In other news, the winners of the My Magic contest (which I wrote about here) have been announced! Congratulations to everyone that entered, but double congrats to Dan Alpers of Iowa and Travis Hall of Alabama, who took first and second prize respectively. Over the past month, Wizards of the Coast was collecting stories and they gathered almost 100. Both winners, for those of you that don’t remember the contest, have won trips to Pro Tour San Juan which is at the end of May.

The contest challenged entrants to tell their best Magic: the Gathering story. Dan Alpers, the first place winner, told a story about how Magic helped shape him into the man he is today- a father, the founder of Central Corridor Gamers, a prominent member of his community. He began playing Magic at an important point in his life, and in the following years he made some lifelong friendships and partnerships with people he met while playing. He founded Games for Troops as well, which collects donations of video games, card games, and tabletop games for overseas American troops.

Travis Hall, the runner up, shared a story about how Magic played a big part in his life. The game and community helped him create strong, lifelong relationships that helped him through good and bad times. When his infant son was diagnosed with a terminal illness, Travis made sure he shared the love of the game with him before he passed, and he even dedicated his favorite card to his son’s memory.

Both of these Magic fans show a deep belief in the community that surrounds Magic as well as giving it back to not only your community of fellow players, but to all communities surrounding every one of us.

We were met by Mike Gills of WotC at our hotel, had breakfast and interesting conversations about Littlest Pet Shop. Yes, that is relevant because the 8 Community members had to choose a LPS figure and write our name on it. It was fun; we got to dress them up. These were thrown into the Community Cup (yes, there is one. I’ll get a picture), and Wizards of the Coast members took turns picking a figure and that determined matchups.

When we got to the WotC office, we were taken to the 4th floor and shown where we would be playing. I instantly claimed a chair right in the middle of one side because it looked the comfiest even though all the chairs are identical. Well… that and my badge was on that chair. The badge is awesome; it’s not only a lanyard, but it has a bungie thing with it. The badge was attached to probably the most epic swag bag I’ve ever seen. Not only is it filled with pretties like a couple deck boxes that I really need, it’s an actual back pack! I’m going to use it for school because not only is it awesome and a good memory, it has the Magic logo and I can totally make my friends jealous.

So far as tournaments go, we’ve had our Zendikar draft. We did our draft and it went pretty smooth. I still can’t believe I had to pass on an Iona and a FOIL (!!!) Chandra Ablaze because I wasn’t playing white or red colors in my deck. I made a nice little mono-black deck, even though I had a few good blue things like my Hedron Crab that I adore.

After round one, the WotC team and the Community team were 4-4. After round two, it was 8-8. It was really weird; we weren’t winning or losing yet. I had some good games and some really close games, but I had a 0-4 record by the end of the second round. During the third round, I had a 1-1 record after the second game, which led to an intense final game that… I inevitably lost. Tolena made me really work, though, to live as long as I did.

Then we had a really nice lunch consisting of sandwiches, chips, sodas, and delicious deserts. Mike brought tasty Canadian chocolate for us all, which just made my day. I was on a horrible losing streak by the time lunch came around, though Alex/Spike did fantabulous with a 3-0 streak. Just before lunch we got a tour of the accessible areas. No R&D’s secret lair for us, but OMG, there’s shelves of all the current merchandise which is just amazing. I got a couple pictures where I could, but it was just really cool. I don’t think I’ve really seen that many Magic items all in the same place ever before outside of tournaments.

Alex/Spike got his first loss during round 2 of the 100-card Singleton against an ex pro tour player, Hall of Fame member, Mike Turian. I almost had a couple wins during round 2, but they were so epic they can’t be mentioned ever again involving elves against elves. By the end of all the matches, the Community team was 1-7 for the round. Round three went just about the same, giving some points and victories to both sides. The 100-card Singleton games were hard for the Community team, as we took quite the beating, but all 8 of us are ready to go at it again tomorrow.

The fun didn’t stop there, though. Afterward we had epic pizza and talked a bit before heading back to our hotel where we were met by some of the online community and local magic players to do a couple different things. Our first thing is probably the one event of the entire day I was the most excited about. Now, it’s hard to go into the differences between paper magic and computer magic, but we finally played about 3 hours of paper magic. Our first event was an all-foil 8th Edition draft. Every single card we chose was from 8th Edition, which is a set that released when I was just learning, so it is near and dear to my heart. I made a really fun red-white deck that gave me protection from every color so not much could be done to me. It was a lot of fun.

Our second event was a Zendikar sealed game. Those of us that wanted to play were given 6 booster packs to make a 40-card deck. I pulled two mythic rares, which are about as rare of cards as you can get before going into promotional and misprinted cards, and felt obligated to make a deck with Ob Nixilis and Eternity Vessel (magiccards.info). I did pretty well with this deck, pretty much making up for my horrible 0-7 streak throughout the day.

Our prizes were probably more awesome than the games. For each game, both players would pick a card from a box of a foil Zendikar set. The winner would choose which of the two they wanted and the loser would take the other. We had our little space until midnight, so for 5 hours, but after 10, Mike let us go to “double foil madness” where each player picked two cards then alternated picking which ones to take home. I think I made out like a bandit and got a really nice fix on shiny cards!

Now, off to bed with me to get ready for tomorrow.