Red Monkey's Planeswalker Messenger Bag: A Review

A while back (shortly after they were announced in this Arcana on the Daily MTG "mothership"), I placed an order from Red Monkey for a Planeswalker Messenger bag. At the time I ordered it, I promised a full review of it to my Twitter followers, as we were all curious as to whether it was really deserving of the $50 price tag. Here, at long last, is that promised review of the bag (the item page of which is here).

First I will comment on the service aspect. It took a LONG time (in my opinion) from order to final shipping. I suppose it is possible that either:

• they make these bags on an as-needed basis, and it takes a while to construct, so there's a delay; or
• they were overwhelmed with orders after getting the top spot on the aforementioned Arcana article

Regardless, I will just state that I ordered on January 18, and the bag shipped on January 30, arriving via UPS on February 3. I cannot say whether this is a normal turn-around time for them or unusual. Your mileage may vary.

Now as for the product itself, here's what I can say. It seems quite sturdily constructed, and seems (so far) like it will hold up to a great deal of use and wear. Of course, as I have had it less than a month, I cannot be absolutely certain of this.

My biggest complaint about the product page (and the reason I decided to write this review) is that it was very difficult to get an idea of what the bag was like, exactly. They only show one image of the bag, and that's with it closed. I am a man who loves pockets, and I wanted to see what the various compartments looked like, and just couldn't do so in this case. I took it on faith that the thing would be useful, and figured that if I started using it to lug my netbooks around for the events I TO for I could at least write it off as a business expense!

Some photos for you, with comments added to flesh out the review...

The Planeswalker Messenger Bag

 So here's a shot of the full bag. The strap is quite adjustable, and comfortable on the shoulder (it's nice and wide, so doesn't dig in). The large flap on the front gets held in place by two Velcro strips.

 

Flap open

You can see the Velcro strips in this shot. Note that the strips on the inside of the flap run horizontally, while the ones on the front of the bag are vertical. Presumably this is so that if the bag is stuffed full, and the flap can't hang down as far, it can still connect with the Velcro on the bag.

If this picture you can also see the four smaller pockets of the bag. There are two on the front, and one on each side. More on these later.

The interior

So here's the bag's main compartment. Note the small extra zippered pocket attached to the back of the main section. It's not that large, but would be good for pens, random loose dice, life pads, that sort of thing. I use it for the USB-charger for my cell phone, a pen or two, and some spare business cards and stickers :)

Open wide!

The bag's base actually sits flat, so when fully opened the bag can stand at attention. Once anything's put in here, of course, it will tip over to one side or the other unless said item can stand on its own as well. But as you can see there's plenty of space in here for trade binders or smaller boxes of cards (an 800-ct long box is just a bit too long, but anything smaller should fit nicely). The base of the bag is right about the width (front to back) of a typical card storage box.

My two netbooks, a mouse pad, and a playmat fit quite nicely with room to spare.

Side pocket snap-action

Finally, my main interest - the pockets. The two side pockets are too small to fit the Ultra Pro magnetic flip boxes that I prefer (see here for an example of what I mean) but the two front ones are large enough to accommodate those. The side pockets can, however, fit the smaller plastic deckboxes (like these). The side pockets have (as you can see in the photo) a snap to close them off, a feature the front pockets do not have.

I use the front and side pockets for power cords & corded mice to go with the netbooks.

So, would I personally use this as my "gaming bag"? Probably not. I'm not one to tote around trade binders, nor do I bring boxes of cards to things. I generally travel with several decks, which would either be banging around together in the copious main compartment, or I'd be limited to 4 decks (2 of which would have to be in smaller deck boxes) if I used only the outer pockets. For me, something like this is better.

HOWEVER - that said, I DO think that this bag would work for a LOT of other gamers out there, from what I have seen at the events I host. If you're heading to an event, and only going to be bringing 1 or 2 decks with you, plus binders of cards to trade...I honestly think that this bag could do very well for you.

Now - is it worth $50 plus shipping? That I can only leave up to you to decide.

