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Episode 70: Angrath and the MtG Dad
97 Plays5 years ago
Welcome back to the Goblin Lore Podcast! For today's episode Hobbes is running solo and somehow barely mentions Bolas at all (and at least it's kind of relevant). Using what we know so far about Angrath, Hobbes discusses what being an MtG Dad means to him and how his relationship with the game has changed in the past 15 months.
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We finally did our 500 follower giveaway at 650 followers! Prizes will be going out soon as we need to limit trips to the Post Office. We will do future giveaways but we hadn't planned beyond 500 followers so will need to regroup!
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You can find the hosts on Twitter: Hobbes Q. at @HobbesQ, and Alex Newman at @Mel_Chronicler. Send questions, comments, thoughts, hopes, and dreams to @GoblinLorePod on Twitter or GoblinLorePodcast@gmail.com.
Opening and closing music by Wintergatan (@wintergatan). Logo art by Steven Raffael (@SteveRaffle).
Goblin Lore is proud to be presented by Hipsters of the Coast, and a part of their growing Vorthos content – as well as Magic content of all kinds. Check them out at hipstersofthecoast.com.
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Transcript
Introduction to Angrath's Story
00:00:31
Speaker
Hello Podwalkers and welcome to another episode of the Goblin Lord podcast. This is your host, Hobbs Q, and I'm bringing you today a solo episode. It's gonna be just me and you. We've had a little bit of a decline in our recording schedule with kind of everything that's going on with work from home and COVID and just our own health, physical and mental. So today I just wanted to kind of record a quick episode so that we made sure that we have something out for everybody this week.
00:00:58
Speaker
And just because this topic is something that's kind of pretty personal to me.
Angrath's Family Reunion
00:01:03
Speaker
So without further ado, I'm going to jump us in by talking a little bit about the planeswalker, Angrath. So Angrath, who first shows up for us on Ixalan,
00:01:14
Speaker
is actually, if you look at his biography that is given to us by Wizards, it's actually interesting because it talks about that in a cruel twist of fate, he kind of, a planeswalking mishap, took him to Ixalan, where he was then trapped, unable to planeswalk away, due to the immortal son. Now, this becomes kind of ironic in the sense that he gets pulled back to later, he gets pulled using the interplanar beacon, he gets
00:01:44
Speaker
pulled to Ravnica and lured there. The reason that I'm bringing up Angrath is that Angrath is a father, and one of the things that happens is that Angrath, when he has been planeswalked in these ways, and kind of that cruel twist of fate that initially happened when he came to Exelon, literally gets pulled away from his family.
00:02:04
Speaker
he's somebody that's kind of we don't know a ton about yet in terms of kind of what led to his initial spark because we meet him when he finally first comes to Ixalan and we get to see him get to return home which is a great story but there's been kind of speculation that it's kind of the sadness that his spark may be different it wasn't necessarily the trauma which we've talked about in kind of some of the previous ones
00:02:29
Speaker
that it could have been passion or desire or just love maybe that kind of caused him to planeswalk and actually caused him to move away from his family kind of that may be a tragedy that's associated with that but one of the things that we know is that he gets trapped on Ixalan where he lives for 14 years he gets trapped there by the immortal son unable to kind of planeswalk away and
00:02:56
Speaker
Kind of is able to finally with the help of kind of Sorry with the help of what Lee and kind of being able to get the immortal son well the immortal son gets taken away which we know ends up being kind of Part of bolus's later plan
Angrath's Wisdom on Loss
00:03:12
Speaker
for war the spark. He is able to Vanish and he returns home
00:03:17
Speaker
There's a really nice story that was given to us on the mothership. It's from February 14th, kind of funny. It's Valentine's Day 2018 by Alison Lors with some additional contributions by Greg Lubin, where we get a nice mini story that I just want to kind of highlight.
00:03:35
Speaker
Basically, Angrath returning home, and it says it looked just like he remembered. The road was dusty and broad, peppered here and there with the stores that had been in business longer than he had been alive. It was a sleepy sort of place and Angrath was very happy, very little, it changed.
