Rich “Modern Hero” Stein, Kadar “Best Friend” Brock, Sam “Likes to Stand with His Legs Apart” Werb, “Twenty Sided” Luis, and I drove to Worcester to play in #GPBOSTON.
I played Infinity. I made almost no changes to the deck list from last week (or whichever week I last talked about Affinity). No, I did not play Ensoul Artifact. I went 5-4 only winning two actual matches. I mulled a number of no land sevens into no land sixes. I mulled a lot of mostly two and three drops plus a Darksteel Citadel hands. Maybe six total games were really fun to play. All of my opponents were good sports and had non-dickhead attitudes.
These guys beat me.*
Kiki Pod, UWR, Affinity, and Junk. Lots of mulligans (no lands or one land + three drops, woof) and a couple punts (against Kikipod I put blinders on with a single line of play and didn’t see a different, winning, line of play).
After battling the UWR deck I played Kyle.
He’s a good dude and we’re Facebook friends now (pending, WTF?!). We played a bunch of games and I beat the snot out of him. We laughed the whole time. He drew me as his angel token on the Hipsters of the Coast business card I’d given him. Another fan was there to capture the event in video form.
I defeated the following people in Magical combat.
Round one I defeated an empty chair in ten minutes.
Round six I faced another empty chair.
Round five my opponent decided to drop after destroying me and I asked him if I could have the win ‘cuz I need the points. He had no interest in Planeswalker Points. I thanked him. He kinda looks like Tom Cruise if Tom Cruise played Magic (I don’t know that he doesn’t). I punted game three by not throwing all of my artifacts into my Ravager then onto an Inkmoth. The next turn he cleared my board and I was fucked. “If I had thrown my artifacts at my Inkmoth would I have won the match?” I asked him. “Yeah, totally,” he responded. He was playing Tron.
The Frazetta painting of a powerful wizard crushed me with UWR.**
Another Affinity mirror, this time I won in three. That’s the dude in the #sixseasonsandamovie t-shirt.
We’ve now completed my #GPBOSTON experience main event experience.
The real story of #GPBOSTON was the Cardhaus booth. I love German language cards. They had a lot and I spent many hundreds of dollars on them. I’ll probably be able to sell the English versions of the cards and get half to 75% of my value back (is what I tell myself to feel better about spending the money).
Look at all of these!
That’s just what I bought on day two (not shown: German Phyrexian Obliterat0r). I was able to get a playset of every shock ‘cept the best shock (Stomping Grounds).
These wackos sold them to me (they know a sucker when they see one)!
Despite buying shit tons of cards I didn’t win any crazy prizes. I also can’t find their store’s website and they were out of business cards. I had a lot of fun shooting the shit with them and listening to awesome German accents. I acquired eight cards for my Legacy deck (the BUG one) and a lot of pieces for Affinity (Blinkmoth Nexus, Glimmervoid).
I played two other guys in a Modern grinder trying to get buys. They’re both Canadian.
And then this guy beat me with a German Tarmoguy (setting the stage for my spending spree).
“How old do you think I am?” German Tarmoguy asked me. “I dunno, 25?” I replied. “I’m 15, everyone thinks I’m older,” he said. I laughed.
I nearly forgot to tell you about Uberfahrt.
Hilarious. I bought two. I’m a trade one to Jess.
You’ve already read how everyone else in Brooklyn did that weekend (badly) so I won’t spend much time on it. At various points in the weekend, usually in the car or at dinner, I laughed so hard I nearly puked. Everyone in the community is so great and I am blessed to be a part of it.
The day before we left I drew a penis and a pee rainbow on the bathroom mirror for good luck.
But it didn’t work. I dropped after receiving my playmat and card pool during the Sunday Series Sealed tournament. Then I signed up for the Sunday Series Modern tournament and lost to the following two guys.
Whatever, it was fun. Gustavo came running over saying he had bought a German Phyrexian Obliterator and when he showed it to me I offered to buy it off him then and there. He accepted.
I was happier than I’ve ever been in my life. Time to get the fuck out of Worcester, home of #GPBOSTON.
We passed a beautifully bumper-stickered car on the way home from #GPBOSTON.
Kadar noted that it was very patriotic of this Lexus owner to have not bought an American vehicle.
And that’s it. The whole experience. I bought four Ensoul Artifacts off of Luis and will be trying them out this Saturday at the West Nyack PTQ. I mean, unless they shit the bed on MTGO practice between now and then.
Thanks for reading!
Matt
Matt Jones (born 1980, Rochester, New York) is an artist living and working in Brooklyn, NY. Matt works between a variety of inter-related genres that explore mythology, archaeology, ancient history, theoretical physics, comedy, and the paranormal—all developed and inspired by research and personal experience. Together his bodies of work form a way for Matt to evaluate, negotiate, and play with the world around him. You can check out his art at www.mattjonesrules.com.
Matt’s played Magic since early 1995, took a break for a decade or so, and came back to the game the weekend after the Scars of Mirrodin release. With Hugh Kramer he formed New York’s Team Draft League and is one of the original writers for Hipsters of the Coast. Matt’s been sober for seven years.
*The Wizard from that Danny McBride movie represents a cool dude who didn’t want his photo taken.
**Another guy who didn’t want his photo taken. UWR players aren’t into having their photos taken at #GPBOSTON.