WPN Boy (Special Dark Ascension Edition)

Okay, I am going to abandon my usual format for this special edition of WPN boy. Below are my reflections from organizing & running 6 Prerelease events and 2 Launch Parties for the newest set, Dark Ascension (hereinafter referred to as "DKA" for simplicity). As usual, this post will assume that you are already somewhat familiar with my situation from reading the Road to WPN series (which begins here) and previous entries in the WPN Boy series (which begins here).

Prerelease

To begin with, this is the first set where stores at the Core level as we are were allowed to run 3 Prereleases. This was the first Prerelease that Novel Places was eligible to run (we got that store up to Core Level shortly after the deadline for registering to run a Prerelease for Innistrad ("ISD" from this point on). This meant that, between the two stores, I would be able to register to run 6 different Prereleases. My struggle over what to do with this has already been covered (here). We ended up running two events at each store on Saturday (with my friend Craig running the two at Novel Places for me that day) and one event at each store on Sunday.

Attendance

The two events on Saturday at Beyond Comics were extremely well attended, with 19 players at the morning event, and 20 at the afternoon event (we can only seat 20 under our current conditions - this may change in the near future as the store is moving to a new location).

Novel Places, on the other hand, had only 6 players at each event, meaning that each event had to be run as a Casual Event as far as the WER is concerned.

Sunday's events were also low, with only 5 players at Beyond Comics in the morning, and 6 at Novel Places in the afternoon.

I now find myself struggling to decide what to do with the next set's Prerelease. I feel that running simultaneous events at both stores hurt the attendance at Novel Places. I don't know if the solution is to run 1 event at each site each day, or to run two events at one store Saturday and two at the other store on Sunday (which will almost certainly result in lower attendance for whoever gets the Sunday slot). The latter has merit, however, as roughly 50% of the players at the afternoon event at Beyond Comics were holdovers from the morning event - they just came and made a day of it. I'm not sure if they all would have been willing to drive 10 miles further up or down I-270 to the other store for the second event.

This is about the only time when I really don't like being the TO for two separate stores - I am obligated to try to maximize what's best for both stores, and I'm not sure how to do that. Jon (store owner for Beyond Comics) has recommended that I poll our players and see what they think should be done, which I think is an excellent idea. Now I just need to draft said document and figure out the best way to get it out to everyone.

Monsters vs. Humans

This prerelease had a gimmick built into it (by WPN, not me). We were to randomly assign players to be "Monsters" for the start of the event (1 player in each tribe: Vampire, Werewolf, Zombie, and Spirit). Everyone else was a Human. Each time a Monster beat a Human, that Human joined that Monster's tribe. At the end of the event, each surviving Human and each member of the tribe with the most members was to receive a special prize.

Sounded good on the surface, and I think the players really got into it (the number of "Team Spirit" and "Lone Wolf" jokes alone was phenomenal). But I had the following problems with it:

1. This was thrust upon the stores with no prize support to back it up. It was up to the store to come up with the prize for this contest. Neither store was ready to put anything up (we found out about this only a week or so before the event), so I ended up creating a coupon to hand out as a prize (see below). I think that inventing a special promotion is great - but don't announce it to the locations a week before the event and say "oh, by the way, you need to fork out a prize for this." [It appears that this may be fixed as of the next set - more on this in a future entry - but if you'd like a preview, check this out].



Better than nothing, I suppose!

2.  I had misread the instruction sheet initially, and I thought that only the winning tribe was supposed to get anything. But the directions were for the winning tribe AND any surviving Humans. In our experience, at least, this meant that the majority of players "won". We had, for example, only 1 Werewolf, 2 Zombies, 2 Spirits and 3 Vampires at the first event (if memory serves me correctly). This meant that 11 players were still Humans. So 11 Humans + 3 Vampires = 14 out of 19 players "won" this competition. That's a lot of prizes to give out (and, possibly, hurt feelings among the only 5 people who didn't "win"). For a company that creates games, I think this one was put together rather poorly.

Prize Support

This is the biggest problem I had with my experience. When Beyond Comics ran Prerelease for ISD, we were only allowed to run two events. We ran two on the Saturday (1 Sealed Deck, 1 Booster Draft - the latter of which is no longer allowed as of DKA). For prize support, the store was sent two "Prerelease Kits", which included a batch of Prerelease promo cards, some other goodies, and (most importantly) a free booster box of ISD to be used as extra packs in the prize pool.

