Playing With Time: Memory and Nostalgia in Magic: the Gathering Communities

This paper presents ongoing research into the role of nostalgia among Australian players of Magic: The Gathering (MTG), the long-running trading card game developed by Wizards of the Coast. Its aims are to clarify how nostalgia shapes participation in MTG communities and players' broader attachment to the game, and to examine how the developer's corporate practices draw on that nostalgia for profit and affect players in turn. The work frames these questions through Svetlana Boym's distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia.

The study rests on qualitative, semi-structured interviews with twenty engaged players in Australia, defined as people who had taken part in MTG events and games for at least twelve months before interview. Participants also supplied photographs of MTG-related objects they associated with nostalgia, sentimentality, or significant memories, which serve both as prompts during discussion and as supplementary data capturing the material dimension of players' nostalgic attachments.

The paper situates MTG as a game of rapid change, with an estimated 40 million regular players worldwide as of 2023 and a card pool that has grown from 293 cards at its debut to over 26,000 by late 2023. New themed sets are released roughly every two months and typically remain in retail circulation for less than a year, after which players depend on secondary markets to obtain older cards. This distribution model produces asymmetrical access shaped by financial, temporal, and spatial circumstances, and it makes set-specific play experiences impossible to reclaim, turning them into objects of retrospection.

The author argues that MTG offers a distinctive case for studying nostalgia in contemporary consumer culture, particularly as tabletop play increasingly intersects with digital technologies. The research is therefore positioned as a contribution both to scholarship on MTG communities and to wider work on how the rapid production and obsolescence of cultural objects shape experiences of time in post-industrial consumer economies.