DeKALB | About 30 local gamers flocked to The Gaming Goat, 229 E. Lincoln Highway, for the prerelease of “Magic: The Gathering’s” new card set “Kaladesh” midnight on Friday.

Philip Henrikson, owner of The Gaming Goat, said this is the largest “Magic: The Gathering” event the store has had. He usually gets 20 to 25 participants at prereleases.

The card set, to be released Sept. 30, has a steampunk theme to it.

“Magic: The Gathering” is a strategic trading card game that has a variety of ways it can be played. The game has a worldwide community of more than 12 million players, according to the game’s website.

Gamers tend to start playing the game because they know someone who plays. Sophomore illustration major Lincoln Held has been playing the card game for about four years and started when a group of his friends introduced him to it in high school.

“If you have a group of friends to play with, then it’s something you can do, usually, without it getting old [regardless of] how many times you play it,” Held said. “They release new content like every couple of months.”

When a new “Magic: The Gathering” card set is going to be released, local gamers get together for prerelease tournaments.

“The weekend before the set is released, all the stores that carry “Magic: The Gathering” get to do a prerelease tournament,” Henrikson said. “The people who participate get to open up cards from the new set and build a deck out of that.”

The format of a prerelease is called “sealed.” Players open new packs of cards they have never seen before, which means no players have an advantage over another.

“For prereleases, it’s all cards that people aren’t really used to, so it puts them all kind of like on the same level,” Held said. “Sometimes the players will get kind of alienated from each other. It’s something that brings the players together from all the different formats.”

Held said the competitiveness of a “Magic: The Gathering” prerelease tournaments is different depending on the location. Some places are very competitive, and at The Gaming Goat, prereleases are more relaxed.

“It’s typically a really noncompetitive experience,” Henrikson said.

Henrikson, who is a resident of DeKalb, bought The Gaming Goat when he was 20 years old and has been the owner for about a year and a half. Henrikson has tried to create a less competitive feel to the store so that players can play games like “Magic: The Gathering” in a fun, non-confrontational environment.

“We’re trying to fill needs that people are having,” Henrikson said. “The biggest need is connection with humans on this unique level that gaming provides.”