Equilibrium

The other weekend I went down to Gothenburg, alone. I had some plans to hang out with friends in the city during my Christmas vacation, but a sprinkle of Covid put a firm stop to all that. So I took a weekend away from the family, mainly to water some social flowers that had been dry for too long. Watch a couple of rad movies (like Mad God), have some long walks in the motherland, and chomp down a fistful Swedish Kebab pizzas.

While there, I also picked up six more rares for the Legends set. Two from Kalle Nord and four from Morgan "Farsan" Karlsson.

"Fun" fact: There are more rares in Legends than there are total cards (c+u+r) in any other of the "early expansions" (Arabian Nights, Antiquities, The Dark, Fallen Empires, or Homelands).

Divine Transformation, Land Equilibrium, Rasputin Dreamweaver, Concordant Crossroads, Hazezon Tamar, Adun Oakenshield. Any one of these could carry their own post. And after my recent highly restrained - borderline shallow - reflections on a page of The Dark cards, I don't want to just write a paragraph on each card and call it a day. I want to go a bit deeper today. But which one to chose?

Yes, Divine Transformation could carry 800 words. Trust me bro.

So, six cards, and I'm not really sure which to pick. Why, any tabletop gamer worth their salt should see the obvious solution to this conundrum.

Let's roll.

Good roll.

Land Equilibrium it is.

This was one of the cards I got from Kalle. A real build-around, this one. In fact, I'm sure there was an old Land Equilibrium list in one of the mid-90s German Magic books I got from the guys in Regensburg nine years ago. Lets try to find it in the lost section of the library and see what an early '95 Land Equilibrium deck looked like.

Or lets just accidentally spill out half a shelf on the floor while recklessly rummaging.

Huh. Long since I saw these old photos. Thought they were down in the cellar storage. One in particular gives me pause.

That's a signed photo of me in front of a Bob Saget billboard.

That photo was taken in late 2007 by Maestro Larry, an old family friend in New York. Larry worked on Broadway, mainly as a musician, and Bob Saget had recently signed on to his show.

That's me in late 2007, sporting 2008 glasses (as was the custom for out-of-towners around Times Square when New Year's Eve approached). Larry is the guy on the left, sporting no glasses (as was the custom for people that actually lived and worked around Times Square).

The US felt a bit different back then, at least as an outsider looking in. Georg W. Bush was still the president, but people seemed eager for a presumed showdown between Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani in the upcoming 2008 election. People were ready to put a mostly unpopular president behind them, and Bush himself appeared ready to go.

It was also three years before the first Starbucks opened in Sweden. 15 years later, and I still don't really get how they manage to sell billions of dollars worth of Frappuccinos each year.

It was the first time I was in New York City, so I did a lot of the touristy stuff during the weekend. Went to see The Rocketts on Broadway; checked out the building site at ground zero; spent way too much time admiring Pollock, Magritte, and Dali at the MoMA; walked down Wall Street without a clue that The Great Recession would officially start a month later; ice skated around the Rockefeller Center Ice Rink; ate all the local pizza; and tasted as many micro brews I could find. But I didn't manage to actually meet Bob Saget, as he'd just left Broadway due to the ongoing writers' strike.

Did get a face-to-face with my possibly all-time favorite painting though; Magritte's The Lovers.

Back then, Bob Saget had a solid reputation over at the Rotary Pub (the pub where we still run n00bcon every non-pandemic year). YouTube was a toddler at this point, but we had already found Bob's retelling of the Aristocrats joke way too hilarious to admit in public. And Rollin' with Saget was a frequent banger during the after-hours in the pub as the night escalated. Late 2007 was pretty much peak Bob Saget time in my life. But that signed picture in front of a billboard was the closest I would get to tell him. Because, as I assume some of you heard, dude passed away last month.

Looking further through the small stack of signed photos, two more in succession stand out.

Darth Vader and Boba Fett.

A little over a year ago, these guys were also still around. Both of them were kicking when we last hosted a physical n00bcon. But today two of my most beloved childhood villains are no more. Hm.

"Behold, I am making all things new", to quote Revelations 21:5. Maestro Larry - the guy who took the picture of me in front of the Bob Saget billboard - doesn't even work in showbiz anymore. At the respectable age of 57 he re-schooled himself to get an associate's degree in health information management, as the Covid pandemic made his old line of work improbable, borderline impossible.

Old keeps getting replaced by new. I think there's a Waylon Jennings' song that says something to the tune of "getting older means watching all of your childhood heroes die." But what happens with us when all the bearers of the culture we grew up in dies? When the zeitgeist itself passes away?

Heraclites - who was one thoughtful cookie - proposed that nothing endures but change. "No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man."

I had to ask my parents. Luckily, they are still around to ask, and most of their youth idols (and perhaps ideals) are now historical. They are some thirty years ahead of me in this experience. I don't know if we found an answer during our discussions, but I did get some sweet stories from the summer of 1969. My mom even traveled across the Atlantic in the early 70s to get a first hand account of hippie era San Fransisco. That seemed rad.

Maybe we are bound to sacrifice the old to make room for the new. If the players around Haight-Ashbury in 1969 - the Janis Joplins, Jefferson Airplanes, and Grateful Deads of the era - would have kept a stranglehold on youth culture, MTV wouldn't have had time to show us Michael Jackson. Movie theaters eventually had to free up the screen they used for Terminator 2 to be able to show us Fury Road. There is arguably finite room for culture, both physical and cognitive, and old must be discarded for new to have a chance to prosper.

Hm, maybe this post is about this card after all.

In late 2007 Oldschool Magic was new, but it certainly was a thing. And you could walk into most any Magic store in the world and find some then-Standard-legal Time Spiral boosters on their shelves. 15 years ago we already had a sense of nostalgia for these things, and now it's like we have nostalgia for that nostalgia. The more I think of it, the more I start to grasp just how long ago 2007 really was. More than a quarter of the world's current population wasn't even born then after all.

...

This was not what I had expected to write today. I blame the roll of a die and an overfull bookshelf. But here's a picture of a good opening hand with Land Equilibrium:

Picture by Kalle (February 2015).