Students gather together for Magic Club every Monday and Thursday, in D206. Club sponsor and English teacher, Aaron Goulette, extends an invitation to all students from all levels of experience.

Goulette provides the main purpose of the club and how he feels about the effects of trying to establish the foundation for a new club.

“The main purpose of the Magic Club is to find a bunch of kids who have like differences or similarities rather and getting them together with a group of friends that they kind of bond with,” he said. “Magic for me, when I first started it in high school, it was actually an appreciation for artwork, and for some of the kids, when they started seeing some of the cards that I had, they kind of noticed the same thing about the artwork. We like some of the themes that it has and… there’s this idea that we can make decks or cards that are themed by our personality.”

Senior Seth Mencia talked about how he started playing Magic.

“My older brother introduced me to Magic when I was 8, because he was playing with his friends at school and we started playing together.”

In Magic: The Gathering, there are many different play styles for many different people. As Goulette mentioned and explains, how you play depends on your personality and what you are more comfortable with.

“If I face Juan, I know that he likes to be very aggressive; if I play Seth I know he likes to mess around with me, make me think he’s going to do things, when he never actually does; if I play Alonso I know he uses very very big characters all of a sudden; if I play Tony I know that he is always going to use zombies, he is always going to be obsessed with the idea of using the same strategy over and over again,” he said.

When asked about growing the club community, he said,”I think the biggest struggle I face with getting the club to be a little bit bigger is getting younger ones into it. A lot of middle school kids got to come in here as freshman, and they play Yu-Gi-Oh or something like that, and a lot of it is just showing them that Magic, one, is the one that started all these trading card games, and two, it’s a little more complex than people believe.”

Alexander Tarbutton, a member of the club, explained how he got into the Magic Club.

“I heard the announcement and decided to see what the club was all about,” Tarbutton said. “The biggest challenge would be trying to figure out how your opponent is going to react to the card you are going to play and reacting to them.”

Goulette talks strategy and changing previous perceptions.

“What’s cool about Magic and what I’m trying to bring into the population is the idea that is more than just sixty cards in the deck, it’s more than just seven cards in your hand at the time. It’s about strategy,” Goulette said. “It’s about being able to plan what the next move is, it’s kind of like poker and chess all at the same time, and what’s cool is that there’s never a similar experience every time. There’s luck involved. Every opponent you play is different, every deck that an opponent has plays differently than another. So there’s this cool experience that I’m trying to sell to kids that Yu-Gi-Oh and Pokemon doesn’t really offer, you know. Magic is all about different things, different themes every single time. There’s just so much variety that I feel all these other games kind of lack, and I’m trying to give that variety to the local population so that they can kind of see it, and at the same time build in social bonding, as Magic is more than a game for a lot of these kids.”

“They started as sophomores and now they’re seniors, graduating together, and it’s become, I think, less about playing the game all the time and it’s more about just playing with each other, building those friendships that they’ve had for so many years.” Goulette said. Some of the aforementioned students above have been going after school for two, even three years, playing before the club was even made official. Now, the founding of the Magic Club has simply expanded the ranks of the participants and the audience.