It is the first day of 2023 and my first article in quite a while. I had every intention of writing more frequently in 2022…but I also promised myself I wouldn’t be too hard on myself if that didn’t happen. In my defense, I was planning my wedding + honeymoon, building a new team at work and hammering out my paper on the Pokémon TCG community with Steffen Eriksen…it is getting very close to completion!
These life pulls led to a slow start for me in our current season of organized play. Next weekend’s Regional Championship in San Diego will be my first CP-awarding event of this Pokémon year, which is already getting close to the halfway point. Like many others, I am eagerly awaiting the return of local CP-awarding events. The COVID recovery is incomplete without them.
One COVID recovery milestone that seems to have gone mostly uncelebrated is the return of “official” Pokémon League. In the Portland metropolitan area, many of the old leagues returned in the fall. The league I have been attending is actually brand new - Mox Boarding House opened their downtown Portland location in the middle of the pandemic. Since mid-October, I have been going by Mox on Saturdays to play with a few regulars (including two dedicated league leaders) and a growing rotation of irregulars - some of which, I suspect, will become regulars when local CP-awarding events finally return. It is my hope that the proliferation of online play has not irrevocably crowded out the demand for weekly league.
For those of you on the fence about making your own return to a league, this 34 year old is here to report on several joyful (and unexpected!) league experiences and observations from the past three months. To fully appreciate what I have to share, I think you will need to know some recent history. Due to a very long break from the Pokémon TCG and a cross-country move, I only got to experience the Portland Pokémon TCG scene for three months before the COVID pandemic shut everything down. Because of this, I hardly knew anyone in the Portland Pokémon TCG community until very recently. When everything shut down, I became one of the many people to start working from home full-time. This next fact might seem a bit out of left field, but I will tie it all together! During the pandemic, Portland’s housing crisis dramatically worsened - significantly more people are living outside. As you might imagine, the combination of permanent work from home arrangements (including my own) and increased homelessness has changed Portland’s city center - which is now host to Mox.
With that context behind us, let’s start with the league experiences and observations. My current life circumstances offer few practical reasons to leave my house. Without a work commute or boundary for ending the work, I never really “leave” work behind. For much of the past few years, my work-related thoughts tended to carry over into the periods of time when I was not actively working (like the evenings and weekends). This has recently and quite unexpectedly changed. My weekly league has created a reliable boundary in my life and, with it, some truly welcome changes to my professional situation. Every Saturday I am given a sanctuary in time that helps me transform from a laborer into a Pokémon trainer (i.e. a non-laborer!). After I leave Mox on Saturdays, thoughts of work rarely come to mind until Monday morning.
While I receive a great deal of social satisfaction from Jeremy (new husband!) and my virtual work community, they do not fully satisfy my social needs…and neither does the online Pokémon TCG community. The community spawned by a league fills many of the gaps. My interactions at Mox instill within me a sense of place and belonging that I certainly could not achieve by Regional hopping across the world. The anticipation of who may or may not show up each week is real. It is an excitement and joyful suspense that I completely forgot about. The semi-structured interactions that take place at league can help build empathy bridges with different kinds of people. I am very much an agnostic city dweller, but I am grateful for the opportunity to mix with religious folk and suburbanites. The connection that is fostered at our league helps us understand one another and, generally, sows the seeds for meaningful friendships. I am delighted to finally have some local Pokémon TCG friends! The community associated with a league, moreover, is the type of social structure that can successfully welcome young people into the Pokémon TCG community and keep them here. Based on recent Junior and Senior Regional attendance, this is the type of social structure the Pokémon TCG desperately needs right now.
One final experience - I want to share a memory from one of my Saturdays at Mox. The rain was pouring (per usual) outside the shop as I sat down to a game with a young boy who was just learning to play. I shuffled my deck and then helped him shuffle his. After I regarded my opening hand and put down a Basic Pokémon, I looked up at the boy and noticed movement over his shoulder. Behind the boy, a man was laying down on the sidewalk just outside the shop. It was a moment of sadness and hope. Poverty and homelessness are terrible problems that are visible in every part of Portland - but there are solutions! Between the man on the sidewalk and me was a boy experiencing the best possible form of positive youth development and potentially on the verge of finding his way into a community that he might call home forever. I firmly believe that meaningful participation in the Pokémon TCG can confer a myriad of protective factors against some of the worst things that can happen in life.
In closing, participation in a league does not come with any guarantees. It does, however, come with many promising possibilities. I encourage you all to return to a Pokémon League and see what you might find!
Colin