Kinda Funny Gamescast: Video Game Podcast - Bless and Mike's MagicCon Stories! - Kinda Funny Gamescast

Episode Date: February 28, 2025

Go to https://kindafunny.com/chicago to grab your tickets! This episode is sponsored by BetterHelp — go to http://betterhelp.com/kindafunny to get 10% off your first month. Thank you for the support! Run of Show - - Start - Housekeeping - Bless & Mike Went to MagicCon - Mike’s Perspective - Ads - Mike’s Golden Triangle - MagicCon - The Meet Up - The Rest of the Adventure - Final Thoughts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Welcome to the Kind of Funny Gamescast for Friday, February 28th, 20, 25. I'm one of your host, Nick Scarpino alongside the Magic Man himself. Blessing, Adioia, Jr. A rare Nick hosting a games cast episode. This might be the first time this has ever happened. This feels crazy. It feels almost unnatural. I was excited about this.

I came in earlier than I normally do, which is probably on time. And I watched an episode from that you guys did for the Monster Hunter review. and I prepped for this because I was very excited because of course as you guys know this is actually part two. We'll get to what this show is about when we get to the topic of the show. But this is part two. If you haven't done your homework, pause this right now. If you're watching live, sorry, your S out of luck. And go watch the kind of funny podcast because we're going to be talking about a very fun thing today.

And we're going to get part two about it. But we're not quite there yet, ladies gentlemen, because of course, joining us as well to co-host is the czar of aura. Snowbike, Mike. My turn. I'm going to put an enchantment on the table. and I'm going to bring it up a little bit. Mike, you know what I mean? You always enchant me every day.

Come on. I appreciate it. Nick, I love you, bro. I love you back. Thank you so much. And I want you to know, Nick, come Monday, I'm going to bring it. I'm going to, you know,

I try to bring it every single day. But like, we just got back off of MagicCon. It was a lot of energy, right? So let me get the weekend. I'm going to bring even more energy. Okay. I appreciate that. Of course, this is kind of funny gamescaste each and every weekday.

We get together to talk about the biggest reviews, and reviews and topics and video games live on YouTube, and on podcast services around the globe. if you like what we do and want to support us, go over and support us with the Kind of Funny membership on Patreon, on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts to get all of our shows ad-free, watch us record them live and get a daily exclusive show for a chance to be a part of this show.

Submit your thoughts and opinions live right now on YouTube with Super Chats as we go. And Mike will be correlating those. I'll be reading them. Housekeeping right now. We're all about live talk shows here at Kind of Funny. Right before this, Blessing and Mike hosted Kind of Funny Games Daily. I talked about the success of Monster Hunter. If you're into that game, you guys should definitely check out that episode.

And of course, after this stream, we're going to be doing a special one today, Mike. Yep. We got a long, fun marathon stream. The hunt is on, answer the call of the Wilds, and join Greg Miller and the crew this Friday today for the launch of Monster Hunter Wilds. Greg will be leading the crew from Marathon Stream exclusively on Twitch.TV slash Kind of Funny Games. Again, that is exclusively on Twitch.com. Where they'll stream as long as you want to hunt. Also, play alongside of the crew so you can jump in and help on the hunt if and when the crew needs it.

Spoilers, they're going to need it a lot. We also want to talk about Pack your bags trainers It's happening It's happening finally We're headed to Joto The next chapter of Pokemon Nick Lock Journey begins

With a mini marathon tomorrow So today is Friday Tomorrow at 9 a.m. Pacific Standard time We are joining us on YouTube We're going to be doing a YouTube live premiere A three hour long super cut Mike myself and Andy will be in the chat

hanging out with you guys But so you can catch up Because, of course, next Friday, we're going back. We're going to Joto. We're doing the Neslock again. How excited are you for that? I'm super excited. I wanted to play Pokemon again since we wrapped up the last one.

I love that. You've been ready. I've been ready. I'm not going to say that Andy and Tim are holding us back, but they're holding us back. It's not that Andy wants to like, you know, just work on everything for so long. He wants to, like, get everything perfect and have all these unique things. He's perfect. Like, he's in the Duffy and all.

It's like, get out the Duffy and let's just get to it. Get out of the Duffy. I think it's also much harder to do what he's doing with a DS game rather than... I didn't tell him to do the game. There's so many Pokemon games, but everyone's like, you got to do Soul Silver. Soul Silver is the one. I was like, and then I googled it. And would you guys be surprised to know there's more than two Pokemon games out there?

More than two? Did you know that? There's a lot. That's crazy. But of course, we're jumping into Soul Silver. It's going to be a Nicklock. And I know what you're thinking. What's a Nicklock?

I didn't watch the last one. Well, it's a Nuzlock, but it's Nick style. So join us next week for that. but before that, of course, jump in tomorrow with a Saturday. It spent a little time in Saturday morning. You can watch the cartoons later. Shout out to our Patreon producers and supporters, Delaney, twading, Carl Jacobs, Omega Buster, and Karen Linder.

Today, we're brought to you by Greg Miller's Live Chicago Show and Better Help, but we'll talk and we'll tell you about that a little bit later. For now, it is time for the topic of the show. Now, as you know, this is part two. Yep. If you watch The Kind of Funny Podcast, Blessing and I, Blessing downloaded the info of all the shenanigans that surrounded MagicCon. But he would not give me any details of the con itself.

The con itself, any sort of battles, the meetup. And so I want to, I think this is going to be our official review of MagicCon. I think this is going to be a lot of things. We're going to really deep. We're getting in there. I enjoyed telling my side of the story myself, but I, it didn't feel all the way right without Mike. Right. Because like I spent an entire 24 hours with Mike, which is the longest time I've ever spent around.

Uninterrupted. Uninterrupted. Just me and Mike for a. full day. Attached at the hip. Yeah, and I couldn't get away from them. Don't need to. Don't you want to. So there was that. There's the meetup that we didn't get to talk about. I talked about also going back to Bloomington, Illinois, Central Illinois, and going

to my aunt's birthday, but you can catch down on a kind of funny podcast. I have thoughts about that too. Yeah, Mike wasn't there. Mike wanted to go. I wanted to go. But I know. And it was planned, it was planned at one point, and then, like, after we thought about it for a second, I then, like, looked at Greg and I looked at Mike, I was like, Mike's not coming. Mike's not coming from my family gathering.

I'm going to bring my co-worker, my white coworker. to this thing. My parent, right, my, my, the whiteest co-worker you have. The whiteest co-worker I have.

He's so white, he's red right now. And they're gonna be like, who is this man you brought? Is this your lover? Like, they're gonna look at me. Yeah,

they're gonna think about that. They don't want him to think, be thought of as my lover. Yeah. You wouldn't, they would 1,000% be like, oh,

blessings never brought home a girl, but he's bringing home this, this white man from San Francisco. He must, they must be in love. Yeah. And Mike is overly affectionate.

Yeah. So it's not that part of a... And I wouldn't have said nothing but nice things about you too. So yeah, they would have got the wrong ideas. Yeah, exactly. So I was like, let me not complicate things. Mike, when he said that, so on the podcast when we talked about this party, which admitted they said it wonderful.

And again, it's so awesome that you had a moment to carve out for your family. It's very, very important. But when I asked, did Mike go? And you said, no. I was like, oh, this is going to be a thing. Yeah. Oh, this is going to be a thing. I can tell Mike is so hurt by this that we have to talk about it today.

The moment I saw the Instagram stories go up, I was like, Fuck, I want to be there. You know what I mean? Like, blessing, first off, he's back in the cool outfit that I'm very jealous of and I want to dress up. Then I have a question. What's up? Okay? You know, there's a moment there where was your aunt dancing in the middle?

Yes. But then they were throwing money at her? Yeah, that's the- part of the culture. You do that in celebration. Like, whoever you're celebrating, like, they'll dance. And then you basically like, yeah, make it rain money. I love that.

I love that. I love that. Yeah. Dude, I wish I took a picture or a video of, like, toward the end of the night, one dollar bills everywhere just money everywhere when it's Mike's birthday you shower me with one dollar bills that's my new goal I love that I'll just buy you a chile latte

it would be equal to how many one dollar bills people will throw at you yeah where do you want to start this I want to start again at the beginning because I know you talked about how y'all got there you talked about the plane you said that you didn't really want to recap but I need to see that through Mike's eyes because blessing as you know when stories happen here

when people go on trips specifically with one snow bike there are usually two perspectives there's what happened and then there's mike's version yep there's what happened so mike i want to start with you uh yeah man what an exciting moment right of course um you know there's so many things to talk about big thank you to the magicon team for inviting us out there you know what i mean um for us to be able to go out and cover it and have some fun was a big deal but to start right uh i was really excited you know As you know, Nick, I always have a vision whenever we have these group trips. Yes.

I want to make a vlog, right? My dream is to be a vlog superstar, right? I want to be like, yo, what up? Everybody, it's your boy Snowbike, Mike, inviting you to the vlog today. We're in Chicago, right? Like, we don't do that. Now, let me stop you. Why don't you just stream when you're there?

Why don't you just, like, go live and stream from your phone? It was a workday, so I didn't want to interrupt this kind of funny stream from that. Next time we do it, though, we should figure it out so that you can just stream. for like three or four hours from MagicCon. I did want to do that. I just didn't want to interrupt that. Dude, we'll put that up. I was playing about. Like, I think it would have been okay or whatever we would.

Imagine we stream the games we were playing. That would have been such good content. And so, you know, there's always, whenever we get a group trip together, the first words out of my mouth is, are we going to meet at the studio? Because in my mind, right, we all meet at the studio. We take the Uber together. Sure. Here's the thing.

I'll say this at the forewry. I'm such an asshole. Because, like, Michael's like, oh, we're going to leave from the studio. I was like, no, man. I'm taking the Uber directly to the airport. I don't want to see you until we're at the gate. That's the rule. Blessing and Andy are very similar of like, no, Mike, I will meet you there.

And I'm like, we can take an Uber. And I'm like, this is my chance. Because I'm like very introverted, right? Like I know when people see and watch content from us, they're only seeing me in a, in a state to where I'm talking. Yeah, you're very extroverted. Yeah. On camera. Off camera, I'm very introverted.

Yeah. I'm very like, you know, I want my space. I want to like, you know, be, do. my own thing. My favorite moments of the day or when I have my headphones on? We know. We know that when your headphones go on, we don't talk to you. It is so nice. It is so nice. And so now this is trip number two for me and Bless of just solo mic and Bless. So I know the rules, right? I know Bless on the plane likes to have his space. I know that Bless needs his space and deserves his space when we do this. But this trip was a little

bit different. This trip, you're going to get 24 hours of just me, which was fun. And so I asked Bless, you want to meet me in the Uber? He says no. So then when I show up to security, Where's blessing? Five people in front of me. Right in front of Mike. But I'm, it's good to see you. Bless looks to be like,

oh, shit. And I love that Mike does not like care about the surroundings around him, right? Like, it's just a bunch of people that are just trying to get to point A to point B. You just hear Mike out of nowhere,

oh, what's up, Bless? And I'm like, who is yelling right now. Nothing smarter than being allowed in an airport. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Exactly.

