Brian Harris

By Elijah Dorn-Recalde

If you’re ever looking for Senior Brian Harris you could of course find him in Mrs. Allen’s class working on a physics worksheet or quiz, or at Gary’s where he works. But 9 times out of 10 you’ll be able to locate him at a table in a store in uptown Mount Vernon aptly named “The Mana-Vault”. He’ll either be sitting playing a game of Magic: The Gathering with some of his friends or helping the owner, Jason, stock up on different cards.

The inside of the shop is all that remains of the once great “Video Village”. Video game posters line cracked sky-blue walls and chances are you’ll find the owner, Jason, behind his desk surrounded by heaps of cards. Harris tells me that Magic: The Gathering is their specialty. While they also have different kinds of card games, Magic is the most popular and the most complicated. So complicated that Harris says that often-times he would attribute the game to physics, with the amount of variables and interactions, he says, “possibilities are literally endless”.

And this is also where Harris comes in, he pulls out a large unwieldy binder and opens it, inside are roughly 200 pages of straight rules on the game. Harris has been studying this pseudo-textbook for the last two months and he hopes he can become a judge of the game in the next month. He says that, “with how complicated the game is people need a judge or someone who has spent so much time with the game that they know how    certain cards interact certain ways with other cards, etcetera”. He also quips about how easy it is for people to cheat on accident, which in the game is a big deal because sometimes hundreds or even millions of dollars are at stake.

“It’s crazy how much money some people put into this game.” He says, “But if you sink enough money in you can make hundreds because other people want some of these super expensive cards for their collections, it’s kinda like gambling”, he laughs.