Pseudo Vacation

Kira and Del have gone off to Disneyland for a 5-day long mother-daughter vacation. This means I'm essentially a bachelor this week. I've been in job search mode pretty much non-stop since New Years so I decided that I too would go on vacation this week. So far I'm pretty happy with how I've spent my time ... here's the run-down:

Monday: I took Del and Kira to the airport in the morning and then headed to the grocery store to lay in a supply of frozen food and Diet Coke. I then proceeded to play Magic Online for 18 consecutive hours, something I have never come close to doing before. Hell, I haven't played that much Magic in a row since my pro player days in the late 90's before I joined Wizards, and that was long before MTGO came out. I started at about 1 in the afternoon and finally crashed around 7am. In between I got top 4 in one Daily Event, top 16 in another, won 2 or 3 drafts, and placed or showed in several others.

I figured I would spend this week seeing if I could get myself qualified for the Magic Online Championship Series (MOCS). It's essentially the same sort of "free roll" tournament system that poker has perfected over the years: if you play enough then you get invited to a special free tournament at the end of the season. In MOCS, you get 1 Qualifiying Point (QP) for winning a queue (aka single-elim. 8-person tournament) and you get 3 QP's for making top 8 of a Daily Event (swiss paired tournaments with typical sizes of 24-64 people). Accumulate 15 QP's over the course of the month and you're invited to the monthly championship. Win one of the 7 monthly championship (the first of which had 354 runners) and you get invited to the (paper) World Championships in Rome and in addition to competing in Worlds you're also in an 8-man MTG) grand finale for $50 grand. I'm actually not eligible to play in real-world Magic events because my wife works for Wizards, but Magic Online is not actually DCI-sanctioned and I'm a sucker for tournaments, esp with lots of context.

At this point it seems likely I'll qualify and I guess if I do manage to win the monthly championship then the runner-up will get a very happy surprise. I don't like my chances all that much since the finals is constructed and I have neither a team nor a collection full of Planeswalkers, but it will be fun to try. Playing full Alara block constructed about 2 weeks after it goes on sale seems like it could be beating for everyone involved. It will seque nicely into Pro Tour Honolulu, though, which I will be attending as part of the coverage team, including the live webcast.

Tuesday: I set my alarm for 3:15 in the afternoon, something I don't think I've done since college. Tuesday is board game night at Wizards plus I had a meeting set up before hand. Before games, though, I was looking forward to debating the merits of the new Star Trek movie with Aaron Forsythe for a few minutes. Aaron is annoyed by old-and-busted Spock appearing in what Aaron was hoping would be a completely new beginning point that would allow him (a non-Trekkie) to jump in and not have to worry about what might or might not have happened before. Basically, he wanted a reboot a la Bond or Batman. In my opinion the actual reboot that Trek has done is significantly *better* because Star Trek has always been about the characters and by changing the world they now give themselves the ability to have characters make different choices.

Look, I already know how the Joker story is going to turn out. Sure it was awesome to see Heath Ledger's take on that character, but it's still essentially the same story it was with Jack Nicholson and I already know how it ends. With this new Trek, though, things are much more open-ended. Quinto-Spock seems like he's going to emphasis his human side way more than Nimoy-Spock (the death of his mom provides new and different motivations, plus he's an endangered species now and needs to breed ... and that looks likely to involve Uhura, which feels totally natural despite being a pretty different story from the one gene Roddenberry told with these characters). Anyway, they needed to reboot more than just the actors and the tech. They needed to re-boot a storyline that had become bloated under the weight of its own continuity and that's precisely what they did. By not settling for a Bond/Batman-style reboot, but instead going the extra mile to both placate Trekkie continuity hounds and also provide the characters with new motivations that set up interestingly different arcs, this movie really blew me away. That's more that enough goodness to allow me to forgive a little bit of lazy writing (I'm looking at you, Ice cave scene).

Anyway, I'm not sure Aaron agrees, but it's not like he hated the movie. He just gave it a mere 'B' and felt obliged to defend himself. i got pulled away because it was time for Agricola. I played maybe my best game of Agricola ever and scored 54 in a 3-player game to win via blow-out. We then played Turbo Hearts over dinner at Cheesecake Factory (during which I also got to hear Kira singing "It's a Small World" several times over the phone ... 30 years later and that song is still insidiously catchy. Somewhere my parents are laughing at me right now.)  I never got majorly boofed in the hearts game, but i still managed to lose like 200 points anyway. After dinner there were 5 left who still wanted to play Hearts and I lost the draw so i decided to head home and play more MTGO.

I proceeded to finish 2nd in 3 of the 4 drafts I could get in before things went into No-Pay mode at 5am in anticipation of the weekly downtime (scrubbing out in the first round of the other). A pretty reasonable result in terms of accumulating cards and packs so I can keep playing, but 2nd place isn't worth any QP's. I'm also pretty frustrated with the inconsistent mana that's inherent to Alara block. Even if you first-pick tri-lands and land-cyclers, you're still rolling the dice and more games are decided by mana issues on one side or the other than I like to see so I find myself playing a lot of Tempest-Stronghold draft and Shadowmoor-Eventide draft. SSE with all its hybrid and the very real possibility of drafting mono-color decks allows for by far the best mana of any limited format ever, but  Alara fires so much more frequently that I find myself running it a lot rather than waiting around.

Wednesday: I went to bed around 6-7am but took my iPhone into the bedroom rather than leaving it synched to my computer like I normally do. I figured I might get a call about the one career opportunity I'm still actively pursuing this week despite trying to mostly just goof off and/or I might get a call about some random gaming opportunity. Around 11am my phone rang and its Rob Watkins. Did I want to drive to Alan Comer's house for a game of Through the Ages? Sure ... that sounds like fun. On the way there Mike Turian calls and wants to game after work too. I had been thinking about playing a poker tournament with Henry Stern (who was out 4th for TTA), but board gaming is more fun so Henry, Mike, and I wind up playing TTA at Mike's house instead. This is actually the second time in the last couple weeks that I've managed to play two games of TTA on the same day. This time, however, I did a lot less winning. In the first game I sacrificed my army to win what I hoped would be a decisive culture war, but there was actually way too much game left for that play. I got attacked 5 times on the last 2+ orbits around the table and wound up a distant 3rd. In the second game I did a bunch of little things wrong, the most egregious of which was probably not going to Theocracy with it's 2 extra military actions as soon as Caeser died. Anyway 11 hours, 2 meals, and 2 Henry Stern victories later I was headed home. I managed to win an Alara draft while flipping back and forth and writing this entry so now seems like a great time to call in a night.
Posted by Randy Buehler at 5/14/2009 12:46 AM
Categories: uncategorized

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