I played a lot of MTG from age 9 to 14 or so. I picked up the game again recently and I was immediately better at the game than my 14-year old self. I don’t have any direct way to prove this, but I’m pretty sure it’s true.

When I was a kid, I liked zombie cards. (And I still do!¹) I looked up zombie decklists online and they all used Carrion Feeder. As a kid, this confused me. Carrion Feeder is bad, I said! It can’t block! Attacking and blocking are the two things creatures do, so if you can’t block, the creature is only half is good! And its ability is useless—why would I want to sacrifice an entire creature to pump up a 1/1?

Now, looking at the card again, I get it. Carrion Feeder is really good. Maybe not ban-worthy, but it’s strong enough that they’ve stopped printing it, and instead they print worse versions like Bloodflow Connoisseur, which is mostly the same except that it costs 3 mana instead of 1.

When they released Isamaru, Hound of Konda—the first ever 2/2 for 1 mana—I thought it was dumb power creep. But looking at it now, it seems fine. Abilities are really important. In most circumstances, I’d rather play a 1/1 with a good abililty than a vanilla 2/2. Plus, Isamaru is legendary, which means you can only have one copy in play at a time—you can’t blitz out a bunch of copies and roll over your opponent in the first three turns.

What was my mistake? I didn’t see the possibilities. As a kid, I only thought about the average-case use for an ability. But that’s wrong because you can specifically engineer a deck to make good use of an ability.

I also simply overlooked some obvious interactions. You can chump block with a creature, sacrifice it to Carrion Feeder, and then take no damage. You just got a +1/+1 counter for free.

As a kid, I thought I would get worse at video games as I aged. I was extremely wrong. The best direct comparison I have: I got my parents to buy me Halo: Combat Evolved when I was 13 or 14. I remember one four-hour play session where I made it most but not all of the way through level 2 on Normal difficulty. I went back and played Halo again when I was 21, and it took me an hour and a half to fully beat level 2 on Heroic. I can’t prove it without a time machine, but I am confident that with an hour of practice, today-me could beat 13-year old me in any game, regardless of how much experience 13-year old me had with it.

I talked with Screwtape about this. Unlike me, he has played a lot of MTG against kids. He’s observed that most middle school aged kids can’t see any card combos that involve 4+ cards—perhaps it’s a working memory issue.²

Screwtape also pointed out that MTG involves a lot of algebra, which I hadn’t realized because you can’t see the equations. But they’re there—deciding how to attack and block with your creatures is an algebra problem. Deciding where to play your buff spells is an algebra problem. I knew algebra when I was 14, but I’m a lot more practiced at it now.

Posted on Nov 29, 2025

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