And I'm back!

Alright, I think it's obvious to everyone involved that I have been a slacker lately. I have been playing, and I haven't been writing about it. Shame on me. No, seriously, I've been doing some really exciting things lately and I've been keeping my mouth shut. Well, no longer! So far in 2015, I have:

• Played in the Fate Reforged pre-release. For Fate Reforged I went to a midnight event following a day of work, and was so tired after 2 match wins that I misplayed horribly in round 3, lost that round 1-2 and conceded to my opponent 2-0 for the round to give him a better record, then dropped and went home at 3 am to try and salvage some sleep. I then promised myself "no more midnight releases". Let's see how that went, shall we?
• Played at Fate Reforged Game day. Now remember, Game Day for Fate fell on Valentine's Day this year. It was mid-afternoon, the store wasn't sure if they would have enough people to hold the event, and my plans with my with didn't start until later that evening. With her permission (trust me, Valentine's is her day, I needed her permission), I went to my local game store. Total competitors in the event? Four! And two of the players were running red aggressive decks, or Red Deck Wins. I beat my first opponent 2-0, then lost in the "finals" 0-2. I think I won a pack of cards. Nice.
• Played in the Dragons of Tarkir pre-release. Twice. First I did the midnight release at my local store. (Yeah, we all knew I wasn't keeping that promise anyway.) However, this time I was well rested, and had no work commitments the day of or the day after. I did much better. So much better, actually. I won first place! My Ojutai pack gave me an Ojutai Exemplars and a Monastery Mentor, so I ran everybody over with my amazing Jeskai colors deck. I'll post the list below. Lesson learned: Get some sleep before your tournaments. (Also, rebound is amazing!)

Playing Again, Finally!

I read a lot of Magic content on the web. In fact, I should probably recommend some sites to you, and will definitely do so in a future post. At the very least, for now you should be keeping up with the official Wizard's of the Coast site, which does daily articles, has downloadable wallpapers and other materials, is full of all the deck list and tournament info you could ever want, and plenty more where that came from. Here's the link, at magic.wizards.com/en/articles, and I love reading their stuff every day. Unfortunately, reading is about all I've been able to do recently.

For the last 2 or three months I've been working exactly the wrong schedule to pretty much ever get to play Magic. Not many people want to sling spells with me between the hours of 9am and 3pm, and I'm a little hesitant to start teaching my three-year-old daughter Magic. We're still working on Candyland and checkers, with Clue Jr. coming up on the horizon. My five-year-old shows a little more promise, but pulling her away from Legos and her new-found love of art is probably not the best course of action right now. So I've been reading, and reading and reading some more. Khans of Tarkir draft sounds awesome, but I have yet to experience it first hand. 

About a week ago, I got to hang out with a friend and play some one-on-one Commander, as well as pit my fledgling Burn-splash-Dig Through Time deck against his casual Zombie deck. His Jalira, Master Polymorphist Commander tore through my Kaalia of the Vast deck twice fairly soundly, but it was a lot of fun. I payed him back by igniting him and his Zombies a couple of times in fair retaliation.

She seems harmless. She's not.
It's a lie. A big, fat lie.

Standard, on the other hand, I got to play today.

Conspiracy draft

I love to draft. As a format I don't play it much for a variety of reasons, primarily two: I don't particularly care for Magic Online, and my work schedule for the last 8 months or so have been abominable for ever going to an event or FNM other than a pre-release. Magic Online would seem like the solution to my schedule woes, but I get wa-aay too distracted when I play Magic on the computer. I need to immerse myself in a game with people I can talk to easily, and Magic Online is missing the social aspect of the game that makes it fun for me.

Enter my playgroup. I have a great group of friends that I get together with far too infrequently to play Magic, again mostly due to scheduling issues. We did manage to schedule something a couple weeks ago, though, and it was a lot of fun. I had my Commander and Standard decks packed up, but I received a package that changed the course of the evening: a box of Conspiracy. Hallelujah!

No, not THAT Conspiracy, the other one! Oh, nevermind...

Every playgroup is different, but my group has a particular love for multiplayer games over 2 player duels. When you get together as often as we do, we want everyone to be playing as much as possible. So we really enjoy Commander, Two-Headed Giant and Emperor, as well as Planeschase and Archenemy variants so maximum mayhem will ensue. Also, most of my playgroup still has the aversion to drafting that many people do; namely, not getting to keep every card that you open.

My solution was to provide a box of Conspiracy, we draft the heck out of it, and then I keep the cards to go towards building a multiplayer cube. I'm slowly getting there with the Cube, but this was going to be our second draft of this wonderful set and I was really looking forward to it. For groups that like multiplayer and a little bit of chaos, I can't recommend it enough.

Updates galore!

Welcome back! Not that any of you went anywhere, of course, as I was definitely the one taking a bit of a vacation here. But because it's been a month and a LOT of Magic has happened since then, we've got some serious catching up to do. So hang on tight, because here we go!

Let's go back in time! (In unrelated news,
this card is amazing! More on this later.)

Khans of Tarkir Spoilers: I missed most of spoiler season for this one. We could say that I saw the majesty that was our two new planeswalker and passed out for the rest of it. Yeah, let's say that. I got ridiculously excited about Sarkhan, and the color red in general, and now I really want to play the "Jeskai Wins" deck that is running around out there.

Or should it be called "Sarkhan Wins!"
I really need to get my hands on this card...

Grand Prix Salt Lake City Report

Two or so years ago, not long after I started playing Magic again, I heard about a tournament that had just happened here in Salt Lake City. They'd had about a thousand players in the Salt Palace Convention Center downtown and all the players at my local game store kept talking about what they'd seen, or bought, or played. I'd never heard of a Grand Prix before, but I started keeping my eyes open for the next one. Well, this past weekend I had to work Saturday and Sunday afternoons and I couldn't get them off, but the tournament was back and I wasn't going to miss it again, at least not completely. So Saturday morning I drove out the the South Towne Expo Center and walked into Hall 1.

After a few very confusing moments of wondering where all the players were, and what the inflatables and kiddy swimming pools were doing at a Magic Tournament, and "hey, isn't he a little young to play Magic?" I exited the Autism Awareness convention and wandered down to Hall 5. This was a little more of what I was expecting.

More Magic players than I could shake a stick at! Not that I had a stick...

878 players recording their pools of just opened Sealed decks. I showed up about 40 minutes after the tournament was scheduled to start, and they lost no time in getting things going. Since I wasn't there to play in the main event, I wandered while the judges announced instructions and lots of people followed them. The sides of the hall were lined with vendors, probably 12 to 14 of them in all. Between them, you could find just about every Magic card you were looking for. I saw graded quality cards from Alpha and Beta expansions, foils of Commander, Modern and Legacy staples in multiple languages. I saw boxed sets from nearly every expansion for sale, and a set of Comic Con planeswalkers I really wanted but were so very out of my price range.