Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #108 - Invitational Part 4

Episode Date: March 28, 2014

Mark talks about The Duelist/Magic Invitationals 7, 8, and 9.

Okay, I'm pulling up my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today is the fourth part of a series that I've been doing about the Magic Invitational. So, I've covered the first six of them in the previous three episodes, podcasts, and today I'm going to do the fourth one. And there's probably a fifth one coming. I don't think I'm getting through all the rest today. Today, I'm going to do the fourth one, and there's probably a fifth one coming. I don't think I'm getting through all the rest today. So, for those that don't know, real quickly, the Magic Invitational was basically the all-star game. It's something I'd started originally for a magazine called The Duelist.

It was called The Duelist Invitational for a while. And we went around the world. In the first six years, we went to Hong Kong, and then to Rio de Janeiro, and then to Barcelona, and then Kuala Lumpur, and then to Sydney, and then to Cape Town. That was my previous episodes. But I got called into... So Chris Galvin, for a long time, was the head of organized play. Chris was a great guy. He called me into his office one day, and he said,

Mark, I need to talk to you. He goes, I like the Invitational. I think the Invitational does good things. But, I don't have any budget for it. So, I can't give you any money, but I do hope that you find a way to keep doing it. And I was like, you know, so for those that have listened to the other podcasts,

one of the reoccurring themes is somehow the Invitational keeps being on the brink of death, and I managed a few other times to sort of save it. So I had a challenge on my hand, which was I had zero money. I had no money, and I needed to run an Invitational. Now, one of the things about an Invitational was it is a relatively cheap thing to run comparative to most events. There's no prize money.

The winner got a card. You've got to make their own card with their picture on it. But there's no prize money. You know, the players, I mean, we had to pay to fly the But there was no prize money. You know, the players... I mean, we had to pay to fly the players there and put them up, but other than that, it was, as events go, and there were 16 players, it was relatively inexpensive.

But it wasn't cheap. I mean, it wasn't free. It might be cheaper than other things, but it still cost them money. And so I had this challenge of how exactly do I run the Invitational without any money. So I did what I had done in the past, which is the key when you have no money is to figure out somebody who has money who needs what you have. And so I had something to offer, which was the Invitational at this point, It was six years in. It had definitely built up a reputation.

The audience really liked it. The players really liked it. You know, the pros really liked it. So it was sort of like I had an institution on my hands and so I needed to find somebody that was in search of a tournament. My salvation, it would come, would come from

Magic Online. It turns out that Magic Online was trying to raise its... was trying to get a little more of a spotlight on it. And so they, I discovered, they were looking for a tournament. I had a tournament. They had money.

I had no money. Now, given they didn't have a lot of money, and so what happened was the compromise we reached is we ran the 7th Invitational in Seattle, in the Wizards' offices. So the idea was that a good chunk of the players were from the U.S., so being in Seattle meant that over half the players usually had a relatively inexpensive flight. Plus, even stuff from Europe wasn't too bad. So most of the flights weren't too bad. And because we were right near our corporate headquarters,

you know, we have a deal with local hotels. We could get a really, really good rate. You know, we're in the middle of Renton. It's not, the hotel rates in Renton aren't too bad. So we were able to fly them out at not too bad an expense. We could put them up in the hotel pretty cheaply. So, you know, Rio de Janeiro, Cape Town, Sydney, Seattle, Washington. So the staff invitation was scaled down a little bit. I mean, there was no, I mean, I guess we had a tour. I took them around Seattle,

but it wasn't quite the grandiosity of like, you know, here is Sydney. So, I tried really hard though to make it as fun an event as possible. We went out and got lots of food and we definitely tried to make it a festive fun thing and we had, you know, snacks galore and we had product for them. So, you know, I mean, that was always true. But we were trying to make it fun. And for the first time, we were going to be on Magic Online. So Magic Online

had a few wrinkles. The biggest one, the saddest one to me, was that there was no way technologically at the time to do what had been a tradition at the Invitational, which was duplicate sealed, where all the players get the exact same card pool. You would think that would sound easy,

but it turned out to be not quite as easy. And so, oh, the other thing that was very important was the Magic Online people wanted to make sure that we were playing formats that anybody could play on Magic Online, because the reason Magic Online wanted to do the Invitational was to show off the capabilities of Magic Online. And so I had to do...

