Day 1 — Tourist Stuff and Casual Magic
Our first full day here in Seattle/Renton had us taking in the sights as Wizards’ guests and playing the new Archenemy format at a fantastic local game store. So why are there no photos, and why weren’t be busily training for the Community Cup?
The photo question is easy — for some reason I can’t figure out how to upload photos from my brother’s camera to my laptop. It’s ok though, they were all your basic tourist pics, and really, do you need another shot peering up from the base of the Space Needle? No. I will say that the sci-fi museum was excellent.
After our day of touring, we stopped by Uncle’s Games for some Archenemy action. Uncle’s is a very nice store in a mall, with a huge variety of games of all kinds, from the collectible stuff to Euro board games to family fun games like Scrabble. They seemed to have a steady schedule of events, too, using table space in the food court right outside. I was highly impressed.
Archenemy pits one player against two to four others. The “others” all take one unified turn and fight to kill the Archenemy before he or she kills them. Seems unfair, but the Archenemy has twice as much life and a “Deck of Schemes.” Each turn the enemy turns up a scheme card and gets some kind of beneficial effect. I saw everything from an extra turn to one that let the enemy look at all opponenst’ decks and cast any one non-creature card from them. Of course, you can blend formats for really wacky games. At one point, Aaron Forsythe was the Archenemy in a game that combined Elder Dragon Highlander and last year’s Planechase casual format with the enemy stuff. It lead to the following tweet from Forsythe: “Played some 4-on-1 EDH Archenemy at the store; it took about 22 people to figure out how to Mindslaver me. Can’t overcome that.”
Tomorrow, the first official event of the Community Cup competition fires off. It’s the MD5 draft (Mirrodin, Darksteel, Fifth Dawn). I think the other community team members are downstairs in the hotel doing an MD5 practice draft — a very cool local player whose name I unfortunately didn’t catch gave the team a draft set to practice with. I’m skipping the practice draft because, as a media team member, I’m sitting out this event to provide full coverage. Watch for that tomorrow afternoon (evening for those back on the east coast).
Of course, we’d have done a lot more practicing if there weren’t a dastardly Wizards conspiracy to keep us all so busy that we don’t have the time or energy at night to get much else done. I’m surprised they haven’t ordered some intern to run up and down the hotel halls banging pots and pans at 3 a.m. to ruin our sleep. JUDGE!
June 9th, 2010 11:41 AM
Oh Wizards, so close, yet so far.