I assumed (yeah, yeah) that, since we were running three events this time, we would get three "Prerelease Kits". NOPE! Core Level stores, from what I have since learned, get two kits, regardless of the number of events they are running (maybe if we only ran 1 event we'd only get 1 kit - not sure on that).

And then we get to the worst mistake: this one by me. Note that I may very well be getting myself in trouble for this, as I am willingly admitting that I broke an agreement with WotC/WPN (although not knowingly at the time). I can only hope that they will be understanding (or that I am wrong in my current understanding of how things are supposed to run).

I had understood that the free boxes we were sent was to be additional prize packs for the pool (2 packs per player is the instruction given). We usually have 2 packs per player in a prize pool, and 4 seemed overly generous, so we ran 3.5 packs per player in the pool. This is how I ran the ISD Prereleases, and also how I planned to run the DKA ones. This, however, gave us two problems:

1. Since we were only given 2 boxes for free, the "2 per player" ran out during the second event (two boxes of 36 packs only supports a total of 36 players, and we had 19 and 20 at Beyond Comics that first day).
2. We actually ran low on DKA packs to the point where, for the second event, I felt I needed to modify my policy and limit the prizes to 4 packs of Dark Ascension per winner (any additional packs were ISD instead). So, for example, a player who got 12 match points (going 4-0-0 in our 4-round event) would win 7 packs: 4 DKA and 3 ISD.

My understanding now, however, is that the prize packs given to us by WotC/WPN in the Prerelease Kit were supposed to be the ONLY packs of DKA in the prize pool. We were welcome to supplement the prize pool with other non-DKA items, but that is it for DKA.

So here's what I don't get. If we are supposed to limit ourselves to only the 2 boxes we received, and we're supposed to put in 2 packs per player, and we're allowed to run 3 events...we're only expected to average 12 players per event? Something seems VERY wrong here, and I'm hoping against hope that someone official from WotC/WPN can tell me I've misunderstood something.

What's also confusing is the Prerelease promos. Each Prerelease Kit comes with 24 promos, so we got 48 promos for each store. At 3 events per store, that's an average of 16 promos per event. This does not match the 12 players per event of the booster packs. Why don't these numbers match up? [Add to the confusion: The "Helvault" promotion mentioned in the Avacyn Restored solicitation supposedly supports up to 54 players: an average of 18 players per event if a store runs 3 events! None of these numbers match up!]

Launch Party

The Launch Parties were EXTREMELY successful for us. Beyond Comics ran theirs on Friday night in lieu of an FNM that week, and had a full house of 20 people (we even had to turn some folks away as we had run out of room). Novel Places' event on Saturday brought in 12 players (and some additional "railbirds"), and helped Novel Places to set not only a new single-day sales record, but a weekly sales record (beating out the week of Christmas, 2011). A blast of a time was had by all, and I was extremely pleased with how everything turned out.

And if I had written this blog entry this weekend (as I had originally hoped), this would probably have ended right here.

But, unfortunately, I awoke this morning to read this article on the Daily MTG "mothership" this morning. Helene Bergeot, Director of Organized Play announced that, essentially, Launch Parties are done. There will be no official events using this name, and the special promo cards that used to go with said event will only be distributed at FNM the night of the release day.

It was somewhat unclear whether the promo cards could be used, for example, on a Saturday event instead (like we just did this past weekend). So I emailed her using the link at the bottom of the article, and she kindly replied later in the day (kudos to her for the quick response!):

Your assumption is absolutely correct - moving forward, in order to get access to the LP promos, a store will have to schedule an FNM that day. We want FNM to be a great place for players to join their local community & enjoy playing Magic and this is why we want to make a big deal out of the very first FNM of a new set.
If one of the stores you TO for doesn't run FNM, it may just be the perfect opportunity to get started.

With that said, we want to continue offering great events (sealed or draft) to the players this very first weekend, but in a much more flexible way than for the prerelease. The local stores and TOs are in the best position to evaluate which events will be the best ones for their player community.

So, we certainly want to encourage stores and TOs to run lots of events the weekend a new set launches. But as for any other FNM promo cards, these additional promos are meant to be used during FNM.