I was trying to do five events that could all be played on Magic Online. So the first event we played is Standard. Traditionally, we play five events. Three are constructed, two are limited. We played Standard. We played Online Extended, which at the time was the format that basically allowed you to play all the cards that were on Magic Online. I mean, there were lots of other things on Magic Online, but at the time, it was the key thing that allowed you to do that.

Next, we had Auction of the People. So that is something we had started a couple years earlier. Well, in Sydney, we had done Auction of the Champions, and then, in Sydney, we had done Auction of the Champions. And then in Cape Town, we had done Auction of the People. So what Auction of the People is, was we went out to the public and had them make 17. They made decks. We chose 17 of them. We'd pick a theme.

And then the players had to bid on the decks, starting with, I think it was eight cards, 25 life, and then either you bid lower than the person before you, with cards taking precedence over life, or you sit down, and the last person who has a bid that didn't drop out gets the deck at the bid they made, and that's their starting hand size and starting life total. The first time in Cape Town, the auction of the people had been about creature type, decks built around creature type.

This time, I did the auction of the people, I wanted to shake things up and make fun deck building challenges so the audience would have fun building them. So this time, it was built around a letter. So what you had to do is choose a letter and then all the cards in your deck had to begin with that letter.

The first letter in the title, in English, had to be that letter. And so, you know, we had the M deck and the L deck, and it was kind of fun to figure out, well, if you're doing a letter, what's the best deck you can do around each letter? And people had a lot of fun doing that. that. The next format, we always try to do at least one wacky format, but we were, the restriction was it had to be stuff you could actually do in Magic Online. So the wacky format we did was Two-Headed Giant. And so what happened there was people would team up and then if you won, you know, if your team won, you both won. It was a little different in a Ron Robin, it's quirky. Normally in a round robin, you play everybody once, but sometimes you would

play people in the two-headed giant. So, anyway. It was definitely quirky. And the fifth format was Onslaught Rochester Draft. Because I believe Onslaught must have been the set at the time. So Rochester Draft, for those that might not remember it, is when you open up the pack, everybody sees the pack. First person

takes a card from the pack. You go all the way to the eighth person. The eighth person takes both, takes two picks. The eighth and ninth pick go to the eighth person, and then it snakes back. So, the event was definitely

different in that because we were in the offices, everybody sort of dropped by. There was tons and tons of Wizards people there. I mean, normally we were in the middle of nowhere, you know, off in Cape Town or something. And, you know, a few of us would travel there, but it wouldn't be a lot of people. But this time, we're in the offices, so tons of people came by. Being on Magic Online was good and bad. I mean, it was more good than bad.

The nice thing about it was it made it very spectator-friendly. One of the things that I liked most about moving to Magic Online was normally we would do the event and you could watch coverage online, but you couldn't really see people play. And now in Magic Online, you could watch people play.

And that was really exciting. That was really cool. And I was quite excited that we were able to up the spectator quality of the imitation. That's my favorite thing about being on Magic Online. Like I said, the downside was we were a little bit more restricted in what we could do. I couldn't do my duplicate sealed, which was one of my favorite signature things of the format. In general, the wackiness level was down a little bit.

I mean, we had Two-Headed Giant, and the auction of the people had a little bit of wackiness, but it was definitely the... I definitely try to add in... Normally, one of the things that was a trademark of The Invitational is I would make up new formats to show off so we could experiment with new things so people could see new formats.

And sometimes I brought formats that we didn't invent, but were popular. Like we had done a 250 in, in, in Cape town. Um, anyway, being on magic online, we were much more restricted. Um, so the ability of what we could do with a little less, but I was super happy. I was very happy to work with magic online. Um, it was a nice solution to the problem, um problem of how to run an event without any money because Magic Online basically funded it. And so anyway, the seventh invitation was online.

So what happened? What happened is Jens Thoren of Sweden defeated Tomi Wallamies of Finland. So it was a Northern European finals. Jens won, for those that know anything about it. So Jens had turned in a green and blue card, two colors, green and blue, which he called Forest Folk, and allowed you to search for a land when it entered the battlefield. It was a 2-2, and allowed you to draw a card when it died.

For those that know anything about Invitational History, that turned into Solemn Sinalakrum. So what happened was, it came out during Mirrodin. Mirrodin was an artifact set. So what we did is we took his card and just shifted it into artifacts. He had turned it in in colors. We said, you know what? Eh, artifacts can do that. And we turned it into an artifact.

