Birmingham - City of Magic

When we started playing on March 11th 2011 by buying the Deck Builder's Toolkit 2011 we found few Magic The Gathering events happening in our local town (Birmingham, UK).  Now it requires two blog posts.  One with the list - and one to explain what I think happened (I am an Analyst after-all).


This is the second post with what I feel caused this shift, and my tiny part in it:


On March 11th 2011 three guys with disposable income walked into a games store and paid £15 for a box of cards. Each. Then one of them bought a second box (this was me).  This simple action was part of a chain of events that led to a town with only one Wizards Play Network (WPN) event per quarter (Magic Geek's Pre Releases) getting more than any one person could attend, or even easily count.  While I am personally responsible for these three poor souls (and a 4th who tried his best to resist the call of the Elves) I'm not responsible for the amazing amount of events that are scheduled for the next two weekends, but I thought it'd be interesting to see exactly what was.  But I'm getting ahead of myself - the real story starts during the Xbox December online sales.


I was working away over the pre-Xmas period and spotted on my Xbox that the Magic The Gathering game had dropped in price from 800 points (£6.40) to 400 points (£3.20) and while I'd enjoyed the trial it's safe to say I didn't really get the game so I deleted it.  I figured it'd be some cheap fun and good for short breaks in work and so I bought it after redownloading and re-trialing it.  I played it an awful lot over the next few months - encouraging friends to get it too.  I also renamed the blog and re-purposed it from Pokemon to general games (as was always planned in my 'write every day' strategy for essay improvement).  Shortly after this promotion the game hit half a million copies sold and the sequel was announced.  I looked into buying cards and found that a beginners box of cards was about £17 but that if we waited a month then the new version was out.  I mentioned it to people at work and we decided to all jump in. Note in that last story that my total cards budget was £25 and I'd said I'd sell any I found worth over £10.


Some opened all their boxes and put into piles.  I catalogued all three sections here, and looking back it's amazing to see that some of the cards from those first 8 boosters are still ones I play.  This section still gets a huge chunk of the site visits so this is an amazingly popular product and loads of the people at Friday Night Magic (FNM) have the boxes from this for cards, but again this is yet to come.


Over the next few weeks I raised my spending limit to £100 and then broke it all without getting anywhere near a win, even casually.  I like to think of this as the Schumacher effect (after the F1 driver). He tended to go off a lot in practice sessions and the UK commentators would get happy that he was vulnerable.  Truth is the only way to find out the absolute fastest speed you can take a corner at is to go over it and then do just a bit less in the actual race.  This effect stood me in good stead as a month and a half after buying the cards I'd actually won some crucial big games within our casual circle - go me!  Uni was busy and so was work so MTG had taken a back seat.  


I did some Googling about the new set and found that they were running an event 20 min walk from my house for it's release!  I had to go - even if it was £25 and only 8 weeks after we started playing.  Mentally i was drained before I'd turned up, but I did OK and found Karn & a Mox Opal which have since traded places on the value scales.  I was surprised to find the event was relaxed and full of people just like me who played for fun (at the bottom tables at least!) and I honestly think that if this first experience wasn't so great that I'd have never gone to another event. I was also surprised to find out that it wasn't some official organiser and just run by the shop Magic Geek.  I now understand how it all works, but do feel sorry for  the tournament organisers like Steve that don't get all the bonuses the physical shops get just because he runs online & events only (especially when so many people seem to be new players that turn up to his events - new DCI cards are always being given out).


Karn took a trip to e-bay, didn't sell and then I went and bought a box of boosters which was rapidly shredded and then ignored due to work.  A month passed.  All was quiet on the MTG front and then something happened.  The new version of the Xbox game launched.  This simple pebble into the placid lake of nerddom is the start of why we have the massive amount of events.  Suddenly the people who missed out on the game and the related promotions had an excuse to join us in our addiction.  The promo cards were dished out giving the site a confusing story (as I got the old promo decks by mistake) but one that still gets the most hits.  The promo cards were only in proper game stores, and the online tool (when it was playing ball) directed you to these shops.  Our local store Wayland's Forge practically sold out of sealed Magic decks and boosters when this happened - all their lapsed players returned at once.  This amazing act of acquisition convinced a lot of other stores that they should also register to give out the promotional cards - other stores pinged up on the WPN radar as places to not only buy cards, but to get the special shiny giants.