00:03:51
Speaker
A little plume of smoke was rising from his foundry. A hand-painted window on the outside read open and blocky lettering. The building was little more than a shack at the far end of town, but it had been his shack on the far end of town. Piles of iron and metal were stacked outside and a number of items and weapons were hung on a rack. Each tagged to mark which orders was which. Angrass' ears flicked as he heard the clang of metal and sizzle of water inside. He approached and exchanged clank with each step he took.
00:04:17
Speaker
Angreth ducked slightly to avoid hitting his head on the doorway. He could still make out the bumps in the wood from every time he had forgotten and paused as he looked for the blacksmith at work. Two minutars glanced up from their anvils. They were tall like their mother had been. They wore bulky leather aprons, and their horns were adorned with the jewelry worn by unmarried women of their age. Their eyes went wide. The one on the right snorted in shock. The other's ears stood up in surprise. The one on the right sniffed the air and trembled with emotion. Father.
00:04:47
Speaker
Steamed, softly hissed, when Angrath's tears met his skin, he smiled. Rumi, Jamira, I'm home." So what we see in this kind of almost coda to what had happened in Ixalan is that Angrath returns
Speculations on Angrath's Spark
00:05:01
Speaker
home. He had been a blacksmith in the town. It's kind of funny because I did ask this question before I started Twitter today a little bit about
00:05:08
Speaker
Do we know how he sparked? And I got a lot of really funny answers, everything from kind of the idea that he smashed his hand working on this forge because he was part of, he was a blacksmith. And he returns home to find kind of the fact that his daughters have basically taken over the family business. They are now the ones running the blacksmithing shop, the forge. And this is kind of a moment of just pure emotion for him.
00:05:38
Speaker
Kind of that idea that tears kind of have just met his skin, he smiles. This is Angrath returned home to be with his daughters and to be with his family. And like I said, what we then know is that he gets pulled to Ravnica and gets trapped again.
00:05:57
Speaker
From here, we don't actually know where Angrath's story is going to go. We don't know what kind of is next for it. He was present for kind of the plane-wide celebration of getting rid of Bolas and getting him gone.
Fatherhood Through Angrath and Hobbs Q
00:06:09
Speaker
And there's kind of this discussion among the planeswalkers about what to do with the immortal son, which Angrath is obviously in favor of just destroying because it's now trapped him twice.
00:06:20
Speaker
The rest of kind of some of the planeswalkers that are involved with this, people that kind of were part of the Gate Watcher that have now been kind of involved with the War of the Spark, they vetoed this idea because they believe that it could help capture the planeswalkers who assisted Bolas. One nice moment that he has towards the end of the War of the Spark, which is that he does have a conversation with Teo and tells the boy not to pity the dead because their suffering is over, but rather to pity the loved ones they left behind.
00:06:48
Speaker
kind of really playing again back into that story that we kind of think of with Angrath with kind of what he has gone through what he has lost what has happened to him in that he keeps getting pulled away from this family and in particular who's two daughters. So before we move on to what the topic of the day is going to be I want to kind of share a little bit of what some of the other answers are that I got online when I asked do we know how Angrath sparked because hilariously I think some people kind of
00:07:14
Speaker
Not knowing why I was asking this question did at least hit on the fact that a lot of the answers were to do about his being a dad. It was different elements of it. So, you know, Travis underscore L underscore M joked about the quarantining with all of his kids.
00:07:32
Speaker
We have Aaron Campbell, who made a nice joke about maybe he stepped on a Lego, at plaid clad, saying big dad energy. We even kind of had the great response from a pretty ugly art that says we don't know how we spark. But we do know that his first act as a planeswalker was to bring his daughters back toys from other dimensions, because we know that this is kind of who Angrath is known as. He is known as a dad.
00:07:58
Speaker
Uh, and I do think that it's awesome that we have a representation of a dad in magic and a dad that's Rakdos really with that kind of passion behind it, that firiness and then seeing what being trapped away from his family kind of did to him on Ixalan and the fact that he's so overcome when he comes back to them. I really think that there's interesting room for where we can go with Angrith in the future, but where I wanted to use it for today's episode was the time to talk about
00:08:24
Speaker
my own journey now that I am 15 months a Father I've been a father for 15 months it at 40 years of age You know, I kind of think of it is this is I thought this would be a good item to tighten I'm almost do a state of being an MTD TG dad There's a whole community of dads out there that play the game. I even Have a we're doing a stream on Thursday. So I
00:08:51
Speaker
Under the it's www.twitch.tv backslash Whichever slash it is Hobbs Q. I'm gonna be streaming with other dads and I put out a call today for Parents who play magic because I do think that there is an element that is changed with how I approach the game my relationship with the game my relationship with the community and
00:09:16
Speaker
Now that I am a father, you know, I always hear the kind of the stories about how your life can change and what's different about it. And here we are 15 months after my daughter has been born. And I've had to reevaluate multiple times how I'm going to engage with Magic the Gathering and what role it's going to have in my life.
