Taking on the two-part tournament report is kind of tricky. First off, it means that you need to have a lot to talk about, meaning you have to retain a lot of information from throughout the weekend. In addition to that, pure strategy kind of turns into blurry lines after so much reading, so you need to give your readers a little something extra in the way of color if you’re going to expect them to come back. If they don’t, no sane editor is going to let you take on this kind of project again in the future.

The flipside is that you can present too much information in just about any article, be it tournament report or strategy. If you do this to the point where every single tidbit is included while ignoring the color aspects, the result can be an eight-part albatross hanging around your neck for years that people will constantly bring up as an example of writing as the art of the money grubber, regardless of whether or not it’s true. Try to find a balance in between: Say what you want to say, while asking yourself, “Would I really want to read that?” That should give you a pretty good guideline.

One good way to use color is pop-cultural references. My favorite Internet writer is Bill Simmons, a.k.a. The Sports Guy, a regular for espn.com. Simmons is gifted enough that he used to write for Jimmy Kimmel and a slew of others, so he obviously carries with him advantages most of us don’t, but a good part of what keeps me entertained while reading his work comes from the always funny references to Hoosiers, The Shawshank Redemption[1], the Karate Kid and other personal favorites. See, the Sports Guy uses these references to find a common ground with his readers. He’s smart enough to know that their subconscious reaction will essentially be, “I too have seen and liked the Karate Kid! Sports Guy is right, Ralph Macchio is the best!” setting off a chain reaction through which the reader can identify with him.

So, without further ado:

Eminem, Boston Red Sox, Spider-Man, Nelly, Survivor, Star Wars, Superman, Madonna, Britney Spears, Batman, Usher, Spongebob Squarepants, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Donald Trump, Beyonce, The Family Guy, The Simpsons, The Matrix, The Terminator, Michael Jordan, and Michael Jackson.

Well, maybe not Michael Jackson.

Now we’re all on the same page.

SATURDAY

Due to my lack of understanding of the intricacies of the game, on Saturday I was assigned to the Blog[2]. For those of you who, like me, are still somewhat confused as to what a Blog is supposed to be, it’s essentially a chronological presentation of the goings on of the day. Not the big goings on, mind you, but the little human interest stories without which the picture we paint in coverage would be incomplete. You don’t just want to know the Red Sox won the series: You want to know that Ricky Henderson called the day after looking for tickets, and when told there would be no game, asked, “Why not?”

I got some advice on blogging from blog-master Brian David-Marshall, who from now to the rest of eternity, I’ll refer to in these pages as BDM. There aren’t many people I feel I can discuss pop culture with, while being certain they’ll get every one of my references, but when it comes to this stuff, BDM is the man. He was the owner of Neutral Ground, the Valhalla of gaming stores in the heart of New York. He knows baseball, TCGs, television, film, and comics like I apparently know snoring. He’s even had story ideas published by DC Comics. To quote Night Court’s Judge Harry speaking of Bull Shannon on the game show episode, his brain is “a warehouse of useless information” (At this point, you should be thinking “I too have seen and liked Night Court. Gary Wise is right, Richard Moll is the best!”) Night Court may have been the greatest ensemble sitcom ever. John Laroquette is a god, Moll found his Luke Skywalker[3] in Bull Shannon, Markie Post was a sex goddess, and Harry Anderson was great at holding it all together. If you haven’t seen it, see it. If you’ve seen it, you know what I’m talking about. For an explanation on why tangents like these are acceptable in the day-by-day tournament report format, see part one.

At the tournament’s restart, I noticed that draft pod seven looked kind of nuts: Adam Horvath, a TOGIT member I’ll expand upon later, was there, as was Jeremy Thomas, the sole LCQ survivor to my knowledge, but they were small potatoes. The really big names were Indianapolis winner Brian Kibler and his teammate and fellow Top 8’er Gabe Walls.

I met Gabe a little over two years ago during a two-week trip I made to Madison, Wisconsin to practice for a Team Pro Tour. One of my team mates, Bob Maher, wasn’t qualified for the next individual PT, so we took a quick two-hour drive to Chicago so Bob could compete while Neil Reeves and I would just hang out and draft a little. The tournament wasn’t that kind to Bob, but the final featured a big kid with a Cheshire grin and an incredible amount of confidence. When I first really noticed him, he was laying a true beating on an opponent he was obviously pretty familiar with, not only with the cards, but also with the mouth. This wasn’t one of those typical trash-talkings full of stupidity and bravado you see from most kids Gabe’s age—this was head game trickery at its finest, the kind that kept me competitive despite most of my PT colleagues insisting I was awful. It was pretty obvious Gabe was the smartest kid in the room.

He and I got to chatting during the match and I threw a couple of verbal jabs his way, more to watch him deflect them than anything else. He did so with flying colors, as if he knew it was just a test, and it wasn’t long before he started showing up with regularity on Pro Tours. I’m not sure how long Gabe is for these games—he’s had poker set firmly in his sights for a while now and will be turning 21 the day before the World Series of Poker’s main event in 2005. Until he makes the full conversion, though, he will remain one of a handful of players on the Pro Circuit you absolutely do not want to sit down across from. Playing someone with that kind of swagger with the intelligence, skill, and resume to back it up is always going to be disconcerting.