As the actual launch for Magic 2012 came and went the stores seemed to realise that they'd missed out on a pay day.  Customers like me were talking about their competitors and travelling a few miles to the events.  It's still a big job to put on a full Magic event so most waited until the Magic Celebration (a free event for both stores and consumers which I couldn't attend) to get started.  A few started a little earlier such as the fabulous Road to WPN Blog details where a guy with no stores ends up running two lots of events and Game UK who runs the FNM that I've been to 5 of so far - even though it's only just become official and only gets the Promo cards from October.  A store needs to run events before it becomes a CORE store and gets full access to the promo program and Game UK has just hit that one week too late to run a pre-release.  I guess many are in a similar position as most Birmingham stores are only running a launch (or an unofficial event on launch day in a few cases!).  This suggests that Magic Celebration needs to be about a month earlier so that stores can get 3 more events in within the time needed to pre-release the first set in the new block.


As an aside you may have noticed from the pics I got 4 titans - I bought 4 copies of the game! While the Steam & XBL versions were for myself the two spare XBL versions were for younger relatives.  Since I paid for their games I got their promo, but since then both have expressed an interest in the paper product too... This was a risk I was willing to take as frankly there are far more damaging activities for teenagers than a card game that teaches important lessons about budgeting, winning and loosing and encourages critical thought.  Long story short both are turning up to the last Zendikar FNM as their first full FNM (one made it to half of one a week ago...).  More player acquisitions due to the value and desirability of the promos.  I'm guessing a similar story has been told in many households and across many formats.


This mass of events is great for semi-players like our group.  We aren't too bothered about winning the whole thing, we are just happy to participate.  I got 2nd at one of these Friday tournaments but was lucky that no-one expected infect (cheers MaRo!) and may not get away with that again.  This mass of events is basically the market's response to the new player base, and the response by us the player will determine how many survive.  I suspect the Sat pre-release will fill up so am going to pre-book my place just in case.


As every store in town creeps towards Core status together in the next three months it will be very interesting.  Cards will get cheaper for stores and maybe players, players will get better due to practice and events will either become larger or forced out by the competition.  Those attached to shops may not care once they get the bonuses that Core status brings (lower priced stock and more freebies) but some may push for ADVANCED status for running 32+ player events.


Magic is poised to become bigger than it's ever been.  I've played with people from work as a pretence to invite people over for an evening of fun.  My fiance has even invited her work friends over and joined in with the fun (although Commander probably wasn't the best place to start).  And over the next few months I'll play a lot less - these things always cycle, but a few good friends have expressed an interest in being shown how to turn creatures sideways and 'Despise' people with a smile on their face.  And who am I to deny them that pleasure.




TL;DR?
Planeswalkers 09 dropped in price & reached a broader section of marketplace
Cheap beginner card sets got the early adopters in
Planeswalkers 2012 restarted everyone at the same point with desirable shiny cards
Magic Celebration got people out into the shops proving that there was an audience
Stores responded and scheduled events - if unsupported they may be one offs.

Innistrad Schedule

When we started playing on March 11th 2011 by buying the Deck Builder's Toolkit 2011 we found few Magic The Gathering events happening in our local town (Birmingham, UK).  Now it requires two blog posts.  One with the list - and one to explain what I think happened (I am an Analyst after-all).


This is the first post with the list of activities:

Fri 23rd Sep:  Game UK @ Global Gaming - Farewell to Zendikar FNM - £4
Sat 24th Sep: Magic Geek @ Quality Hotel - Innistrad PreRelease 6 Booster Sealed - £25
Sun 25th Sep - day of rest / Forbidden Planet Birmingham - M2012 Booster Draft (old skool!)

Wed or Thur - My House - Launch Prep/Games night

Fri 30th Sep: Game UK @ Global Gaming - Launch Party 3 Boosters I think - £10
Sat 1st Oct: Waylands Forge - Launch Event 6 Boosters £TBC-£20?
Sun 2nd Oct: Magic Geek @ Oddfellows Hall Stafford - Innistrad Launch 6 Booster Sealed - £25 (or FP Launch B'ham)

I think there are other events going on too - for example our preferred card shop (the fabulous Superdrome in Worcester) is doing both Launch & PreRelease and so is their odd neighbour Mana Leak.  Very tempted to go to their Launch event, but I think that clashes with Wayland's trying out their first major event in a long while - and they are my 2nd favourite games shop ever (Role'n'Play Wolverhampton - how we miss ye - hang on, according to Google they just moved again!! Woo!!).  Both Forbidden Planets (B'ham & Wolves) are running Launch but not Pre-Release events. That's a crazy amount of magic compared to just 3 Months ago...

If you want to check out what is near you then pop your postcode in here.  As you see above attending everything would be expensive, but I hope to pick & choose.

And stay tuned for the 'think piece'!

Friday Night Magic 5 - Compare the Myr Deck

As Steel Overseer is about to drop out of standard I felt compelled to play my multiplayer Myr deck build for the pre-FNM games nights we had at my house.  I miss these, but we may restart them on a Wed.

