Okay, That's Bilbo

I opened a Tolkien collector booster a few weeks ago, pulled a Hobbit character, looked at the artwork and thought, "Okay, that's Bilbo."

And that was about it.

I noticed the reaction, or the lack of one, because I had spent real money expecting something better. Some background: I recently got back into Magic: The Gathering, the collectible card game that has been around since the early 1990s, where you build a deck of creatures, spells and artifacts and use it to beat up on the other wizards at the table. The version I play now is Commander, where four people show up with hundred-card decks built around one legendary creature. My brother's brother-in-law, who I also count as a friend, kept encouraging me to play, and that was enough to get me interested again. Apparently, it was also enough to get me buying cards again.

By the time Bilbo showed up I had a whole box of Tolkien collector boosters, Marvel Commander decks sitting in the house, a pre-order in for the upcoming Star Trek product, a few Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles packs bought just to see what they were like, and serious thoughts about the Masters of the Universe Secret Lair. On paper this was almost perfectly designed to separate me from my money. Star Trek, Marvel, Tolkien, TMNT and Masters of the Universe are all things I have affection for, in some cases a great deal of it.

So I expected the packs to be fun to open. Mostly they gave me recognition, with very little of the small jolt that makes cracking a pack worth the price.

That bothered me because I know exactly what the other feeling is like. I have been buying cards attached to fictional worlds for a very long time: Yu-Gi-Oh, Pokemon, the original Star Wars Customizable Card Game, the Wheel of Time and Lord of the Rings card games, those late-1990s Marvel trading cards I loved. Some of those I played. Some I collected because I liked the world, and sometimes the distinction hardly mattered. Every so often you turned a card over and there was somebody you knew immediately.

The old Star Wars cards did this best because they used photographs from the movies. When one showed Han Solo or Darth Vader, it was an actual frame from Star Wars, and I usually knew the scene, what was happening around it, and what came before and after. All of that arrived with the picture. The Marvel cards worked the same way for the characters I had actually read, because pulling one came with the history of having bought their comics.

The new Marvel cards have been instructive on that point. I have always liked Marvel, but that does not mean I have followed everything Marvel has published, and I have been opening cards featuring heroes and heroines I barely know. I read the flavor text, look the character up online, and understand afterward why they matter. The card itself gave me nothing on the way to that understanding. I am discovering that my attachment to Marvel is a lot more specific than the enormous Marvel name makes it sound. It lives in particular characters, teams and periods, and a card from outside those does not get in.

TMNT is a different version of the same problem. I am in my late fifties, and when I get nostalgic about the Turtles my mind goes to the original black-and-white independent comics, which were weird, violent, funny and unlike anything else I was reading. They hit me at about the same age ElfQuest did, scratching a very different itch. A perfectly recognizable Leonardo on a modern card does not take me back to that.

For a while I wondered whether the real explanation was age. I have bought, watched, read and collected enough things over the decades that maybe opening another package of cards simply cannot feel the way it used to. I had more or less accepted that, which is not a great thing to accept.

Magic itself made the theory hard to keep.

I opened some Strixhaven and became interested almost immediately once I understood what the set was doing with its Lessons and magical-school theme. There was the familiar click where a card stopped being another card and started being an idea I wanted to build around.

Murders at Karlov Manor got me for a different reason. A Magic set built around detectives, clues and solving crimes sounded great to me, so I went to an event for it, and I was genuinely disappointed that nobody at my table even tried to build around the mystery. I wanted someone to lean into the investigate mechanic, chain Clues into evidence, and treat the table like a case being worked. Instead, everyone played Magic exactly the way they would have played it anyway. That hacked me off. The premise was the whole reason I showed up.

Then Adventures in the Forgotten Realms gave me the reaction I had been looking for, repeatedly.

Oh cool, a beholder.

Ooooh, a troll.

Oh my, I got Drizzt.

I have been playing Dungeons & Dragons since the early 1980s. A beholder already has decades of associations for me. I know what a troll means in D&D. I certainly know who Drizzt is. Those cards connected to something that had been living in my imagination for years, and the jolt was right there.

So the sense of wonder I thought I might be losing is still perfectly capable of showing up. It showed up for a set with no license at all, and it showed up hardest for a license that happened to overlap with the exact part of my life it was drawing on. What I had been doing was giving the property itself too much credit. A familiar logo gets announced, I already know I love the source material, and before long I am looking at boxes and Commander decks as though all of that affection will automatically transfer to the cards inside. Forgotten Realms proved that sometimes it does. Tolkien proved that sometimes I get Bilbo and think, "Okay, that's Bilbo."

Star Trek is going to be a good test. I love Star Trek, but there is an enormous amount of it now, spread across decades of television and movies, and loving Star Trek does not mean I will care equally about every character. There may be a Commander deck that hits exactly the era I want. I might enjoy a few boosters. I might be happier waiting for the card list and picking out the handful of characters I actually care about. Whichever it turns out to be, I would like to find out before the box is already on the porch.

That is where I have landed. The feeling has not gone anywhere; I have been expecting it from products that, for one reason or another, were never going to have the same connection for me. The next time a publisher announces cards based on something I have loved for thirty or forty years, I will still pay attention. I would just like to give myself enough time to figure out whether I am excited about the cards or excited about what the name on the box reminds me of, because I suspect the cards I buy after making that distinction will be a lot more fun to open.