Thousands of Oklahomans may occupy Texas for the Red River Showdown, but at least 114 remain for another kind of game, this one being played at the comic and game shop on Jenkins next to Thai Delight.
This is the biggest crowd Wizard’s Asylum has ever drawn, even bigger than the crowd of 102 drawn to the previous Magic: The Gathering state championship it hosted. The owner, Bryan Alcorn, was only expecting about 90 this fall, so he’s forced to put tables outside to make room. Fortunately, the weather this Sunday morning is excellent, and, at worst, the scorecards tremble precariously in the breeze.
The indoor players could use the ventilation. So many of them stuff the shop’s three rooms that it’s noticeably warm, and the faint scent of body odor hangs in the air. This does nothing to stifle the excitement, however. After the judges have posted table assignments, gamers swarm to meet their first opponents of the day. There are a few minutes of banter, and then a judge bellows “Round 1 has begun!” and the rooms are filled with the noises of dice being rolled and decks being shuffled.
Wizard’s Asylum is a business, sure. But its true identity can’t be fully appreciated until one is present during a tournament like this. First and foremost, the place is a habitat.
Alcorn, who stands at a cash register behind a vanguard of figurines including Batman, Sandman, and Orion of New Genesis, can explain.
“We kind of build a community, a place where they can meet and play,” Alcorn said. “Without the shop, they wouldn’t be able to meet many gamers. It would be a lot harder, anyway.”
Alcorn established the shop when he was 24 years old after graduating from OU in 1997. He's a former employee of the Wizard’s Asylum location in Tulsa, which the Norman location closely mirrors. Since his store’s inception, locals have made it the most prominent of its kind in the area, not just because it sells comics and games, but also because it provides a place for gamers to simply exist.
“You can play games at home or play them elsewhere, but I just want to have a place where you can meet people who have similar interests,” Alcorn said. “You can play Magic online and stuff, but interacting with other people is what I like.”
You might infer Wizard’s Asylum’s success from the size of its Friday night tournaments, which often draw roughly 60 people, sometimes more, from Norman and the neighboring towns of Ardmore, Washington and Duncan. But many of the people at this tournament, the Star City Games State Championship, happen to be regulars, and they’ll testify from experience what makes it special.
“[Alcorn is] very generous in how he runs his store,” physics graduate student Mitchell Yothers said. “He allows me to play here even though sometimes I don’t necessarily buy things for long periods of time. He gives me a place to hang out and play games with the kind of people that I like.”
Yothers is one of the tournament’s well-dressed judges, clad in black, who patrol the narrow spaces between folding tables covered in cards and shelves stocked with Warhammer paraphernalia and graphic novels. He says he volunteered for this role to “give back to the community” he’s belonged to for the last two years.
Yothers believes Wizard’s Asylum is the best shop of its kind in at least a few hours' driving radius. He says not every shop owner is as tolerant as Alcorn and as focused on providing a welcoming space. Other owners might kick people out for not purchasing items, or make them rent tables to play on. Local cliques can also be a problem, but not here, Yothers says.
“We try to foster being nice to each other and being open because we’re all here to play games and have fun,” Yothers said. “We don’t need to exile anybody.”
This isn’t just nice — it’s good business sense. Gerald “Jim Bob” Sixkiller, four-time state champion for Magic and owner of Sixkiller’s Gaming House in Owasso, explains that creating an environment is one important thing local businesses can do that large retailers cannot.
“Community building is very important,” Sixkiller said. “You used to find these [comics] in grocery stores, Walmart … You still can. The big difference is the personal touch that the people that work here give you.”
Sixkiller says that here, unlike at big places like Vintage Stock, you can expect to receive recommendations and back-and-forth dialogue about products from the employees. After all, they’re gamers and comic enthusiasts, too.
By the time it's dark outside, most of the tables are empty and the trash cans are overflowing with the foil wrappers of Magic booster packs. The competition pool has narrowed significantly, but the shop is still active.
Some people now play just for fun, while others watch the remaining tournament players duel in the back. For many of them, though, it’s enough to make small talk and simply be there.
For Alcorn, whose goal is to foster a social environment, that's enough, too.
