Despite a history of failed Magic stores in the area, Finch and Sparrow has expanded its space and was recently deemed a Wizards Premium Store (a public recognition by the creators of Magic of “the best game stores in the world”).
On Tuesday, Sept. 28, a room full of players looked steadily at their decks, sorting through visages of dragons and sorcerers with knowing precision. The goal: compile a deadly combination of cards to outwit and out-strategize their opponents.
The game: Magic: The Gathering. The battleground: Finch and Sparrow Games in Signal Hill.
Seated four at a table, Joe Stucken, Dustin Sandhu, Patrick Donley and Jacob Anile shuffle their libraries and grab a flourish of seven cards.
Some, like Sandhu, use starter decks. He’s a newcomer, only playing Magic for a little more than a month. Others, like Anile and Donley, have lightly curated their decks to adhere to certain strategies. Stucken comes with a behemoth volume full of cards. (He’s been playing since the 90s.) They share laughs. Sandhu shares a few Rice Krispie Treats with the table.
They come at least once a week.
“We’ll play like eight, nine hours worth of it, which is crazy because it’s just a card game. But it goes so fast,” said Anile, who introduced his friends to the game just a few months ago.
“We’ll get here at 11 a.m. and stay until 8 p.m. at night,” Donley added.
The gameplay begins. Preliminary cards are placed, “tapped” and rotated 90 degrees. As the game becomes more complex, players place dice on certain cards to keep track of health and tokens.
Tuesday nights are busy at Finch and Sparrow Games, but Thursdays are unrivaled: it’s Commander Night, the most popular gameplay format for the 28-year-old fantasy card game.
The Long Beach Magic community makes itself known on these Thursdays when 14 tables and 56 chairs fill up with card-wielders who often remain in their seats until they’re ushered out at the store’s 10 p.m. closing time.
Finch and Sparrow Games is the premier Magic shop in the Long Beach area, with a strong community and a regular showing, assisted by the fact that events are scheduled every day of the week.
According to Wizards of the Coast, the creators of Magic: The Gathering, attendance at member stores for Commander games tripled from 2018 to 2020, with about 28,000 unique players each week. The thriving Long Beach and Signal Hill Magic community is only a small fraction of the estimated 35 million Magic: The Gathering players worldwide.
“Magic brings people together. You can make friends, doesn’t matter who you are,” said Stucken, who’s been playing Magic since 1994. “Any race, gender, nationality, you can come together and be wizards, goblins and merfolk.”
On most nights, Finch and Sparrow Owner Michael Aust sits by, watching the players dole out curses and send their creatures on the attack.
He didn’t expect to become the co-owner of a Magic: The Gathering space in his younger years. Even more, he didn’t expect the space to become a Wizards Premium Store (a public recognition by the creators of Magic of “the best game stores in the world”).
“We like to think of ourselves as kind of the best iteration of any of the Magic stores that have existed in this area,” Aust said. “There isn’t really anyone who serves like Long Beach or Signal Hill kind of proper in terms of what we do.”
And there were plenty of Magic stores before Finch and Sparrow Games.
In 2012 a similar shop named The Legendary Lotus closed down. A Magic store by the name of RivalsCCG popped up in its place but closed down in 2015 when its owners relocated to La Puente. After that came Power 9—a misnomer for nine extremely rare Magic cards—which closed in 2018.
Aust was selling cards online at the time, a business he started after rekindling his love of Magic in college. He’d planned to eventually move to a brick-and-mortar location and when Power 9 shut down he jumped at the opportunity.
Magic: The Gathering players compete with each other in a Commander formatted tournament at Finch and Sparrow Games in Signal Hill, California, on Sept. 30, 2021. The shades on the windows are one way transparent so that players just showing up for the night’s tournament can see how much competition there is. (Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune) 
Finch and Sparrow Games owner Michael Aust poses for a portrait with the eight most valuable Magic: the Gathering cards the shop owns on Sept. 28, 2021. The set is worth upwards of $30,000 to card collectors. (Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune)
During that time, the space embodied the stereotypical gamer environment, complete with dim lighting and cheap fold-out tables in a relatively cramped 1,400-square-foot space.
The environment didn’t deter Magic lovers from coming to the store.
“This is the only card store local to us that you can get basically every card,” Anile said, noting that the store comes complete with game space, snacks and fellow Magic lovers. “Basically, you can do everything.”
Until mid-June of this year, Finch and Sparrow Games was confined to the smaller retail space.
But business was booming. During the pandemic, conventions were canceled and Magic players turned to the internet to flesh out their decks.
Aust took the leap and purchased a secondary unit in the same business park.
Now, Magic aficionados enter Finch and Sparrow to play in a 2,300-square-foot space, complete with a rentable gaming room and a modest mini arcade.
Often, Magic cards are pushed into a corner at a comic store, wedged between board games and Funko Pops. At Finch and Sparrow Games, they take center stage.
