Magic Is in the Air at Long Beach Tournament

Hmmm. Let’s find a perfect game for those young guys who used to hang out at comic book stores when they weren’t home doing math puzzles or reading Tolkien.

For starters, take a battle tactics game like chess, but keep adding new pieces every couple of months to weed out everyone but the truly obsessed.

And let’s make it a card game, addictive and challenging like bridge, but played with cards decorated with awesome scenes from a fantasy world of wizards, dragons, bizarre creatures and heroic battles. Instant trading cards!

And base the game on mathematics so that thousands of players the world over will find the game irresistible.

Do all that and you might come up with a game like Magic: The Gathering.

Magic: The Gathering is a hugely popular game that has taken over the Queen Mary in Long Beach for the weekend. An international field of more than 300 intense young men and two women, mostly in their 20s, wearing T-shirts, blue jeans and large, clunky shoes, is competing for $150,000 in prize money.

Hundreds of card tables have been set up on three decks of the old ship, and sponsors hope to go well above the 1,500 who showed up last year to play or cheer themselves hoarse watching the game’s best players duke it out in the Sunday finals on big-screen television.

That its decks would one day be awash with hordes of fantasy-game players probably was never envisioned by the builders of the Queen Mary.

But the 1930s-era luxury liner seems to be a good setting for the tournament because the game combines fantasy, escape and a degree of high-rolling romance. Turn the right cards over, and you might win the $25,000 top prize.

Female contestants are almost nonexistent. Claudia Loroff, 25, from Germany is one of two women who could be confirmed in the field of 342 pro tour competitors who started the tournament.

Loroff wears a black “Highway to Hell” sweatshirt--the name of the game shop in Berlin that is sponsoring her--with the image of a skull on the back. Loroff got to Long Beach by winning third place in a qualifying tournament in Prague.

A psychology student at a Berlin university, she said her best subject is statistics, which should make her right at home with other players.

The skull and crossbones imagery is commonplace among contestants, although they tend to be shy and quiet. These are members of a generation that watched “Star Wars” until their eyes ached. They dress like bikers, but have enough Boy Scout in them to make a soccer mom proud. Many are so pale they look as though they believe the sun is just a rumor.

Some of the players are a little sensitive about their image.

The public face Magic presents to the world is one of fantasy. Based loosely on medieval warfare, the game matches two wizards (players) using cards decorated with mythic beasts, witches and sorcery.

But at its heart, say the players, it is a game of mathematics. There are about 2,000 cards that can come into play, each with a mathematical value that can change in relationship with other cards.

“Nothing is as important to winning as being able to calculate odds and percentages,” said Mark Justice, 27, the second leading money winner on the Magic pro tour, having won $51,000 since 1996.

Justice said he was running a comic book store when Magic came out. “I just got hooked,” he said. Justice warmed up for the tournament by playing 1,200 games in the last 3 1/2 weeks, mostly with himself.

He recently started a professional players association. It already has 2,000 members. He said he gets annoyed by geeky stereotypes of Magic players.

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“They expect us to walk around in Spock ears,” he said. “We have top players in the game who are lawyers, accountants, professionals. Many have advanced degrees in math or science.”

Since being introduced in 1993 by two Seattle men--mathematician Richard Garfield and his business partner, Peter Adkison --there have been nearly 3 billion game cards sold, most of them in packs of 60. There have been spinoff magazines, World Wide Web sites and numerous imitators, to say nothing of the pro tour.

“When I was in school, the football jocks got all the attention, and the math whizzes never got any recognition,” Adkison said. “This is a way for really smart people to get recognized.”