Regional Magic 2010 prerelease/UFC100 wrap up

Went to bed at midnight Friday so I could arise at 7:30 AM. I get to the confrence center by 8:30AM.

the semi professional surroundings were intimidating and the faux windows chilled me to my very essence.

Registration didn’t start til 9AM so I had a half hour to kill. I Kind of checked out the trader’s selection of cards but I knew I wouldn’t be spending any extra amount of money if possible. I saw the advertised special guest artist “RK Post”. Every magic card needs art and RK Post is one of the best. Looking through his catalog of magic cards that he’s done over the years is impressive. Then I saw that he did teh art for a card called, “Mind Funeral”. His art depicts a sorting trough made of black stone and littered with skulls some of which are sliding down a ramp into it. The card itself makes your opponent put quite a lot cards from his deck into his graveyard. I immediately splurged and bought an “artist proof” of the card for him to sign. for 5 dollars I thought it was a fair value even though the card can’t be used in the actual game.

Shortly there after wards I looked to start a casual game while I waited but there were no takers. But I did strike up a conversation with a guy just getting back into the game. Pretty cool guy. But as soon as registration opened up I said good bye. Registration was a 30 dollar fee which got you a coupon for free entry to Friday Night Magic at a local game store as well as 6 boosters of the new Magic 2010 set and a promo card.

Magic nerds...we're sneaky.

The event I signed up for was called sealed format. You sit in an assigned seat. you’re given a deck registration sheet and then given 6 sealed booster packs. When everyone has all the same supplies were open teh packs and write down which and how many of each card are in the boosters.  You see once the booster contents are recorded you pass them to another person. This allows for full subjectivity when recording the contest of the deck. I was pretty impressed with the cards I registered. Two mythic rare cards and a lot of rare cards that I had wanted. So then it was announced that we would be passing the cards to ourselves! So of course I immediately started evaluating my cards for a potential deck.

That feat was actually kind of tricky. You see I started magic right as magic had become very reliant on cards that are “multi-colored) meaning the majority of the newer cards required to you to use multiple kinds of mana to use them. So I had always built decks based off that ideology. This release was nothing but single color cards. So because of the small pool of cards we had to make a deck with you still needed to do a multi color deck but then again none of your cards greatly benefited from the other color you would be using in the deck. I knew my green cards were very good and my white ones seemed pretty good but there wasn’t enough creatures in my green to balance out teh white cards. So I made a green black deck. It didn’t do so well and after running into a pal named Dan who I play magic with on Tuesdays. He convinced me that I should reengineer the deck as a green/white. That did indeed help but I still lost 3 rounds in a row. It’s nice to win these events since you get more boosters but the point is to get early access to cards not being sold yet. So I had already won out IMO.

BUT, turns out Dan had signed up for the third “flight” of teh same event I signed up for. A “flight” is teh diea that some people show up late so you hold multiples of the same event but staggered through the day. The first flight is the one I signed up for. Dan had signed up for flight 3 which needed 4 more people to sign up before it could start. Dan begged me to sign up so he could play. I told him I would but I needed more money and there was no ATM at the conference center. Dan actually lent me 8 bucks. So that was another 6 boosters, coupon and promo. Though I did get the free promo from flight 1 already and yes it was a mythic rare card it also was pretty useless in most decks. The deck I registered was pretty bad, there was a planeswalker card in there(I had gotten one already in teh first flight). But overall I didn’t like what was in the deck mostly just really not very good cards. Luckily this time we did pass the decks and I ended up with some really nice stuff. Unfortunately I couldn’t use any of the cards I got from the first flight so my deck still sucked. the last guy I faced was real class though. He was a silent player who only spoke to announce the new phase of combat but he wasn’t annoying. Then after trouncing me 2-0 he offered me all the uncommon and common cards he drew. I immediately thanked him. Considering at most you can get 2 rares in a booster he gave me the majority of the cards he got from the prerelease so that’s pretty much 17.5 boosters for 60 bucks spent.

I left shortly there after and later at night went to the fox and hound for UFC100 with Chris, overall a good event. Lesnar pummeled Frank Mir heavily and proved that he can dominate most competors. he gained my respect…then completely lost any I could have had. He literally did a WWE style speech as if he was still a heel in Vince Mcmahon’s pro-wrestling league. He insulted teh guy who went two brutal rounds with him. He insulted the main sponsor of the event bud light then endorsed Coors which is probably the shittiest beer around(considering I dislike beer as is that’s pretty bad), then he insulted Dana White by claiming he wasn’t making enough money yet. Of course after being in his locker room and getting a visit from a certain “Mr. White” he completly apologized at teh press conference after wards.

Dan Henderson brought teh fury with a one punch knockout over Bisping. Bisping should have had more sense and not circled into Dan’s rocket Right hand but Bisping tends to make mistakes like that. I really wish Henderson hadn’t done that 2nd dropping punch when Bisping was already out cold but it was teh ref’s job to stop the fight not Henderson’s.

GSP continued his dominance but Thiago still showed great heart and despite losing every round he still came off looking like a true contender.

Akiyama faced Belcher and won very split decision. I completely agreed with the judges for once and then Joe Rogan screams, “Belcher got robbed!” Everyone around me and even chris said, “WHAT?” Akiyama won teh first 2 rounds hands dopwn and then the third could’ve gone either way. Akiyama answered every hit belcher trhough and dsipite getting low blowed(brutally) and eye poked Akiyama remained solid. Neither man was able to do much damage but Akiyama still scored a takedown in most of the rounds.

Chris and I watched Kung-fu panda afterwards. It is indeed Dreamworks most watchable animation movie still pales next to Pixar’s worst.

Sunday I got to play some magic at Stevies and I complied a really nice white soldier deck. Hopefully it’ll do well on Tuesday.