For this past Saturday, Tom Lapille decided for many reasons, chief among them the fact that he couldn't play MODO, that a bunch of the midwest players should get together and draft all day. He invited many of the regular Magic faces around for the festivities and many players decided to come. I drove up from Athens to Columbus to join in the festivities... but my trip pales in comparison to the voyages taken by Cedric Phillips and Gerry Thompson from Indiana and especially from Josh "Jushi" Wludyka who flew in from Detroit just for this occasion. They decided to make the trip for a few reasons, chief among them, once more, the lack of MODO.
MODO is like crack to a Magic player. And they were in remission. They came in to get a Cube fix.
Jushi's flight where my day began, actually. I picked him up from Port Columbus International at about noon and we made our way to the Columbus Convention Center. We had decided to meet downtown at the CCC for a few reasons. One, many of the stores that could host such an event were at the time hosting Yugioh or some other tournament that was taking up too much room to include a dozen more players. Two, the Center was hosting a WoW GP, so we thought that we could snag an extra table or two and do our thing out of the way and even have a food court near by when we got hungry. Good plan, right?
Well, turns out that plan fell through. Jushi and I arrived and met up with Tom, Ben Weinberg, Sam Stoddard and several others and when we did they informed us that we could not in fact play there. Turns out WoW tourneys are run by a bunch of mother f... um... run by a bunch of folks who don't want people playing Wizards of the Coast games at thier Upper Deck run tournaments. So they asked them (us) to leave. We discussed what we should do. Eventually we decided to go to Comic Town on Morse Road. Jushi and I left shortly thereafter.
...But we had a job to do before just going to the store. We had to pick up Adam Yurchick. Jushi and I actually had to wait a pretty long time for him. We joked about how he must have been packing his plastic Kroger bag of health food for the day's activities. Once Adam joined us we got on our way.
After picking up Adam, we headed to the C.T. It's a little place behind a Toys R Us and it ended up being perfect. When we arrived the first draft was already underway.
A quick line up of the day:
Me (obv)
Tom Lapille
Sam Stoddard
Adam Yurchick
Josh 'Jushi' Wludyka
Doug Linn
Ian Gossett
JR Wade
Justin Calhoun
Jake Meiser
Ben Weinburg
Brian Six
Gerry Thompson
Wolf
Cedric Phillips
Doug Prosak
Adam decided to grab some Subway next door, so we started a 6-man without him. I started drafting a decent UB control deck. We were in the middle of the first pack when I had just picked up a Skeletal Vampire when someone (I think JR, but I'm not sure) openly used the f-bomb in the store at a high volume, eliciting a response from the store operator.
"Hey, guys, you are going to have to keep it down and try to keep your language under control. We have other patrons in the store."
After this, we quieted down pretty quickly. That is until Adam walked in, with a sub in one hand and a drink in the other, and noticed that everyone was in a draft. Everyone except him. He was not pleased at this clear injustice and in a loud, angry voice said,
"Oh, eat a d***!"
Probably not what the store had in mind. We all burst into laughter. That was hilarious.
Despite Adam's protests, we kept on going. The UB control deck never really came about into anything worth anything. I had decent beats and some fine elimination and discard but after my Coalition Relic I didn't have any acceleration or decent fixing, so was limited to what I could do. I went 0-3 and only won 1 game.
A quick note: Tom added Shadowmoor cards to the Cube for spice. The 4 Cairns lands (besides Cairns, of course), Tattermunge Maniac and Vexing Shusher. I didn't see any more of the new set, so there may have been more gems out there but i missed them. Anyway, that was a cool idea too.
Eric Blegen and Kyle 'Caboose' Pastor dropped by for a draft at some point. Those guys are my Legacy temmates, so I was happy to see them. They were protesting Scientology downtown that day and so they couldn't be there early. They also went to go draft in an actual sanctioned draft that night so didn't stick around long. They tried to convince me to go but i drove here to crack packs with foreign and signed versions of Ravenous Baloth, Burning of Xinye and Force of Will, not just Ceaseless Seerblades, Moonglove Extract and Distant Melody.
Natually, the conversation all day long was entertaining. At one point we counted the number of total Nationals top-12s were there. I think we had 5. Of course, no top-8s.
When these guys get going, they bounce off of each other something fierce. The conversations were epic. I should have just recorded the whole affair, but i had only a few minutes of battery left on my camera. I forgot to plug it in. I'm sorry, everyone. I'll do it next time.
I had quite the RG aggro deck (with the new Maniac) in the second draft and ended up 2-1. I didn't end up playing Gerry, who was my last opponent. It's strange, I've cubed many times, but only against Gerry twice and both of those times we cut the games short for one reason or another.
He's just scared of me.
One day, Gerry, your day will come.
Wimp.
He had 6 signets and the Fellwar Stone, so I'm not sure I actually wanted to play against him.
Before any more drafts got underway we tried to get our dinner plans together. The original plan was BD's Mongolian BBQ, but turns out a decent percentage of folks hate that place with a passion. Next was Cheesecake Factory, but they apparently don't take reservations on Saturdays (strange policy) and also the wait time was something like an hour and a half. I suggested a place I know of called Barley's Smokehouse and Brew Pub because I knew we could get a reservation for 15 people (Doug Prosak didn't join us) and I knew the food and drink to be amazing. There was some hesitation, but they ended up trusting me and going for it.
Our reservation was for 8 so we decided to run four 2v2s for the last draft of the day. I suggested that the winning teams move on, March Madness style but nobody went for that. Too bad; I had a sick UBrg reanimator deck with only a single white card in the deck: Resurrection. Had no trouble playing it, with my 11 nonbasics. Fortunately Ruination wasn't in my draft's pool, as it would have Ruin'd me (see what I did there?). With targets like Hellkite, Spirit of the Night, and Duplicant (MVP!) I rolled folks and went 2-0.
As it turns out, everyone enjoyed Barley's (I think). We were seated almost immediately (15 minutes early), the service was very good and the company was even better. Turns out that outside the competitive air of the PTQ and tournament scene we actually enjoy each other's company quite a bit. Everyone's stories and jokes were just great.
On one end of the long table were the Indy guys Gerry, Wolf and Ced. For the first time in my life I saw Gerry without his hat on. Next to them were Jushi and Brian. Jushi, it turns out really liked the foor at Barleys, so much so that he engulfed the burger he order (a big burger, ind you) before anyone saw him actually take a bite. We thought he must have just absorbed it. Next to them were Adam, Tom, myself and Doug Linn. Adam and I laughed quietly to ourselves when, before our food got to the table, Tom was folding his napkin quite incessantly and with incredible focus for about ten minutes. Next to us were Sam and JR and on the other end of the table were Ben, Jake, Justin and Ian. I didn't hear much of the conversation from that end of the table, but talking with Sam we decided that we should get together like this again soon... for a pig roast.
Cube all day + a whole pig. Wow.
Invite only. There's only so many ribs.
At the end we were all sad to part, but the Indy crew had to get back on the road and everyone was tired. We said our goodbyes and took off. I actually was so tired that I think I fell asleep at the wheel for about 2 seconds at one point on the ride home. Dangerous... but worth it.
So much fun. I hope this happens again. Next time, I'll bring my camera.
Reubs
Tags: Tmp Cube
