I was running on two hours of sleep, a can of Dr. Pepper, a peanut butter sandwich and two Advil. After waking at 5:30, departing for a two hour drive at seven, and around twelve hours of competition I was in the finals. It was the third game in a best of three match and my brain was essentially mush. I was behind, but I knew that I was still in the game. I established a very rough game plan with a few specific plays that would be easy enough to follow and good enough to win. Fortunately for me there was very little that could actually go wrong if I followed my plan because everything that I hadn’t decided to do turns in advance I did horribly wrong. Eventually I succeeded in executing my A plan (though a turn slower than I conceivably could have) and I found myself as the last man standing in an 148 man battle for a round trip ticket to Japan.
I’m not going to pretend like most people are interested in the particulars of Magic: The Gathering. In light of this I’m going to spare the details that I couldn’t pay you to care about. All you need to know is that I’m going to Japan because I did well playing a children’s card game.
I don’t think that the reality has fully set in yet. Maybe it’s because I didn’t get much sleep last night either. I’ve been competing in events like these since my freshman year in college, but there was never a point in time that I wanted to win more than yesterday and the weeks leading up to it. The way these events (called Pro Tour Qualifiers, or PTQs) work is that all entrants play for a set number of rounds getting paired against somebody with a like record every round- these are called swiss rounds. After the swiss rounds the eight players with the best records play in a single-elimination bracket where the winner is awarded free airfare to a Pro Tour event. In January I made my first top 8. After handily winning the first game in the quarterfinals I ended up losing the match and going home with a flashy pin that says “Qualifier Top 8”. Don’t get me wrong, I like the pin a whole lot but I was there for the ticket. I won’t say that I left that day feeling disappointed. I think that hungry is a better word. I vowed that I was going to win a PTQ this season. I worked a lot on modifying the deck that I played in January but after a point it just stopped being workable. Then I returned to my regular routine of waffling back and forth about what to play and last Wednesday I found something from another event that looked very well positioned. I made a few changes to the list, got in as many games as I could with it on such short notice and now here we are.
I feel a lot like Samwise Gamgee must have felt during The Fellowship of the Ring. You know that part in Fellowship where he completely loses sight of the fact that he is embarking on what will be the greatest expedition of his entire life and instead marvels at the first step that sets the record for the furthest he had ever been from the Shire? That’s probably where I’m at in my journey. I’ve never left North America and in June I’ll be on the other side of the planet. Heavy.
I wish I had more to expound on the matter as this is really more of a glorified status update, but as of now my brain is still demushifying (this is not a word).
Life is good.
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