Just screaming across a TSA security line. Just having some fun. Well, Blessings, know our toe bad. got of course checked, you know? Yeah, we talked about that. And I told Blesss, I was like, be aware they usually check giant blocks of cards

because you can't see through that shit so they think it's a bomb. And sure enough, Blessing got checked, you know what I mean? Now, again, we talked about this before, but that would give me so much anxiety because I know how much you guys take care of your cards. Oh, dude. You have them in sleeves and shit. I was like, please don't go for them. You can't.

Don't start taking them out the sleeves. No. They're getting fingerprints on them and that shit's going to stay in there forever. Forget it. Yeah. forget it, no. That's funny. And so, I also had a special treat that I didn't tell blessing about that I whispered to Roger, which was my first class upgrade. Of course, you know, Joey has taught me, upgrade. Joey has taught me a move. Yeah. Where, you know, if you are invited somewhere,

you can take the free ticket and maybe you upgrade for more dollars, you know what I mean? And so I looked at the plane. And this was the biggest plane that I was ever going to go on. I don't take many trips outside of the U.S., so I'm never on these big jets that you see. with the pods, multiple sections, there's a row in the middle along with rows on the windows. That's crazy to me, right? That's the biggest thing I've ever seen. And so I noticed like, oh, shit, there's pods.

And I see all the cool YouTubers there in these pods. And I'm like, oh, my God, imagine if I wrote a pod. And now I'm not going to France. I'm not going to Japan. This is a smaller ticket price. It's still a five, still like, you know, a five-hour flight. So I can understand. It was, you know what?

Because it was so big, it flew faster there. It's only 4.15. On the way back, it was five. Because it goes against the winds. Exactly. And so it was only four hours. So it was a little fast. It was a little fast.

And so I got the pot upgrade, but I didn't tell Bless. And so the whole time, I didn't tell Bless. Yeah. And then Bless knows is he's like, why are you standing in the first section? We're Section 3. And I was sitting there smiling laughing. And this guy's looking at me and Bless now. His Blessing's looking at me.

And the guy goes, what are y'all doing? We're going to Magic Con. And the guy immediately shook his head. He's like, oh, here's some nerds. But he was like, I like magic too. And we're like, yeah, we got a whole conversation with the guy, with the dude in the line,

both of them in the line for first class. And so now as first class is starting to go in, Blessing looks to me and goes, okay, well, I'm gonna go over there then, I guess. And the guy's like,

no, no, no, you can go with him. You're his teammate. Yeah. And Blessing, what did you say? I forget what I said.

You said, Greg never brings me up. Yeah, oh yeah, I did say it. Immediately sells Greg under the bus. Because, like, there have been times where I'm going to the same place as Greg,

It'll be like summer game fest or some shit, right? Or we're going to the same preview event. And like Greg will be in first class, or not first class. He'll be in like group one. Yeah, because he's got all the miles from traveling. And all being group five. Yeah. Like literally like it was the time I'm thinking of.

I was in the very last group. I was like on group six or seven, which I didn't know existed. And like I remember talking to Greg and being like, all right, peace. Like I'll go stand on my part of the line. I didn't know you can just walk in with somebody who's in group one. You technically can. If you're traveling with them, you can walk in with. them. But I don't know that that is a hard and fast rule. I think it's more of like a courtesy.

Yeah. Because if they see, if they see that you're born in group five, they technically can ask you to go. Well, they did not do that when I want when it was like, cool. It was so nice. Like yeah, you're you're flying with him. You can go with his group. And we were like, really, we've never heard of that, you know. And so we walked up together. Sure shit. I fucking scan it. Blessing's like, I'm with him. She's like, get on board. Let's have a great flight. And so it was awesome. Right. And so I don't know if I told by that time, Blessing knew I was in first class, right? And so we get on to the plane and she goes, first class to the left,

blessing, you're to the right. And I said, see you bless. And I mean, this plane is massive, Nick. They got a whole stewardess area in the middle there. Oh yeah. And so now I'm in the pods. And in my mind, bless him, Nick, just so you know, I upgraded to the pod thinking it was going to be a pod. You see all these videos, right? Ryan Treyhan, he's on a, he's on a plane with a shower in there, you know what I thought I would step to the pod. It'd be a larger seat that could lay all the way back,

but I'd have like windows that would go down in between me and Bless here, right, that would secure me my own pod. Yeah. No, no, no. It was just a row of the chairs that could lay down, but we could see each other. There was no windows. There was no courtesy were you in that with the window, were they actually

the first class or were they the business class? No, well, this was as far forward as you could be. So it was literally like one of those where you can kind of lane back. You are in a self-contained area. You can put the little divider up between you. No dividers. There wasn't, you maybe just didn't know. When you lay far enough back, you're technically in the seat cove. So like, I guess that would be your divider there.

Well, the ones that I have seen, I've never flown in these parts before. Do you have a button you can hit where the thing will go up? So you're not looking at the other person. So I told you're like, they're sitting like 60-9ing. Yeah, it's not like that. It was a, dude. It was a dude. Damn, dude, dude.

What I mean? What does that mean? Dude. Dude. So there I was. I lock eyes with this older woman across the aisle, right? So it's me on the middle left seat because there's four and twos, right? And so it's me on the middle left along with the Gibroni next to me.

And I lock eyes with this old woman across the way. And she's baffled that she's in first class because, you know, we're not supposed to be here. And she looked at me. She goes, I can't believe we're here. And I said, Miss, you look good in it. And she started to smile. She died her and her old husband. And laying back, she's got a blanket.

She's got an eye mask on now. passed out. I'm like, this is how we all deserve to fly. Can I pitch a Patreon exclusive item? Sure. We need a book of Mikeisms. Yeah. I think we need like a little book that is just a bunch of Mike sayings. Because I need that. We need a bunch of Mike's things.

That's good. We need Mike's sayings and we need the list, the ongoing list of Mike's nicknames for his friends. Like Martin Farton and Earl of Squirrel. You know, Sad boy Sean finally quit Starbucks. Very proud of you Sad boy, Sean. I love you. He hated that job. He needed to get out of it. It's a tough job. It's a tough job. So Mike, was it everything you wanted it to be? No,

I was mad. Um, you know what? Let me say this. Was it worth the upgrade? Don't tell me how much. Don't tell me how much because it's your money. I don't. Was it worth the upgrade? Was it worth the amount of money you spent on it? Yes. As someone who has a lot of flight anxiety, as you know, and it's not really the, the, it's more of just a trip anxiety. So it is nice to like be able to have the seat, be comfortable and get over there, right? And so that was a big deal for me. So it was totally worth it at the end. And I had more fun at the end than at the beginning because I was, let down, right? Because now I'm staring at, I'm awkwardly laying down with this guy at the same time.

We're both, like, looking at each other. I'm like, oh, shit, this is so weird. And he's laying down and I'm laying down. I'm like, just two pros laying right next to each other. Didn't want that vibe. Didn't want that vibe. But let me tell you what, at the end, when I'm watching Predator 2, and I'm fully laid back and my feet are up, the best.

You know what I mean? It was all worth it. Sure. And so, what I told Bless at the end of us, like, you should go with someone, get the two-pack, it's more comfortable. The four-pack, not comfortable at all. That's a great. How it's open the chat says it should be called Mike drops. That's good. That's a great name for that book.

And so, first class was a great time. They give you a hot towel, awful food selection, you know what I mean? Just the worst food of your life. But, fuck. You're eating lunch? I think I missed it. Actually, I slept through that, that whole thing. And so, that was my flight.

We get off the flight, and here's the best part, Nick. Now me and and blessed her together. The trip has begun and you know me. We're getting in an Uber and I'm talking. Right? And me and this Uber driver we're going back and forth. I'm excited to be in Chicago. Mike learned the entire history

of Chicago. You know what I want you to do next time you're going to trip with Mike. I want you to write the story but leave blank the parts that I have to guess. Like, for instance, when we got in the Uber and then just leave it blank and I will fill in Mike talk this guy's ear off. For the entire hour long

ride from wherever you guys are going. To be fair, the Uber himself was also very talking about. Of course they are. All Uber drivers are talking to. It was like he was excited. He was so excited to tell us everything about Chicago. I love talking to the Uber driver. So we're going back and forth. Man, we got a Bulls game.

I think it's Friday. No, no, Mike. It's Saturday. Nick, I shit you not. This man is driving on the highway. Now he's on his phone like this. Like full eyes on the phone. He's typing things in,

looking up Chicago things to do for us while driving 60 on the highway. It was fantastic. Did you explain to this gentleman that you have something to do? It's called MagicCon. It is the moment. So we were like, oh, we're headed to the convention tomorrow. Right? We're going to be hanging out around McCormick Place.

Like what's around there? What can we do? And he then was like, oh, are you guys here for the dentist convention? Dentist convention? Of course. And we're like, what do you mean? He's like, the McCormick Place is going to be a dentist convention. I brought somebody here who's here for that.

And we're like, no, we're here for MagicCon. He's like, magic the gathering. It's like, oh, you should look into it. I think there's a dentist convention. Turns out both were happening at the same time. Biggest convention center. I like that he did it feel like he wanted you to look into it to maybe get you to go to the dentist convention instead of magic I think it was like very fascinating with the fact that there are two conventions happening in the same exact location I went to a vidcon one time I think it was the first vidcon we had ever gone to where half of the convention center was Vidcon and the other half was the national fencing associations like state championship hell yeah which was weird I should have got lost in the dentist convention that was my biggest dude McCorm we'll get there but McCormick place try to You can't. Unbelievable.

Big convention center. Biggest you've ever seen. Massive. And so now I'm talking to the guy, Bull's game. He's looking up, you know Charlie X, X is in the building. I'm like, oh shit, Charlie's here? That's crazy. Brad Summer.

Oh, I know Charlie X. Yeah. Brad Summer. And so then we get to talk about hockey. I'm like, man, I wish I could see a Black Hawk's game. You know, they got the World Cup going on right now. He goes, dude, it's on right now. The man proceeds to pull up the live feed of a hockey game,

flip his phone over and is actively watching the hockey game. None of this is legal. while driving. Okay? The man is actively driving 65 on the highway watching a hockey game on the dashboard with me and blunts. Blessing is looking at me, shaking his head at this point.

