Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #785: Scott Larabee

Episode Date: October 23, 2020

In this podcast, I interview Scott Larabee, the esports senior league operations manager. We talk about his many years of running tournaments.

I'm not pulling out of the driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for other drive to work. Coronavirus edition. So I've been doing all sorts of fun interviews and today's no exception. So I have Scott Larrabee, the eSports Senior League Operation Manager. So hi, Scott. Hi, Mark. How you doing? So you and I go way, way back. So yeah, we'll get to that. We'll get to that. Yeah. So let me start the question I've been asking everybody, which is, how did you first get into magic?

I first got into magic because a friend of my brother's, who was also a friend of mine, he was more of a friend of my brother's, though, in high school. We were out of high school in, you know, in 2000. It was in 1994 got a whole you knew i played games because we used to play computer games and all kinds of games he's like scott there's this new game i played he was going to caltech at the time and he said uh this new game it's called magic and he goes it's perfect for you he goes it's absolutely perfect for you you really need to get it and i said okay and then i didn't and like three months later he

got a whole i happened to talk to him again he's like so did you ever pick up magic and i said no he's like you really really really need to go get this trust me so i did i went over i was living down in southern california in costa mesa at the time and i went to the only game store i knew about which was over at uh south coast plaza in uh costa mesa a store called gamesmanship and i went in and asked about it i said hey do you have this game called magic and the guy behind the counter said yeah he goes we don't really have we don't really have a lot left and all they had left was unlimited starters so and they only had two of them left and i bought the last two they had and i took them them home and gave one to my brother.

And that's what we played until we could get more cards. Okay, so here's how you and I start meeting each other, which is pretty early on, is I lived in Los Angeles as well. And I got into Magic a little earlier than you. I got into Alpha. Yeah, yeah, you got into it earlier. But I was looking for got an alpha. Yeah, yeah, you got it earlier. But I was looking for places to play. There really wasn't any place to play.

And then I heard rumors of this awesome place to play that was far away from where I lived, down in Costa Mesa, at the Costa Mesa Women's Center. We actually met earlier than that. Oh, did we? Did we meet earlier than that? We did. So my brother got to know you on the Magic IRC channel. Oh, did we? Did we meet earlier than that? We did. So my brother got to know you on the Magic IRC channel. Okay.

And there was a convention that was going to happen in LA called Magic Con. Yes. And he said, hey, I was talking to this guy I know online. He said, there's going to be a tournament and dealers. And so we went and we got there. He goes, hang on, let me go find this guy. And he goes and runs off for 10 minutes. He comes back and he brought you and he goes, hi, this is Mark. I met him. So Mark's literally the first person in Magic I met, except my brother. Oh, wow. I didn't realize that. He said, come over and meet my friends.

What's that? The first convention I went to, I don't know if this was this one. The first convention I went to was this tiny, tiny, tiny convention that had like maybe 30 people. No, this thing was bigger. Okay. this was bigger than that. This had like 200 people. Oh, okay, okay. It was at the hotel there on the, right by the airport. Oh, okay, okay. So Mark drags me over to

meet his friends. So the second person I met in Magic was Henry Stern. Okay. So, and then it was at that show that there were flyers for the first Costa Mesa tournament. Okay. So, and then it was at that show that there were flyers for the first Costa Mesa tournament. Okay. Because all the guys who started the Costa Mesa tournament were also at this con. Okay.

So, Jim Murphy, Kyle Schubel, who was actually the guy I bought the, he was the guy who helped me buy the starters at Gamesmanship. Okay. who helped me buy the starters at gamesmanship okay uh kyle schubel uh jim murphy eric and um chuck uh those guys were all there and so i had the flyer and it was happening the next weekend so my brother and i went and the rest is uh as they say history uh you then started showing up every week right so let me explain to the audience so they understand what Costa Mesa, what this was. So, there were a few game stores that would run tournaments, but you guys rented out this hall.