Balancing Magic and Parenthood
00:09:39
Speaker
because it is an important element or an important thing for me for my mental health and my well-being, which is something that I feel that I need in order to be there for my daughter. And at the same time, just the very nature of being a father for a toddler means that
00:09:56
Speaker
the ability to just play magic when I want to play magic is not there. Early on you probably know that there were jokes about hearing Gwen in the background of a cast because trying to figure out childcare with a wife who's on call and works and then around a recording schedule around a toddler's nap time just
00:10:16
Speaker
it's unpredictable. It's been me recording recently a deck tech trying to get it in real quick while she's asleep. In fact, I started this recording tonight while she was taking a rare afternoon nap, which she woke up from about 10 minutes into the recording. And luckily, my wife was still home before going to pick up our grocery order during this quarantine and was able to kind of help. But
00:10:41
Speaker
You know, it's trying to find these new things, but I mainly just wanted to use today to talk a little bit about What that means kind of being a father who plays magic and also just what it means for me to be a father So I guess that's kind of be what I'm gonna spend the next kind of you know We'll see how long we go but the rest of this episode talking about with you all and
00:11:04
Speaker
As many of you may know that becoming a father is something that has always been really important to me and something that I had almost given up on. So those who have been in the community, I was figuring this out the other day when I discovered EDH deck lists and stuff that I had saved from 2010. And that's around the time that I joined Twitter right around the age of 31.
00:11:30
Speaker
So I've always been kind of the dad of the Twitter community in some ways or at least felt like there was a kind of a older element to what I have done and it's only grown over the last 10 years. Anybody who knew me at that point knows that
00:11:49
Speaker
I was a very different person than I am now, I would say. I was not in as good a place in my life. I was in the middle of grad school. I was in a relationship that had gone on for eight years and there was nothing that was horrible or bad about that relationship. It just was not a relationship that unfortunately was going to go the direction that I had wanted it to and had a vision that it would at one point. And part of that was the idea of becoming
00:12:18
Speaker
a father to be married to have a family i've always kind of had this weird i know i'm not weird but i've always had this notion of of what a family is and what it means to have a family because i'm the product of a 19 year old and a 21 year old who had one kid and
00:12:34
Speaker
kind of are still together. It warped my view at a young age. When I'm now in college at 22 and stuff and neither of my parents went to school, so I had this view that like, wow, am I gonna have kids while I'm in college? And then I barely dated in college, that just wasn't where I was at that lifetime. And then I'm in grad school and I'm getting older and then I lose the relationship or the relationship ends that I had been in for so long.
00:13:04
Speaker
And I'm now in my, you know, thirties, which it's not necessarily that that's old, but I was nowhere near this point and.