Like, Mike, what have you done? Yeah, it's at this point that I would be like, let's just stop before this situation gets any worse. Because at a certain point, he's going to be in the back seat with you guys. And the Tesla's going to be self-driving. Oh, yeah. It might as well have been at that point. He's turning it up.

He's finding the perfect volume for us. It was. He was doing that. Also just giving us all these different bits of like Chicago stuff. Of course. Tell us about the Chicago fire. Tell us about McDonald's and how it's headquartered in Chicago and how you pointed out the biggest, biggest McDonald's in America to us, which looked really cool.

Oh, I would have gone to that. I love going to the biggest whatever. Yeah. And so that was, then we got to the hotel. Yeah, then we got to hotel, dropped our stuff off. We dropped our stuff off. We had a nice little steak dinner with the PR team. That was fantastic.

And then afterwards we asked for recommendations. You know, we drove past River North. which for all of you out there, you know, there's different pockets of the city. That's happening. That's young. That's hip. That's hot.

And we said, hey, we saw River North really hot right now. People, young people dance and having fun. We kind of want that vibe. And I asked these two gentlemen along with Bless, and said, what's the vibe? Where should we go?

And they pointed us to a bar, Bless. Yeah. They said, go to Rainbow Bar. Best Dive Bar in Chicago. Rainbow without a W. We showed up to Rainbow Bar, Nick, and there was 10 motherfuckers in the building.

It was just a regular ass. dive bar in like a unbusy air. We wanted to go to, yeah, the River North thing. I wanted to go to River North. The bar we went to nowhere near that, right? It was like some secluded bar, walk in, this is a regular dive bar. Were these PR people from Chicago? These were journalists

from another group and they were from Chicago. But I don't think they were picking up my vibes of like, I want young, hip. Maybe the bar's a little too loud and you don't like that. That's what me and Blesser going for on Friday night. I would imagine and I don't want a stereotype. But I would imagine that Magic, the Gathering, journalists.

don't know where the party is at. We should have taken all their recommendations, thrown it on the trash, and just gone right to River North, quit ourselves and just started walking. If you drove past the club that was spilling over with the party, that's the vibe that you probably wanted to go to.

Then you go to the rainbow afterward for like one little drink. And then you go and then you go to get pizza. Yeah, I think the thing was they were suggesting, I think their favorite bar, right? Like their go-to bar. It's the equivalent of asking me what my favorite bar is. Exactly.

Like, I don't go out to party and you guys know that. I do want a shout out. those guys, though, because they were fun to talk to. We had a lot of great people, yeah. A lot of great people at that dinner. And, yeah, there were, like, some dudes that worked at Polygon. And, like, I was just asking questions about, like, yo, what's it like working at Polygon?

Polygon. Yeah, right? I was like, what's Polygon? They're still around. I basically was like, how's Polygon doing it? Yeah. I didn't know where you were, like, yeah, y'all were still. I get that confused.

I don't want to make fun. I don't want to make a lot of that situation. We'll just keep moving on. Yeah. So, yeah, we went out to Rainbow. And now, don't get me wrong, Midwest vibes. good like just good just like down home quiet American vibes 12 people nice empty bar people there had a good energy everybody was smiling

having fun I told bless I said there's two cute girls over there get ready I'm gonna talk to him yep 30 minutes later didn't talk to him yep no yeah trying to make eye contact yep try to try to get the nod first before I walked up you know I mean couldn't get it where they at the bar uh no we were on a sofa they were at a nice little seat me Mike sitting next to each other on a sofa yeah drink our drinks and just talking to each other. And they're like in that corner, yeah, like in kind of a booth talking to each other. And it was just the four of you in this

place, basically. No, it was like a few more people. I mean, we were probably half the people there. Yeah, it was really empty. It was a good vibe. It was a good vibe. Does Mike keep trying on making eye contact with these people? It's just Mike and Bless, we're just two homies talking, having some fun, really connecting, really bonding. Because this is our first trip. We're like, we're going to talk a lot about it of like Mike and Bless fully together. You know, Pax East when we went together. We had our moments. But like, I was able to

Dap up Bless and be like, hey, I'm going with Jeff Club. And Bless is like, I'm going to this hot TwitchCon party, I'll see it a little bit, right? So like, we would dapp up, do some other things, and we'd come back together. This was like, no, bless. It's like, we had nobody else. You know, it's just us to. Yes. We don't know, it's not like Pax, right? No, a million people at Pax. We don't know,

we're at MagicCon. I don't know Magic people. You guys have to roll together. It's fun. We went to, or at least we attempted to go to three different bars. Yeah, so then, of course, I'm sure you heard, we went to a second bar. Because I remembered the guy was like, if you go to rainbow, there's this gold star bar that's just a block away. So I looked at Bless. Now, mind you, it's fucking

negative 14 now. And I'm having the time of my life, okay? Finally, this fat winter coat is working. I heard you brought an appropriate thick coat. I thought I'm not bringing a coat and then I was like, no, I'm not bringing a coat. You know what I mean? It's just I didn't have not even the car heart out and everything, Nick, and I didn't.

Like that would have been the perfect wait for you for that kind of Oh, it would have been perfect. I would have looked great. No, there I was freezing. I was looking like an idiot. I was freezing. I was freezing the death in the sweater, right? My champion's sweater. I love the champion sweater. Mike and I ask you a question. This is from Arjun in the chat. Mike and Blass, this is when you send them a drink. Have you ever thought about that? Because I think you could have gotten a way with sending them a drink. I could have maybe, but like it was, it's not like that kind of vibes when you weren't at the bar top. Right. It wasn't like they were across the bar. It was quite

literally like I would have to get up, go to the bartender, order them drinks, then walk it over there myself. Nope. Yeah. And so that didn't vibe well. That's a already looking at it's a red flag for most Yeah, I'm getting them the rundown of like, these girls already got drinks, they're smiling, having fun. So if she looked at me, I would have looked at her, gave her the nod, got up and been like,

hey, what's going on? How are y'all ladies doing tonight? Yeah. That's how it would have gone. I think you made the right choice. I think if there are two people sitting in a booth by themselves and enjoying each other's company, I think you let them be.

If you're at the bar and you can maybe have an organic way of being like, do you guys want to do some shots or something like that, that's always a fun thing. They can watch the bartender pour of the shots. So everything seems like okay and safe. But yeah, I think you made the right choice. Yeah, being blessed got it. Okay, don't worry about it. We got it like that.

Mike was like, I'm going to talk to these girls. I was like, Mike, that's not me. I was like, if you want, I'll follow you. Like, oh, we're going to talk. I'll follow, but I'm, that's not me. So then we go to the next bar, which is Star Bar right down the block. Seven minute ice cold walk. Blessings freeze into death, unfortunately.

Your boy, stomach, Mike, thriving in the winter cold. I'm having so much fun. Just experiencing it. Then we get to Rainbow Bar or Star Bar dead again, Nick. They had a pizza party, though. almost wanted to travel in the pizza six i mean you walk in nick big bar then pool table and sofa in the back but when you walked up to the back room they had like six pizzas there and i was like shit should i grab a slice that's like you know what don't grab one mike i don't want to get sick right

now i backed off of it backed off smart smart and so we walk around of course they're hogging the pool table can we talk about pool table etiquette okay yeah you can you finish a game get the fuck out the way were you were you trying to play pool yeah i wanted to play pool i didn't know you're trying to Dude, you said that. I would have, like, doubled up. They finished the game and immediately just went for another one. It's like, hey, slap me. You got to, you got to, you got to walk away for five minutes.

If no one else comes, then you can come back and do a second game. You got, yeah, oh, yes. Thank you, Barry. That's what I'm saying. You walk. You go get some drinks, right? You clearly see Snowbike, Mike, standing up here. I'm looking at the chalkboard.

I'm looking at you. You finish your game. Get out the way. There's one pool table. Okay. I'll see, if you, I would have, I would have gone up and be like, yo, can I get next? I'm most bodyed them. You got to be like, can I get next?

So then we went to the bar. We're hanging out. Cute girl walks by. Say, what up? She's going out. She's going out for a heater. And you know me? I'm like, hey, what's up?

Of course. Nothing more than you know, I know about you that you's love ripping heaters. You like standing outside near people who are ripping heaters. I love it. I love talking. My favorite thing to do. I love the vibe. So, me and Bless, had a great time.

Then we go to another bar. It was close. Yeah. Barthar, bartender sent us to the moon. Basically, they were like, oh, yeah, should go to this bar. It's fucking awesome. Getting an Uber. The Uber drops us off and drives away and we're stranded at a bar that is

fully closed. Oh, good. Yeah. She took us to a bar that's clearly a summertime bar. Nick, it was beautiful. Awesome. All outdoors. Are all cargo containers lining the outside of it that have been cut open to have like windows and cool standing areas, right? This place was called recess

and I promise you during the Chicago summers, that place pops off. Oh, yeah. That's where you want to be as recess. Not a great name for a bar. Freezing cold Thursday night in Chicago, right? So she, she fucked us. Yeah, so we're just standing outside. I don't remember that. I forget what time. It must have been like 1 a.m.

or some shit. We're just standing outside and we're like, all right, let's go home. It's cold. Let's go home. So we get Uber back to the hotel. We Uber back and Bless, it's like, okay, this is the end. And I was like, Bless, that's just fine. What time you want to go tomorrow? He's like, Mike, let's get some sleep. We'll recap in the morning. I said, Bless, that's my guy. Okay, we got some good sleep.

Got some good. So did Mike try to sleep on the floor in your room. Oh, absolutely not. I would not have allowed that. Blessing was on the tippy top of the tower. Yeah. Blessing on the 22nd floor. I'm on the 18th. Yeah,

there's nothing like saying goodbye in the elevator and like me getting that moment alone being like, oh, man, I can relax. Yeah. Thank God. I can be. I don't have to talk anymore. I don't have to talk. Mike loves to talk.

So then we make it to MagicCon the next day. Yeah. And Nick, let me tell you what. Let me, let's back up for a second. So what is the itinerary for MagicCon? Do you guys have to be at things? Are there, are there like, do you have appointments for MagicCon? No.