It was called the Costa Mesa Women's Center, so I literally assumed that's what it was. That's what we referred to it as. And every Saturday night, it started at like 5? No, it would start in the afternoon. And then it went, yeah, it would go late in the evening. Maybe I showed the afternoon. It would go late in the evening. Maybe I would show up

late. You would call me up and you would call the pay phone that was in the lobby and people would go, Mark's on the phone and I'd come over and you're like, save me a spot in the Grandmaster. So anyway, it was a play

back in the day in Los Angeles it was like kind of the the hot spot of magic play and a lot of my like my friends from that era

that's where I met a lot of them and it was just like if you were in Los Angeles back in 94 95 whatever it was like

the place to play and I every Saturday I'd go down there every Saturday it was like an hour plus drive and I'd get down there every Saturday. It was like an hour plus drive. And I'd get down there late afternoon, and I'd stay until late in the evening,

and I played a lot of Magic. Yeah, it was good times back then. It was the first, I remember when, so I started there, I started going to it before I started running it for a while. And what they would do is they had a tournament, which was constructed or standard, and there were no rules back then, so the people running it made up their own ban list and stuff. And then they would do a thing, and they would start that, and then like two hours later, they would start a thing called

a seal deck. I remember the advertising. $15, and you get a starter and two boosters and you keep the cards. It was all very exciting. Then they would run Grandmasters in the late evening. Grandmaster was you got a starter and you play and you built

your deck and it was single Elim but if you beat someone you got all their cards and you'd rebuild your deck for the next round. And the winner just ended up with all eight of them. Yeah, I played in a lot of Grandmafters. I won some, but I played in a lot of Grandmafters. And then that inspired Henry and I to make the Mini-Mafter,

what people call Pack Wars. Henry and I were the creators of that way, way back in the day, based on Grandmafter. We called it Mini-Mafter because it was just a single pack. Okay, so at some point you went from just running tournaments in Costa Mesa to being involved in the Pro Tour. How did you get involved

in the Pro Tour? I did. Well, the people who ran that tournament every week then opened a store, which I then went and hung out at, eventually became a partner in that store and then ran the Costa Mesa tournament. And then the Pro Tour came along and a lot of people from a lot of the guys, the guys of the Costa Mesa Women's Club, Henry, Mario Robina, Mark Chalice, those guys all went

off and played in the tournament in New York. And then the next thing you know, there was going to be one in L.A. So it was at the Queen Mary. So I'm looking for volunteers for judges. And I ran tournaments. So I volunteered and I went and got to meet a whole bunch of people there. Went on to work the top eight uh including spotting the top eight because the guy you had spotting had to leave so i saw you and my spot i remember that so that's the

by the way for the little trivia a little bit of pt trivia uh my i was doing commentary mark justice was doing color commentary right and the only booth they could find for us was literally a phone booth it was a phone booth it's a slightly was literally a phone booth. It was a phone booth. It was a slightly bigger than normal phone booth, but it was a phone booth. And I think that finals was like seven and a half hours or something crazy. It was crazy. Yeah. It was Sean Hammer Regner versus Tight Tommy. Yeah.

Tom Gaben. Tom Gaben. And I remember, and it was draft, and it was like fourth edition Homelands, the worst draft format, maybe in the history of Magic. And it went to four or five games, and I remember game two took like two hours. Sean only had three creatures in his entire deck, and one of them was giant oyster. Oh, yeah. It was the worst format ever. Yeah.

oh yeah it was uh worst format ever yeah um and so i did that uh then um at the end of that show uh people from wizards i got to know um you know i got to know uh andrew finch and karen krisnick and scath and at the end of that show they said uh we want to fly you out to a columbus to the next show and help have you help run side events and judge and do all that. So I did that for a number of shows for a few years, continued to do my stuff back in Costa Mesa, including running pre-releases and pro tour qualifiers and stuff down in LA, Arizona, and San Diego. And then in 1998, got a call from Wizards from Diana Johns, who was the show manager for the Pro Tour, saying, I finally got permission to hire someone to be an assistant Pro Tour manager. And you were the one I liked. Can you be here in four days for an interview?

