More Hall of Fame thoughts

Miscellaneous thoughts and things I have discovered as I finalize my ballot for this year's Magic Pro Tour Hall of Fame:

One guy who is getting some attention that I haven’t mentioned before is Masashiro Kuroda. He’s got an impressive 121 points in just13 appearances, by far the highest points / PT on the ballot. To be fair,though, he’s got 7 GP T8’s factoring in there and his median PT finish is just103rd. Brian Selden is much more impressive to me if you want ashort-career guy: 3 T8’s and a win in just 14 PT’s attended, with a median finish of 37th. That’s the 3rd best median finish on the ballot yet somehow this guy only got 1 vote last year?

 

Meanwhile, if you want to go by raw play skill, Neil Reeves and Baby Huey (aka William Jensen) deserve a lot of consideration.

 

Mark Justice’s median finish of 28.5 and his 4 T8’s in just 18appearances continues to impress me, by the way. And some would argue that his true peak actually pre-dates the Pro Tour. (Justice’s 3-year “peak median”finish is an insane 13th. That ties him with Finkel for the best of all-time. The next highest in the history of the game is me at 18th,but I didn’t attend enough events to qualify based on the way Wizards is currently calculating the stat. Kai is next at 23rd.) Quite simply, Justice was The Man for those first few seasons.

 

OMFG I knew I was voting for Kamiel but a median finish of36th across *45* Pro Tours?! Unprecedented. Karsten at 47this the only other guy among the 15 on the ballot with 35+ PT’s attended who even finished Top 70 at half of their events. Budde’s median finish was 42nd (in 42 events). Finkel’s,when elected, was 52nd in 47 events. Most folks have a couple year stretch where they are awesome and then a couple years where they are hanging out enjoying their ride on the train. Kamiel just stayed consistently great for most of a decade.

 

Shvartsman – median finish of 92.5. I know  the 21 GP T8’s look impressive, but he traveled to a lot of GP's where he was the only American and this was an era where the Japanese were not yet good enough to compete and win on an international stage.

 

Long – Imagine if we had a time machine and could go back to the beginning and convince WotC to spin Mike as a face rather than a heel. Now imagine that WotC had spun Olle Rade as Mr. Sketchy (which would not have been hard to do, especially given his talent for recognizing the inconsistencies on the backs of Magic cards that used to plague WotC’s print runs). Their HoF fortunes would be reversed, right? Long has become the poster child of all that is evil, but I think his reputation is probably worse than he deserves. He certainly embraced that reputation, encouraged it, and used it to his advantage; but it’s hard to blame him for cooperating with WotC’s attempt to make the Pro Tour into compelling theater. We all want the prize money to keep flowing, and ideally to grow, so we all tend to cooperate with whatever PR initiatives Wizards is trying. For the early years of the PT Wizards was hoping the game could have mass appeal and that the Pro Tour would become a spectator sport. They desperately wanted the PT to have compelling characters that could appeal to even non-playing spectators and they applied a number of lessons from professional wrestling to their promotional efforts.  Are we sure they were wrong? When push comes to shove I actually can imagine myself voting for Long, though I haven’t done so yet and as a point of principle I don’t think I’m going to consider it unless the iconic “white hat” (Chris Pikula) gets voted into the Hall first.

 

Everyone with 300 or more lifetime pro points has gotten in on their 1st ballot appearance. That’s good news for Antoine and Kamiel, not that they need it as most ballots I have seen discussed publicly seem to include them both. (By the way, did you know that Antoine’s brother Olivier Ruel is now only 23 points behind Kai for #1 all-time?)

 

Since year 1, only one person with less than 200 lifetime Pro Points has been voted in: me at 126. And I’m a pretty weird case, as I’m sure lots of the votes I got were based on my overall service to the game from inside Wizards R&D, inside the commentary booth, etc. Justice and Pikula both have 133, and Long is at 191. That said, both Rade and Comer got in below 200 (198 in Comer's case, though I think it was like 192 or 194 when he was voted in). Mostly I think the early years of the PT are both more influential and also had fewer Pro Points in the system but for anyone being added to the ballot now you pretty much need 200 or you aren't going to get serious consideration.

 

Justin Gary. The case lives here: http://www.wizards.com/Magic/Magazine/HallOfFame.aspx?x=mtgevent/hof/06ballot1aand basically comes down to this: how impressed are you by 8 consecutive Top 32finishes when only one of them is a Top 8? How about 11 T-32’s out of 13 PT’s?Personally, I’m pretty impressed.

 

A sneak peek at next year: Nassif finally gets officially coronated. Saito seems pretty obvious as well and then after that it looks like an interesting collection of specialists and/or short career guys and/or we get to find out how deep into the Japanese invasion of the PT the line for the Hall of Fame is going to be drawn: Akira Asahara, Eugene Harvey, Rich Hoaen, Anton Jonsson, Shu Komura, Katsuhiro Mori, Guillaume Wafo-Tapa, Shota Yasooka, etc.

 


Posted by Randy Buehler at 7/22/2009 9:01 PM
Categories: uncategorized

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