the shop. These days he’s dividing his time up a little more evenly with all his interests, but having Thom around is always a real vibe-booster. His genuine interest in things and search for excitement in life is a fantastic piece of the puzzle to make this playgroup legendary for us all.
PIERRE
By the time I had begun playing at RollingDice, Pierre had already been there for some time. Generally in the corner with others who had been in the shop for a while too, I don’t recall the first time he and I began interacting exactly. I vaguely recall he was the first person there who I was sure was French. And I certainly do recall the first game we ever played, which I think may have even been before Jamie showed up. He was running Millicent, Relentless Revenant. I took note because until I’d seen him play it, I was thinking of making the same deck. But I’m not a copy-cat, even if I get thrashed so badly that I’m sure building it would have been a good idea.
Of everyone in our Playgroup of Destiny, Pierre is actually the person who has played Magic the longest. He played back in the 90’s, and it’s somewhat ironic that he got out of the game at just around the same time I got into it. The border change at 8th Edition was the only thing he remembered missing beyond the lore, the latter of which I diligently filled him in on recently. He was allegedly pretty good, playing competitively and getting fairly far at the time in the French circuit.
That last point is vitally relevant because, of all of us currently around for the meta, Pierre is without a doubt the one who thinks of the game most in competitive terms. Which isn’t a problem at all. Similarly to Thom, he has trained us to think about the game differently and is the consistent benchmark against which we evaluate deck power and player skill. We’re all better at the game because Pierre is there.
His competitive mindset has, in the past, led to some philosophical disagreements about how the game should be played and what each player owes to the others at the table. While many of us in the group are primarily a Timmy, Johnny, or a combination of the two, Pierre is undoubtedly a Spike.
All Magic players are some mixture of the three – I mean, who doesn’t like to win? – but for some people the destination is more important than the journey. Which, again, isn’t mentioned to be scornful. Pierre is plenty of fun to play with. It took a few impassioned speeches about the repetitive nature of his decks – flying from NYC, to Dallas, to LA time after time instead of taking Route 66 and deviating for the landmarks – but eventually we brought him around to playing longer and lower powered games with us. He even suggested an “all cards under $1” format for Christmas that we adored. With time, we have subtly infected him with our more casual mindset.
Pierre is the oldest of us all by about 5 years and is from Eastern France. He’s lived in South Korea for around a decade now and shows absolutely no signs of ever leaving. We even had a conversation once about his banking accounts accidentally being erased due to inactivity back home. A talented (by my estimation) code writer for mobile games, he uses a somewhat obscure language that brings him to Japan and London for conferences to give talks on his work.
Beyond all that, he is also a very kind and welcoming person. He was the first person in the French Meta to ask me specifically where I was from and details about my background; a conversation I distinctly recall excitedly explaining to someone else as the marker for feeling like I was making more friends. He’s nearly always in a mask, but even so you can clearly see his smile underneath. He loves movies and does so for many of the same reasons I do. He will eagerly suggest lunch or dinner and makes a lot of the suggestions for when and where we should think about playing each weekend. He graciously invited many of us to his apartment for Christmas where we played board games, watched Christmas movies, and ate fantastically delicious baked desserts prepared by his talented wife. He’s got his life together, he’s comfortable, and he likes to socialize with those he deems positively impactful. In both gaming skill and life goals, he is a role model for the rest of us in the group and we are lucky to have him around.
GABRIEL
The last member, but certainly not the least, of the French Meta. He was, and probably in a lot of ways still is, the Final Boss.
I recall noticing Gabriel across the room during many trips to RollingDice. He’s tall. For a long while I wasn’t entirely sure if he was French considering his ancestry is Korean. The accent wasn’t something I wanted to guess. We even played a few games before even really becoming friends. In the very beginning of my time there I ran a Breya, Etherium Sculptor deck that Kyle helped me build because artifacts, and a mono-red burn Torbran, Thane of Red Fell deck that was meant somewhat as an allegory for my family. The first deck I remember bringing against the French Meta as a whole was a Sisay Shrines deck because those had just been released in February.
These decks were very bad and cheap. Gabriel always came with the best. I was destroyed in every game I played against them at the time. And what he understood as “The Best” evolved as time moved forward, getting more competitive with each iteration.
We have a spoken rule in our play group, and one that sort of extends to the whole gaming store community. Before we were playing with each other regularly, I would hear from other players about Gabriel. Everything from “He’s pretty good” to “He spends a lot” and even “He’s really toxic.” The rule we have is called “Gabriel’s Maxim” or “The Gabriel Protocol.” Basically, if you don’t eliminate Gabriel first, he WILL win. Somehow, someway, if you don’t take him seriously, you’ve already lost.
I never quite considered Gabriel to be toxic myself, but I can see where others might have come to that conclusion. Gabriel is the Spike-iest Spike who ever Spiked. He is at that table to win. His decks are designed to be competitive regardless of the table he finds himself at. He was the benchmark against which we all held our decks and skills to gauge our level. Some people can’t handle that sort of competition in a game and in a format that was primarily designed to be casual and fun. I would regularly get alerts from my smart watch telling me my stress levels were too high when in games with him.