I think we just had the dinner with PR That night before We knew about the dinner We also knew that there was a big Magicon ceremony happening on day one That is kind of like the announcement And the welcome And they were like hey you definitely don't want to miss that

That's where we're going to announce this big cool thing And we're like all right awesome And so I think we can announce that now We can talk about it for a moment right Yeah so I think a big thing that Magic's been doing the last year They've been doing a lot of collaborations What they call universes beyond Universe is what they call it

And so you know the way I got in a magic or the way I got into magic and Greg got into magic was through Ghostbusters because Greg they allowed Greg to help announce the Ghostbusters expansion of they're doing and Greg got excited through that and then I got excited through like fallout and Final Fantasy and these different things that they're doing so the one they announced during MagicCon was for Avatar the last Airbender. Oh, which is really cool. Big deal. Very cool. Big deal because now I'm like I'm looking at Barrett and I'm like Barrett. This might be your chance. Damn. Damn. Like Assassin's Creed wasn't going to do it. I feel like there's been another like Dr. who I think right was another one right Mikey yes doctor who was another those couldn't do it maybe avatar though because here's think because I mean like there's so many friends out in the

bay area that are avatar the last airbander people and I know that this is the crossover that they've been waiting for and that that's a great week to announce it it was the 20th anniversary of avatar like literally the other day I think that's probably what it lined up with huge and why they did it I mean this is a big rollout because this will be the end of the year too so in June you get final fantasy uh which all of the you know Tim the nerds excited for, right? They bring it all the final fantasies underneath one roof for all the different cards, which is awesome. Then we'll

roll into, of course, Universes Beyond with Avatar the Last Airbender at the end of the year. Different packs in between. It's going to be a really dope year for match. Can you mix those packs in with a normal deck or is this how does that work out? Starting that you can. Starting with Final Fantasy. You can't. But you have to stay like, hey, we're following, we're just playing

the Fallout deck. No, you can mix a match. So it's just kind of a theme, kind of fun. Yeah. I think before they're a bit more separate, before where they, but I think after a while they're kind of like, fuck it. Like, it's a lot to manage. And I think it's probably better as far as getting people in. Because, like, I think there are a lot of people that just want to buy the avatar set and play magic. So it's way easier to buy that and be like, all right, cool.

I know Mike plays magic, so I'm just going to play with him. Sure. Yeah. So, yeah, there will be the mix now together starting in June, which is really, really cool of, like, it, there's no rules anymore. There's no separation. Everybody's in whatever decks you want. Fantastic. Mike.

Yeah. I want to hear more about this incredible. trip to MagicCon. And we're going to do that right after a word from our sponsors. This episode is brought to you by me, Greg Miller. Chicago, what are you doing Thursday, April 10th at 7 p.m.? The answer? Coming to my live show.

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That's BetterHelp. H-E-L-P.com slash Kind of Funny. BetterHelp.com slash Kind of Funny. And we're back. I really honestly blessing with Mike, I can never tell if he's the happiest human being I've ever met or if he's like a bad day away from ending it all. This is the third time this joke has been made today.

I really don't. That's crazy. I'm here for you for both. I want you to know if you want to celebrate life, I want to stand next to your side as your friend and coworker and do that with you. And if you're struggling, just let me know. Because here's the thing, right? Me and Roger and us were having the conversation this morning before KFD of if Mike

dies. Mike and Miyamoto die on the same day. Who gets the headline? Who gets the headline? Who gets the headline? Who gets the headline? Oh, it's definitely Miyamoto. Yeah. Sorry. Because do we resort? Do we take Mike? Who's hosting? Am I hosting that day or is Tim hosting? Let's say it's, let's say it's Greg and you. If it's Greg and me, oh, it's going to be Mike probably. If it's Greg and me, it might be Miyamoto, but like Mike, we'll give you like a wee news slot. Thank you. Mike and this is the thing that you have to think about. If you, if you were to,

if you were to pass away and we don't want you to. Yeah. But there would be a moment where everyone would, you know, they'd, they'd remember you. Yeah. They'd take a second for you. I appreciate that. Thank you so much. That's important. Yeah, I got a new lifestyle.

That's got real dark. You know, I want to shout out Count, who's in the chat right now. Count, can I get a little quick chat about Tupelo, Twin Lakes at Tupelo? I need to know my main man who's putting me onto the Golden Triangle. I got a new way of life that I'm very excited to tell you all about. It's a mindset. Okay. Okay, because you have to realize where you're at in life.

and like you got to appreciate that sometimes you could be in the golden triangle. Maybe your golden triangle isn't fully in right now but like I Snowbike Mike I'm deep in the golden triangle. I'm living the best life. Good. We're gonna talk about that in just a minute.

Okay. All right so MagicCon. I met him at MagicCon and he put me on and changed my life. Okay. The golden triangle. Let me just tell you about the golden triangle. What is the golden triangle, Mike? Let me put you on to the gold triangle.

Yeah, I like you. I like you to string me along for the next five days. I Google it myself. I thought this was a white lotus thing. I thought you were going to talk about the white lotus triangle. I thought this was a magic card. It's about health, time, and money, right? And through life, your golden triangle will move around.

Maybe your Mike and Blessings Age and beyond, maybe you got kids. And, like, your time is a little more limited. Maybe you're a little bit on the older side and your health is a little bit more limited. Maybe you're not, maybe you're 18. You don't have the financials down yet. So your money's a little more limited. But when you think of Snowbike Mike, in his prime, Flesh with cash.

Fucking dialed into the golden triangle. And so right now, I just want to appreciate right now. Wait, the king of Tupelo, my man, okay, for putting me on. Because when I think about my life, right? And it's like, what does Mike have? Mike has a whole lot of time. A lot of time. Great health.

Okay, sure I'm breathing pretty heavy, but great health. You are, yeah, you are the picture of health. I mean, I'm the picture right there. And then I got plenty of cash to spend on whatever I want. Obviously, upgrade the place. And so when you think about your boy, Snowbike, Mike, I'm in the golden triangle. I'm living. perfect moment right now.

And sometimes maybe I meet a girl. Maybe I have a kid. It changes, okay? Maybe I fall on bad health. I twist my ankle. I can't go and do all the cool stuff I want to do. Maybe I fall on hard times. I buy too many magic cards.

Okay? You know what I mean? That's for sure. But here's the deal. As of right now, shout out to my man count in the building. I'm in the triangle. And I need to remember that. When Andy teases me and he's like,

Mike, what are you doing? It's like, I'm just living my best life right now. So, Chad, I want you to know that I'm living my best life. the man that loves lying, by the way. Mike, I want to say congratulations on living your best life. Thank you. And please reach out to me if you need help. Yes, please.

I'm just telling you, this is the truth. You got to remember that. And I'm saying, on one side, I appreciate that, and I think it's awesome that you're crushing it. On the other side, I'm here for you. Okay. I'm just letting you know, whatever day that's going to be. Sorry, I, thank you, you know,

shout to Twin Lakes, Tupelo. Just so special. Chris Aker, the chat says, Mike spends his nights telling us I'm dying What he does I know Chris I know I know we just can be here for him That's all we can do That's all we can do

There's no help but self help Blessing back to magic The actual convention I guess we should talk about Arriving at Magicon Right we get there Oh the morning We go to McDonald's

What time we're talking in the morning What time we're talking? 930 yeah We met at 930 It's a little early But like We want to make the most of the day I'm only there for a while

day as well I want to make sure I took it to be really cool convention hours too Nick the convention show floor 10 to 7 you can buy magic cards you can explore the show floor but underneath in the belly of the beast yeah where all the tables and magic is going down open till midnight crazy so they're like hey the show floor is closing you can go down and play as much as you want till midnight and fucking everyone's down there playing games trading it was so sick so we wake up we meet up at the bottom of the hotel we walk to McDonald's that's right next to us real quick to grab some breakfast. Best McDonald's ever. It was the greatest

McDonald's meal of having a lot of. The biscuit light, fluffy. It's home on McDonald's. Yep. That's where it was founded. They knew. They were like, we're two blocks from HQ. We're two blocks from the biggest McDonald's ever. We got to put on for our city and they put on. Yeah, no, it was different. So the biggest McDonald's ever is right next to the convention center? No, it's in downtown. Oh, okay. It was like close to our hotel.

Did you go to the one in the headquarters of McDonald's? No. Oh, okay. No, there's just a lot of McDonald's. So like the one we went to was just a corner McDonald's. Okay. But if we wanted to, honestly, we probably could have gone to the biggest one. We should have gone to the biggest one, but we didn't. We're just busy. Time was limited.

We were making it. I get it. So we get to the convention center. We Uber over. We get out and immediately played the game of, all right, who's here for magic and who's a dentist. And let me tell you, easy game to play. Not a hard one. Not a hard game.

Not a hard. You look at like a man who's in like a nice jacket, you know, and like a little. Beautiful teeth. Stunning teeth. And you're like, okay, that's a dentist. You look to the right and just see people with backpacks on. And you see it with backpacks and Naruto Fainty Pax. The hair's kind of died.

You're like, all right, that's a magic player. It looked like they have. They're like, okay, this is day one of not showering for four days. Yeah. And so we follow where we see the magic players so we can find where the cons going on. I'm going to defend them. Yeah. Smell was good.

You were there for a day. 35% stank. You were there for a day. I was there for two days. Okay. And let me tell you what. 35% stink. Dirty five.

I don't think I smell much. At all. Exactly. I'm telling you, it was very nice in there. Everybody was mindful. everybody was clean, it was good. There are quite a few people who I shook their hands. After I shook a number of people's hands, hands a little bit sticky.

And so work on that, y'all. Work on that. That's going to happen. As you know, Andy has that little lanyard of, you know, Purell that he walks around with. You got to do it. Oh, you also, you got to do a fist bump, bless. I try. People for some reason they don't accept the fist bump anymore.

What? I'm fucking up. Can I talk about it? I would probably go for a fist bump and somebody will grab my fist. Like, yeah, the fist bump, people don't accept. My handshake I've been fucking up, because you know, I come from up here. Right? And so normally, what I want bless is I want one of these.

We need to do that or I want one of these blasts. Would it come in? A little hug, give a hug. Right? But my, when I come up here, people go, oh shit, hug. Initiated. Yeah. No, I don't want the hug. We dab first, then we might hug.

Yeah. But like, because I'm coming up so high, everybody gives me a hug. I don't want that. And there's people that I think would pick that up. But you just transition to the hug. It's fun to hug people. Hey, I'm fine with hugging. I like hugging.

Get in here. But I want to do the cool hands. Handshake first. As a non sequitur. Yeah. It was brought to my attention that LeBron James has a handshake for every single person in his life. That's different. I would like that.

I would like you to institute that ain't kind of funny. If we all showed up at the exact same time, I would stand at the door and I would make us all do the same high fives. Like an elementary school teacher. Everybody would do the high fives before you walked in. So I'll figure out a way where I listen to hear the gate close and then I walk to the front door and I meet you and you have to do the high five. This is what you do. You do it during the weekly meeting of. all right Mike you're up and you just walk around

everybody gets a unique handshake this is good I like this is good I like this so you go to Magic so are you catching games now at what point do you initially how does one initiate a game of magic so you step up

you step up you step up I want to get there in a second because I just want to shout out the fact that me and Mike as we were going to this convention had no idea how big it was going to be as we were walking toward it Magic's been on forever yeah but we didn't know like

how the convention was though right like it might have been moment con we're like oh man there's a lot of empty rooms here because we knew there are multiple conventions a year also so it's like okay is this just people in chicago that like magic that are going is this like the con for magic this is one of three there's three a year sometimes four they bring us all around yeah so there's one in Vegas there's one was it atlanta is one of Atlanta yeah so like you get them in different locations throughout the year um but we were just like all right is this is it's gonna be small is this is going to be huge as we're walking we're like yo there are so many people here

it didn't feel that way until you legit get into the show floor, the hall. And then you also realize, because we also didn't know those two floors, you get to the hall and you're like, oh man, the show floor is massive, there's a lot of people. Then we walked downstairs and we just see a sea of table. Bear, can we bring up that video I sent you really quick if you're listening and watching? I want to show the belly of the beast because I ended the week going up to PR and thanking them for bringing us here.

