I was watching two men locked in one-on-one combat, as ritualized in Magic: The Gathering. On a Friday morning in November, I was standing near one match, far enough away to give the players some space, but closer than six feet. But one building felt more like a dream than any of those: the Greater Richmond Convention Center, where nearly 500 men and women paired off in rows of card tables placed in a tight grid that looked as if it might extend to the horizon. When I thought of the crowded rooms that were an unremarkable part of life before the coronavirus pandemic, I remembered sweaty rock clubs, Greek restaurants, NBA arenas. In the months that followed, we entered a different world, where a handshake became a distant memory. I wanted to learn about the culture of the game and how it had managed to thrive a quarter-century after its debut, but I hoped that while I was there I might figure out some things about heroes, too. In the immensely popular card game Magic: The Gathering, however, heroism is often distilled to its traditional essence: virtuous men and women going on quests to defeat unambiguously evil creatures like Massacre Wurms and Rune-Scarred Demons. Too many men - writers, actors, Founding Fathers - whom I had once believed to be worthy of admiration instead lay somewhere on the continuum between flawed human beings and bipedal Superfund sites. We’ve often been uncomfortable with heroes - the book “A Hero Ain’t Nothin’ But a Sandwich” dates to 1973 - but in an era when the world needed them more than ever, they seemed to be in short supply. But the whole way there, I kept thinking about heroes. Nine months ago, I went on a road trip to Richmond to see hundreds of people try to win $50,000 by playing a card game about swamps and elk and math.
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