Community Profile: Tony Burian

Searching for home-grown stars in a field full of TCG converts, I was directed to the pierced, cowboy-hat-wearing, non-participating administrator of the Vs. community’s largest online community, Tony Burian.

It seemed strange to be at the game’s first premiere level event and find a qualified enthusiast who’d chosen to sit on the sidelines. Qualification is the common man’s Holy Grail, the hobbyist’s version of something worth killing for, and to give it the laugh and choose to sit and watch seems . . . blasphemous. Fortunately, for we non-players, it provides a window of opportunity. 

I sat down with Tony and asked for the basics: he’s 27, born in Hawaii, lives in Atlanta, and is dedicating himself full time to Vs. System and the community the surrounds it. His online community, found at vsrealms.com, is the largest on the Internet, a meeting of gamer minds and a foundation for deckbuilding and game theory. He explained his reasons for not playing today: Lacking the preparation needed to be ready in a way he was comfortable with, he decided he’d prove more useful as a rallying point for Team Realmworx, an acting manager of sorts.

Relatively inexperienced as a gamer, Vs. System has provided Burian incentive to drop his other card playing pursuits in order to better focus his attention here. To that same end, he left his daytime job as IT manager of an Internet marketing company, allowing him to spend more time on the website. “Tony Burian is amazing,” enthused Jeff Donais, the Galactus of the gaming industry and eater of random planets. “He’s one of the most incredible people I’ve ever met.” Jeff is well known for his penchant for hyperbole, but he assured me that in this case, it was all true.

Readying himself for Anaheim, Tony spoke to me about the swarm of pros entering the game from other TCGs and had this to say: “Preparation is key to this game. You can’t just pick it up and assume you can play . . . there are so many decisions to make. If I were to sit down across from Kai Budde (a professional TCG player who’s best known for his dominance of Magic: the Gathering in recent years), I’d be worried because I don’t see someone like that showing up unprepared, but if people haven’t worked as hard on Vs. System as they do on their games, they’re going to have a rough weekend.”

With VSRealms now up to fifteen sites and Tony full time, it seems like he and Realmworx are in a good position to teach those usurper TCG pro–types a thing or two about practice and dedication. It’s the latter that makes him so important to the game: without a foundation like Tony Burian, there’s nothing to build a community on.

What percentage of the game is made up of luck, skill, and knowledge/preparation?