And I said, this was an unbelievable experience that I will never be able to describe to somebody of how big this downstairs area was and all of the people playing. So you see we're on one wall. If I pan over, it is a just... There you go. That's insane. All tables. That looks like a backroom.

Tables filled out. It looks like the backrooms. And there are tables and seats everywhere. And there are people playing at every single hour all along there. It was jam-packed. It was unbelievable. Is this... I assume a lot of these games are just for fun.

But is there a ranked like bracketed... So there's the pro tour up top. How do we go pro? And I watch the pro tour. Okay. They're nasty. Are they nasty? Yeah, the pro tour is super sick.

So they start off, it's half and half. First half is draft. So you're not bringing in your own stuff. You're similar to what blessing does where they give you packs and then you have to quickly make a deck out of the packs that you've received, right? So there's no strategy of like, oh, this is my pre-stratized deck that I'm bringing in. No, you got to make it right there on the spot. And then they have the second half where you bring in your pre-made deck and battle.

But you can only bring one. one deck for the whole weekend. No change in decks, the kid told me. And I was like, so how'd you do? And he's like, first day, I barely got by five and three. Today, not so hot. Oh, fuck. Dude, that's crazy.

And then I watched the finale at the end on YouTube because they broadcast it live on YouTube and Twitch. Fucking epic. Bro, you got to go watch this. The kid's doing massive math problems to see if he can defeat the other kid. They got a mere match of the both same decks going back and forth at each other. It was awesome. The pro tour is sick.

It's awesome. The pro two are sick. Mike, we got to talk about what we did. Yeah, we got, I mean, let's talk.

Just Nick McCormick's center is massive. This is the biggest convention center, I think ever. I mean, truly not. I'm not seeing a convention center big than this one. This thing is fucking massive. Because as we got into MagicCon,

let me tell you, stop seeing the dentist. I'm like, we're the dentist at because I want to see how big their rooms are. I'll be real. I don't think dentists are coming like that. You know what I mean?

I think they got like maybe an eighth of this convention center recording off of that. I'm expecting like tens of thousands. There was a lot of dentists. A lot of beautiful smiles. A lot of beautiful smiles. They went to the left. Nick, we got dropped off in the front. We had to walk for a mile across. We had to go across a bridge that went over a highway to the back half of the place. And then when we arrived there, it was massive, stunning top floor of show floor. Like, they had ether drift, little go-carts that you could race here. What do they call those little RC track go-carts?

R-Cs? Is that what they are? When they're on like the, they're on the pre-d predetermined path and they're the electric ones back in the day. I guess they would be RC cars, sure. Yeah, super fun. They had that, just miles of tables for people to play, food vendors, and then downstairs the belly of the beast is ticketed play, where you can pay to play and they'll give you like a bunch of decks and cards to make up for what you've paid for essentially.

And so when we- Oh, so you pay and actually keep the deck. Yeah, that's kind of cool. Yeah, they have just like regular free play, and then there's ticketed play where it's like organized and happening. And so Bless is reading through. he's like oh i want to play commander and i was like no bless like let's play together like we're here together let's do this together so bless and i found two headed giant is a magic is a magic is a magic format where it is two v2 and it's so rad and i was trying to talk mike out of it because like mike

hadn't played two headed giant before and like it's not that the rules are super complex or anything yeah but you have to understand mike's a gamer he's a shooter i mean yeah i mean yeah but i that's the thing is i saw that and i was like i know i've played it before with friends um you know a couple different rules you We're taking our turns at the exact same time. We share life and stuff. Like, Mike, are you sure you want to do it? Mike's like, oh, yeah, that sounds fun. And so we pay the money.

We do it. We go up. It's a whole process that we don't need to get into, but it was a technical difficulties because we're there on a press pass as opposed to a regular pass. And so, like, the website wouldn't accept ours. Yeah, so like, basically we had to talk to people,

to help us actually sign up because they wouldn't work through the website. They got tournament and play organizers everywhere. Yeah, everywhere. There was never a time where you would have a problem that couldn't be solved. You walk up to this massive, look at that downstairs underbelly.

Imagine all that, but in the dead center, it's this massive pillar of just help, right? So you can walk up there, you can sign up, they'll organize you on what table you need to go to. And so we walked up, they signed us up right away.

They're like, be back at one. Yeah. And we came back. There was hundreds of people gathered around for just our tournament of play, not to mention the thousands of people downstairs already playing other things happening. Doing their own formats.

And so the format was two-headed giant, chaos draft, draft, draft, I know that sounds like a bunch of gibberish, right? And we didn't know what most of those words meant when we sat down. So we sit down and basically in a regular draft, right, like they'll give you a bunch of packs of the same pack. Like I went to the Etherdrift pre-release and they gave me a bunch of Etherdrift packs to open and then I make a deck in the 30 minutes that we have. Here, Chaosraft means that you are given a bunch of different packs from different expansions.

that aren't really supposed to play together well, right? Like, you aren't just getting random cards from random whatever. So you're going to cobble it together and trying to figure out how to make a strat. Exactly. So you've got to cobble it together. But it's also draft your draft. And so the way we're doing it is they dump a bunch of packs on our table. And then each team at a time picks a pack.

And so you have to be like, all right, I like this one with the dinosaurs on it. So I'm just going to take the dinosaur pack. And then the next people will go and the next people go. And they're like, all right, we'll do the foundations because we know like there's good cards in there. Then you go, all right, let's do the vampires,

I guess. So you're just picking random shit, just based off of like, how the pack looks, right? It was a vibe. I fucked with it.

It was an exciting. It was fucking cool, because now it is me and Mike being like, all right, one for you, one for me. Like, Mike, what do you want?

You like dinosaurs? All right, let's get that. Okay, I like this black and white deck looks cool. Okay, I'll do that, right? And we're trying to strategize together.

Yeah. We then draft our, our packs, and then we open them. And now it is, we had to make two decks out of the six packs that we opened. And of course, it's Mike. And they don't know.

They don't know. I got the fucking mastermind of magic here. And I looked at Bless, I said, whip that deck up for me. Yeah, Mike looked at me and it was like you do it. He started cooking. Oh, Mike handed it to you. He was like, you do it? You play it again?

Mike tried to make it sound cool just now. No, Mike was basically like, all right, bless, make it. That's a shocker, bless. That's crazy. I've never heard of that before. I love Mike trying to twist that. It's a, oh, and I got the mastermind. No, Mike just didn't want to make a deck.

Yeah. No, I understand that. Mike wanted me to do it for him. I get it. It's all you build for me. So he was like, you do it. And guess what? I fucking love me.

He's fucking cooked. That's my favorite part of the game is deck building. So I did that for him. And so I look through, I don't need to get into the too deep of the process, but basically separate it out by color. Look for the legionaries. Look for like, what do we have the most of? All right. Mike, I think you're going to be good with a red.

I forget what your other color was. Red white. Red white. Yeah. And then I think I want black blue. Because you only have so many cards. We're limited on what we can really do. So we're trying to like push cards together.

We had 40 on this one. Yeah, for this one you can have like at least 40. Okay. At least 40. I believe it's 40 or more, but it might just be 40. I forget which. But yeah, it's 40 cards in the deck. So do that.

We're then waiting for the tournament to actually get started because you have time to build. But then after when everybody's done, we then start. You play like I think a best of three matches against two other, against three other teams. To earn tickets. So Blessing can go buy prizes. Exactly.

Yeah. Tickets were on the line. So we build, we finish building, and then we wait for it to get started, and then we wait, and then we wait. And for some reason, I don't know what went wrong. But how- I think the turn, for some reason for this specific tournament, organization was just off. And we waited for maybe, it felt like two hours. Just sitting there, wasting time. We made friends with the people who were sitting around.

Because everybody was like, what the fuck is happening? And like, something was just off. We ended up playing commander with our own decks with the people that were. around us just trying to kill time. Yeah. It was fun because, guess what? One, people in the Midwest, very nice people. Very kind.

Very kind people. Very fun to talk to. Not like those assholes in L.A. Exactly. But then also, magic brings people together. It's just a bunch. They don't call it magic for nothing. It's the gathering.

It's the gathering. I know of a different gathering, but this was our gathering. What gathering are you talking about? The juggalo, the gatherings are the jugglers. I was like, never mind. I can't even say what I was thinking. Yeah. You can't just say,

you're going to gatherings, Mike. Does that have a great connotation? Yeah. Oh shit. I didn't think of that. I thought you were talking about sex stuff. My brain went sex first, but then, yeah, there's a...

Oh my God. My God. I was like, oh shit, you think I'm going to sexual gatherings? No, man. Middle of the night in the Midwest. I'm going to a gathering real quick. Very black history. Oh, my God.

But no, everybody was super fucking nice and super fucking awesome. We made, like, we made tons of friends with people. But finally, it was time to go. Finally, the thing started. We played against a team. And let me tell you, playing 2V2 with Mike, such a fucking fun time. It was such a fantastic. Because it was us, like, again, kind of newer to the game.

Obviously, I'm newer to the game because I only learned recently. And Mike is like, this is like you kind of re-endering into that world and a heavier way, right? And so I think there is just like this baby-like wonder, childlike wonder. Excitement. That's like, oh, man, we are. playing this game. We're working together. I'm showing him my car. We're showing each other. Our cars. We're staring down our opponents. They're hitting in.

I'm whispering. Bless his here. I'm like, oh shit, did you see that? Yeah. We got to get after that. And Bless is like, hold that. Wait a minute. Yeah. I'm like, don't play that because I'm going to kill this thing. What should we do? It was so cool. It's such a fun time. Yeah. And so we got squatted up against like, can we fucking one nerd who was like mastermind. This guy had it all down. And then the ultimate mega workout nerd. This guy was buff as hell, Nick. Fucking arms. out, just cut the sleeves off. He was a physical trainer. Yeah, it's, oh, bulked up, bro, dominating us. Honestly, it is, dominating us. It's kind of like when you meet gym leaders in Pokemon. Sure. Where it's like, oh, you're a personality. And now I got to face off against him. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like, remember when I was wearing the fake Harry Potter glasses. The Harry Potter glasses. But he looked cool in them. And you're like, oh, fuck, this guy's a personality is right. So we face off against them. It's a long game. Because the two out of giant games, I think, just last long game. We were battling. We were, and we were battling. We were battling. We were, we were battling. We were keeping in there.

but at the end of the day, the other team won. The first team that we faced off against Bidas. So after we finished that first game, we realized that we hadn't eaten in forever. We had that McDonald's like two to three o'clock at this point. And I looked at Bless even before that. I think it was like five o'clock, dude. We need to get food.