This confirmed it. We will not be able to do what we did just this past weekend for both stores. The only way that both stores can participate is to have both stores run FNM that week. Of course for us this is a problem, as there has thus far been a "gentleman's agreement" between the stores that Beyond Comics gets FNM, and Novel Places gets regular Saturday-afternoon events. Since the two stores are so close to each other, directly competing seems counter-productive (not to mention the fact that I can't be in two places at once!).

True, we can continue to run a special event at Novel Places on the Saturday after a release day, but it will not be the same (the loss of the promo is part of it, but more importantly the loss of folks finding us through the Wizards Event Locator looking for a local Launch Party).

On the larger scale, this policy shift bothers me because it leaves so many players and locations out in the cold.

• FNM is only available to Core and Advanced level stores. Launch Parties were available to Gateway-level stores, and were a chance for such stores to draw a big crowd, and help them get up to Core level. It's now that much harder to level up.
• Many, many people either cannot attend (jobs, family commitments, what-have-you) or choose not to attend (date night, anyone?) FNM. But these people would like to participate in Launch Parties.

All in all, I'm very disappointed with this change, to put it mildly. I certainly hope that this, like a few other policy changes that got quickly overhauled after negative player response, gets changed soon.

Okay, that's all for this installment. I should get another normal edition of WPN Boy out before too much longer (I have many Diary entries already, and even some Q's to A). Here's hoping that in that entry I can report a Launch Party policy shift...

[TO BE CONTINUED...]

WPN Boy (Part 3)

[This is part 3 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1 and Part 2 (not to mention the entire Road to WPN series, which begins here)]

Q&A Session

I'm afraid no-one has sent me any questions (via email, or comments on the blog), so there's no Q's for me to A this time :( I will say that the comments from last time about having a Draft-training session some time sounds like a mighty fine idea. Lord knows I could use it!

DIARY OF A WPN KID

December 27, 2011: I'm a little frustrated with WotC's Customer Service right now. I emailed trying to find the answer to a question that I just can't seem to get an official answer on. Namely: how many booster packs of Innistrad and Dark Ascension are used to do a Sealed Deck event? My thinking (and I don't know where this comes from) is that at the prerelease it's 3 packs each, then for regular events it would be 4 packs of Innistrad and 2 of Dark Ascension.

When I posed the question via the WotC Customer Service interface (remember: I can no longer directly email my WPN "handler", Brian), I got a VERY speedy reply (even though it was around 9:30 pm my time) which was pleasantly surprising. Less so, however, was their response, which directed me to the sales announcements for Dark Ascension. These documents did not have the answers I needed, so I wrote back and thanked them for the quick response, but stated that I didn't get the answer I needed.

The reason I need this answer is so that I can advise Patrick and Jon as to how much product of the two sets they need to order for the events coming up.

December 28, 2011: Got another reply from WotC Customer Service:

Thank you for your reply. Unfortunately, we do not have any other more specific information for the Dark Ascension Prerelease. Often the specifics (like how many of each booster to be used) will be included in the event kit and it's occasionally posted in an article on our website (http://www.wizards.com/Sales) as soon as that information is available. For questions about how much to order, you may want to contact (or have the store owners contact) their Distributors for help with recommended quantities or limits for purchasing products for the prerelease.

I'm sure it will be in the event kit. Unfortunately that will be too late for ordering purposes. Plus, it will not answer the question as to whether regular events use a different ratio of booster packs than the prerelease.

A quick Twitter discussion today indicates that I am off my rocker, and the whole 4/2 booster split is a figment of my imagination. It seems that the split is 3/3 always. I have no idea where the 4/2 thing came from (maybe I just assumed it, since once the third set of a block comes out it's usually 2/2/2 - so it seemed logical that the big set would get more representation until then?). Anyway, unless I somehow hear/read/see something official that says differently, I will operate under the working assumption that a Dark Ascension sealed deck event will use 3 packs each of Dark Ascension and Innistrad.

[SIDE NOTE: A Dark Ascension Draft, on the other hand, will be 1 pack Dark Ascension and 2 packs of Innistrad, drafted in that order. Just FYI in case you didn't know.]