Kibler, meanwhile, may go down in history as having the most successful career in PC history, because he’s done. In a couple of weeks, he’ll be heading out to San Diego and looking for a new apartment as he settles into his new job as a member of R&D. While it’s unfortunate that the game will be losing its first great marketing tool[4], this couldn’t be a more natural fit. He’s obviously attained a strong understanding of the game’s mechanics, and at the same time, he’s been widely known as one of the greatest TCG deck builders ever. Kibler’s going to create some great 12-cost characters only he could ever play effectively, but in between, he’ll make contributions to the game the rest of us can more effectively use.

Brian is some zoned-out hippy’s version of the all-American kid. Smart, funny, outgoing and good looking, all wrapped up in a tie-dyed shirt and weather-beaten sandals. Before you even ask, I’m a heterosexual man, but logic dictates that when female gamers set up shrines in the honor of men they’ve never met, the men in question are generally going to be handsome. Oh, and guys who protest that they’re straight, and how could they possibly figure out what defines a good looking man, often have bigger questions they need to ask themselves . . . not that there’s anything wrong with that. Kibler’s a guy who loves the spotlight, and combined with his other qualities, there aren’t many better choices for “Initial Vs. System Pro Circuit hero,” but we’re not losing him; we’re just taking full advantage of his talents.

After the draft was done, Kibler and Walls both told me they’d drafted the table’s one 3-0 deck. Neither made the finals, but this brings up a good point: Of all the traits I’ve seen exhibited by Pro TCG’ers over the years, self confidence is the most universal and most important. Belief in one’s self is a powerful tool that inadvertently intimidates the opponent and leads to a truer understanding of the game. If you work and play enough, you’ll instinctively know what the best play is in any given situation: At that point, only self-doubt can lead you to question what you know to be the right play.

After writing up my blurb on Brian and Gabe, I grabbed Craig Gibson for a run around the immediate Con. Gibson, who some may recognize as the former Craig Cudnohofsky, is one of my older friends from tournament play. We started out just being guys who sort of nodded with a smile out of the familiarity from seeing one another at every tournament, and that’s just evolved over the years to the point where Craig’s one of my favorite people to hang out with at any given tournament. We’ve also done a lot of work together over the years: I find the stories, he takes the pictures, which gave us the perfect excuse to get away from the overstuffed Metagame staff room for a bit for a piece on the environment of Gen Con.

Gen Con is a reflection on the TCG community in that it’s a place where the unwanted and unusual can be made to feel wanted and usual. There aren’t a lot of places in society where some gamers would be accepted, and certainly not by the mainstream. When we made our way around the room, we saw it all: Julia, an Amazonian style princess dressed in less material than one might find in an average yarmulke[5]. Kids in costumes ranging from the devil to vampires to devil-vampires. Three guys dressed as the Ghostbusters, people demo’ing games, LARPers . . . even an inflatable castle apparently set up so Con-goers could abandon their children for a time in order to get some good old fashioned freedom. In some ways, it struck me as a freak-fest, but you know what? I know that from the outside looking in, I’m one of the freaks, and that always makes for a soft spot in my heart for these people and inspires a certain amount of pride in this community. There will always be gamers ages 15-18 who in expressing fears relating to their own social awkwardness will put down those around them, but excusing them, the TCG world is a safe haven for the otherwise unwanted: They pass no judgments and welcome with open arms. That’s a pretty good reason to be proud of an affiliation, I think: TGCers are amongst the most open-minded people in the world.

After that tour, I headed to the Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament area, where Craig pointed out the remarkable amount of cultural diversity in the field. Jason Grabher-Meyer would later inform me it wasn’t just an LA thing, that tournaments everywhere were like this, and I was more than a little impressed. The typical tournament scene for me in the past has been a collection of either under- or overweight Caucasian and Asian kids with a spattering of others. Yu-Gi-Oh! had it all, with a healthy mix of African- and Latin-American players ranging in ages. I did a piece on Larry Taylor Jr., the epitome of this reflection in that he was rough, gruff 20-year old African American male standing at least a head above me. I told him how he stood out in my eyes, asking “What the hell are you doing here?” to start our interview. He was cool about it, recognizing he didn’t quite fit that more common gamer description, and an hour later, Craig had managed to shrink down my image to two thirds it’s original size and paste it onto a picture of Larry in which the “new me” barely made it past his waist.

Late in the day, I sat and had a chat with Tony Burian about Vs. Realms and Team Realmworx. It seemed an appropriate moment I light of Ryan Jones’s apparent dominance and his recent addition to the team. From everything I’ve seen, Burian and his teammates are great guys, epitomized by a true gamer’s gamer, Dave Spears. I can’t say I can remember meeting anyone so happy in his tournament surroundings as Dave. He went 0-3 with a great deck to start day two and was still all smiles. Having something of a dark side myself, I complained that he was too happy, to which “Smilin” Dave’[6] replied “Well, my girlfriend broke up with me this week. How’s that for a dark side?” I spent the rest of the weekend trying to extract shoelace from between my wisdom teeth, but I later came to this realization: Dave’s going to become a much better player over the next couple of months. There’s a direct correlation between TCG performance and time spent alone in the sack.

