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There’s a part of me with a reflexive hate of Elder Dragon Highlander because of the manner in which I was introduced to it.  There are some Magic Judges that I simply don’t get along with and one is the elder statemen of Magic for the south who, during our first meeting, I corrected him on a trivial rules point, slightly outperformed him in terms of Spanish, and refused to be a sycophant gaining me his backhand.  Such is the way of things.

Randy Booz was having a few people over to play EDH and after venting my hatred of the format he informed me that they didn’t play EDH but MCHG, multiplayer centurion highlander with generals.  Sounds fun!  I had just helped a friend assemble such a deck but didn’t have time to build one and shot to his apartment to watch the games unfold.  Upon arriving, I remembered some other reasons I couldn’t stand EDH.

  1. Your time in the game is inverse proportional to how nice you are leaving the gave in a 1 v 1 dick duel.  In this case, dicklord supreme never thanked me for my cheesecake.
  2. All generals have the flagbearer mechanic from Apocalypse whereby they have to be the first thing to die.
  3. If the first two people to lose aren’t sitting across from each other you have two people seemingly relegated to spectator in absence of additional table space.
  4. Despite being a “casual” format, players have no compunction about becoming a rules lawyer when it suits them.

The again, I barely have the patience for a two player game and the apartment was a spot warm and completely devoid of ice.  The next host lives in an igloo, maybe this will change my opinion.

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Me: Hey, do you want to come over and build your EDH deck?
Marcus: Sure.  I’m in the middle of something, I’ll call you back in a bit.
*hour later*
Marcus: I’m not going to be coming over to make my deck today.
Me: Why?
Marcus: I just broke my arm.  I’ll come over when it’s better.
Me: Ok.

Hm…

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I’d failed to run a 5-Color event for 3 months and snuck one in today.  The time between announcement and event was about a week so I didn’t feel bad when 6 people canceled due to work and we had event participation of 6.  The deck I had built for the day quite simply blew as it was a case of what I call reactionary differentiation in trying to build a new deck.  I’d made a card choice, realize it made the deck closer to a deck I was trying to avoid building and would add the opposite.  This process happened between 8 and 12 times resulting in an unwieldy deck that did nothing particularly well.  I scraped through three matches winning two largely by non-core win conditions in the deck.  I sucked.

I didn’t play much Magic over the summer.  I didn’t play much Magic over the spring.  I didn’t play much Magic over the Winter.  I detect a trend.

The redeeming aspect of the event was going out to eat with Mike Noble where we coined a phenomenon for something I’ve been doing more and more often: conceptual name dropping.  Looking over my recent media posts I’ve used phrases like Buridan’s Ass, Morton’s Fork, Hobson’s Choice, File Drawer Effect, Euthypro dilemma, and Russell’s Teapot a lot.  I think there’s a power to having a name for a phenomenon such that I found I got more traction if I said someone was falling for the Perfect solution fallacy rather than saying “you’re making the good the enemy of the perfect”.  I’m glad I have a slightly mocking name for this tendency.

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I had the day blocked off as “sort Magic cards”.  Normally, I’d start with some studying but I guessed that it’d take about 14 hours to sort all my cards and was willing to trade some study time for the finality of having everything in its place by the end of the day.  I started at about 4 AM with a grand basic sort that involves the following piles in order of deference:

  1. Foil/Promo/Misprint
  2. From a deck or known needed card (would go into my personal collection binders
  3. From Legends (I realized I have enough random Legends cards that I could assemble  a set)
  4. Silver Border Card
  5. Other Special
  6. Rare
  7. Common/Uncommon

These piles then get broken down by color and set and in the case of rares are sieved into bulk piles if I have more than 5 of a “bad” rare or sieved into bulk piles if it’s an uncommon that I have more than 4, 8, or 12 of, depending on how usable I think the card is.  At around 5 I’d been sorting for 10 hours once you account for my lunch break and I started to see things.  I’d see a foil flash by to not find it on a recheck or see some valuable card in the wrong pile, the hardest part was doing foreign cards as these were identified most viscerally and most prone to error.  At one point I thought a card in some Asian language that I somehow “knew” meant “PENISTOWN”.  I indulged myself and went back to find this:

Good news: My eyes weren’t playing tricks on me.  Bad news:  I have what I think is a Japanese Ghost Town with the word “Penis Town” written across it.

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My pricings at the Ockanickon Magic Tournament is highly correlated with how much stuff I still have.  Normally, I sell grab bags for $5.00 but having many left I dropped the price to $3.00 or 4 for $10.  A staff member was very happy to have sold 4 at once for the first time this season, he chalked it up to ability, I chalked it up to a 40% discount.

There were a surprising number of participants considering that Week 8 was our lightest and I was very excited when Joe kept showing me cards and asking me “did I want them?” to which I always said “yes”.  The problem is that my buy decisions are normally informed by who I think will take the card and I failed to consider that my next sales opportunity was not 7 days away but 309 days away as part of the 2011 camp season (I’d lose my shirt on dealer prices and FNM folk rarely buy cards).  Should anyone at that time wish to walk down memory lane and build a standard deck from a format that’s no longer current I will be ready.

