MagicCon Las Vegas Recap (Patreon)

I had an incredible time at MagicCon Vegas last weekend, so I thought it would be fun to recap a few of the highlights. I'm going to try to write this pretty quickly, so I apologize now for any typos.

I arrived at the convention hall on Friday afternoon where I was greeted by this amazing scene.

This MagicCon seemed quite a bit larger than the one in Las Vegas last summer. There was one full convention hall for all the dealers, booths, artists, content creators, and various play areas. There was a whole other convention hall for the command zone, on-demand and paid events, and more free play areas. And then there was also the Pro Tour, for which I think you could only see the feature matches.

After dropping off my product with the Girudo booth, I headed straight to the artist area. One of my all-time favorite Magic artists, Tony DiTerlizzi, was there and I wanted to make sure I got his autograph before I got too busy. As far as I know, this is the first Magic-focused event he's done in like 20 years. I couldn't resist getting a playmat as well, and I 'm super glad I did because I'm pretty sure it was sold out by the next day.

On Saturday, I set up my table at Girudo. They were super generous in giving me this space and allowing me to sell stuff on both Saturday and Sunday morning. I had an assortment of books, playmats, and tokens, and my setup looked like this.

By far my biggest highlight from the weekend was getting to meet all the people who were familiar with Cardboard Crack and had stories about what the comic meant to them. I was super touched by some very personal things that people shared. At the end of the day, the main reason I do this comic is to connect with people, and to give people something positive. And to hear that my comic was succeeding in this sense really meant the world to me. So if you were one of those people who came by, thank you so much for sharing your stories. You really made my weekend!

One goal for my weekend was to find people that have influenced and inspired me as well, and let them know how much I appreciate them. And what better way to do that than with comics! One person I made a comic for was Alayna Danner, who is another of my all-time favorite artists, and has also been super supportive of Cardboard Crack. So I was really happy to get to give her this.

Another person I wanted to meet was Mark Rosewater. I've been following his work since he used to write Magic: The Puzzling in Duelest Magazine, and later with his Pro Tour coverage, and of course he is probably only second to Richard Garfield in his influence on Magic. The problem was where would I find him? Luckily, right after I did my Meet & Greet on Saturday evening, I spotted Mark across the hall. Now was my chance! So I moved quickly to catch him and give him this.

It's not the best picture. I was so nervous that I was shaking as I took the selfie. Mark took a picture too, so hopefully he shares it at some point because it probably came out better. Anyway, Mark was super duper nice. There's nothing better than meeting one of your heroes and they end up being even nicer than you expect.

I did get some Premodern and Legacy games in on Saturday night, and played Commander in the Command Zone on Sunday afternoon. I had the worst draws in my Commander games, so we won't talk about that. Of course I also picked up some cards. At the beginning of the convention I dropped off a bunch of rares I didn't need to a dealer to turn into cash. Probably around 300 rares, mostly from drafts over the years. Amazingly, I was able to use it to get exactly the cards I wanted most from the convention: 2 Phyrexian Dreadnought to complete my set of those for Premodern, and 2 Italian City of Brass so my Gro-A-Tog deck can now be completely black border. And all for cards that were just sitting in a long box going unused.

The Cities were definitely the kind of card that I only think I could get at a MagicCon. I went to almost every dealer before I found these (with an Italian dealer, go figure). And the price they gave me was roughly half of what I could find anywhere online in the US!

Hope you enjoyed this quick recap. It was a really amazing event. I can't encourage people enough to attend one of these if you ever get the chance. It's difficult to really comprehend how big and awesome MagicCon is without seeing it yourself in person (I heard this one had somewhere between 25,000 to 30,000 people). Even if you're shy about playing with strangers, as I sometimes am, in the Command Zone they do a great job of pairing up people with similar bracket decks, and everyone is so friendly and excited to just be playing Magic. I also really enjoy seeing all the creative ways people find to interact with the game. I had so many people visit me at the booth, and tell me about their YouTube channels, or engraving business, or awesome tokens, or some other really cool idea. I love seeing how Magic inspires so many people like this because I see a little of myself in each of these people too!