So I flew up, did the interview. Then Susan Scheid, if you remember her, said, oh, Scott's interested in working here. I want to interview him for a job in conventions. So I actually took the job in conventions because it had relocation money. So I moved up to Seattle and I did the convention thing for about 10 months until somebody on the Pro Tour team down in Organized Play was leaving. Chris Galvin said, please interview. I did. And then I started working, started scheduling the qualifiers and doing all that kind of stuff. The pre-releases, taking care of the premier TOs that we had at the time.

And that was back in August of 1998, and I've been at Wizards ever since. Been in the organized play department, which has changed names and reporting structures over the years, but still doing my thing. One of the fun things is

you're just dropping names into the audience. It's like, random name you've never heard of before. And I'm like, oh, like Diana. I hadn't thought of Diana in years. So anyway, that's, it's fun. So, okay. So you officially start working for Wizards. Yep.

So, well, let's talk a little bit. So at some point you became the tournament manager for the Pro Tour. I did. That was in 2003, right after, I'm going to drop another name that I think more people know. That was after Mr. Jeff Donay left the company. They had the position open for a few months, then we had a reorg in OP, and I was given that job.

So what's that like? What's running? Talk a little bit about what does it entail to run the Pro Tour? Well, there's an events team that takes care of... I mean, you were the tournament manager, right? I was the tournament manager, right? So there's a whole other team that takes care of running the show. My job is running the tournament. So, you know, I would hire the head judge, and part of what I would do back at the office we decide what format it's going to be and how many rounds it is and all this kind of stuff

that goes on in the background but my job at the show is actually kind of akin to the the closest thing i've seen to it uh in other games uh would be like at the uh at a poker tournament you've got the tournament director and he's like kind of the final authority on the tournament and what's going to happen and that's kind of my job so i uh keep track of uh how how fast we're going how slow we're going if we're going too slow we try and figure out what's going on um i'm just kind of the last the last stop on all things tournament while that thing goes on. Yeah, one of the things

I find interesting and one of the reasons I like doing interviews with just different people in the company is getting some sense of, hey, this is a whole thing. Someone's got to do

all sorts of things and care about it and there's all these things you never even think about but you have to take care of them. Yeah, they don't just happen. And how many people, how many people, like when you were running a tournament, how many people are working, I mean, four of you might be loose,

but how many people are you in charge of overseeing? I oversee, so all the judges that are running it through the head judge. The scorekeeper is somebody that, uh, that oversee, um, that's, that's my group of people. So, and then there's, you know, a whole nother group of people that are dealing with coverage. And when we used to have side events, we had a whole nother person that would double inside events. And, you know, there's a lot of stuff going on at one of those shows, but, uh, my, my thing is really the tournament. So the turn, the, the pro tour tournament itself is my, uh, is my domain domain for that weekend. So, um, do you have any, uh, fun stories from your times

running pro tours? Well, uh, so it's funny. Uh, I just, uh, calculated recently cause somebody asked me on how it came up, but, uh, Oh, it came up because uh the esports department has recently been put under studio x so yeah um we were doing introductions for the rest of studio about what we all did and somebody so i had to do my little bio and i thought oh this would be a good time to say how many pro tours i haven't been to okay because i've been to all of them except for 16. That's pretty good. I had the record for a while of the most pro tours, but you have long since passed me because I... Right. You had all of them.

Yeah. Until you didn't. Yeah, I had all of them until my daughter was born. That was the first one I missed. And then my twins were born. I missed that one. And then I stopped going to them. There are so many stories and I've been doing it so long and I'm not as young as I used to be.

They all blur at this point. The first Pro Tour was on the Queen Mary. We did a whole bunch on the Queen Mary. I know a lot of players who were on that Queen Mary look back on that event as being something that was very formative in the early days I mean we were open 24 hours a day with those early shows Scaf would stay up at night and run drafts for players and I know people really liked that that venue was miserable I did not like running anything there so we were on the boat for three or four I think four pro tours like five five almost five yeah they the problem with the queen mary is that it's made of metal so like

all the floors are metal even though they have carpet it's metal so like being on your feet the whole time for players because they're sitting most of the time it's fine but we were running around the whole time we just completely wrecked at the end of the day. And it was like, it's Southern California in May. And it's a metal box. And the sun is just beating on the side. And it's hot in there. There's nothing you can do about it. The coolest thing about what I do there is that I do this thing.