And it's a very good card. To artifact. And it's a very good card. To this day, it's a very good card. It sees play in a lot of larger, older formats. The finals, by the way, of the event, we only did the three constructed events of this one. We did standard, online extended, and auction of the people. Anyway, I believe it went to three matches. It was exciting.

Tommy Wallenby, by the way, is a long-time Magic player. He's kind of known around the pro tour scene as being one of the funnier pro players. He actually, for a while, I believe, or maybe still, did stand-up, did professional stand-up. And he was just fun. He definitely is a player that people remember as just being someone who, while being a very good player, was also very entertaining. Jens is known for being a little more quiet. He was very thorough.

He came in second in Pro Player of the Year the previous year, losing out to Kaibuda, which was harder to beat at the time. So anyway, that was harder to beat at the time. So anyway, that was number seven. Let's move on to Magic Invitational number eight. So what had happened was we had created a relationship with the Magic Online. And Magic Online was very happy how the previous one had gone. So they came to me one day and they said, Mark, have you ever been to E3?

So E3 is, what is it? The Entertainment Electronic Expo? Or Electronic Entertainment Expo? It's a giant convention in Los Angeles where all the different electronic entertainment companies, people who make video games mostly, would come and do this major spectacle. Eventually, they sort of took the public out of it and became a private industry event.

But at the time we were there, it was still a public event. The public could still come. And so the Imagine Online people asked us if we would mind if we held the event at E3. And the reason was, is they were, one of the things that the Invitational was very, very good at was attracting media attention. Because it had a nice bite-sized, you know, it's the all-star game. The best of the best, you know, playing for the top honor. And so we decided that

Magic Online really wanted to go to E3. I was like, okay. Well, we've been in Seattle the previous year. It was nice. Okay, now we can go to Los Angeles. It was a little more, I mean, a little more glamorous than sitting in the rooms at Wizards. So I said, oh, that sounds exciting. So we were off to E3.

So the previous, the number seven, by the way, it happened in October 18th through the 20th in 2002. And there actually was a gap of a year. The number eight didn't happen until

May 11th through the 15th in 2004. And the reason of that was they really wanted to do it in E3, so we hold it to make it happen in E3. So that's why there was no 2003 Invitational. Although

there was an Invitational for every season. But this one got delayed a little bit. Okay, so what we did so I was trying to shake things up a little bit. Remember I mentioned the previous year it had been a little more traditional. So I was trying to shake it up. So the first thing

we did was, I had worked with Magic Online to figure out things that we could do, and they allowed me to shake things up a little more. So the wackiest thing I think we did is we did something called a pack draft. So what a pack draft was is we had, I think,

three boosters of every pack that were available on Magic Online. And what we did is the players did a draft where they drafted booster packs. And it was done much like a Rochester draft. Actually, it was done more like a Rotisserie draft. Anyway, all the packs were laid out. And then you started at one. I think, by the way, we might have, I forget whether we did this as one 16-person draft

or as two 8-person drafts. I don't remember. But what we did is, let's assume it was two 8-person drafts. We laid all the packs off, and then one through eight, you know, one got to pick one pack, all the way to eight, where eight got to pick two packs, back to one, and one got to pick two packs, and it snaked back and forth. Second format

we did is that we did another auction of the people. I was very, very fond of auction of the people, and the reason was I wanted to have a constructed format that players did not have to build for, because the Invitational required a lot of prep work. The players, I mean, it was the all-star game, but there's no money on it.

The players usually didn't put tons of time in it. And so I liked having two formats they had to work for and one more format that's constructed that they didn't. And Auction of the People was really nice because all they had to do was look at the decks made by the players. It also had a nice audience component in which to let the audience get involved. And anyway, I really, really liked Auction of the People. The fact that we could change the theme every year

meant it was radically different. That, you know, even though it was called Auctions of the People every year, the actual decks you played with varied greatly. So this year, the theme was artists. All of your cards had to be illustrated by the same artist. And if cards

had multiple versions, as long as there was a version with your artist artist you were fine I think the sole exception was you could have basic land that didn't have to be your artist otherwise you were very restricted although there were a few people I believe that built decks that the basic land also had the artist but that wasn't required

next we had Mirrodin block constructed this was on the tails of Mirrodin, so we did a block constructed. We did Online Extended again, which was kind of playing with everything that existed on Extended at the time. And then 8th Edition Rochester Draft. So we did, I think, 8th Edition must have been the core set at the time that it had come out. So, what happened? So what happened is Bob Marr Jr. of the USA defeated Matthias Jorstedt of Sweden.