I'm dying. And Bless was like, we'll get food. Like let's just see how this plays out. Like let's just ride for a second. And we didn't know we were going to have two hours of like downtime, right? And so we saw our other homie from our, pod, he walked up with a Bratworth

and it's like, fuck, now we're hungry, homie. You're going to kill us here. Yeah. And so... That's good strategy. When we finished, I looked at Blesss. I was like, here's the deal. I'm going to get up and I'm going to go get us food.

Yeah. So whatever happens, you sit here and you play for me. You got my deck. Here's the thing. Mike even left his phone of like... This is... Go for it. This is the place in the Madlibs where I write in.

You never saw Mike for the rest of the day. So get this, Nick. You ready for this? Because like, I got to tell my side, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Because like, I leave. bless and I need you to know Nick that like I'm taking a walk

I know you are Mike I know you are driving Mike is fucking done with this experience can I explain to you like Mike's not waiting two more hours to play other fucking double sided snake or whatever that game is called so basically the way this works you should know you should know the way this works is

we have the companion app the Magic the Gathering companion app and between each round they tell you in that app where you're supposed to go to do your next game that's pretty sick. And we signed up via Mike's phone. So think about this. So Mike is going to go get food. I'm here

like holding down the fort. And I'm like well Mike if you take your phone I'm not going to know where to go because Mike's like oh our next game starts to just play both decks. Play both games without And so I'm like Mike I'm not going to know where to go. Mike leaves his phone with me and then leaves in the biggest in the biggest hall you can imagine this fucking leaves and then I get a notification

on Mike's phone of hey this is your next match. And so then I go and I'm like all right cool. I'm just going to have to trust that Mike's going to find me. And so what did you go? I walked up. Okay. I didn't know if there was food downstairs. So I only knew a food upstairs. Like it was, I'm just throwing this out there, right? I'm just saying

like logistically. That's what that's, we'll call that option A. Option B is Mike takes his phone with him and then texts you where to go next. Oh, that would have smart. Oh, shit, we didn't do that. Because he could have said, Mike, you got to hustle the fuck up. Because here's what happened. It's one of the coolest

things about having phones is actually, and people don't know this. It's a great way to communicate phone to phone. They allow you to do that. Didn't think of that. Did not. I mean, I was like, yeah, let's take my phone. I don't give my shit. You know what I mean? Okay, so Mike goes, Mike's taking his time. Sweet-ass time. I mean,

sweet-ass time. I have Mike's phone, and I have both of our decks and everything, right? And I find the next location for our second match. I sit down, and it is I'm sitting across from two 13-year-old cousins. Oh, they're going to fuck you up. These kids, I can tell right now these kids are the double dragon.

They're going to fuck you up. And like, I, I, I, Put down Mike stuff, right? I put down my stuff too. And I look at the kid, I'm like, hey, you know, the dude I'm playing with, like, he went to go grab food real quick. We can start, but I'll just start off playing both hands. And that kid looks at me, one of the kids looks at me and is like, oh, you can't start until your partner's here. He said no. Yep.

Shut his ass down. These kids are serious. They're going pro. Wait until we just, dude, the 13 year olds were so great. The one kid, fucking buy the book, trying to win. Yeah. We're like, I'm a prick energy. Okay.

I'll just say it like that. Yeah. And then his cousin? the coolest cousin. Fucking long hair, looking like he's shaggy from Scooby-Doo. Just here for a good time. Finding his voice,

but he knows that the mean cousin's going to kind of direct the conversation. So the whole time, like, I'm trying to get the young cousin going by like, you're having a good time. What's up?

What's up? Well, he doesn't shut it down every single time. Because here's the thing, right? Before you even get there, I'm like, oh, okay, yeah,

we can wait. Like, we'll wait for Mike then. We'll wait for my guy to get here. And it is just me sitting across them, like, just staring at you. Just staring. I haven't had a camera.

Just mind games. Mike doesn't have a phone. I can't text and be like, yo, hurry the fuck up. Like these kids are right. No anxiety with this one, Mike. I'm just sitting in front of these kids being like, yo,

us three are waiting for a man to find us. And he doesn't know where we're at. Check this out. So Blessing says I want a- Biggest convention hall on the planet. And he said, Mike, I want a Bratworth. And I said, all right, I'll get you a Bratworth's, right? And so now mind you, Nick,

downstairs, there might have been food. We didn't really explore the deepest depths of downstairs. Sure. So I go upstairs. I'm now here. on the farthest end is the food, which means I got to walk all the way across the convention center.

I'm walking. I'm not power walking. I'm not running. I'm leisure in. You know what I'm doing? Meanwhile, I'm sweating in front of these children. I get to the food section.

I walk through all the three vendors. There's churros. There's a fudge stand. There's hot dogs. There's chicken tenders. I'm not seeing a single brot. So what do I do? I buy a hot dog.

I eat the whole hot dog. Then I go over. I buy a churro. I eat the food. whole chiro. And I'm just standing there. This whole time I'm sitting in front of these kids. I'm gna on it.

I'm like, I'll be here any second. I go, oh, fuck, what does you want? And I go, you know what? I'll just buy my hot dog and a pretzel.

So then I go up, I go, give me a hot dog and a pretzel. I get that. Then I slow walk back. Right? I mean, I'm just,

people are saying hi to me. I'm taking photos with people. I start, I start shuffling Mike's deck. I start like, I'm like, okay, well, I guess we'll get this prep

for when he gets here so he can sit down and play. And so I show up, thank God. Blessing is at the front table of all of this, right? I'm lost in the back foods. I have no idea where I'm mad. Periodically, I'm doing this. I'm just like looking for Mike in a sea of people.

Just hoping he sees me. I see Blas. I go, they don't got a brat worse. He goes, fuck it. I'll just eat the pretzel, then, whatever. And now what up kids? How y'all do what? Mike, let's dab up.

Let's have some fun. Kids shuts me down. Yeah. So he's a competitor. He's a better for us. We faced off. We faced off. We're fucking

And let me tell you, we're locked in. I finally have a pretzel. Yeah, you got some carbohydrates to your brain. Yeah, I got some carbs. I'm back alive after this. Yeah, you are. Right? We start playing,

and it is like a, it's a competitive game. Like, it is us two versus again, the nice cousin. The nice cousin and the evil cousin. The nice cousin and the evil cousin, well. The evil cousin who's locked in. Kids about to turn 14 was celebrating

his birthday at MagicCon. The whole family came out. It's like, yo, this is sick stuff. His other cousin was like, shut the fuck up. Don't tell him anything we were here to win. Yeah, no personal information and whatsoever they can use against us.

Like you guys are mentalists. We're not making friends with these. Yeah. These guys exist just to be dominated by us. These are fodder. And so we play. It comes down to the wire. Down to the wire.

When you're playing in like this kind of format, what happens if you run out of time? Because we ran out of time, obviously. Yeah, you get 45 minutes on the clock. Yeah. Best of three. And when you run out of time, basically it is, all right, this is your last three turns.

Okay. And so we hit that point. We're getting Nancy. You know what I mean? Like, this is. was supposed to go from one to five. It's probably 5.30. And we still have a whole other game to play.

Do you think that if you hadn't eaten the pretzel and the hot dog, you guys could squeeze in one more game? Well, here's the, well, no, we were going to still play more. But like, we would have more time to play against these kids a couple more times. Yeah, a couple more turns. And so the guy goes, okay, last call. You get three turns. Like, we got to make this happen.

You're on your next game. And me and Bless are up like 17 to three on this team. Like we're up right now. We found a groove. And we started like. And so now the cool cousin is like adding it up. He's like, oh, three turns. So they're over here.

Like, we could beat them. And I'm looking at bless. I'm like, we got this shit in the bag. I'm like, oh, we got this shit. We got this shit in the bag, bro. Like, we had gotten to the point of, oh, we went on this turn. Like, there's not really much they can do here. Like, here it is.

In three turns, you cannot turn this around. Like, this is us. And when I tell you, the cranky cousin. Cranky cousin. He could not let it go. He's like doing everything he can to be like, oh, but what if you do this? What if he's on his phone looking up rules? Yeah.

He's trying to dispute our car, like, you know, rules that are that the way our cards work. Let's let it go. It's all right. We'll play the next time. It's so fun. Just let him win. Craig cousin, absolutely. And he's got some obsessive compulsive tendencies. Yeah.

And he's like, you know what? That kid's going to go pro. Oh, yeah. Yeah. He's going to have zero friends and be the best magic thing of the other player ever. For me, it's the thing of like, okay, well, these are two like, you know, teenagers are 13. Obviously, like, you know, you grow and you get those social skills and hopefully you develop

and all that stuff, right? I was hoping to come out of this being like, hey kids, you did good. Yeah. That was a fun time. Yeah. Instead, I came out of this, I looked at Mike, I was like, yo, we fucked them up. Got their ass.

We got their ass. We fucking, we destroyed these kids. I've never felt such a good feeling. It was a win. That shit was a win. It felt so good. Like, you might have salt that that kid had? Oh, man. Yeah.

I need that high again. You're like a new Fortnite emote on him, you know what I mean? I need the day. I need the doggy with him. Oh, man. We got those tickets. I would even, maybe I would have like even given the tickets. So Blessing got the tickets now, right?

And so Blessing saw the prize box. before we walked in massive stage, all these different prizes that you can get. And Blessing looked at me, it's like, they're promoting a card and I need that card, Mike. I want that card. And I was like,

Blessing, why did I tell you? Said, take all the tickets, but I want a ticket to put in my phone. Yeah, yeah, yeah. After you cash the tickets, ask the guy if I can keep the tickets. Do you let you keep it? No, I didn't let me.

Okay, I was like, I was going to be surprised we did. I just wanted to keep the ticket for memories. But yeah, that was us doing ticketed play, which is very fun. That was us doing ticket to play. And they do that all day. So there's like set, there's three sessions every 30 minutes to an hour that you can sign up from 10 to midnight.

I mean, this is happening nonstop for three days straight. So you will always have a fun, organized way to play if you want to sign up. You want to get, you know, cards that you buy, of course, but like you get your own packs to keep with you. And they have all different styles. There was this one called the unknown, Nick. And everybody was talking about the unknown. You got to play in this unknown. This guy puts together this awesome thing, right?