Meanwhile, in much more exciting news, Casual Magic Night had 10 people tonight - including 2 new DCI members, which helps Novel Places' bottom line towards staying at the Core Level. My Green-White Tokens deck ("Tokens of my Affection") proved to be a VERY capable Archenemy deck with the tailor-made Scheme deck I put together to run with it. BWAHAHAHAHAHA!

December 30, 2011: FNM tonight was Standard. We had 8 people, so barely enough to run sanctioned (but, then again, it WAS sanctioned, so I can't complain too much!). Everyone had been there before (one player was the gent who had been "strong-armed" into playing Two-Headed Giant last week).

January 3, 2012: Today I received the nicest note in my email (sent to me and a few of the regular players at our events, from another one of our regulars). I will leave it here with no comment other than: this is EXACTLY why I wanted to start organizing events!

Gentlemen - a quick Happy New (M12) Year to you guys!

Just wanted to say thanks for making all the games at Beyond and Novel very fun this past year!

And a big thanks to Mr. Don for starting up his FNMs and other events - we've got a great group

of players and it has been my pleasure to meet everyone.

See you at Don's events throughout "M12"... ;-)

 January 4, 2012: Casual Magic Night. Tonight we tried a new format created by William Davy, who runs events for Beyond Comics' Frederick store. I will include here his report from what he learned after the playtest. Here are the rules for the format (called Political Economics Magic) in case you'd like to read them for yourself before reading his review. Take it away, William!

Let me start off by saying that I expected a lot less of the format. I expected I would have to completely overhaul the rules after a play test. I never expected that it would work as well as it did.

Before the game began, I realized I had not planned for Foil lands in the packs. If they were removed, it would reduce the card pool (admittedly only a little bit) and I didn’t want that to happen. So I added this to the rules:

1.1.2.2 If a foil basic land is opened, that card goes into the Spell Deck.

1.3.1 Foil Basic Lands are shuffled into the Spell Deck.

2.6.1 If a foil Basic Land is played, that land generates 2 mana of the specified type.

2.9.1.1 Even if a Foil Basic Land is exposed, that portion of the card’s effect does nothing.

Even after making this adjustment, we did not open any foil lands and as such, did not get to test this mechanic.

To begin, the card pool was incredible. We used eighteen packs of Mirrodin Besieged and in the process of opening all the cards, I opened a sword of Feast and Famine, Inkmoth Nexus, Contested war zone, Consecrated Sphinx, Hero of Oxid Ridge, Tezzeret, Mirran Crusader, Victory’s Herald, Cryptoplasm, two Galvanoths, a foil Distant Memories, and a Foil Massacre Wurm. Not bad for just eighteen Packs. Anyway… on to the gameplay.

It went much better than I had anticipated. The Face up Land deck made for an interesting mechanic, At more than one point during the game, there was a land that nobody needed sitting on top (a swamp to be exact) and it sat there undisturbed for several turns. And this was not because nobody needed another mana, it was because nobody wanted a Swamp. However, there was much of the land deck that went undisturbed. Because of this, I am changing the land deck construction to include only three of each basic land for every player at the table.

Because we were playing Mirrodin Besieged, there were a lot of creatures being played that had Infect. Right off the bat, we determined that nobody liked poison damage and that, because of our high starting life, fifteen poison damage sounded fair. The starting life total will also be reduced from 40 to 30.

The card pool, while quite valuable, was enormous. Eighteen booster packs for five players seemed like quite a lot. The card pool will be adjusted accordingly. Each player will purchase/supply three booster packs to the card pool. These booster packs will be from any set of the player’s choosing.

The shared mana mechanic was used a lot more often than I expected. Red and Green mana were at a premium (no more than two of each were on the board throughout the game) and as such, the other players often left them untapped in case someone wanted to use them. I remember at one point, another player was swinging with all of his creatures, I think he had three of them, into the biggest threat on the table. He blocked most of the damage but before the damage occurred, I noticed the attacker had an untapped mountain, and offered Rally the Forces. He gladly tapped the red mana and I paid the other two, destroying most of the defender’s creatures in the process.

Unfortunately, I did not get a chance to test the graveyard mechanic extensively, and the milling mechanic was not used at all. I would like to run another game using cards from Innistrad at some point in the future to test the graveyard mechanic more thoroughly.