So the previous year, Sweden had won. This year, Sweden came in second. And the USA came on top. So Bob Marr, for those who do not know, won one of the Pro Tour Chicago's. He was second at Worlds in 2000. And I believe he was Pro Player of the Year in 2000. Anyway,

so the Bob Marr would go on later to become a Hall of Famer, he got into the Hall of Fame and anyway, Bob managed to win and he got to make his own card so, I forget what, I actually didn't write it down Bob, oh I know what Bob turned into. Bob turned into a card that was like, gee, give target player nine poison counters

or something. It was something we were never going to make. And he turned it into a joke. So what happened was, when Bob went and said, okay, Bob, I need a card. And Bob was, he didn't know what to do. And so I said, well, if you want, you know, one of the things is I can help you. Being a professional game designer. I said, okay. So what we did is Bob and I sat down and Bob explained to me what he wanted. So what Bob was very eager for was a cheap black creature that had card advantage. And so I worked with him.

And we went back and forth in fact this happened there was a pro tour in Seattle that was a pro tour that was a team it was a team pro tour it's the one in which for those who know the history

Chris Pakula made a mistake and lost out getting into the top four which would have been his fourth top eight, which Chris is convinced would have got him into the Hall of Fame, which he might have. Chris was super close. Anyway, during that whole thing, Bob and I, like, Bob would say things, I'd make a card, I'd give it to Bob, Bob would give me feedback.

So eventually, I turned into Bob a card. It was 1B21, and it said, beginning of your turn, you get to draw a card off the top of your library, reveal it, and then you lost life equals the burn mana cost of the card. Bob liked it a lot. Bob's one note on it, he goes, well, what if it was optional

whether you got the card or not? Could you look at the card and then choose whether to get it? And I was like, no. I go, one, that's way more powerful, and B, from a flavor standpoint, you know, look, if you're a black mage getting into the dark arts, sometimes it's going to burn you.

And that is what made the card interesting. I remember because Bob Marr and Dave Williams, who was there, the two of them were looking at things and making notes and talking with me because Bob and Dave were good friends. And I was like, no. I go, it's not going to cost two mana if you can choose not to draw the card. Because that's, you know, that was pure upset. Like, when it's good for me, I'll do it. When it's not, I won't. And I was like, no, no, no. There's

got to be some risk to it. And also, the nice thing about it is, it makes you go, do I want to put big things in a deck that has this? Because I might draw them. So obviously the card went on to be called Dark Confidant. And Bob's picture's on it. And it went on to be one of the best, if not the most powerful, invitational card made. It probably is the most powerful invitational card ever made. It's one of the most powerful creatures ever made.

But anyway, Bob was super, super happy with his card. And Der Confidant is called Bob. It's his nickname. If you ever wonder why Der Confidant is called Bob, it's because it's Bob Marr's card. And he won it in the eighth Invitational. So let's go on to the ninth Invitational. So the ninth Invitational was also held at E3.

In fact, the Invitational was held at E3 three times. And this was May 17th to the 20th, 2005. So it was a year later. It was the next E3. In fact, the invitation was held at E3 three times. And this was May 17th to the 20th, 2005. So it was a year later. It was the next E3. It had gone really well at E3 and the Magic Online people were happy and wanted to do it again. They'd got a lot of press. I'm like, okay.

Sounds good. So they were willing to flip the bill. I'm like, sounds good to me. Okay, so at this one, the formats we played, we played standard again. We hadn't played standard the previous year. We played online extended, which was, once again, all the cards available on Magic Online at the time. We did auction of the people. So the auction of the people this time was you had to choose a word,

and the word had to appear in all your flavor text. Not flavor text. All your rules text. And so there were different people, you know, I think there was a target deck and a creature deck and an artifact deck and, you know, just different words. And then there was,

I think someone had made, there were some people that had some fun with prepositions. Anyway, the idea essentially was you had to build around some word, and so a lot of times it created a theme because that theme, sometimes it was mechanically, sometimes it was people that found words

that showed up in a lot of different kinds of cards and found a way to make that deck. Then we had Invasion Booster Draft. Invasion was the first product available online. I think they were planning to do some new Invasion Drafts, so they wanted to show off that you could do Invasion Booster Draft. And the final thing was Vanguard Sealed.