Edit: I’ve come to learn I may have lost a Foil Jace, the Mind Sculptor that night.  Damn.

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I’m looking to expand what I sell at the OSR Magic tournament and have a few ideas.  For about 6 years I’ve sold “grab bags” that started as 3 rares, a foil, and 50 commons and uncommons for 5 dollars but abundance of cards has upped this to 7 rares, 3 foils, and 70 commons and uncommons.  Normally when I buy a collection I just skim the best cards off the top and turn the rest into grab bags which has vastly increased the quality of these to the point where they now contain planeswalkers, mythic rares, and a Mox Diamond.

To Add:

  • Dollar packs – 2 cards of each color + multicolor and an artifact and one rare ($1).
  • Color packs – 40 cards of a specific color, 5 rares, 1 foil ($5).
  • Pile of Lands – 10 lands of each basic type ($5).
  • Megapack – 35 rares, 10 of each basic land, 350 commons and uncommons, 15 foils ($20).

Now I just need to summon the hours to make these.

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New set releases are tough at camp as we get our cards from another vendor and Wizards releases only a certain amount of product for each store.  I wanted to up that amount as OSR would probably go through four cases of M11 in a week so I wrote to a Wizards sales agent outlining the camp’s needs, how many participants we get and a link to semi-posed pictures of kids having more fun than should be legal playing Magic.  I never got a response and with trepidation called Cyborg 1 on the release day to see what their stock was.

Me: So, how many cases did you get in?
Cyborg 1: Our initial order was 9 cases, we were expecting 2, but we got all 9.   I guess they produced more M11.

I checked with other vendors who got their usual two cases and OSR was flooded with the M11 that’d make the kids heads pop off.

Thank you, Wizards.

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Because of the Council Dinner we had to hold the Magic Tournament in Handicraft which is the old dining hall, an old dusty building that uses benches instead of chairs.  I sniffed and sneezed my way through the evening damning the acoustics and difficulty in controlling traffic and at the end of the evening I was looking forward to moving back to the Dining Hall.  Then I noted that the tournament ended at 9:49 PM and that my car was packed and the site was cleaned by 9:55 PM consuming 1/9th the normal amount of time as we had to do no mopping and I could back my car right up to the door.  With some Claritin, I think I can deal with the new site and reclaim some of my Tuesday evening.

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The Pre-Release

There were 130 people at the West Chester pre-release, there were 71 people at Cyborg 1’s.   The event was dull.   Two kids were applying to be judges and I ran into a recurring phenomenon of “I know the rules and have no friends, I want to be a judge”.  These types of applicants flounder through their first event as they have no idea how to approach players and haven’t played at enough events to know.  I’m an event and experience judge, not a rules judge (although I know the rules as well as I need to).  At the end of day we did a review of how the judges did and the other proctoring judge and I compared notes.

His List:

  • Did not have full knowledge of how layers worked
  • Did not know differences between characteristics and abilities
  • Not familiar with penalty guidelines

My List:

  • Did not push in chairs or pick up trash
  • Did not smile when approaching players
  • Did not find jokes funny

Thoughts on M11

Quite simply I hate M10 and M11 from a flavor standpoint.  Every Magic set has a story to tell with unique cultures and plots and antagonists and heroes and M-series core sets write over this with a broad brush of generic fantasy.  Flavorful cards that drip with lore and involvement with the narrative are washed away with crap you could find in “AMAZING TALES #19” or some other beige-box malarkey.

Example:  Bloodthrone Vampire

Rise of the Eldrazi Flavor Text: Some humans willingly offered up their blood, hoping it would grant the vampire families the strength to stave off the Eldrazi.

M11 Flavor Text: “The underclass often forget that they are not tenants, or servants, but property.”

The M11 text is pure drivel and references to “underclass” and so on are shortcuts taken by the lazy who can’t convey the idea otherwise.

One area where I’ve always respected Magic’s creative team is that they don’t waste terms.  The very first set included Pearled Unicorn,Thicket Basilisk, and Scathe Zombies setting the template of “adjective + creature” as the naming convention for the game.   M10 and M11 destroy this and we wind up with crap like Crystal Ball (<Scrying Sheets), Stone Golem (< Limestone Golem) and generic verb spells.  Ugh.

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Staff members are drawn to the Magic Tournament as the locus of nerd-life at camp and they’re usually quite willing to help me with the fantastically menial tasks that dominate preparing my collection for sale.  One particular staff member sprang to the opportunity to work with cards and I gave him the following directions:  Create piles containing 12 unique cards of each color, 10 unique artifacts and 15 multicolor cards.  Keep going until you run out of cards (he had a 5000 count box, which would take me almost a day to process).

I returned about 10 minutes later and he had make 12 piles each containing one card of each color, an artifact, and a multicolor card.  He made 10 of these piles and when I asked him what he did he responded “I did exactly what you said”.