Robot Viking Invited to Magic Online Community Cup 2010!
Last year, Wizards held the first Magic: the Gathering Online Community Cup. The event pitted members of the Magic Online Community and Magic media members against a crack team of Wizards employees, with prizes for the MTGO community at large at stake. The Community Team won in 2009, and this year I’ll have a chance to help defend the Cup — Wizards of the Coast invited me to join the Community Team as a media member!
I’ve been sitting on this news for a week, and just about bursting with excitement. Wizards flies all the Community Team members to their headquarters in Washington for the five-day competition, where we’ll play Magic Online against the people who actually design the game. The tournament is broken into multiple formats, including two constructed and several limited events. If the Community Team wins, all the forum members who contributed to deck development and practice sessions for the team get a prize (they haven’t announced this year’s prizes yet).
The whole thing goes down in early June. You can read the official announcement here (having my job title of Mighty Overlord publicly acknowledged is a career highlight for me). The Community forum threads where the events will be discussed, planned for and the constructed decks will be developed are here.
The limited events haven’t been announced yet, but the constructed events are Unified Standard and Unified Commander. Unified means that you can only use four copies of a given card across the entire team. If one of us plays Jund and uses four copies of Bloodbraid Elf, the Boss Naya player can’t use them. Commander is the online version of Elder Dragon Highlander.
I can’t even begin to tell you how excited I am about this, and how honored I am to have been invited. The other Community Team members are a seriously awesome bunch. Expect tons of coverage of the events, plus a lot of talk about deck development in the weeks leading up to the tournament. Plus, I hear Wizards makes a few other games Robot Viking readers might be interested in, so maybe I can squeeze in some bonus coverage.
April 21st, 2010 8:10 AM
Incredible news, Ed. Congratulations.
April 21st, 2010 1:25 PM
Wow, This little corner of the net is hitting the mainstream. Few more weeks we’re going to need a moderation system to keep the trolls out.
April 21st, 2010 2:58 PM
Dude, how kickass is that? Very kickass is the appropriate answer. Here’s hoping you have a great time, and figuratively smash some dudes in their figurative faces via the game of Magic.
April 21st, 2010 3:57 PM
Definitely figuratively. I’ve learned the “no roundhouse face kick rule” will be in effect for this competition.
April 22nd, 2010 12:00 AM
Well, that seriously limits my moveset. In other news, how does the community create the decks?