Musings from a Magic: the Gathering PTQ - Edison, NJ

If it comes as a surprise that I'm a huge nerd when I use my free time to write about how cool it is that I found a Wobbuffet plush at Toys R Us, clearly you're out of the loop and should uninstall your internet and throw your computer out of a window.

This weekend, I decided I would play in my first Magic Pro Tour Qualifier since my freshman year of college, when I just missed the top 16 of an Extended PTQ by scooping to my opponent for packs after suffering from an ailment I like to call, "Playing Magic Competitively For 14 or So Hours on No Sleep." I was supposedly more well-prepared to play in this event than my previous one, so I figured my odds were pretty awesome at walking away with prize: I was playing the best deck, had the best preparation, had a great understanding of what the other decks in the metagame did (entirely based on the fact that I've playtested with ALL of the decks)... basically, I expected to do well, not entirely hedging bets on repeating my last performance but also not being entirely surprised if I did.

0-3 drop later, 2/3s of which can be attributed to "Really slow and ineffective draws" and 1/3 of which can be summarized as "I am a terrible player and should feel terrible," I walked around, $150 richer from a process I call "cleaning my room," and generally in a good mood.

My day's highlight comes not from being awful at Magical cards or the money, but from the processes I followed to enter and play in the event and my doings in and around the event. I decided to go to the event as ironically as possible (in the hipster sense of irony and not with any actual dictionary definition or irony or coincidence, as it is sometimes misattributed); I wore my 3-cat Keyboard Moon shirt, was playing with Pokemon TCG sleeves and had a Dragon Ball Z trading card game deckbox (from the late 90s TCG which I coincidentally played... only coincidentally because a friend who had not played mysteriously presented the box to me as a gift for use during the tourney).

The shirt brought about some of the best conversations I've had with people in ages, particularly since most of the people I've interacted with at Magic events in the past Forever have been scumbags and meanies alike. Some genuinely awesome bros (and Jacob van Lunen, Pro Tour winner, MTG.com writer and long-time friend/associate) started conversations with me entirely based on my wearing the greatest shirt known to man (possibly). My first conversation started with a man wearing some Hot Topic-esq "wordswordswords" shirt, a dog collar and chain, huge tail and shoulder-mounted wolf plush asking where the shirt could be acquired. If you missed the tweet, this was not meant ironically.

This was followed by a game with a man wearing a Gengar shirt in the same vein as my Wobbuffet shirt from the Nintendo World Store in NYC. During our match (which I lost to a mull-to-5 and "too fast" start games 1 and 3 respectively), we talked about the Pokemon DS game (spurred by my Pokemon sleeves) and various other malarky. Fun times.

My third round opponent was Ivan somethingoranother, though I like to imagine he was a time-shifted Ivan Drago, as his sour attitude (more from other people being jerks and the judges being UP HIS ASS) and thick Russian accent hinted at him being the future heavyweight boxing machine. The judges hounded him most of the match due to his lost DCI card, culminating in a judge telling him he would receive a game loss from that point on every time he did not have his DCI card at the start of a tourney due to him not entering his new DCI number into his phone IN THE MIDDLE OF A MATCH HE WAS PLAYING AGAINST ME. Dick move, I thought, especially since it didn't help me win.

After losing to Ivan, he proceeded to tell me an unnamed group of people "Trained me to play this deck like dog, woof woof." This was said jovially, but we should both pretend it was said over my felled and barely-conscious form as he pounds his chest with a boxing glove.

Not much else to say about the event, since most of the rest of my time at the event centered around wheeling and dealing, commenting on other decks people were playing, beating other people with my deck (people with better, non-drop records... COOL TIMING ON GOOD DRAWS, BRO) and slowly dying of lack of food and sleep. I went back home to play in a draft at my local gaming store to victory... which was a nice contrast to losing in the Big Show.

Conclusion: Playing Magic just to be ironic leads to the best fun I've had at a room packed with sweaty dudes and random girls there to either be paraded around by their boyfriends with ridiculously oversized jewelery on rappers or show up dudes with the "I'M IN YOUR GAME, HAVING A VAGINA" factor.

