This is what will be

Priceless to me,
and I sure ain't talking
about money

Adults have a way of ruining things.

Jack (and Ruby to a slightly lesser extent) are both passionate players and collectors of all things related to Magic: The Gathering, a card game that was unknown to me until about a year ago. You play against others, trying to destroy them with powerful cards from a deck you have collected. There are such things as Planeswalkers and Merfolk of the Depths and Arc Lightnings, and the game is full of casting spells, attacking and defending.

It has a rabid fanbase, and some cards are so rare that they fetch hundreds or thousands of dollars. In fact, there are several gaming stores in my neck of the woods, where at any given moment there are dozens of people playing, collecting, whatever.

The game itself is oh-so-confusing to me (Jack: "I taught Ruby to play in five minutes!"), but this isn't about my ineptitude; it's more about how things are different today.

When I was just a bit younger than Jack, I (and most of my friends) collected baseball cards just as feverishly as he collected Magic cards. But we wanted all the cards, we didn't play with them, we just searched for and coveted our favorite players. We had no idea these cards would be worth bags of money in the future, but we sure found that out later on.

Anyway, we just traded what we needed and/or liked. Which is what Jack tried to do with one of his buddies over the weekend. Just as they shook on the deal, two adults who were in the "gaming store" (including a parent) stepped saying it wasn't a fair deal as some cards were worth more monetarily than others. In essence, an unfair trade. Money-wise, that was true, despite the fact that each trader would have been happy for the deal to go down.

OK, trades should be fair, obviously. But in this instance it really removed some part of the joy of collecting and trading. Even though they were kids, they are now not playing a kids game. the unfortunate truth is that money rules. Maybe that's the way it has to be done, but it's a shame how it lords over a couple of pre-teens and how they want to play.

When I wanted a Bobby Richardson card and would have traded a Don Mossi and a Tom Tresh for one of my favorite players, no one was thinking that the Richardson card might have been worth scads more than the others (and I am sure that's a bad example, you get the point).

Bobby Richardson was priceless to me then, not unlike how certain cards are priceless to Jack now.

But it's all for a different reason, and I'm not sure it's for the better.