He nearly always gets his combo off or draws his whole deck by turn 4. He’s always got a counter spell in hand, so resistance is futile. If you’ve made an error in how you play, he will quickly mention it and move on with his turn whether you understand or not. His decks only see play for two or three weeks because people can’t stand playing against them. Even his Krark, The Thumbless//Sakashima of a Thousand Faces partner deck – which he called “fair” because he didn’t know if he would win or not until after going through twenty coin flips/dice rolls that sounded like a casino – nearly drove Pierre insane; and Pierre “likes a challenge” while being very resistant to deck fatigue.
I don’t think I have ever seen another player at an LGS draw so much ire. All the conversations we had with Pierre about player responsibility and repetitiveness were at some point also had with Gabriel.
That being said, Gabriel is an awesome person to spend time with and play against. He is a very friendly person who likes to make social connections. Once, on a whim, I took him and some of the others to check out a club called Macaroni Funky Club I dance and drink at from time to time. His final few months here in Korea were spent chilling at Macaroni almost every night as he forged close ties and friendships with the people and workers there. While he has Korean roots, he grew up in France and has a deep love for the things from that country. Many times spent outside RD with him were spent learning about France or even trying some of the best French food I’ve ever had. He’s quick to respond with wit and likes a good time.
He’s also a skilled artist, makes comics online, and would spend a premium in order to have the foil borderless special art version of as many cards as he could. Where he got that money while being in school is beyond me, but he was a major player in the “arms race” that took place in our play group – and most importantly, in a way I do not regret. His deck was always a work of art, and it drove me to appreciate that part of the game more than I once might have.
Gabriel pushed us all to be better at the game. While the majority of the summer had us adhering to “Gabriel’s Maxim” in every game we played – and honestly failing half the time to prevent him from winning – by the end of it, most of us had gotten skilled enough to the point where it was no longer necessary. He was still the best at threat assessment, figuring out who was going to win a turn or two before it happened, but near the end of his time here it was less and less him. He also happened to start playing lower-powered, though still competitive, decks to foster fun for the entire playgroup; so who knows if the Maxim would have held if he’d always been playing at his strongest.
Gabriel has sadly moved on from Seoul. Back to France to live the life he seemed to prefer there. We weren’t seeing a whole lot of him in the last two or three months, but the times that we did were always legendary. He says he might visit, possibly sometime in the summer. If he does, we will be ecstatic to see him and hang! If not, then, well, this is the way of life. “C’est la vie” as I have often been told. But Magic 2022, Gabriel’s inclusion in our group, and the fun times we had will never be forgotten.
THE SEOUL INTERNATIONAL PLAYGROUP OF DESTINY
And that, ladies and gentlemen, are the five people I spend the majority of my time outside of work with here in Seoul. They are a group of friends I consider myself lucky to have formed and look forward to seeing in some way each weekend. I haven’t had male friends I spent so much time with in years. In one way or another, they push me to be better or closer to who I want to be simply by being around.
Magic: The Gathering is a big part of the time we spend together, but it’s by no means all of it; something I couldn’t be happier about. As 2023 comes into full swing, I have intentions of moving away from Magic. I’m not done playing, but I want to play less. First of all, it costs a lot. Secondly, I came to Korea with the intention of exploring my other hobbies like game design, music, language learning, story writing, and traveling. Magic has consumed so much of my brain space for almost a year that those other hobbies aren’t getting the attention I want them to.
Third, and possibly the worst reason, is how the game has changed how I interact with people. I think that in some way my current job has also warped how I engage with others, but the way we play Magic now has certainly had its effects. I started this game – both in 2003 and at the end of 2021 – as a Timmy, just here to have a good time and not caring if I lost. These days, I’m far too close to being a pure Spike for comfort.
Games are meant to be fun, and if I’m not having fun I shouldn’t be playing. If the only way for me to have fun anymore is to win, then I’ve lost sight of what games mean for the true me. It’s too common that I get angry with the people in this pod for playing against me (something you inevitably need to do in a game like this), or quit a game because I see no way to come out on top, or abandon a fun deck idea because it’s not competitive enough. This isn’t how I want to engage with my hobbies or the people who help me experience them.
Thankfully, the Seoul International Playgroup of Destiny is not something I will be taking a step back from. The games of Magic blend together, but I am not surprised to find our dinners, nights out, or attempts at other hobbies like bowling and watching movies do not. I don’t really enjoy Korea as a whole, but in the past year I’ve been lucky to find a shining example of positive friendships amongst the mundane, numb, seemingly barren – in a narrow kind of way – social landscape. I couldn’t have made it this far in Korea without these five, and that’s the truth.
To the Seoul International Playgroup of Destiny! May our fun times evolve, but never end!
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