And so that was happening on day two. Okay. that blessing missed out on. And so day two was the unknown event, which is like this crazy commander setup, but with playtest cards that aren't real. And so these cards are all like different sort of rule sets and fun ways. And I went down and I talked with our PR agent.

And they were like, oh yeah, the kids just went to go play. Like if you want to get involved, I can help you. And I was like, no, no, but I'll check it out. And she looked at me. She goes, there's 900 people playing this right now. Nick, when I walked over into that room, it, first off, didn't even make a, a dent in the giant belly of the beast room.

That's how big this room was. But at the same time, 900 people was amazing to see. It was like, oh my God, look at how many human beings are here right now, all about to play the same event. It was sick. That's awesome. It was sick. That's wonderful.

So wait, what is the, what was the event? This is the unknown? The unknown, well, the unknown are the unknown cards. Oh, okay. So there's a special play test cards that you don't know about. That is the whole problem. She's got to like get on the fly. seen these cards before.

You've never seen this car. Like nobody's ever seen these cards. No. Yeah. That's crazy. So you basically have to like on the fly. You got to be on the fly, be able to work it out,

figure it out, and master it. That's crazy. Yeah, it's cool. It was sick. That's fucking awesome. And so that's the end of day one for us where now we're going to

Portillo's hot dogs. Get this right? So Blessing's already out. He texts me. He goes, I'm going to get an Uber. And I'm like, well, fuck,

let me get with you. You know what I mean? Like, don't leave me behind. That's like, I'm like, well as well as well. I don't need to be around you anymore. I knew the meetup was coming up. Of course. We had about 30 minutes of play here to like hotel, quick change, drop your shit off and go. So for me, just ride till the moment. For me, I'm like, if I'm going to make it back to the hotel to freshen up real quick and then go, then I'm going right now. Got it. Got it. So now I'm trying to get with Bless because I'm, you know me. And where was the meet and Green at here? I'm finger.

So I'm finger-gunned people. I'm fucking high-fiving. And I'm like, oh, shit, where's blessed? He's like, I'm moving. And I was like, all right, I'll meet you there. And then I get a text and bless, I had to go get my coat check. I forgot about my coach. Now I'm stumped.

Because technically, the front door is this way. Blessings underneath me behind me at Co-check. So I'm stuck in this awkward middle. And I've only been, we've only done it so many times. We only know one staircase. So I text plus and say, I'm at the top of the staircase. I'll wait for you, right? Now a group of kind of funny best friends show up.

And I'm like, oh shit. like Bless is about to walk up this staircase right now don't go and they're like we got an event at seven I'm like well 645 like you wait for bless so I'm dapping them up I'm doing the thing of like where the fuck is blessed I keep looking down this escalator and then Bless is like I've walked through a different staircase

I was like where the fuck is a different staircase and it was a quicker staircase wow you mean there's more than one staircase the world's biggest conventions that are your boys stomach has to run the mile I need to go catch up the bletting at the front door before he leaves me It was so hectic too.

The whole time my Uber was called. Exactly. The Uber was called. I show up and he goes, the Uber is here. I goes, thank God. You know what I mean? Thank God.

Arrived. Yeah. So we go back to a hotel, freshen up, and then it is, we get to Portillo's. Meet and greet time. Meeting greet's fucking awesome.

And you know what? The Midwest showed up. Yeah. Oh, man. The best friends show. We had so many. We had so many. We probably had 60 gibronies up in this

motherfucker. I love that for us. And what did I do? I bought seven hot dogs for everyone. Nobody ate a single hot dog. thing. No one ate a single hot dog? No one. They all looked to me like I was nuts. At Portillas? Because we were all hanging out.

Because me and Mike have been talking the whole time about going to get some deep dish pizza. Yeah, you got to do that. We've got to get some. After Portillo's, me and Mike were going to go to Luminati's. But then it was also the thing of I was hungry. I was starving. But when you're at a meeting, meeting, greet, like, I'm shaking everybody's hand. I'm not. My hands coming nowhere near my mouth. No. Because I made all day. I was hungry, Nick.

And I wanted to eat portillos. Greg has talked about it so much. And so I walk up to the. counter, say, give me seven hot dogs, four French fries. Like, I'll order around for some people and see if they're hungry, you know what I mean? Yeah. Takes way too long because I ordered way too much. Yeah, you ordered seven hot dogs. And so then I grabbed the bags.

I put it on there, go, everybody, I got a hot dog for you. And they looked at me like, I don't want a fucking hot dog, Mike. I'm like, okay. They want to talk to you. The bags are in there. So fuck the hot dog. Now, did I try the hot dog? I took one bite.

So I can't even tell you if this place is good or not. I have no idea. Wow. Don't let Greg Miller here. He didn't even get the chocolate milkshake. And you know. You got to get the milkshake with a chocolate cake in it, buddy. You fucked that up.

What you got to do and just pro te for the portillo's. Yeah. Is that I think the last time we did it at memory of first quickly, we showed up like an hour early so that we could eat portillo's. And eat in and then as people started to show up, we had a table that was everyone can kind of come around. That was the one that we did, I think, in Buena Park. We didn't do that. But it's tough.

You also have to realize like when you're doing these meeting grates, you got to just know that people just want to talk to you. Well, I was having a blessing. There's no downtime. It's an opportunity for them to say hi. It was a great. You're standing on your feet the whole time. You're not doing anything. We had security.

Like, you got so many motherfuckers up in here, get out of the doorway. We took them all up and stayed. It was a blast. That's fun. Shout out to the best friends. All of you made such a big impact on me and blessed. We had an absolute great time. Shout out to so many people.

Shout out to give me the Pogtillo's sticker. Shout out. He gave me a full on Pokemon set, like a card set. He's like, I watched you play. some Pokemon, open up some cards. Here's some of your favorite cards. They had all my favorite. Hey, way above and beyond. Thank you so much. Let's give some more. I also do want a shout out. I did

warn Portillo. Somebody in Chats did bless ever worn Portillo's. I did call Portillo's. We let them know. Thank you. Did they care? Absolutely not. No, absolutely not. They were like, we didn't even, weren't even there. Weirdly enough, the last time we did a meet and greet at Portillo's in Chicago, not only was Greg's mom, I think was

associated with that particular Portillo's, but the other Nick Scarpino. Yeah. Was like the VE of marketing four portals. He hooked us the fuck up. I think I left this part out of the story when I was talking about it when we first introduced the idea of doing a meetup is that Greg was attempting to contact. I think that other Nick Scarpino doesn't work there anymore. No, he is now the chief marketing officer at Giordano's. Yep.

Which is so funny because we all. We were about to fuck that pizza. So if you'd have done that, I could have put you in contact with him and he probably would hook you guys the fuck up. Yeah, because like Greg basically was like, oh, you know, our contact Nick Scarpito isn't there anymore. but I'll hit up Nick to say who I shouldn't hit up and then nobody got ended up getting back to us but that was going to be the plan to like you know tell somebody oh we want to do a meetup here

I knew it wasn't going to be a thing because I'd done meetup before and I know about how many people show up yeah it's like a quick warning of like hey you know we might bring in 40 people obviously is always great for that's a nice heads up for them yeah yeah but it was never going to be a thing of like we were going to shut the building down I think people were kind of scared well we did that in New York one time I got in trouble with

my PD yeah oh shit really there for that no you work with us then that was that when we did our New York meeting group. Now they were there. Yeah, we found a nice bar and whoa, so many people came out. Really? The point where the cops were like, you guys have to take this somewhere else. And then, yeah, I remember, I think Cool Greg edited that vlog where it's like,

y'all just like went on like a little mini parade to find somewhere else. We walked out to the, basically to the bay and sat in like this nice, beautiful like, like, I guess park area and finished it out as the sun went down and then all of us just kind of scattered. It was super fun. Oh, yeah? Yeah. So, oh, no.

We got more. Okay. Let's keep going. We got stories to tell. So a couple of shoutouts. Shout out to everyone that showed up. Thank you so much. I want to shout out Captain Tom.

Captain Tom, you know who you are. I'm sorry I backed out of that flight. Captain Tom offered to fly with me. And you know me. I'm taking to the skies. So Captain Tom, I apologize. Thank you for the offer. A shout out to Dalton out there.

Nicky once made a fun of Dalton for not ever watching Roadhouse. Roadhouse. And you teased him. Dalton now was put on the Roadhouse. Absolutely. As Dolton should be. And also shout out to Count and his family. Great family. taught me about the Golden Triangle.

I'm living in it. You know what I mean? Because those two Dalton, his brother and the roommate, they taught me how to play commander. Count and his family taught me how to play commander. Made me feel comfortable. Great time. Did they let me win? Of course they did.

Of course they did. You know what I mean? You got to let people win. It's like we let Andy win sometimes. We went to Illuminati's. So now I'm, get this, Nick. I know I only have one night with Bless. And I want.

everything with Bless, right? I want to go to Portillo's. Then I want us on the vlog to taste test both staples of the Chicago deep dis industry, Lumell Montanadis and Giordanis. And I told, I told Bless, I said, I know you're tired. But what if after this, we go eat pizza? You go and he goes, fuck, yeah. Yes. So we go to. Again, this is where I stop. I actually know how the story ends. But if I were to guess, I would guess that you went to both places. But at the first place, you ordered so much pizza, you weren't even hungry for the second place. We go to lose. We go to lose. Luminatis.

Girl walks up, says what you want. I said, get us a medium. By the way, before he says a medium, we are looking at the menu, and it tells you how many people are served by each size. Sure. And so a small will serve two people. Did I get us appies as well? He did.

Bruchetta. Yeah, that's what it was. Fancy garlic bread. And they gave us like 20 pieces of bruchetta, and we ate like three. Garlic bread, I don't believe. Right? So like a small feeds two. Medium feeds like four people.

And so blessing is dying by now. And I'm dying. We left it because, like, he's like, Mike, my social battery is up. Like, let's just go recharge. Let's chill. Let's call it tonight. I said, bless, let's do this. But do me one favor.

Let's go to both. And he was like, let's eat one and see where this goes. Mike, I'm tired. I don't want to go to this restaurant. Cool. How about we go to two restaurants instead of one restaurant? When we sit down and I'm like, all right, small sounds like the way to go. She comes.

Mike's like, let's get the medium and get a spuchetta. And I'm like, we're not going to the second place. We're not going to the second place. More carbs. It's like a drier pizza. We're dying here. Yeah. The pizza bomb, though.

There's a sesty sauce. I like Luminati. Yeah. We liked Lou. Lou brought, didn't know they were chains. No, I think it started as, and memories of it was correct.