Overall, I think the game was a success. Many of the mechanics I devised for the game worked much better than anticipated and only need minor tweaking. Below are the modified rules. Italicized sections are still subject to change, bold sections are new additions and changes.

 [TO BE CONTINUED IN THE DARK ASCENSION SPECIAL EDITION]

WPN Boy (Part 2)

[This is part 2 in a series, and assumes that you've already read Part 1 (not to mention the entire Road to WPN series, which begins here)]

Q&A Session

Behrooz 'Bezman' Shahriari checked in last time with more Q's for me to A!

- What's the most rewarding part of being a WPN event-organiser?
- What's the most difficult part?
- Do you enjoy magic more or less? How has your relationship with the game changed since a year ago?

Most rewarding part: To be completely honest, I get a blast out of seeing people having fun playing Magic, and knowing that I had a hand in arranging that experience for them. Also, I love the fact that if I want to play Magic myself, I'm never more than a couple days away from another opportunity to do so!

Most difficult part: The time commitment is quite more than I thought it would be. Between logging the events in WER, keeping the event calendar up-to-date, getting a decent newsletter out every week, keeping the stores apprised on what booster packs they need to have on stock for any given event, advertising the events, writing the blog - and all of that is on top of the time I put in at the actual events themselves!

Enjoying Magic: I think there's give and take here. I was disappointed to learn just how many people go to the 'net for deck ideas (sometimes with minor tweaking) for constructed events. I would SO much rather see a bunch of home-brewed decks battling it out, like kitchen-table Magic at an epic level :) As it stands the events often end up being won by those who can afford the cards needed for the "best deck" (whatever that may be at the time).

On the other hand, I definitely find myself having many more ideas for decks, and build a lot more (and enjoy playing them) than I used to. They're unlikely to win too many of my own events, as they are not the "best deck" (nor am I a world-class player) but I have a blast with it.

DIARY OF A WPN KID

November 25, 2011: Tonight we held FNM at Novel Places instead of the usual location, and was a Standard event. I knew we'd have trouble, it being the night after Thanksgiving. Adding in the fact that it was at an unusual location, I was worried. Unfortunately my fears turned out to be founded. Only 2 players showed up, so I joined in to make it more interesting. We played three rounds, round-robin style.


The idea came up tonight of running a casual Magic night (since this was essentially that). Something to pursue later?

November 26, 2011: Innistrad Draft at Novel Places. Patrick had another event taking place on the main floor of the store, so we surreptitiously held the event upstairs. That area is used mostly as storage right now, and is filled with antiques and curios. The open rafter design of the old building made for a rather spooky setting, just perfect for an Innistrad Draft. We had 11 players, and (despite my having to rush back home to get my basic land box which I had forgotten), the event went off rather well. I owe a HUGE thanks to Craig, who had come out to help me run the event so he could make sure he knew what would be needed to run WER for the Dark Ascension prerelease events he'll be running at Novel Places at the end of January.

5 players had never played at Novel Places before, which helped with our bottom line for maintaining Core Level. Thanks go to Serg for helping arrange for so many new people to come out!

December 2, 2011: Standard event FNM at Beyond Comics. 8 players, so we ran a sanctioned 3-round event. Also tonight I picked up a used netbook to use as a back-up, especially when we'll have multiple Dark Ascension prerelease events going on at once.

One player was new to the DCI at this event, and two of the players were brothers who attended together. Hopefully some or all three will become regulars!

December 9, 2011: FNM was Innistrad Booster Draft tonight. All three of the new-to-us players from last week made it, along with another new DCI member and 6 others for a lovely 10-person Draft. The event itself ended up rather oddly, as the prize distribution was originally set based on the "perfect" result which would have had 2 players at 9 match points (we only run 3 rounds for limited events due to time constraints). But after round two, when I expected to have 3 players at 6 points, we instead had only 1 (the player who won round one but got paired down in round two didn't win as the model predicted, and two other round 1 winners ended up in a draw). I made adjustments to the prize distribution (increasing the pack payout at each level, since there'd be fewer people at the very top), and STILL had 3 packs left over at the end to randomly give out amongst 4 players who hadn't won a pack.