00:13:14
Speaker
In some ways, I think I'd almost given up the idea of that I was going to be a father. I had kind of come to grips with that. I've come to terms with it. I mean, and it's that weird thing too, because that also meant other things is, if I'm not married to somebody that has
00:13:35
Speaker
siblings, I'm also never going to be an uncle because I'm an only child. So there was all this kind of beliefs about myself, the beliefs that people had told me about what a great father they could see that I would be, how they could very easily imagining me being that I really had kind of started to give up on and really thought was not going to be
00:13:56
Speaker
an option and and now it is now i am a father i mean that that changed everything changed within three short years basically of even moving to minnesota um i got married i moved i even have a kid i've had all of these changes and almost none of them compare the fact of having daughter my daughter gwen in my life um
00:14:22
Speaker
I've always struggled with sleep. I've always struggled with anxiety and Initially those things just became even worse because now I'm worried about something that's that can't something someone a person that can't take care of themselves that that you can't reason with you know that it's not that I can take you know, my dogs at least
00:14:48
Speaker
I can let them outside and let them run around and they're not going to get hurt or at least I'm not going to be worried that they're going to do something that they're going to fall down and hit their head to the same degree. It was scary to me. I'm somebody that's always been scared of death and that concept and now I felt like
00:15:12
Speaker
Here I am. If I die, my daughter's not going to have a dad. She's not going to have that person in her life. And these things just weighed on me very, very heavily. And in the past, when things have weighed on me very, very heavily, my go-to is becoming lost in magic, whether that is in the lore or that is in just playing or building decks. And
Community Support for Magic Parents
00:15:35
Speaker
I really wasn't able to just escape into that sure I could maybe play some MTGO at times or arena but even then I have to be cognizant of what my wife needs what my daughter needs from me and I can't just
00:15:51
Speaker
start a game and then tell my wife, well, you know, I'm really sorry. We're in the middle of this game of EDH. I'll be done sometime between now and two hours from now. There just isn't that ability for me to just do even in the way that I could do when it was just me and my wife, who is very, very understanding and very encouraging of
00:16:11
Speaker
my magic and me playing and magic the gathering in general. I mean, the joke being that she said during her wedding vows, which I had not seen beforehand, that she would never throw away my magic cards. I mean, she has been supportive of this cast. So that, you know, of everything, just making sure even asking me if I'm playing, she loves the magic community, even though she doesn't play herself. She talks about how great it was having people here at our barbecue in Minneapolis, getting to meet them. She remembers
00:16:39
Speaker
information about like all the magic players that she has met and especially with our Minnesota and Minneapolis community is very aware of kind of who everybody is so I have that support but I also don't just have the same ability that I could not do or that I could do before to just play to just start a game at any point and not have to worry about it and
00:17:04
Speaker
And I had to start recognizing that that's okay. My priorities in some way had changed. What's funny is by doing this cast, I've kind of allowed myself to have an outlet.
00:17:19
Speaker
that we've been working on keeping regular and consistent and as many of you know that's been one of the things when we've come back that's been important to us is putting out consistent episodes again and to get that routine going because I can now start to arrange things that she does have at least a regular bedtime so maybe I'm going to sacrifice a little bit more of my sleep so that I have an element of the Magic the Gathering community.
00:17:44
Speaker
Now this is all talking in the first 15 months of her life. This is not even getting into the fact that I don't know what it'll mean in a year or two because what I would love to have happen, I would love the idea that I'm going to teach my daughter to play magic. I always had that idea that I would teach a child or my child to play.
00:18:05
Speaker
I've already looked at people like the booze cube or Looking at Dana Fisher's parents and what they've done to see how they're introducing the game and kind of how to teach it to kids How to make it accessible to them. I love this idea, but I just I don't know there's a part of me that realizes that maybe she's not interested in this and
00:18:27
Speaker
which is would be very very difficult on me I think and very hard on me because this game has been so important to me and given so much to me and allowed me to be this that might not be the direction that she goes to so
00:18:41
Speaker
my priorities and everything have kind of changed and I've had to find what is important and what's important about magic right now to me is the community and the stay at home order actually now that I am spending more time at home and being with my daughter and my wife and also having this weird period of is it free time is it not to spend with all of you I am throwing myself back into the community in a lot of ways
00:19:10
Speaker
that is important to me to kind of be talking about this and to be having these discussions about what does it mean to be a parent that plays magic or a parent that is engaged in magic. I say play because that's only one way that we do have to engage in our community. There's lots of other ways.
00:19:26
Speaker
And those have been my modes for the last six months or so has been a lot less play. What's funny is my ability to play has actually increased due to the coronavirus and the quarantine and the self social distancing and all of that. But the lore of the podcast, the people online that are a big part of it have been would have allowed me to have a community to reach out to.
00:19:54
Speaker
There have been other dads that have paved the way for me to make it possible for me to have somebody to reach out to. When they knew I was going to have a child, I had Magic players reach out to me to offer advice, to offer kind of suggestions, just to be kind of a sounding board, knowing that I was going to need that, to talk about the differences and what their relationship was with the game during this time and when they kind of, you know, how they did it.
00:20:21
Speaker
I'm very fortunate in that there are a lot of dads in the Minneapolis community.
