There’s a specific kind of dread that comes with walking into a new space where everyone else clearly knows what they’re doing and you absolutely do not.
I know this feeling well. Anxiety has a funny way of turning completely ordinary situations into things that feel enormous. A shop door becomes a barrier, a simple question becomes a potential embarrassment and the act of admitting you’re a beginner feels like standing up in a room full of experts and announcing that you’ve never heard of gravity. It’s irrational. I know it’s irrational. That knowledge has never once made it easier.
So when my interest in Magic: The Gathering started to properly take hold, spurred on by the Respawning team’s broader dive into tabletop and card games; I found myself in a familiar holding pattern. Interested. Genuinely, properly interested. And completely unable to take the first step.
My friend mentioned that local game stores often provide starter decks for newcomers. A gentle nudge, casually dropped. And so, after what I’ll generously describe as “a reasonable amount of internal deliberation” and what my anxiety would more accurately describe as “an unnecessary amount of overthinking,” I walked through the door of Union County Games in Exeter.
I didn’t know a single person in there. I didn’t really know what I was asking for. I just knew I wanted to learn.
What happened next was one of those quietly lovely things that doesn’t make for a dramatic story but makes for an important one. Two people, whose names I absolutely should have remembered and am mortified that I didn’t, took the time to actually talk to me. Not in a perfunctory “yes we have those, they’re over there” way. In a genuine, patient, enthusiastic way. They handed me a starter deck. They gave me dice. They talked me through the basics of how Magic actually works, and more usefully, they talked me through how to learn it.
MTG Arena, they explained, is brilliant for getting to grips with the mechanics but it also does an awful lot of the work for you, which means you can play for hours and still not fully understand what’s happening because the interface handles the timing and the triggers and the stack. Good for a gentle introduction, less good for actually building knowledge. Commander, the format everyone eventually ends up obsessed with, is fantastic but for a newcomer it can feel like being dropped into the deep end of a pool that also has complicated rules about who gets to swim when and why that one card is banned. They weren’t discouraging either option, just honest about them. The kind of honest that comes from people who genuinely love something and want to help you love it too.
I left with a deck, some dice, a rough sense of direction, and this is the part that matters: a sense that I’d been welcomed rather than tolerated.
That’s not a given. Hobbyist spaces, for all the warmth they contain, can sometimes feel impenetrable from the outside. There’s an assumed baseline of knowledge that can make a newcomer feel like they’ve missed several important memos. The anxiety I carry into those situations isn’t irrational because the spaces are unfriendly, it’s just my brain catastrophising, as it tends to do. But the antidote to catastrophising, it turns out, is just people being kind. Simple as that.
Union County Games are based at 21 Whipton Village Rd, Exeter and if you’re anywhere near Exeter and even remotely curious about Magic, Lorcana, Pokémon, or just the world of tabletop gaming in general, I’d genuinely point you their way. They stock singles, sealed product, and a whole lot more and based on my experience, the people behind the counter are the kind who make a hobby feel accessible rather than exclusive. You can find them online at unioncountygames.com, or follow them on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter/X.
I’m still very much a beginner. My understanding of the stack is shaky at best. I have made several decisions in my short Magic career that I suspect were deeply wrong in ways I don’t yet have the vocabulary to fully understand. But I’m playing. I’m learning. And the reason I took that first step, despite everything my anxiety had to say about it, is because someone was kind enough to make the door feel worth opening.
Sometimes that’s all it takes.