A Return to the Promised Land: Moving Home and Finding a Thriving Community

Thompson Noble-Kelly · July 10, 2026

Sometimes, something you have done, or played for most of your life, surprises you in new and inventive ways. My experience with Magic has been like that pretty much my entire playing career. There are days where I find it hard to grapple with the fact that I might be an "Old Head" in Magic, despite being only 37 years old. I started playing when I was about ten, cracking packs and learning what the cards did. And still I'm learning what this game, what this community offers. Unsurprisingly to me, a sense of inclusion, understanding and friendship are at the forefront of what the local Premodern players offer on a daily basis. I bet most of you would agree.

When I left the state in 2017, it was after running events for about seven years at The Whiz in Westborough. My wife and I picked up our lives and moved to Washington State on a whim; we had no family out there, no friends, no community. We left with a dream and a prayer. We knew together we could make a leap of faith, learn from the challenges we would face, and grow as people. What we didn't know was how hard it would be to find a group of people like those we left behind.

For my part, I was deeply and actively involved in the local Magic community before we moved. I had so many friends, and so many people played in the events I ran weekly for so long. These are people I watched grow up, people that I watched age into having families and drift away, people that I carpooled with across the East Coast, to Canada, and to any event we could find to grind and play this game we love. What format? Didn't matter. How long was the drive? Who cares! Can't leave Toronto until 10pm on a Sunday night because your buddy made Day 2 of a GP and you've got to work at 6am on Monday morning? Uh oh, guess Monday is gonna suck, but you bet we're celebrating that whole long-ass ride home. These are precious and formative memories of mine that I cherish of playing Magic in my early 20s.

When I landed in Washington State, my first thoughts weren't on finding community; they were on establishing my new life and getting my feet under me. That wasn't a quick process. Finding work didn't prove to be difficult, but the time demanded by it meant that hobbies took a back seat. I hauled three or four 5,000-count boxes of cards and decks across the country with me, bags of playmats and dice and the like. After we landed, I lovingly packed them into a closet for later. About six months after we moved, I felt that familiar itch. A Standard GP was going to be in Portland, OR in November. I knew no buddies to carpool with; I had no friends to test with, but I went anyway. I built Blue-Black Control; the deck was a fantastic meta call in a field of Temur Energy. I made a called shot, and it paid off. I made Day 2 after getting some favorable matchups on Day 1. I got trounced out on Day 2 unceremoniously.

I was happy with my performance, happy with my deck choice, and happy with how I played all weekend. Despite that, I left feeling weirdly empty, and it was something I hadn't experienced playing Magic before. I drove the three and a half hours home to my wife that Sunday and regaled her with my weekend. I was happy, but that feeling of emptiness continued to eat away at me. I sat with it for a while. Why didn't I feel happier? Why wasn't this a high point for me? I talked to my friends back home about it, told them of how I did, and they were pumped for me. At that moment, hearing my friends cheer me on from 3,000 miles away, it hit me like a truck. I missed having that camaraderie. I missed the friends constantly cheering each other on. I missed those long drives where we talked through the weekend and just decompressed after the event. I missed the near delirium you feel after 48 hours of straight Magic. I knew I had to try and find that again.

I started going to a local store. Showing up for drafts, playing whatever format they were into there. I slowly made some friends, but it felt different somehow. I knew them by name; we went to bigger tournaments together. We shared meals and deck ideas and car rides together. But we didn't have a shared history. These groups were established already. They shared the same formative memories I had with MY friends. They welcomed me into the scene, but I didn't share their history.

If you haven't heard about the Seattle Freeze, let me tell you about my experience as an East Coaster. They're an exceptionally nice group of people, Seattleites. They're welcoming and friendly, but they keep you at arm's length. I think it's a learned form of emotional self-defense. Seattle is a city of transplants. So many people have moved there for work in the last twenty years, only to then move to where the next bigger paycheck is. As a tech hub, the turnover is crazy. People move in and out of their lives all the time. I can only imagine how exhausting that must be. I think they've learned to keep an emotional distance because they don't know how long people are going to stay. I don't fault them for that, but boy does it make it difficult to try and make deep connections with people. I tried, for seven years, to make those same kinds of friends I had out here. It proved too difficult, and for my wife and me, that was a big choice in moving home. So, in 2023, we packed up the cars again, and drove back home, to the Promised Land we didn't know we had left behind.