Shifting Values as a Parent
00:20:25
Speaker
So we've gotten clever. Even before I had Gwen, we would find ways to do a cube event and do it at a very specific time when we knew dads might be able to get away for a couple of hours to come cube. And we do it once. So it might happen once a month, but that was still them being able to get away and to be able to do it. And I realized now that I'm going to need that and I'm going to want that to be there, but also
00:20:50
Speaker
What have I learned from this game in this community that I'm gonna be able to use hopefully to be a good father? I'm Joking that you don't get an instruction manual and I'm the type of person that tried to read books and do all this stuff But I'm still just raising a child with a very supportive wife that both of us, you know
00:21:08
Speaker
we're learning we're we're older i mean i'm part of what was difficult for me and this is where i really feel like i kind of connect with the angry story not that i'm being taken away from gwen for these long periods of time but the fact that he was gone for 14 years he comes back he's taken away again my fears when it comes to things like death is
00:21:28
Speaker
just even knowing that unlike my parents who had me at a very young age and are still alive and still young grandparents I'm probably not going to have that same
00:21:42
Speaker
relationship or have that same ability given that I am 40. So even if I live in great shape until my eighties, you know, that gets me to Gwen being 40. I don't know how much time I'll get to have with a grandchild or I won't be able to do maybe some of the things that my parents are able to, or even Jen's parents are able to do with Gwen.
00:22:02
Speaker
And that it's very saddening to me and it makes me kind of think of that idea that, you know, Angra trying to find his freedom and get back to them. I know it's not the same given that he was taken away during their lifetime, but I think it just is that idea that he realizes that he is trying to always get back to his family and that it really is not, it's,
00:22:29
Speaker
It's just a hard concept to really kind of discuss. This is something that's very difficult for me to even engage with or discuss because this is a difficult area for me, which is dealing with my own more mortality, I guess, versus maybe a planeswalker in some ways.
00:22:44
Speaker
But this idea that he is very clear and very kind of sympathetic to Teo to kind of discuss this idea to not pity the dead for their suffering is over, but rather to pity the loved ones they left behind. And it just makes me feel that I could be filled with pity.
00:23:06
Speaker
This is rambling and I understand that and it's just because this is a topic that is kind of new for me to really be thinking about. But this is one of the first times I've actually put down into words what being a dad means for me at this point. I'm trying to spend time engaging with my daughter. I'm learning about how she sees the world at 15 months and admitting that there are still difficult times because it's not like a 15 month old I can just
00:23:35
Speaker
There's it's it's like an in-between area It's not like I can just put her down for a nap and then I can do some stuff for my own time I she's also not old enough to just go play on her own and there are days that it does feel exhausting and there's days that it feels very tough and There's days that I have to continually reevaluate and analyze. What is My relationship with family. What is my relationship? socially and what is my relationship with magic the gathering in the community and
00:24:05
Speaker
who I lean on for support, and I have to always be mindful of the fact that it's not pulling me away from the other things that are important to me and my values. And what's great about this is it's not an all or none situation. So our last episode was on those cognitive biases that I still have to cope with, and I have to still prepare for and be aware of, but
00:24:29
Speaker
this isn't an all or none situation. It is a situation of kind of priorities and values and where I see those being and how those may shift given the coming years. I could end up with a daughter who loves to play magic and is you know as into the game as I am and considering I didn't start until my 20s but you know I have a wealth of knowledge that I can share her and I can teach her. Maybe we're going to game stores and I get to have that great relationship of
00:24:57
Speaker
those parents playing too had a giant at a pre-release with their child and she maybe wants to get into cosplay. I mean this is a nerdy family and I mean she could rebel completely against Jen and I but she's gonna probably be around a lot of fantasy and sci-fi stuff just by the very nature of who Jen and I are and that could be great that could be just wonderful and everything that I would hope for and maybe my wildest dreams in terms of my vision and I also have to be aware of the fact is
00:25:27
Speaker
None of that might happen. People and children, no matter what their environment is, they do also are gonna be exposed to other things. She's gonna meet people at school. She's going to, you know, it's not like this is a controlled environment where, you know, she's gonna turn out a certain way just because I ask her to be or dad shows interest in something. Like, it's gonna be great, I'm excited, maybe she will, and I'll be ready to teach her.
