Travel, Part 3 (Patreon)

Following Part 1 and Part 2 on Japan, I'm finally ready to write about MagicCon Vegas! I arrived home from Japan on a Thursday night and then left for Vegas first thing Friday morning. The jet lag should have been insane, but I think that with all the adrenaline of being at the MagicCon, I was able to power through without even really thinking about it much.

Looking back now, in retrospect, I should have taken way more pictures. But I'll share what I have. Overall, it was a pretty crazy event. The hype surrounding Final Fantasy added a bunch of extra energy to the room, from the huge lines at Ultra Pro of people grabbing merch, to the people trying to jam as many high stakes drafts as possible (and often not even playing them out), to everyone having stories about the high value cards they or their friends opened in Collector Packs (more on that later). I was hearing estimates of around 25,000 people being there, making it the largest MagicCon ever.

Most of my Magic-playing activities consisted of a combination of drafting and Commander. Final Fantasy was more fun than I anticipated. One of the better limited sets I've played in a while. The Commander area used the bracket system to set up pods. I generally thought it worked really well. The majority of the games I participated in were pretty balanced. I brought bracket 2, 3, and 4 decks. I probably enjoyed the bracket 4 games the most, just because the players were more experienced and would play faster. But almost everyone was friendly and so enthusiastic to be there, which was super fun! I was trying out a new Commander deck that I recently built as well, so stay tuned for me sharing this to Patreon some time in the near future.

One unique thing I participated in was the Commander and Cocktails event, which Brian David Marshall invited me to. For this you get 24 packs, and then have to build a Commander deck. I picked up my packs on Friday and spent like 1 to 2am that night putting my deck together! Here are the packs

After opening them all, and roughly sorting them, this is what my hotel table looked like:

The first step was to identify what my Commander should be and what colors I should play. It was pretty immediately clear that majority of my most powerful cards were in black and red. Just look at the mythics and rares I had:

On top of this I had 7 pieces of fixing in black and red, so I could have a really consistent manabase in these colors as well. I ended up using Black Waltz No. 3 as my commander. On the plus side, this gave me a consistent clock to slowly tick down my opponents' life totals. On the negative side, it made me the target in a lot of games. But if I could protect Black Waltz No. 3 with combat tricks (deathtouch did a LOT of work), I could stall games long enough to finish people off with one of my mythic bombs. Overall, I was really impressed with this format. I thought the games would stall and take forever, but modern cards are so powerful that most games had a lot of momentum and fun twists and turns.

Another fun thing was all the artists signing cards and selling playmats. There were so many artists that I admire and respect, and just getting the chance to tell them how much their art meant to me really felt good. You have to be careful though because paying between $5 to $15 per signature (depending on the artist and the style you request) can really add up fast! I didn't get a lot of pictures of the artists, but I couldn't resist this picture of Dan Frazier signing an insane pile of power:

I was able to control myself and only get a few playmats. The first was by Alayna Danner's Jeweled Lotus. I just love iconic art like this on a playmat. It's so breathtaking!

The other playmat I got was Hazezon Tamar by Richard Kane Ferguson. I mean, I have a Commander deck led by this card, so how could I not get the playmat?

The third playmat I wanted was Mox Diamond by Dan Frazier. He had some the first day, but I hesitated buying it, and by the next day it was sold out. Never hesitate!

Another big part of the weekend was my Meet & Greet on Saturday morning. I got to my table at 10:15am when it wasn't supposed to begin until 10:30am, and there was already a line of people waiting. I felt so bad! Everyone was super nice though. After doing Cardboard Crack on and off for over 12 years, it was so nice to meet and talk to people that read these stupid comics I make. People had awesome stories, like how they got into the game, what the game means to them, their favorite comics, and so much more. There were even some people that didn't know about Cardboard Crack, but were curious about what it was. So thank you, thank you, thank you if you stopped by. I have a habit of burning myself out on these comics, and taking the time to interact directly with people like you can really go a long way to invigorating the creative process so I can keep making these comics that I love. Unfortunately, I didn't think of taking pictures, so if you have any pictures from the Meet & Greet, I would love to see them.

Another important thing for me for the weekend was to meet in person some of the people that have been really helpful in supporting Cardboard Crack over the years. I just wanted the chance to give them a book and tell them how much I appreciated them. So here are some pictures with Gavin Verhey:

Reuben Bresler:

Mike Linnemann:

and Brian David Marshall:

For Brian's book I couldn't resist adding a sketch:

As you can maybe see, even in these cases it was the other person taking the selfie because I would forget to take a picture myself. So thanks to all these people for sharing these pictures with me. I also tried to track down Brian Lewis (The Professor), but I had no chance of finding him because, wow, that guy is popular!

I guess one final thing to mention is the Collector Boosters I got as part of my admission to the MagicCon. Due to the long lines, I didn't get my convention goodie bag until Saturday, but when I opened the cards I almost fell out of my chair:

Crazy, right? Every dealer friend I had recommended that I either hold on to them for the long run or sell them as soon as possible while they were still hyped. So I ended up selling the cards. My family nicely let me take this trip away for the weekend, and by selling the cards, I was able to pay for the entire trip and more. And anyway, the cards have actually fallen in price quite a bit since I sold them (they're now way less than what I sold them for), so it was probably the right decision in the short term.

Hope you enjoyed this look into my fun weekend. Thanks again to everyone that came by and said hi. I really hope I get a chance to do this more in the future, because this was definitely one of my highlights from this year.