Settling back into a routine out here was easy. We knew the roads, the places to eat, the fun things to do on the weekend. We had friends we got to see again. We bought a house in the woods and got back to work. Soon, though, that itch returned for me. It never really leaves, does it? It's been a part of who I am for most of my life. I knew before long that I'd be playing again. I reached out to my friends: "Hey, what are you guys playing nowadays? Not Standard, I hope." The answer was Premodern. Huh, hadn't heard of that format before. Oh, it's a closed format? That's kind of cool, I'll give it a shot I guess. I built Black-White Control first. Went to a DxC regional with it. Did OK, kind of a middling performance, but guess what, I was there with my old group of friends. We went outside between rounds and went over our matchups. It instantly brought me fifteen years back in time. I was HOME again.

I started to see a whole bunch of faces from the past. Jay McCowan and Nick Pynn, both actual adults now and not the young upstarts that played at my events every week until we literally had to turn off the lights. Billy Mills-Curran, a regular who went off for a while, back and ripping it up per usual. Cam and Raf, they opened their own shop, Webway Games, after The Whiz went under. God damn, am I proud of them. The list goes on and on. It was such a refreshing thing, stepping back into the local scene, being welcomed with open arms like I had never even left.

The most surprising thing, I think, was not that the scene was doing well (it was left in the next generation's capable hands). It was THRIVING. So many different groups of players had formed. Duress Crew, Granite State Grinders, Rishadan Port Authority, Squee's House of Pizza, The Deranged Hermits, Impulse Crew, and so many more. And Zoo Crew. The team that put a shirt on my back before I knew half of those guys. It was what I had missed for seven years. The dinners, the car rides, the emphatic support of each other. The hatred of the Duress Crew. Well, most of them; a couple are Zoo Crew sleeper agents. Coming home felt like I had just taken a breath of fresh air again. It breathed new life into my hobby, something that was so important to me for so long, something I didn't realize I had left behind all those years ago.

To all you wonderful, welcoming, fun nerds, thank you for bringing me home. Thank you for being you. Until we meet across the table, or on the sidewalk between rounds, know that your community is something to be treasured, because you never know when you'll find out how much you missed having it.

Zoo Crew Forever

-TNK

Deck spotlight by Phil Villain

Since Thompson has returned to the east coast, and to Zoo Crew's theaters of war against the Duress Crew, he has been hard at work carving a piece of the meta in his name. Such toilings have given rise to his Tinker-Infestation deck, or as he has come to call it, Rolled Oats. Following the naming construction of the "Breakfast Decks" of the past, Rolled Oats has multiple gears you can quickly flip into: from the aggro zombie plan, to the Tinker-Devourer combo, to the slow squeeze of the prison lock. Rolled Oats gives the pilot game against a wide swath of the meta and a feeling that you are never truly out of options. It has bullet support that can surprise: Coat of Arms for the zombie plan, maindeck Phyrexian Furnace to fight midrange and combo alike, with Intuitions and Tinkers to help pull the plans together, moving off of the Survival of the Fittest backbone that these decks more commonly rely on.

If you choose to play the list, feel free to reach out to Thompson on Moxfield or at thompson.p.noble.kelly@gmail.com with feedback from your games, or if you want any tips on lines. And check out Neon Mushroom playing the list for some paper reps: Infestation Welder vs. UW Dr. Teeth: Paper Premodern MtG Gameplay (2026).

Hope to see y'all at the upcoming Zoo Crew events. The Wooden Bar in Worcester, MA on July 17th, 2026 for our AAA and Premodern hang. August 1st, 2026 for our Enchanted Summer event, currently sold out, but email me at phil.lorrain@gmail.com to grab a wait-list spot. And keep your eyes peeled for the Annual All Hallow's Eve event in October 2026 at Webway Games in Marlborough, MA. Later animals.

-Phil Villain