00:25:54
Speaker
But I also have to wonder about what it means if she's not interested in those things and then what happens to me in this hobby and where does it fit into my life at a point where I don't I have an even less time or it really is that I need I want to be engaged in what my child is engaged in.
00:26:13
Speaker
And so I would say that thinking back to this first year, what I've kind of learned is that I am so thankful to have a community of Magic players who have gone through this that are kind of there as guidance for me and that I can reach out for during that first, I mean, during these times. I would not have had the support network of parents going through similar things as me without Magic the Gathering.
00:26:37
Speaker
And that is just kind of a cool thing to realize. Without Twitter and everybody that I have met, I don't have a ton of other friends outside the Magic community that are my age or have kids around the same age as Gwen.
00:26:53
Speaker
I get that by being involved with this community. So without it, I don't have that resource.
Connecting Magic with Family
00:27:00
Speaker
I have my escape in that I can come to the podcast and I can really have the support to kind of keep putting this stuff out there, which is an outlet for me, even if I can't sit down and record.
00:27:13
Speaker
What's kind of cool is I'm working on kind of getting maybe a more regular game of my stream. So one of the things I've been able to do during this period is to be streaming during, after Gwen's gone to bed obviously, but during this kind of the quarantine, I've been able to stream more and I'm trying to get a regular stream night going. And one thing that I set out to do today is to start getting together a group of parents that play EDH together
00:27:42
Speaker
so that we can record and maybe actually just have good conversations on that stream about our kids, about what we're going to do. Because that's the gathering piece, that's the social piece, that's the piece that is the most important at the end of the day to me.
00:27:59
Speaker
is those social connections that I am building as a parent to have others around me that I feel that are going to understand where I'm coming from, even though we all have our own experiences and everybody is unique, they're still going to have at least some idea of what I'm going through. And I kind of love this idea of maybe trying to get them together to be playing magic on a regular basis to have these conversations because it's a fun place to do it over a tabletop where we also have the game there right in front of us.
00:28:28
Speaker
So that's kind of the main points that I want to talk about today. One of the things that I wanted to bring up is that the project I'm working on right now that I am not going to have ready for this Thursday's first time of doing the parents playing MTG is a Sir Gwyn deck.
00:28:47
Speaker
So when Gwen was being born and the decks came out, I was able to pick up the Brawl deck and I have not actually gotten to build it, but I did build this deck for my daughter because the other Gwendolyn within Magic is not appropriate artwork if she decides that she wants to play and have this deck together. You can go check it out if you don't believe me.
00:29:07
Speaker
But it is from the original Legends set and it is a little scandalous and probably not where I would use to be for an introduction to the game for my daughter. But I am building this deck based on kind of around the character of Gwen, around the other knights. And so that is the project that I'm working on to kind of try to honor my daughter in this way. And hopefully maybe that could be a way for me to eventually someday tell her like, hey,
00:29:34
Speaker
this is a community that was so important to me when you were just starting out in this world and they are a community that has always been there for me and I'm hoping that maybe someday that this community is going to continue to grow and not fade away.
Conclusion and Reflections
00:29:49
Speaker
25 plus years strong of magic is impressive for any game and to just see the connections that that has built over those years and to see just the fact that I am on a social media site for 10 years
00:30:03
Speaker
Seeing changes in magic. I hope that that's still there for my daughter when we get to that point So it's basically the kind of the show for today a little bit of a shorter one just because it's me kind of by myself and I don't think I could talk much longer, but I really do appreciate anybody who's kind of listening today kind of that Sat through all of this I
00:30:27
Speaker
Just kind of leaving you with that, yeah, Angrath is who we kind of use as our kicking off point. There are plenty of other dads within Magic. We do know for a fact that, you know, like Dafari is a father. We have Ciaran Nilar. I joked when I was looking with, I was joked when I talked to Joe, who used to be one of the hosts on here, who's helping me come up with some ideas that maybe I would not choose Urza because I feel like that's a really bad role model.
00:30:54
Speaker
And he also mentioned the Markov Patriarchs are probably not a good example either. So there is this kind of in magic, but Angreth really just felt like such a great starting off point for this conversation. And I thank you for taking the time to spend it with me today.