And it's always the same, but it's not. It's always a bit different because every hall is different, every city is different. The judge staffs are always different. Certainly getting to travel the world to run these events. I started running events at the 1,000 square foot Costa Mesa Women's Club and go on to run these huge professional tournaments giving away hundreds of thousands of dollars in locations all over the world

is a pretty amazing thing. In fact, it is the thing that I'm missing the most right now. I was just commenting to somebody the other day that this is the longest period of time without getting on a plane that I've had in since I started going to magic tournaments. Since I flew to my first magic tournament back in the summer of 1996. This is the longest period of time between getting on a plane. I flew back from Reno, Nevada. I went to the Magic Fest in Reno at the end of February, and I haven't been on a plane since don't I don't like it. I miss

I miss the traveling. I miss going in, getting the show set up. Yeah. Running it, shutting it down and then flying home. It is one of the coolest parts of my job is getting to fly to all these places and not being able to do it right now. It's kind of a bummer. Do you have any idea how many countries you've gone to? Oh, my God. That's something else I should calculate at some point. Not as many as you would think. I mean, we tend to run the pro tour in pretty major countries. I've been to places like Puerto Rico because we ran a pro tour in Puerto Rico. I've been to Malaysia because we ran one in Kuala Lumpur. I've been to Japan, oodles of Thailand. Like in all of APAC, you know, Asia Pacific region, I've been only to Japan, Malaysia, and Australia.

Because that's the places we ran stuff when I was doing it. Yeah, I was also, I went to Korean Nationals and I went, first invitation was in Hong Kong. But other than that, those are where I've been, same places where I've been in Asia. None of those. I was at the Invitational with you in Sydney.

Because we held a... It was Australian Nationals and that. I was in charge of organized play, the premier play level of stuff down in Australia at the time, so I went down for that. I've never been to South America because we've never run anything

big down in South America. I know you have. We went to Rio for Invitational. That's the only time I've been to South America because we've never run anything big down in South America. I know you have. We went to Rio for an invitation. That's the only time I've been to South America. And in Europe, I've been to Ireland, been to the UK, France, Spain, Prague. Prague's a fun one. That's a cool memory. I went to do Prague, flew into Prague, set up the show, ran day one. Then on the morning of day two, I had to do Prague, flew into Prague, set up the show, ran day one. Then on the morning of day two, I had to fly to L.A. because it was my sister-in-law's wedding.

So I went and I did like 96 hours in Prague, flew to L.A., did my sister's wedding, then met up with all the people that ran that pro tour because the Invitational was in L.A. at E3 that week. So I did the wedding and then just saw you guys over at the convention center my sister's wedding was uh day one and two at worlds uh it's 98 the one that um the one at the u the yeah it was at the university um and day one and two i'm there day three and four at my at home at my sister's wedding we flew back that night and i show up like part way into the finals day because i had to do the finals and so we did the finals so right um but uh that's the only uh for the pro tours that i've gone to work that's the uh that's the only one i haven't done the whole show on but i still count it because i

went yeah you're there um i've there's ones I've been out. I've missed a day of. DC99, the first Team Pro Tour, if you recall, like a third of everybody in the building got sick. There was something going. We think there was something in the water. Literally.

People just dropped. I remember Team Your Move Games, like Rob was playing that. Oh, yeah, yeah. He was on the floor, yeah. Okay, so here's a memory I have of you. So this goes back to the early days. So my job when I was on the Pro Tour, when I worked on the Pro Tour, was I handled the feature matches.

I did the coverage on the last day, but I did the feature matches on all the other days. And so whenever you were ready, you would give me the list, and then I had to pick the feature matches on all the other days and so you had whenever you were ready you would give me the list and then i had to pick the feature matches really fast before you could post anything um and i always would hang around and then like you would you would wave it like okay i gotta pick my feature matches yep but that that's my memory is uh always watching you waiting for you to finish so i could get my future man right right i know before before i started running pro tours i went to a lot of

the pro tours and i did side events when i got hired by wizards in the conventions department one of my job was to run the side events the pro tour but i still did the spotting yeah on sunday because i remember because you're like nope, Scott's got to be the spotter. Because I did almost every Pro Tour from that. Yeah, you were my spotter for quite a while. I mean... Yeah, yeah. The funny thing is, I gave up. I stopped doing commentary pretty quickly.

