#we've tried asking outside of mtg nights if anything's going on or if he's okay and he just says 'work's gotten stressful'

[vox-off]

re: your grumpy friend who’s annoying playing mtg

I’m not as socially deficient as this guy, but I get some of where he’s coming from. While I do like to play competitively or recreationally, things like storytelling, art, lore, the feel of the world, etc. are a big part of what attracts me to one game or another, one expansion or another, etc. I also really don’t care about limited formats or draft formats, for the same reason. Deck cohesion and theming is a big part of what makes card games fun to me, so I’ve only ever really like tribal sets in limited.

I’m not as big of a crybaby about people playing to win as I used to be, or as much as he is, but idk how old he is. I was obnoxious as a kid.

ANYWAY, actual advice:

If you guys really want to keep him as a friend, have you considered just playing something else? It seems like he’d have a lot more fun playing a collaborative game, or a ttrpg, or doing a different activity with more of a role-playing creative aspect

not trying to tell you how to live your life, but I can see how a guy like that would find a competitive game very frustrating, I almost exclusively play single player games and watch movies these days, or play commander precon v. precon as a very casual party game.

league of legends was like, life-ruining frustrating for me, as much as I got invested in the world and its characters, the actual gameplay experience was just kinda ass

oh believe me, i also get where he's coming from, i'm not saying that his style of play and what he finds rewarding in magic is wrong or lesser than mine, and if my original post implied that, that absolutely was not my intent. i get it from a parallel sense; he enjoys constructing stories with his decks and i enjoy constructing rube goldberg machines with mine. both are correct ways of playing magic

i also feel i should clarify the pod's "competitiveness": we all play kitchen table. my favorite 60 card deck of mine to play is a madness deck that costs about $6. the most expensive deck ever to hit our table was around $70 and it was HIS eldrazi deck. it's never been a rout either, he has the second highest winning record in the pod. we keep a tally - he wins more than he loses. lol i have the worst record in the pod by far, and it is a bummer i very much get it, but i don't scream obscenities at my friends when i lose

and we DO play ttrpgs - half of my mtg pod is also half of my tt group (it's like a venn diagram of my nerd friends). i've invited him to play multiple times, but he only wants to play rogue trader or 5e and i'm currently running a pbta campaign. i've encouraged him to run his own rogue trader campaign - i've been a DM for over a decade, i LOVE opportunities to be a player again - but he's never taken me up on it. our magic nights are sort of... open? if that makes sense? we post times and who's hosting in the discord, whoever wants to show up shows up and we play. no one's forcing him to play magic with us, he's making the conscious choice to come to magic nights

what bothers me is that for him, gameplay is not a two-way street. if he takes out something on my board, that's "strategy." if i return the favor - because on what planet am i going to let Krenko, Mob Boss stay on a battlefield already covered in goblin tokens if i have a Murder in hand - i'm "targeting him." he behaves as if his opponent is supposed to be his audience, not a participating player in a game

also, if this puts anything into perspective, he's almost 40