Basically the idea is you throw out a load of little Myr then boost and tap/untap them with trinkets and then hope to find my one copy of Tempered Steel or Jor Kadeen to make you win faster.  I have 1 voltaic key to  reuse the overseers as needed too which adds to the chaos.  In theory it works.  Not against the FNM field though...

Round one was a 2-0 loss against burn & bloodthirst which was interesting, but I couldn't keep anything on the board long enough to get boosting.

Round 2 was the White Ally deck and while I started big in game 2 I got DOJ'd off the board and couldn't rebuild fast enough to get my items powered up. 2-0 again

Round 3 was more promising as this Diabolic Tutor deck was good, but I had essentially 4 turns to ramp up.  I kept drawing into my high cost Scrapyard Salvo and Relentless Assault 'end game' cards and couldn't outpace him.  2-0.  I took these out at the end of the game and won 4 straight side games over the rest of the evening! Such is Magic.

I did a write up of this with the LSV energy drink for FSF.

Round 4?  Bye.  This gave me the extra 2 PWP I needed to hit Level 10!  With the FNM/Pre-release next weekend giving me a pretty much guaranteed 5 base participant points I could be sitting pretty for the start of the Oct FNM proper.

Next week Phyrexian Suicide Cult 1.5 takes it's final bow prior to rotation. And I have a few extra surprises slotted in...

Friday Night Magic 4 - Beware the Trees...

Bit belated this one.  Couldn't Tweet due to balancing the arrival of a friend to his first ever FNM (and getting on the right bus int he wrong direction to miss two rounds), and forgot to write up.

I thought that this one was a bit of a bust - the deck seemed to take ages to get anywhere and struggled to find answers to other people's win conditions.  I was playing Blue Green Landfall and had up to 30 mana on some turns due to 2x Vorinclex but failed to put enough X cost cards in to utilise it.

Round 1 was against good friend @Disknoir 's Blue 'stall then play Stormtide' deck which would be fantastic if everyone wasn't playing burn and removal spells.  I cocked up my landfall and lost my only decent flier by adding +2/+2 instead of +4/+4 and couldn't fly over the stormtide after this.  Due to time this was a draw in the end, but I bet I could have won game 3 due to knowing what I needed to keep back to beat the stormtide.

Round 2 was against a BladeHold deck I really couldn't beat once it got going.  I had to go collect my visitor during this game too so was a bit distracted - 2-0 to him.

Round 3 was against elves, and while game 1 took ages due to me not finding good damage producers game 2 was a walkover with the fab Hydra getting into 3 digit tokens again (it had in round 1 but been unable to attack).

Round 4 was unfortunately against my invited friend! It was fun to play, but as we'd been playing this same match-up the night before it felt like we'd been robbed of another contest.  i won 2-1 due to a slip up in round 2 on my part where I hadn't taken the lifelink into account.

I came top half and gave my friend the promo card - he'd earned it!

If I'd conceded faster in Round 1 game 1 we might have made it to the 3rd game and I could have come top 4.  As my Rd 2 opponed pointed out I needed to put BEast within in the deck and I realised after that adding 4 cards for red X cost spells would make the deck much more powerful.  After rotation I will run this deck again - but without landfall can a landfetch deck really be that good? It'll be fun to find out.

Also - here is my Planeswalker Points link!

Friday Night Magic 3 - Loss Adjustment

This week's was a four round affair where I took a Red/Black/Blue deck manipulation 75 card affair that I'd built the previous week while quite ill.  It didn't do very well.  The theme was 'make Time Reversal playable' This card is a Mythic Rare from the Magic 2012 set that is lower in value than most of the normal Rares.  Ponder - a common card - tends to sell for more.  I figured a way that you could kill people with it and went to work.

Round 1 - Red/Black Burn & vampires beat me 2:0

Round 2 - Elves beat me 2:0 (I think this was the same borrowed elves as a previous week being played by a different person)

Round 3 - Illusions beat me 2:0

Round 4 - A different Elves beat me 2:1.  Yes - I won the penultimate game of the night.

After the Illusions battle I spread out my cards and found I'd only left 4 Red spells in and still got lots of mana (basic and non basic) for them.  I took those out and fixed the lands and it ran a lot more smoothly.  Still very clunky and requiring longer games to win with not much in the way of stalling tactics (Spellskite as a star blocker?!) I managed to sneak out a Psychosis Crawler with a Time reversal in hand and played it for the win (when I draw a card Psychosis Crawler does one damage to target player - Time Reversal makes us both dump hands and draw 7) - goal!!achieved!!

Sure I had to loose 8 (plus two extra matches I played to see what happened) to get 1 win, but I've figured out the key parts of the process now.  I loved having Psychic surgery in the deck, but exiling cards only gets you so far - and the idea isn't really to let the opponent live to use their 7 cards.

On to next week where I'm looking after new players so will play a more traditional deck.