I haven't been playing much Magic during the COVID-19 lock down. I can't really explain why. I guess I just haven't been into it. Without a big tournament to prepare for I don't really see the point in playing just for fun online. None of the online events are offering the prize that I'm looking for (that being the last 5% partial invite I need, but who knows how that will even work after this is all done?)
I have used the time to finally finish organizing and inventorying my collection. It has been a slow process over the past 5 years given how much bulk I had, but now everything is in its final place.
The End of Planeswalker Points
I've had two blog posts unpublished for several years now. One was about the flaws of the PWP system and what changes I thought it would make it something useful. Another was a retrospective of all the PTQs I played that I was planning on doing when they first killed PTQs, but never got around to finishing and now they are back. When I was working on it, I had saved all my PTQ match history so I was a bit ahead of the curve when they announced PWP was shutting down.
I don't know how to express the importance of archival storage. Maybe some people just don't see the value, but for those that do it is so readily apparent. I've lost a large portion of my tournament reports over the years to websites that vanished overnight without a chance to recover. My policy for last 5 years has been to copy everything I write to this blog even if it is published elsewhere. It is useful enough to me that the effort is worth it. I have managed to find two reports from 2004 that I have put on this blog. I wish I had the others from that era and all the eras in between.
I may still do the PTQ retrospective to cover the ones I don't already have reports on. I'll include GP and PT as well, maybe 5 per post. Until then, I wanted to share 5 events from my PWP history. A lot of people were doing this on Twitter, but I didn't want to clog the timeline.
The First Events
My first two sanctioned events are above. I was entirely casual up to this point. The FNM was Prophecy era Standard. I borrowed Accelerated Blue copied directly from a Zvi article (I'm sure this list is somewhere, it played Blasted Landscape). I borrowed it from Tracey Steele, who I only knew from the SCG Forums online. I was just a 16 year old kid from the internet and he trusted me with his $200 deck. I made top 4 mainly by just having a real deck and playing cards like Masticore against the field of rogue brews. My round 3 opponent was Minh Mai, who would become one of my best friends a few years later. At the time, we were both in high school at different schools. Tracey beat me in the top 4 since I had no idea what I was doing. We still talk occasionally to this day.
The other event was my first limited event, the Invasion Prerelease. A big surprise in looking at this was the name Andy Swaffar. I've recently become acquainted with him in the past 9 months as part of the Texas Old School Magic scene. He lives in the BCS area same as me and we've gone to several Old School events together. I had no idea we had played 20 years ago. Jonathan Job is also a guy I still talk to occasionally.
The First PTQ Win
This is the one report I most wish I still had. Legions era Sealed Deck. I top 8 with a builds itself RG deck. In the top 8 I drafted 4x Improvised Armor over the first two packs. In the third pack I took as many creatures with Provoke as possible. I wrote about my top 4 match with Nathan Zamora here.
The Events I'm Most Proud Of
I was the Two Headed Giant State Champion in 2006 in South Carolina. I was also the 2007 2HG State Champion in Hawaii. I was runner-up in 2005 Texas States. For whatever reason I really liked State Championships. I really wanted to have an Individual Title, and I set my sights on the Texas event in 2011 shortly after returning home from the Navy. I even went so far as to call my shot on the local MTG Forum, telling others to not bother showing up. My full report is still up here. (I should add that to this blog for archive now that I think about it.)
The PTQ in Lubbock I played Boros in Modern. I built the deck on the 9 hour drive from Houston to Lubbock with David Thomas.
These events I'm most proud of in retrospect because they are when I realized I could actually have success with my own innovations in deck building. They aren't my favorite decks I've ever built, but they brought me success and proved I could do it.
Reminiscing
I always enjoy a good walk down Memory Lane. I'll probably write about 4 or 5 events at a time in a new series until I get through all 97 PTQs and other events. Maybe it will be my next 5 year MTG project.
