Deck for Brains

Brian Cooper was a sort of nerd’s version of the badass who would only enter a drag race if you agreed to put up the pink slip to your car.

But instead of racing hot rods, Cooper’s game involved the decidedly geeky pursuit of collectible card games.

You know the deal: Younger, date-challenged guys at coffee shops, pulling colorful cards out of plastic protectors and slapping them down on tabletops while saying things like “My wizard cancels out your bugbear.”

But Cooper was such a badass that he’d challenge other players to “deck burner” matches — whoever lost in the head-to-head strategy sessions had to take their pile of pricey cards and set them on fire.

One friend who lost such a match to Cooper burned up a deck that had cost him somewhere between $350 and $500 to assemble.

But that’s Cooper’s style. The 21-year-old Emporia State poli-sci major is a killer when it comes to strategy.

“I’ve been playing for four years,” he tells the Strip. “Every game that I’ve played, I’ve gone to the top.” Cooper’s brash manner and unusual tactics have won him matches in tournaments from Minnesota to California. “I’d usually win the tournaments I went to. I only lost a few times.”

Collectible card games have been around since 1993, when Magic: The Gathering arrived and exploded in popularity, particularly with boys in their teens. Other games have cashed in on the craze, too, including one based on the characters from Pokemon and the current big seller, Yu-Gi-Oh. The games can be highly addictive; youngsters spend plenty of allowance money trying to snag rare cards that grant special powers in game play.

Cooper, however, never liked Magic. His game was one of the many imitators that popped up soon after Magic’s success.

This game was Redemption, a Christian copycat that replaced monsters and spell casters with Satan‘s minions battling archangels and disciples.

Redemption is the brainchild of Rob Anderson, who invented it in 1995. His North Carolina company Cactus Game Design specializes in producing Christian versions of popular mainstream games. There’s a holy version of Scattergories, for example (“How many Bible categories can you match before time runs out?” asks the company’s Web page); the popular board game Settlers of Catan has been reimagined as Settlers of Canaan (“Each player represents a tribe of Israel as they seek to settle the land of Canaan”); and there’s a Biblical version of Outburst (“Pandemonium reigns as the 60-second timer is turned over and the verbal explosions begin,” reads this game’s site, which leads this meat patty to wonder if Anderson and the other good folks at Cactus Design realize that pandemonium — literally all demons — is another name for hell).

Cactus Game Design claims that Redemption is the “most played, most collected Christian Card Collecting Game on the market,” and the Kansas City area seems to have a particularly healthy community of players.

None is quite so hardcore as Cooper, who estimates that he spends about $350 a month collecting new cards.

But these days, it’s usually not new Redemption packs that he’s buying.

That’s because after the 2002 national Redemption championship tournament in Rochester, Minnesota, Anderson personally banned Cooper. Permanently.

That’s right — Cooper is such a wicked Christian card player, he’s been tossed out of the game.

“Rob Anderson thought that I was taking advantage of the cards that were out there,” Cooper says.

But, the Strip inquired, isn’t that the point of such games, to find ways to use cards and their special powers in ways that confound other players?

“That’s what I thought, yeah,” Cooper says, laughing.

“My play was not something he wanted in his game. He told me I needed to seek therapy,” Cooper says. “I was kicked out over the Internet by an e-mail because he didn’t have the guts to do it in person.”

Indeed, this porterhouse also learned that Anderson prefers electronic communications. When we called the game designer, Anderson responded instead with an e-mail.

“I do not want to discuss that situation involving Brian Cooper as I wish to do nothing that would hurt Brian,” Anderson wrote. “I explained our position to Brian in my letter to him in the fall of 2002.”

Cooper has lost that e-mailed letter, but he thinks he knows the real reason Anderson booted him. “I think it was more my flamboyant attitude in the game. I was a little younger then, and I was cocky. I played to win, and I think that made him leery about me playing.”

The Strip wondered about the “evil” characters that are a part of the game. Had Cooper, like the poet John Milton before him, found that Satan‘s side of the story was simply a little more compelling? Had Anderson booted him because Cooper had turned the game into a triumph of evil over good?

Nah, Cooper says. Like all players, he made use of evil characters. But his successful strategies were all tied to good winning out in the end. “I think it’s kind of a cool thing that it has both good and evil. All Christians need to have a healthy understanding of the evil side. Without it, there’s no understanding of the good,” he says.

But promoting goodness, Cooper says, didn’t stop him from being an aggressive, boastful player who wanted to win at all costs. And in the 2002 national tournament that sealed his fate, Cooper arrived looking for blood.

“The weekend before the tournament, this guy from Missouri told everyone he could beat me. On the Internet, he was bragging. Then I told him, put your Redemption deck up against mine. The loser has to set theirs on fire. He said OK.”

And as it turned out, Cooper and his Missouri rival drew a first-round match at the national meet, which had attracted about 100 regional tournament winners from around the country. “I beat him 7 to 1, but he refused to set his deck on fire,” Cooper says.

Cooper continued to advance in the tournament, using a previously unknown strategy that perplexed other players. “In defense, I would take Simon the Magician and use Joseph in Prison to remove all cards from the field of play. I would do that four times in one game. Then I would go out there with little tiny people and do Authority of Christ, which removed all evil characters from the game.”

Uh, OK, Brian.

Eventually, Cooper found himself at the final table with four other competitors. That’s where things got ugly. “The other four worked together to beat me,” he says, implying that he’d been set up. “I was unmatched until they all ganged up on me.”

Ganging up on a skillful player to get him kicked out of a tournament? Isn’t that a little un-Christian?

“It seemed like it to me. But it’s all part of the game. If I can’t deal with it, that’s my problem,” Cooper says.

Still, he didn’t anticipate Anderson’s decision to ban him. But he’s not moping about it. Cooper has moved on to another collectible card game — Lord of the Rings — and he’s mastering its strategies as well.

“I kill my own fellowship off to make it stronger. But my friend here has figured that out, and I have to come up with something else,” Cooper says by telephone in the middle of a match. “My ultimate goal in Lord of the Rings is to see how many cards I can make illegal. Because I use them in unusual ways. I might get three cards banned in upcoming tournaments,” he says.

This past weekend, Cooper spent part of his Holy Week slinging cards at a Lord of the Rings tournament at 31st Century Games and Hobbies, a games store in Olathe.

In the fall, he hopes to transfer to the University of Southern California. And in the meantime, he still picks up a Redemption card occasionally, just in case.

“If they ever let me back in, I have a new deck strategy that’s even meaner and more ‘twisted,’ as Rob Anderson put it,” he says. — as told to Tony Ortega.