“We went very much into this saying: ‘No, we’re not going to do that. We will have the best Magic store in the area,’” Aust said. “And we’ve done that. We have one of the best card selections you can get in Southern California.”
As for the old space, “It’s literally just racks of cards for us now,” Aust said.
The space holds over 2 million cards organized on six 12-foot-long, 7-foot-high shelves. Cards are catalogued into a database, searchable on computer kiosks in the main storefront. A sorting machine sits in the corner.
“We might need a second one soon,” Aust said as one of his employees pulled out a long tray of cards.
Finch and Sparrow Games co-owner Michael Aust looks at some of the cards that will go towards an online order in the shop’s warehouse on Sept. 30, 2021. There are nearly 5 million cards held in the warehouse at any given time. (Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune) 
Finch and Sparrow Games co-owner Michael Aust pulls up one of the roughly 5 million cards stored in the shop’s warehouse on Sept. 30, 2021. (Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune)
These cards make up the world of Magic: its lands, its commanders, its creatures, its attacks, curses and spells, each small enough to fit in the palm of a player’s hand.
“There’s something kind of inherently cool if you’d like to take a step back and kind of look at it from the top-down, from a lore perspective,” Aust said. “You’re playing as a wizard. You cast spells and summon monsters to attack your opponent. I don’t know, that’s kind of cool.”
Some are just in it for the fun, playing casually between friends. Others take the competition seriously, bulking up their decks to compete with thousands on a competitive circuit. Others appreciate the cards for their fantasy art, collecting cards for their rarity or beauty.
“There’s different pockets of the community. The thing that’s super cool for me is how all of those kind of intersect,” Aust said. “That’s why the shop exists, because it’s like the intersection of all those little pockets.”
Longtime player Stucken said the gameplay itself is what drew him to Magic.
“For me personally, the best thing about Magic is that it’s an intellectual game,” Stucken said, noting that the current card list is in the thousands, giving rise to diverse gameplay and strategy options. “Even when you’re alone you can deck build, brew up your own deck and then try it out in the wild.”
When asked about his own deck, Aust admitted that he didn’t have one. For him, it’s not about the glitz and glam of a super-rare, iridescent foil deck (which could easily cost tens of thousands of dollars), it’s about making a space for others to share in their love of the game.
“I’ve grown to enjoy facilitating people getting the stuff they want. It’s really cool. People talk to me about their decks all the time,” Aust said. “I kind of have joint ownership of people’s decks in the sense that we talk about it, we make deck decisions together, and they ask me for some of my feedback.”
Dustin, a Magic: the Gathering player, pulls three cards from his deck before the next play at Finch and Sparrow Games in Signal Hill on Sept. 28, 2021. (Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune) 
Dustin, a Magic: the Gathering player, fans out his cards before the next play at Finch and Sparrow Games in Signal Hill on Sept. 28, 2021. (Richard H. Grant | Signal Tribune)
On nights like Tuesdays and Thursdays, he gets to see those deck decisions play out in real time.
“I don’t want to say [it’s like] mentoring someone because it’s not, but in the same way a mentor would probably be proud of their mentee,” Aust said. “When someone’s deck wins and it’s a card that I recommended I’m like, ‘That’s right!’”
Though Aust acknowledged that the stereotype of the “nerd in the card store” is not unfounded, he denies the idea that members of so-called “nerdom” are standoffish or unwelcoming. At Finch and Sparrow, he said the opposite is true.
“I’ve been super fortunate to see this community grow and I can definitively say we have a super welcoming community,” he said. “A lot of people build really strong friendships.”
Regulars Kate Bryent and Nick Hansen have found the same to be true. They come to the shop around three times a week; Bryent chimes in, “That might be an underestimate.”
“Since we started playing here, which is around three to four months, we’ve made 10, 15, 20 friends. It’s super easy,” Hansen said. “Everyone here is super inviting and gets to know you. It’s super friendly.”
It helps that Magic players abide by what Hansen referred to as “Rule Zero”—players talk amongst each other before they play to determine each other’s experience so they can accommodate skill levels during the game.
“It brings them together. You find ways to connect with people,” Aust said. “There’s a ton of people who like to hang out, even outside the context of Magic, that have either met people here and done all of that, or they’ve known each other beforehand but became even better friends because [of the game].”
Finch and Sparrow Games is located at 2699 E 28th St. #406, Signal Hill, CA 90744. The shop is open from 12 p.m. to 10 p.m. every day. A schedule of events can be found online. Finch and Sparrow offers Magic: The Gathering cards in singles and packs as well as a small selection of Pokemon cards and a growing collection of Flesh and Blood cards.
Update: Oct. 1, 4:14 p.m., This story was updated to reflect that Finch and Sparrow Games is a Wizards Premium Store, not a Wizards Premier Store as previously stated. Premier is an older designation that is no longer used by Wizards of the Coast.
