Gen Con '09 - Winning Article

At 5:30am on Friday I awoke and drove with my friend, Red, to Kinkos to print off the deck registration sheets for the Sealed event that evening. We got to the convention hall at 7 and prepared ourselves for the massive amounts of demos we would do that day. The hall opened and the rush hit us like a brick. Red, myself, a guy named Brendan, and his girlfriend Amy were selling 2-Player Starters left and right. Every now and then we would mention the Sealed event that was going on that night.

After the demoing ended on Thursday, I figured the tournament would be around 30 people give or take 5. Just to be safe, product for 64 people was set aside to insure that it wasn’t sold. By noon on Friday it was clear that the tournament would reach the 64 person mark.

At 3:00pm I joined Red in the card hall to do some one-on-one demos. During the next two hours The Spoils area started to fill with people. When 5 o’clock hit, I started taking signups and by 6 the rolls were full. There was so much interest in the tournament that anywhere between 10 and 20 people were turned away.

Red takes the role of head judge while I perform the score keeper functions as well as Judge #2. We get the players seated and pass out product and deck registration sheets. Red makes a few announcements, and deck registration began at around 6:30.

With round one paired on the computer, snag one occurred. Red and I came to Gencon without the knowledge that we would d be running tournaments, so therefore there was no printer. So at roughly 7:20 round one pairings went up in my beautiful hand writing. (I write like a 2nd grader. I guess I’ve been using a word processor for too long.) Round one ends with no difficulties and round two goes up right away. 40 minutes into round two I discover that two sets of pairings got switched. That means that Timmy was supposed to play Steve and Joe was supposed to play Tommy... but Timmy played Tommy and Steve played Joe. It got harder to correct because Timmy and Steve won their matches. I went in to manually re-pair Round 2. During the manual repair 2 people were dropped that hadn’t done so, and 1 player was removed from the player registry. After about 10 more minutes tinkering with the roles, the decision was made to run the event with pen and paper.

All of the remaining players (about 6 had dropped intentionally) were given a note card with their name on it along with who they had played and the result of the match. From there Red and I did what the computer would have done. We paired people with similar records who had not previously played each other. Rounds 3-6 went smoothly with the only down side being that the judges had lost their voices from having to announce the pairings of each round aloud.

The Top 8 was set and ready to draft. The draft started at approximately 3:00am, which - for those keeping track at home - was 9 hours after the event was scheduled to start. The draft was Triple SEED with each player drafting a different archetype. The winner ended up drafting a deck that reused characters that had come into play abilities by using Living God of Thabbash. His main game plan was to gain a resource advantage against his opponent and use it to draw more cards and eventually use the Living God to bounce and replay his creatures while emptying his opponent’s hand. Overall a great deck piloted by a great player. The event wrapped up around 6:30am. Red and I were exhausted from the 12 plus hours of running events and the 8 or so we spent demoing and selling the game, but we were satisfied that we had helped get The Spoils back on its feet.

The players in the Sealed event were great and easy going. Without their patience, the event could have easily erupted into a riot when things went awry. A big thank you goes out to Kim, who organized everything "The Spoils" at Gencon. Another thanks goes out to everyone who stopped by the booth and the demo area and played this great game.

Bend it 'til you Break it.

Will Clark