But you were my... I mean, I was still producing it. So you were still my spotter. Yeah, I would still do that. Okay, so let's get into something else that is a big magic thing that you were very instrumental in. Yeah. Which is, okay, so the judges, after the tournament's done, like to play some games of magic. They did, it turns out.

And so this leads somewhere else that you're a big player in. So let's talk about that. Absolutely. So I'm in Atlanta in 2005. And I'm getting ready. You know, you finish the tournament, and you go into dinner with other staff people. And I know all the judges. They're all friends of mine.

And I see that they're in the hall. We were still open really late or 24 hours at that point. And I see the moving tables around. And I'm like, what are you guys doing? I run over. I remember specifically running over to go, what are you doing and why are you moving tables? Like, this is not something that should be happening. And Sheldon's there because he's the head judge of the event. And Sheldon says, oh, we're going to play magic. And I said,

okay, but why do you need to rearrange the tables into these weird big squares? He goes, oh, we're playing this format called Elder Dragon Highlander. And I said, what? And he goes, yeah, he gave me the brief thing. And I said, okay, whatever. And so they go off and they do their thing. At the next show, which was in Philadelphia, it was the Skins Pro Tour, actually. I stayed one night with Sheldon because I wanted to learn more about this thing. Sheldon had been emailing me going, you really need to play this. So I sat and I actually watched them play it. And I was intrigued. And I sat there with Sheldon and Geese Hogendijk from,

he was one of the judges from the Netherlands that we're really into at the time, and explained the format and I asked questions and we talked about decks and the whole night. Then the next show, Sheldon handed me a deck and he goes, here, why don't you play this? If you like it, I'll give you the deck list and I won't play it anymore.

He was going to give me the deck. So I sat and played, and I've been hooked and have been playing Commander ever since. I kind of stopped playing Magic at that point. I played a lot of board games. I think one of the things I liked about it was that it was, I call it the board game version of Magic. It has everything you want in a board game. It's got the politics, the multiplayer aspect of it. And played, would stay late and play on the Pro Tour

with the judges constantly. Eventually, Sheldon and some of the other people asked me to be on the Rules Committee. It was back in 2008, 2009, and I've been doing that ever since. And that is, other than running these big tournaments, I'm also very highly placed on this format that is about the exact opposite of the Pro Tour,

that it could actually be. The very polar ends of the spectrum. Yeah, it's one thing that's fine, is that, right, you're very into these two things that are such opposite from each other, but, so, I want to talk a little bit from your point of view, so, I mean, you were at Wizards this whole time, so you were the earliest

person involved that was a Wizards person, although Wizards wasn't in any way connected with it in the early days at all. Correct. So what was it like? Do you remember we made the first Commander decks? And you were involved in that, right? I was on that design team. Yeah.

They asked me to be on it. We weren't designing Commander decks at the time. We were designing something else that was multiplayer. And I remember Aaron Forsythe telling us, you know, we've got to have something together by a certain date. And if you don't think it's working, the backup is we'll do commander decks. Because commander was starting to get popular. Yeah.

We worked on a thing. It didn't really work out. So we immediately switched over to commander decks. And that's how we got those first decks. And so, yeah, I was on that first design team. I think I had never designed cards before. I think I was there mostly because I was the guy in the building. I mean, there were people playing in the building by that point.

But I'm the one who brought it kind of in. I think what happened is on the Pro Tour, we had other staff members who would, one would one at a time start going what are you guys doing late playing this game and we started a little we started a little uh group of people playing on friday afternoons at the uh at the office and uh aaron's aaron started playing with us too on fridays he really liked the format and started playing with us and uh it was uh it was weird because it wasn't nearly as popular as it is now but we were making a product and so we didn't know there's a whole bunch of stuff we didn't know i mean those early decks are just themeless right there they were based on they were based on uh just colors and that's it and it was it was a lot of fun i've been on a lot of

design teams for commander since those early ones weren't fun because there were just no rules. You just made cool cards and if the lead designer and the developers liked it, it went in. It didn't. They had light themes, you know, Graveyard Recursion or plus one, plus one counters, but they were pretty wide on the theme.

