And that’s magic!

Keach Hagey

• Last Updated: July 17. 2008 8:53PM UAE / July 17. 2008 4:53PM GMT

Card sharp: Omar Sharif plays Magic: The Gathering with friends at Rydges Plaza every week. Randi Sokoloff / The National

Born into a culture in which men traditionally wear white, 26-year-old Omar Sharif prefers black: black skull T-shirt, black shoulder tattoo, black talons through his many tribal piercings. And when he gets together with his friends on Thursdays and Saturdays at the Rydges Plaza Hotel in Dubai to play Magic: The Gathering – a fantasy-themed collectible card game – there’s no mulling what color cards he will use to construct his deck.

“I don’t do blue or white cards,” says Sharif, who by day is a kandura-clad customs agent at the Dubai airport. “It’s not my thing. I prefer mostly red and black. Why should I play with a fairy, when I can play with a dragon?”

Such a colour choice will affect the style of spells he can cast on his opponents in the game – black is best at making adversaries discard cards, but often backfires and hurts the “wizard”, or player, casting the spell – and ultimately whether he walks away from the five-hour tournament with a prize. The spoils usually consist of more Magic cards, and occasionally a tablecloth featuring some fantastical creature, the better to intimidate one’s adversaries the next time around. Only two of the 10 players locked in combat in the hotel’s poolside breakfast room last Saturday evening brandished such mats, but that’s likely to change as the group grows.

“We had been struggling for the last two years, and then two months ago, we just sort of exploded,” says Derek Pennell, a boyish-looking 35-year-old Briton who organizes the tournaments. Like many of the players, he got into the game soon after it came out in the early Nineties, but stopped playing when “family and work and things got in the way”. He never expected moving to Ajman to work for the offshore marine industry would reconnect him with his old hobby.

“I’ve been here for seven years, but it took me three years to find out where the gaming was going on,” he says. Today, in addition to organising Magic matches, he plays the table-top game Warhammer in the car park outside the Al Safa Park N Shop – the de facto centre of Dubai’s gaming culture.

Rydges has become another gaming haven thanks to Dave Barnes, a 38-year-old Sydney native with three dragon tattoos who DJs at the hotel bar and procured the venue. He used to play Dungeons and Dragons, the fantasy role-playing game created in the 1970s, but today prefers Magic because it’s more competitive, “like a cross between poker and chess”.

The top ranking in the room belongs to Zach Espera, a 24-year-old Filipino with a pony tail and a hipster slouch, but he’s quick to point out that he’s only number two in the country. The number-one ranking, according to the international website, belongs to a mysterious figure who has never shown up for any of the tournaments.

The UAE cannot hold official national Magic competitions until it amasses 32 players – a daunting goal for a game that, as Sharif points out, even fanatics will deny playing in the presence of women. “It’s not the sort of thing that you tend to advertise to people when you first meet them,” said Lachlan Sutherland, a 28-year-old Australian who also serves as the local dungeon master for players of D & D (as Dungeons and Dragons is commonly known).

The universal challenges posed by life as a geek are compounded by cultural ones unique to the Emirates. At least one of the group’s members has been stuck at airport security having to explain that the cards in his bag are neither for gambling nor – despite what the text printed on them may say – for actually casting spells.

Sharif, mindful of such superstitions, remembers the uproar when Pokémon was banned in the region when he was a teenager. Now he worries what will become of the Magic community should it grow large enough to sustain national tournaments.

“If it got famous, and they didn’t have a proper local sponsor with connections, it will get banned,” he says. “Pokémon didn’t have anybody in the Arabic community.”

Sharif, whose father used to work for the ruler of Dubai, is considering becoming that somebody. “Most people who are UAE nationals don’t have a lot to do when we are young,” he says. “This is something people of all ages can enjoy.”