MTG Event at Area 52 -- By Nick

I rocked up to the area 52 Magic Tournament. Its been a long time since I played Magic -- my official player registration is dated 94!

The tournament was a well run event. There were over 40 players -- a good show from a small city! There were even a couple of players from Melbourne!.

You got 6 boosters (90 cards), with which to make a 40 card deck. There was a whole process where you wrote down the cards you got and then passed them over to another player. I found this difficult -- the list to fill in was in small print that middle aged eyes had a hard time with!!!! Once you have the cards given to you, there is 30 minutes to choose the cards in your deck. Cards not used were a sideboard, i.e. cards that could be swapped in later. In the end, I misscalculated. The rules of the tournment were that the deck you designed was the deck you had to use in the first game against every opponent. So a bad decision in the initial deck construction could not easily be adjusted as the tournament went on. And I made plenty of bad decisions as I was new to the card set used for the tournament.

In the end, I finished with 3 wins and 3 losses. 4 of the games were quick wipeouts (2 wins and 2 losses). But 2 games were long drawn out knuckle biting affairs -- the sort of games that make magic great!