I think Greg, it started as like individual places. And I think throughout the years that Gerdonos and Luminatis became like franchise. Yeah, I thought it was like Tonys here in the bay. Tony's also the same thing, a little bit higher, upscale, seeded area, you know what I mean?

Yeah. No, I think if Tony's could, there would be 30 Tony's. Oh, yeah. I think they're getting to that. They are. I think there's a couple of them. But like, yeah, so we went to lose. Fantastic.

I do wish we could have gone to Giordano's. Yeah. Because like I lose, I liked. I don't know if it was my favorite deep dish pizza I've ever had, though. I agree, bless. I agree. I think if we tried both, there's also another one with a Pee that everybody was talking about. That is just the one location that's well.

Pisanos? Not Pisanos. Maybe Patches, maybe Patches, Patches. Yeah. Pachis? Yeah. We have a Pachis here. Piquots.

There's a Piquots. It's Piquas. It's like it's not Pachis. Pachis is very, very. They were talking about, they were hype and Piquads up. Pequads, okay. And so I'm begging bless, let's do this. He's like, Mike, let's get some rest.

I said, okay. But then it's set in. We get to the elevator. And it really set end. My homie, my best friend is leaving. And I'm fucked. I'm all by myself. Now you're by yourself with your thoughts.

Now I'm not happy about it. What are you going to do? So now everything's changed. The game is changed. I'm not happy about that. I felt a euphoria. What was that like? Yeah, blessing.

Saying goodbye to the mic in the elevator. I was like, I'm about to have so much peace and quiet. See, in my hotel room, the weight lifted off your shoulders. Just relax, get in my bed, get on TikTok, just scroll through for a good 20 minutes. And so I apologize to Captain Tom, who I should have taken you up. Captain Tom, one day I'll be back. I hope that I can take off your offer to go take to the skies with you because you're the best. And so now I'm lost.

What do I do, Nick? And I said, you know what? I talked about it on Kind of Funny Games Daily. Where's that fire? where's that ignition to get up and go explore even when you're solo? And there was a year where I captured that. There's been recent weeks now where I'm not feeling it, right? I'm looking for an adventure buddy.

I miss that. I want an adventure buddy. But sometimes I have really good moments where I adventure solo and it reignites the flame of like, I can do this. You're a human being. Being outside is nice. And so what did I do? I stood up.

I walked to the Willis Tower and I'm looking up at this fucking monstrosity, this incredible human engine. engineering fucking marvel that we built. I'm looking up at this beautiful building going, fuck, humanity is a beautiful thing. Like, I'm in, I'm back, right? Fucking brisk winter weather on my face. I'm like, you know what?

I'm going to walk down this river, and I'm going to follow the river all the way down. And so what did I do? I followed the river walk. And I'm seeing these beautiful sites of Chicago. I see the pods building. You know about that way? It's like this crazy, like...

I've seen that, yeah? Yeah, it looks... It's iconic. It's on the river. It's beautiful, right? It's like a 60s style. You know what it looks like the pods from the smaller map in Warzone? It does look like the pods.

A little bit like that, but it's more little bit of bubble. Beautiful stuff. I think you meant, did you meet the Sears Tower? When you said this? Which tower? The all black tower, I believe is the Willis Tower. Okay, the Willis Tower. Yeah, the Willis Tower.

I didn't know if you were confusing that with Bruce Willis from Diehardt. No, no, no, yeah. I think the Sears Tower is the Willis Tower. Oh, they changed the name? Oh, they're doing the thing when they changed the names like that? Yeah, it used to be the Sears Tower, but then I think they changed it to the Willis Tower. There you go. And so, yeah, I see that beautiful.

Walk the River. I see the Chicago Tribune. I think of God. Yeah. I almost sent some of a message. You know what I mean? I was going to say, I'm thinking about you. Oh, you should have.

Because it was beautiful. You got the cool pods. You got the bridge, the iconic bridge. And then you see the Tribune and this building is beautiful. Giant clock, cool architecture. It was happening, right? And then I keep walking. You know, I see the lake.

I'm like, holy shit. I don't know the lake was this beautiful. I'm getting caught up in Chicago. Then I take a right, I go to Millennial Park. I see the Bean. Everybody in their mom is at the Bean. That's why I call the Uber. I'm like, you know what?

I've had enough. It's time to go back to MagicCon. And I rip MagicCon. I'm buying Jurassic Park cards, okay? I'm sitting down and playing all by myself. I'm dapping people. I'm having the time of my life, Nick. I end the night and I said, Mike, you got one rule.

You're going to go somewhere where everyone loves to go, but before anyone wakes up. Cheers. Cheers. Cheers, where they know my name. and I said, I'm going to go to the bean at 6 a.m. to get the most epic photo of this awesome tourist attraction with no one there. 6 a.m. the alarm, alarm beeps. Sun's not even out yet.

And I'm like, fuck. My last day I should sleep before this flight. I shouldn't do this. I get up, Nick. Tie my shoes. Mind you my Tims. The best walking shoes. Wrong city.

My feet hurt. Jesus. Don't ever let me wear the team for a three day. That's fine. Okay. Get up. I tie my shoes. At 6.15, the Uber picks me up.

We start driving. Beautiful pink skies. The sun is coming up. He drops me off. He laughs. He goes, I think you're the only person here. And I look at him. I go, sir, this is exactly what I wanted.

I walk up the steps of Millennial Park. I look at the bean, sun radiating off of it. Come on. Fucking pink everywhere. And I am now looking at the backside where it reflects all the city skyline. And I am the only motherfucker at the Bean at 6th. How cold was it at this moment? Cold.

I was going to guess five degrees. It was worth it. And let me tell you what, it reignited the flame bless. I love that. It got me going of like, I'm ready to explore. Let me tell you, Chicago is such a fucking good city. Chicago is a cool city. How do we pick up this company and move it to Chicago?

No, no, no. I feel like we can get Greg Miller on that side. Yeah, that would be a little bit tougher, ladies and gentlemen. Gentlemen, closing thoughts on MagicCon. I mean, I want to go back. It was such a good time. So this is something that's going to happen yearly. Yes.

I want to go to MagicCon every single year. Once a year I would like to go. It is something that is so inviting, welcoming, fun and exciting. You are part of it, and you are able to sit down at any table and play. It reminds me of going to kind of funny live back in the day, where you are around people that love the similar things. Everybody is there for one reason. They're having fun together, and it was so rad. So, yeah, I hope me and Bless can go back again and do another fun one.

I would love to see Chicago again. Shout to Chicago. And also I went to Commander Night for the first ever time by myself on Thursday. We talked about this. Blessing has been playing Commander with his friends. And I've always wanted to learn Commander because that's the play style now, Nick. That's what I want to get on. When you talk to everybody, everybody plays Commander.

Nobody's playing Standard. There's drafts that are popular, but it's Commander. And so Blessing has been playing Commander. He's been learning Commander with his friends. And I've been excited and I want to learn. And Blessing has done really well trying to teach me. But every time we play, we get interrupted. Somebody comes through.

Stand up and Blessing's like, you're going to leave the cards. We'll just come back. I go, no, no, no. And I pack up all the cards, which means we have to reset everything. And so I finally did it. Blessing was like, Mike, just go. And I was riding the high off of MagicCon Chicago. I went to my local card shop. Again, guys a dick. Okay. Oh, yeah. What'd you call him the, the

crappy cousin? Yeah. Yeah, the cranky cousin. This guy, every time. Okay, it's a beautiful fucking Thursday night. The sun is setting on the ocean is where there's card shop is. You can see the ocean with the sunset. And this guy has never smiled, has never greeted me

and the 20 times I've walked in every time I feel awkward talking to him because he never wants to talk to me, right? Like, this is fucking fantastic. This is my first night. I got my little book bag like I'm looking like an idiot. It's hard awkwardly walk in and I don't know what to do. And so I walk

up, I'm like, you know what? It's my local car shop. I'm going to support. I'll buy something before Commander Night to show that, hey, I'm here to support. I want to be part of it. I fucking walk up. I'm like, hey, how you doing today? It's fine. You know, just doing numbers.

Like, okay. Just doing numbers. Just doing numbers. I'm talking about magic. You want to help direct me and all? No love from this guy ever. Except for the one time when his boss was there, made him fucking be a little lovable, okay?

So fuck that guy. One day I'm going to break that guy. We'll get him to love me. I'm with you on this mission. I believe in you. I sit down. I'm all by myself. And this group of two looks at me.

They go, would you like to play? I go, I would love to. And I sat down. Shout out to Lily. Shout to my main man, Marlowe. And they were welcoming. They taught me, they let me learn how to play while playing. They had fun.

We laughed. We put a fourth in there. We had a blast with this guy named Shad. Shad. Not Shade. Not Chad. Shad. Shad.

Cool name. Cool name, bro. Cool guy. And so then Marlow had to leave. And it's like getting 8.30, 9 o'clock. 13 year old kid sits down. Fucking freak. Kid dominated us.

Dude, every single time I go to a magic pre-release event, it's always the kids. Like, they're into magic. I had the time of my life, Nick, where I left that, I left Magic Con with Bless and I said, I want to play Magic once a week for now for forever. Yep. So we will figure that out because it was so much fun. Ladies and gentlemen, that has been your Magic the Gathering. Gathering Con, Magic Con, review.

Guys, thank you so much for that. Of course, you want some fun stories about Blessings, Family Trip. which was very, very endearing and awesome. Go over to the kind of funny podcast this week where we talked about that. And I really got the truth out of what Mike was doing at MagicCon the entire time. Mike, don't bother listening to that. Of course, a couple super chats came in.

I want to shout out before we let you all go. I have no idea what time these came in. So I'm just going to start reading them. Not like us isn't beat saver. Fantastic. I've gotten, Mani Bagel Boy Sanchez says, I've gotten into Magic and you go again

and taking care of my health, more soccer, more gym, feeling happier. Glad to hear that. Got to Mani. Who is Kirk says, it's smooth. It's cool.

It's macha. And then I think a couple of these were from five days ago, but they're still relevant. I'll just say, now. I count. Chrisco says, It's so cool meeting Mike and blessing. Have a blast, including Mike and the fam, and playing some commander, hashtag the Golden Triangle.

Bobby Jubby said bummed you guys. I didn't see you guys at Portillo's that Friday. I hope you guys had fun, fun time in Chicago. And our final one comes from Dean and Hacker. This is Blano is a college town. Mike would have thrived. Ladies and gentlemen, this has been your kind of funny games cast for February 28th Friday,

2025. Remember, we are going to be doing a monster hunter marathon stream right after this, just on Twitch. It's exclusive on Twitch. So if you guys are on the YouTube, we love you very much. Head over to Twitch. Twitch, hang tight right now. We'll be right back. Cheers.