They were not as tight as they were now. How many Commander teams have you been on? I was on the first two. So I was on the Commander and Commander 2013. I think I've been on five, and I think I just started my sixth just this week. Okay. Just this week started for some more Commander stuff down the road.

Okay. And so what was it like from your point of view of it going from this kind of quirky thing the judges did to what it is today? What was that transition like? It was one of those things. It's probably like boiling a frog, right? I mean, the whole story, you put a frog in a cold pot and turn it up and it doesn't do anything. It's weird. It just didn't seem like, like the popularity grew so gradually. I don't recall the exact moment that, I don't recall the exact moment that I thought that I

went, wow, this thing is like big. I think it might've been when I went to go play somewhere in the Seattle area. I went to a store in the Seattle area to, I don't know, buy cards or I don't even remember why I was there. And there were people playing commander and I went, okay, there are people I didn't know personally that were playing commander. It was certainly, uh, it was certainly before those decks came out, but, uh, it, uh commander it was certainly uh it was certainly before those decks came out but uh it uh it was cool it grew and it grew and it grew and it grew so much that now it's kind of scary how much it's grown it's uh i mean uh there are clearly cards that are designed for commander in everything we do now and that is just a huge difference yeah from where we started even with those uh those early Commander decks

where we were trying to make something, oh, look, we can make cards specifically for this format, like Command Tower, for instance, versus now we're playing around with Command Zone and really doing weird stuff with multiplayer. But it's satisfying. It's certainly, having been part of something so early on and seeing but it's uh it's it's satisfying it's uh you know it's certainly having been part of something so early on and seeing where it's gone it's the second time i've

got to do that like i in magic i was around at the beginning of magic organized play when it was just you know small and not a thing and it's grown into what it is and commander is the same thing and commander's even like it was even smaller. I mean, when I started playing Commander, I'll bet there were 30, 40 people in the world that were playing Commander. And that was it. And now it's, you know, it's millions. And it's pretty satisfying. Walking into GP Las Vegas last year for the first Command Zone

and seeing how many people were sitting there playing the thing that you've been working on and has been your baby for a long time is a, it's extremely satisfying. Yeah. Well, that's cool. I guess it's not often you get a, you do one thing that way and you got to do two. So that's, that's pretty awesome. You don't get to build two things very often that are that big in the same, in the same industry, much less as the same company. So,

so anyway, one of the things that you and I don't get to see each other as much as we once did. Back when I used to go to all the Pro Tours, at least I always would see you at the Pro Tours. One thing I always remember is whenever we were in another country, you always had the phone so I could call my wife. Right. This is back before pay plan.

I had one of the super cool international pay plans on a phone. Not a lot of people did. It's not that way anymore. Right, not a lot easier to do that. Yeah, you weren't the only one I did that for. I did do it for Randy, too. Okay. But anyway, one of the things that's neat,

one of the fun of me doing these interviews is just chatting with people that I've known forever. Like I said, you and I, um, so October 30th is my, my 25th year at wizards.

Um, and you and I knew each other before that. So, um, like I said, I, we've known each other for a long, long,

long time. So it was a lot of fun talking with you. So I've known you since May of 1994. It's been, it's been a crazy time. It's been a 26 years. We're, uh, we've gone gray since May of 1994. It's been a crazy long time. It's been 26 years. We've gone gray together, my friend. Well, I went gray pretty fast, but we have.

It's funny. You have to get really early pictures of me to even see like light brown hair or something. I went gray super fast. But anyway, it's great talking with you. And unfortunately, I can see my desk. So we all know that's the end of my drive to work. So I want to thank you for being here. Thank you,

Mark. I appreciate it. So guys, when I see my desk, you know what that means. This is the end of my drive to work. Instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So Scott, thank you so much for being here today. And guys, I will see all of you next time. Bye-bye.