As Dave and I were tailing off, Rian Fike approached me, informing me that I was the man he was told to find. Rian is a forty-something art teacher, the kind of art teacher I have fond memories of being “cultured” by in a non-sexual-extra-curricular way after classes at my alternative high school. The beard straggles, the eyes look about wildly and the heart encompasses all that appeals to him completely. Rian pulled a move at this tournament that’s definitely my style: he punished himself for abandoning Sentinels just before the tournament by purchasing the first comic to hold their visage and giving it away to the man who beat his Indy-established record for highest finish in a PC with Sentinels. A lot of people couldn’t do something like this simply because they’d view it as throwing away the thirty-some odd bucks for an act of silliness, but for artistic types like Rian and I, ceremony can often outweigh the importance of cash.

I haven’t gotten to know Rian real well yet, and I can’t help but feel like he may look at me as a usurper, being that I didn’t get into the game merely for the love of it, but I have a good feeling about where our relationship’s going to go. In a couple of months, we’ll be heading to Amsterdam, and at some point, I’m going to force him into a café for introspective talks of all things artistic and aesthetic. This is a guy I’m truly looking forward to getting to know.

Having said that, though, there are a lot of players like that in the community. Burian and Spears and Scott Hunstad and Jamie Tachiyama and . . . and . . . and . . . it’s remarkable: everyone I’ve met has been a really good person. Magic’s always had its share of scumbags, but there seems to be a remarkable shortage of them on the PC thus far, which is a truly exciting prospect. Throw in the fact I like just about everyone who’s made the crossover from M:TG and you have a place where I really want to be. Think about it: how many particular rendezvous can you think of two, six, ten, thirty months down the line that you can definitively say you’re already looking forward to attending? There aren’t too many.

My work day ended with a horrible breach of professionalism, hardly a shock to those who know me. See, a part of this job is maintaining a certain amount of objectivity. It’s important that players not see you as favoring one of them over their fellows, in large part because you want them to have the security that comes with knowing they’re participating in a level playing field. This time, I couldn’t help it.

I was in the bathroom washing up and chatting with Adam Horvath, who’d just lost his winner-makes-Top-8 match. Adam is a guy I’d bet on to score a Top 8 over the next few events himself, as he’s intelligent, focused and has a good team around him, so I didn’t feel that badly (it’s not often one can have that kind of confidence in a player’s future), but Adam then said something that made the rest of my day complete: “At least Antonio made it.”

(What you’re hearing right now inside my brain is that often-used movie sound effect of the record player screeching to a halt, the disc that’s playing irrevocably scratched, causing the entire room to stop what they’re doing to turn and stare down the offender of whatever spectacle caused the DJ the reach this way)

Let me tell you about Antonino De Rosa. That’s not a typo, by the way—Antonio is the name his American friends adopted because they couldn’t sputter out the Italian version. Antonino is a big, loud, friendly guy whose trademark in Magic was the near miss. Time and again, he’s performed well in the big tournaments, but not well enough to crack the Top 8, where the real money was made. Doing that well is a nice way to earn respect and let yourself know you’re doing some things right, but at the end of the day, Antonino was lacking the one big payday every full-time player needs and deserves.

Cue PCLA.

When Adam told, me, I pumped the fist. Then I yelled triumphantly, accustomed to being De Rosa’s teammate instead of part of the coverage team. After starting 0-2 and 4-4, Antonino reeled off eleven straight wins, including all nine of his Sealed Pack matches, to finish with fifteen wins where fourteen wouldn’t have been enough due to his awful tiebreakers. If you haven’t figured out, one’s tiebreakers generally get worse the earlier they take their losses, as they’ll always be playing against players with poorer records than the tournament leaders. Put another way, Antonino was playing a Top-8-sudden-death-match in every round after the eighth of Day 1. That’s what sports writers would call “clutch.”

Antonio, Eugene (whose Top8 was an equally happy occasion, though those who know him are now more shocked when he doesn’t Top 8 any kind of card tournament), Paul Sottosanti, the rest of the Top 8, Craig Gibson, and I headed outside for pictures with everyone in high spirits. When that was done, I headed back in to write up a couple of Top 8 bios for the site plus the end of day blurb, and finally, at around 11:30 at night, I was done. I headed back to the room, watched a little VH1[7] and called it a night.

Saturday was packed so full with events and tangents that I’m going to have to cut it here. I apologize for those of you who came here looking for how you could help for this ultimate betrayal, but it wasn’t planned . . . I just had more to say than I accounted for. I don’t care if it’s fifty pages: part three will be the conclusion. As with part one, I hope you’ve enjoyed my reminiscences, and that they’ve given you a clearer picture of the Pro Circuit.

See you “Sunday,”

Gary Wise

Presently nicknameless (teaser still)