About twenty years ago, I played Magic: The Gathering and built a competitive deck around a card called Death Cloud.
For the Magic-uninclined, the game is played by putting creatures, lands, and other cards onto the table and using them to attack your opponent, defend yourself, and slowly take control of the game. Lands are especially important because they give you the resources you need to actually play your other cards.
Death Cloud basically wrecked all of that.
Creatures disappeared. Cards disappeared. Lands disappeared. Both players lost huge portions of what they had spent the game building. The trick was that my deck was built to recover from the wreckage better than the person across from me.
I loved that deck.
Then I stopped playing Magic for about twenty years.
Recently, after getting into Pokémon with my six-year-old and behaving with exactly the amount of restraint documented elsewhere, I started wondering what Magic looked like now.
This was a bad question.
Just days later, I was building a black-green-blue reanimator deck. In Magic, cards that get destroyed, discarded, or otherwise used up usually go into a pile called the graveyard. A reanimator deck looks at that pile and says, no, no, we can still use those.
Creatures can come back. Some cards become more useful because something has already died. Sometimes you put something in the graveyard on purpose because getting it back from there is easier than playing it normally.
I started calling the deck DEAD AS F*.
Then I remembered Death Cloud.
Different cards. Different rules. Same guy. Apparently I have been attracted to decks that look at a ruined game and think, okay, what do we still have?
Oh shit.
I built myself.
Not in the personality-test sense where you answer nine questions and discover you are a Hufflepuff with excellent leadership potential. I mean the deck’s actual operating assumptions started looking familiar.
A reanimator deck does not prevent things from dying. It assumes they will. That is a very different strategy.
There are decks that try to establish control and keep it. There are decks that move so fast the other player never has enough time to recover. There are decks built around protecting one enormous threat and daring the person across from you to deal with it.
Reanimator decks are comfortable with a mess. Kill the creature. Fine. Discard the card. Fine. Clear the whole table. Annoying, certainly. But not necessarily fatal. The graveyard is still sitting there.
And then I started noticing that I kind of do this with everything.
I’ve had careers go sideways. Jobs end. Plans that looked permanent turn out to have expiration dates nobody had bothered to print on them. I’ve had projects fail. I’ve been through an actual financial bankruptcy, not the motivational-speaker version where someone says they were “bankrupt of ideas.” I mean lawyers, forms, numbers, the whole glamorous experience.
There have been times when the future I thought I was building simply stopped being available.
My response is usually not immediate optimism. I can be angry, embarrassed, scared, or spectacularly annoyed like anybody else. But eventually some other part of my brain shows up and asks:
Okay. What do we still have?
That question is different from asking how to get everything back. Sometimes you can’t.
This is where the Magic metaphor needs an important rule clarification before we accidentally turn the essay into a resilience poster.
Not everything in the graveyard comes back.
Magic actually has another place called exile, because apparently the designers decided the game needed a more serious version of gone. Some losses are like that.
There are things you cannot rebuild into their previous form. Time passes. Relationships change. Opportunities close. A mistake can be learned from without becoming a good thing that happened. Loss does not become secretly valuable just because somebody eventually found meaning around it.
Everything is figureoutable does not mean everything is fixable.
“Figureoutable” sounds like confidence that there is always an answer, but that is not really what I mean by it anymore. Sometimes the answer is that the original position is gone.
The board changed.
Now what?
That is the part I recognize in the deck. You play from the position that actually exists.
Maybe the creature died. Maybe you are down cards. Maybe the other player just destroyed the thing your entire turn was built around. You do not get to insist that the previous position was better and therefore should still be available.
You look at what remains.
The graveyard. The cards in your hand. The lands you still have on the table. Whatever you learned about the person sitting across from you.
Then you make the next move.
I have apparently been doing a version of that outside card games for most of my adult life.
Old jobs did not disappear just because I left them. Skills came with me. A role I hated might still have taught me something I use constantly now. A failed project leaves behind a better question. A career detour turns out to contain some obscure piece of experience that becomes useful five years later in a room I could not have predicted.
Even the writing works this way.
Stories sit around for decades.
Things I remember from childhood, jobs I barely think about anymore, conversations that seemed ordinary when they happened, questions about watches that should have stayed questions about watches. They disappear into some internal pile until something in the present gives them another job.
I suppose I have a graveyard for ideas too.
This does not mean every discarded thought deserves resurrection. Some drafts died for excellent reasons. But I rarely believe that something was useless merely because its first purpose ended.
That may be why coming back to Magic after twenty years felt remarkably familiar. I had changed. The game had changed. There were new cards, new mechanics, new formats, and a distressing number of things I suddenly believed I needed to purchase.
But there was still the graveyard.
And there was me, once again delighted by the possibility that the thing everyone else thought was gone might still have work left to do.
I had assumed my attraction to the new deck was about power. Big creatures. Recursion. Inevitability. The deeply satisfying experience of watching somebody finally deal with the problem you put in front of them and then finding another copy of the problem climbing back out of the dirt.
That is definitely part of it. But I think there is something underneath it.
I do not seem particularly interested in being impossible to knock down.
I am interested in still having a move after it happens.
Those are not the same ambition.
One imagines a life where enough preparation, intelligence, money, competence, or luck eventually makes you untouchable. The other assumes the board is going to get wiped sometimes. I know which version I believe now.
Things die. Plans fail. Resources disappear. And then you look at the board again.
The graveyard is still there.
It was part of the board the whole time.