Strangest moment of the draft was possibly the situation where a player who had mulliganed down to 5 cards had an early board state of 2 copies of Blazing Torch and 2 copies of One-Eyed Scarecrow (in addition to his lands). So bizarre!

December 10, 2011

Bigger news is that Patrick has agreed to give the Casual Magic night a try, so the first one will be this coming Wednesday (December 14). He'll keep the shop open two hours later than normal, and the official posted times will be 6-9 pm.

December 14, 2011: The inaugural Casual Magic Night was tonight. My sons have karate on Wednesday nights, so we showed up late (~8:30) but there were three other players there (including one that had never been at Novel Places before). Not too bad for the first time out. I'll continue to advertise it in my weekly email newsletter, and try to drum up interest at FNM.

December 16, 2011: FNM at Beyond Comics, Standard Constructed. 10 players again tonight (this time I did not need to play!). We ran 4 rounds, and I think it went quite well. Next week is Two-Headed Giant, Innistrad Sealed. I'm looking forward to it, and hope we have at least 4 teams!

Tonight I scheduled the FNMs for February. The first week we'll sacrifice FNM to run a Friday night Dark Ascension Launch Party. Second week will be Innistrad/Dark Ascension Draft. Third will be Standard, and fourth will be my first ever Block Constructed event. Haven't 100% decided if it will be Scars of Mirrodin Block (allows cards from Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged and New Phyrexia) or Innistrad Block (which will allow cards from Innistrad and Dark Ascension). Leaning toward the latter.

December 21, 2011: 7 players for Casual Magic Night at Novel Places tonight. Much insanity ensued when we combined my deck of Plane cards from Planechase (1 copy of each Plane in existence, including promos) with EDH/Commander. Turns out that a 5-player EDH game with Planes takes a LONG time. We called it (with no-one really clearly in the lead) at 9:30, a good half-hour after the event was supposed to end. Lucky for us Patrick seemed to be enjoying us being so goofy!

Also tonight, Patrick gave the thumbs up to extend the Casual Magic Night through January at least.

December 23, 2011:  FNM at Beyond Comics was Two-Headed Giant Innistrad Sealed Deck. We had (barely) 4 teams, so an official FNM. One player (Josh) had just shown up to observe, but he was convinced to team up with one of our regulars, Dan, who had shown up without a partner. Dan was willing to pay for both of them, provided he got to keep all the cards at the end of the event. Josh was happy to get to play for free.

Team "Last Minute" (myself and Craig) played pretty well together, winning Rounds 1 & 2, and were only 1 land drop away from winning Round 3.

I take issue with the WER on something, though. I had decided that the 12 prize packs would be distributed as follows:

• 1st place: 5 packs
• 2nd place: 4 packs
• 3rd place: 2 packs
• 4th place: 1 pack

That way everyone wins something. But in this case what happened was that two teams had identical scores at the top (win %'s, opponent win %'s, in every way identical) and the same for the 3rd & 4th slots. For the top two slots one team (myself and Craig) had beaten the other team, so you would think that the 1st place slot would be given to us. But instead it was given to the other team. And in the lower two slots the same thing happened. The team who ended up 4th place had actually beaten the team that was put in 3rd place. I don't know what criteria the WER bases places when the stats are identical (random would seem logical?) but in this case it seems to me that there's clearly a way to determine ranking: if the two tied teams played each other, rank the one that won that matchup higher than the other!

I'm worried about tomorrow's event at Novel Places. Despite this incredibly awesome flyer Craig came up with:

Santa Garruk wants YOU for the Draft!

Still it is on Christmas Eve, and with folks on vacation or with family obligations, we may have a hard time hitting at least 8 players. We'll see!

December 24, 2011:  Well, it was not as bad as it could have been! 5 players showed up for the Innistrad Draft at Novel Places today. I joined in as well so that there'd be an even number (although, as my 0-3 record will attest, we might as well have just given a Bye to everyone who was paired up against me). I proved once again that I am absolutely hopeless when it comes to drafting, and my deck was just God-awful. But, the players seemed to enjoy themselves nonetheless, and for that I am grateful.

[TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 3]