Video game pull: Uhh... the Garruk Wildspeaker from Duels of the Planeswalkers for the XBOX 360 was going for all the money or something, I guess.

I would crack a joke about /v/, but

Gamers are old and depressed according to Reuters.

A recent survey of 552 respondents showed 45% of those surveyed play the vidya, 56% were male, "most" had a high BMI and were around 35 years old.

Most female gamers were described as "depressed" and in poorer health than non-gamers.

Clearly my personal sphere of gaming friends are not representative of everyone, but also bear in mind that 552 people is not really a significant portion of the population - let alone population of people playing video games. Also keep in mind these are just the people who took the time to respond to the survey. While I'm sure 35, fat and older than your stereotypical Bro who plays Madden and chugs PBR is not the farthest stretch for "average gamer" (then again, enough kids who would not be able to fill out the survey travel with DSes and PSPs [or play Halo rotf lol] would probably skew the ages quite a bit in favor of the younger crowd, if included), the data sample isn't representative enough to say 'this is a guy who plays games.'

Also Batman is being heralded as "Game of the Year." Which isn't saying much as it's in competition with inFamous and maybe BlazBlue.

Cool Story of the Week: Pokemon Champion Crowned, His Parents Aren't Good At Video Games

11 year-old Jeremy Fan is the World Pokemon Champ, I'm assuming only through video game play (since the PWC is for both the game and tcg). The article Google News shot at me is available here. I didn't think that the article was all that good (half the time, it's about the kid's family... I want to know about his and his opponent's teams, about the event, about Nintendo, ABOUT THE KID WHO WON). I mean, you get that he can't play all that much. No, there's something else here I thought was a great resource:

"Humbly, unlike their offspring, neither Fan parent says they're any good at games. Jian Fan said when he was growing up in Fujian, China, people of his generation were too poor to have time for such things. And now, with full-time jobs in Silicon Valley, he and his wife are simply too busy."

LOL WUT. Thanks, Asian stereotype parents. Who thinks to include this stuff while reporting on a kid winning a World-spanning event. Like... he's the best at something... in the world... And we're talking about how his parents came from China and aren't good at video games.

Official "Cool Story" of the week.

All Time Lows, All Time Highs

I know my last few entries of "Nothing is happening and that's pretty much it so yeah" have been more than thrilling to my more than captive audience (of maybe two), but a google search for some good old fashioned video game news (you know, when I can't magically form ideas for entries on my lonesome) yields several low-tier titles, Tekken 6 (ok, not exactly the best example of "not low tier" gaming) and this.

That's when it hit me, "Mother of fuck," something I routinely say when I'm thinking to myself and need to have my mouth washed out with soap, "Video gaming is at its height. The economy is awful and we're celebrating a game based off of a half-decently rated parody of a campy summer blockbuster based off of a Hasbro toy line and 80's cartoon."

But then you have to take a step back for a second. The game is in 3-D. I don't think, short of the headache inducing VirtualBoy, that's ever been done before. And last time I checked, you could not make video games, let alone tie your shoes without using the bunny ear system (at least I know I can't); making games that can be played in 3-D? That's some kind of new-age wizardry that I can't even comprehend.

Then I thought about it even more... the Wii operates with 3-D controls. Yeah, you're playing on a 2-D realm based on a flat TV screen using some kind of avatar that sort of moves around in 3 dimensions but is still confined to 3-D. Then you have the new motion controls of Natal and whatever the PS3's equivalent of 3-D controls are (I can't be asked, as a video game news person, to keep up with this stuff). The screen pops out at you, but it's essentially no different than the 2-D imagery we're given through the simulated 3-D world in most modern gaming. Without physically controlling your game in that third dimension or operating in virtual reality, you're not really doing anything.

I'm currently trying to playtest for a Magic PTQ, so my ability to dig through mounds of dung are hampered a bit. If things don't pick up soon in the video game world, I'm going to start either jabbering endlessly about cool stuff that isn't timely or just start writing about other nerdy stuff that is. Also there'll be pictures. But no pictures for this post, I'm talking about G-Force. And that's terrible.