FOR THE LAST six years, Auggie, my 11-year -old son, has been playing Magic the Gathering, a very complicated card game that involves characters with names like Realmwalker, Yawgmoth, and Reckless Velocitaur.

Every week we send Auggie to Brooklyn Game Lab, an afterschool program and ingenious mechanism for separating parents from their fortunes. Tuesdays and Thursdays afternoons, Friday nights, and the first Sunday of the month are devoted to MTG.

Auggie’s room is full of binders and those binders full of cards. His mind is a catalogue of arcane and Byzantine rules that govern the Magic the Gathering universe and he is always happy to explain them.

I, however, have been leery. Though Auggie has taught me Magic—and there is no pleasure greater than a father learning from his son—I’d prefer to kick rocks. Or doom scroll. Or lose at chess. A Magic the Gathering player delights in the accumulation of rote knowledge. I feel the same horror for MTG that I do for the math problems my grandfather used to pose or the name-that-composer game my father used to play while listening to sonatas in the car.

But every child deserves at least one epic trip with their father, a trip for no other purpose than their joy. For years, Auggie has asked to attend MagicCon; an annual gathering of collectors and players from around the world. I always half-agreed and then never followed through. MagicCon was too expensive. I was too busy. It’s three days long. But this year, I ran out of excuses. And who knows how long the boy will be into Magic before he lapses into teenage apathy and looksmaxxing?

McCormick Place, Chicago’s convention center, is near what used to be the city’s famous stockyards. And like cattle, Auggie and I joined the flow of 17,000 visitors through the massive hallway to the Lakeside Center.

A few months ago, Auggie had signed up for a pro qualifying tour tournament at the convention. “The winner of the pro tour wins a million dollars!” he told me on the day of the event, his voice quivering with excitement. On the tournament floor, there were row after row of tables, each folding chair occupied a man with long hair and some sort of facial hair, wearing a hooded sweatshirt, his deckbox with him. And each man is hunched over, pitched forward toward his opponent across from him. When Auggie took his assigned seat to play, a gap appeared in the skyline of dudes, a sapling. Auggie, the youngest player by years, with his long bright red hair and beardless cheeks.

This was no place for a boy, I thought, but what about a boy’s father? I lurked for a little while, but Auggie was giving me the stink eye and my knees are telling me to sit down. So for a few hours I wandered among artists signing cards, vendors selling everything from protective sleeves to collectible tokens, tattoo artists offering permanent remembrances of the convention, and a cosplay contest. But mostly I sat in the press room and work. Auggie periodically updated me in terse text messages throughout the day. Won. Lost. Lost Again. Lost.

Periodically Magic the Gathering luminaries stopped by for group Q&As with journalists. I know nothing of new decks like Aetherdrift or the arcana of retired cards, so I stayed quiet. But when Mark Rosewater, the man who has overseen Magic for the last thirty years, visited I asked him how being a game designer has affected him as a father. He paused for a moment before answering, “I’m not just designing a game. I’m designing the game for people. And as a dad it’s the same thing. You aren’t just parenting. You are parenting for your specific child. You can’t lose sight of that.”

Which made me wonder: What is a father without a son? Magic the Gathering, to me, was completely un-magical. For Auggie, it is the opposite. Auggie found his tribe in MTG—and I did help in leading him there. The “tuition” at Brooklyn Game Lab. The countless card packs I bought him for birthdays and rewards. I’d at least supported him in his passion—and that felt like something. I was watching my child in some way reach exit velocity.

Mark was right. As I headed back into the convention basement to find Auggie, and when I saw him, brow furrowed, in complete flow state among his people, it was magic indeed.

Joshua David Stein has written for publications including _The New York Times, Fatherly, Esquire, and The Guardian.