So what Vanguard was, is you got one pack of champions of Kamigawa, and two packs of betrayers of Kamigawa. That was the set available at the time. And what happened was, you got to choose a Vanguard. So for those that don't know Vanguard, I talked about this on another podcast. Vanguard was a thing we had done long ago where we had cards, and the cards represented you had

a starting life, a starting opening hand, and then you had an ability that was unique that you had for the game. And we, for a while, the avatars on Magic Online were given Vanguard ability. And so for this, you played sealed, and then

you picked a Vanguard. And now, I think you've got to build your deck and then pick your thing. I think you could choose whatever Vanguard you want. Like, you saw your card pool, you could pick your Vanguard and then build your deck. So in this event, Terry So of Malaysia defeated Tioshi Fujita

of Japan. So, Terry had turned in, what did he call it, Master of Disruption, Jin, Master of Disruption. And it was BB, it was 2-2, and you could reveal your hand, and they got to coercion you, and then you got to coercion them. The idea of the deck being that your deck was more suited to be coercion, because you were more aggressive and fast, and that your card pool was of more equal quality, where your opponent might be

saving things and holding things, you know, and so you were able to go after and get their stuff. What happened with this card is it turned into Rakdos Augur Mage. So instead of being BB22, it became a BBR, so Black, Black, Red, 3-2 with First Strike. And it ended up going into Descension because we wanted it to be a Black, Red card. So Bob's card had gone into Ravnica, and then Terry's card went into dissension. So the first time that in one block two different Invitational cards show up, we kind of heard it along because it made more sense in Ravnica

than it made in, what's it say, after Ravnica, was Time Spiral. It made less sense than Time Spiral. So we saw an opportunity to rush it and we got it into dissension, which Rakdos, Black Red, was part of that. And that's another reason that it was a black-red card.

At the event, by the way, we did this other thing in which we allowed the public to vote on one of the cards made by the players. What we always did is the players would make their cards, we always would show off the cards the players were playing for. And then we would work with the winner to massage their card. I mean, we'd go through development, sometimes design. But this year, and only this year,

we tried a thing where we let the public pick a card and then we made it. And the person whose card we made, they didn't appear on the card because they weren't a winner. And I just realized I didn't write the name of the card. So Shoshi Fujita made the card. It was a land that if you went second, it helps you if you didn't go first, I think. Anyway, I forgot the name of the land. It was a land. His land, I think, showed up...

I think his land was in Champions of Kamigawa. I did not write down the name of his land. You guys at home could be screaming out the answer. But it was a land that cared about whether you went first or second in the game. And I think had an ability that only mattered if you went second. And it didn't...

You couldn't use it if you went first. Anyway, that whole thing didn't really go didn't, you couldn't use it if you went first. Anyway, that whole thing didn't really go over that well. We were trying to find, one of the things we were constantly trying to do with the Invitational

is we were trying to find out ways to get the audience more involved. The Auction of the People was, that's why we let the audience vote in some members. You know, there was always players vote

to get people into the Auction of the People. I'm not even saying, into the Invitational. And, this was just another thing, another way to try to get people into the auction with the people. I'm sorry, into the Invitational. And this was just another thing, another way to try to get people involved. Being on Magic Online, we were having more people watching.

So we were trying to do more things. One of the things that's very interesting is if you watch the history of the Invitational is when it started, it was in the magazine. We would send reporters. We'd write an article about it. Like if you wanted to know about it, it really it was in the magazine. We would send reporters. We'd write an article about it. Like, if you wanted to know about it, really, it was just in the article.

Then I started having players write tournament reports about it. So not only was there an article about it, but you then could read tournament reports about it that gave a lot more detail. Then we started covering it online. So we started, you know, you could read about it and we'd do some online coverage.

And then we got on Magic Online and you could start watching it. we'd do some online coverage. And then we got on Magic Online and you could start watching it. As the years went by, it became more and more approachable to the players to be spectators of the event. And like I said, the entire formatting was built, the structure of the tournament

was built to be as spectator-friendly as possible. Here are the 16 best players in the world. They are playing each other. In fact, here are the 16 best players in the world. They are playing each other. In fact, every person plays every other person once. It's a round-robin tournament. We were playing lots of different formats, some of which were very different and unique.

You know, we were testing the players and really putting them through the ringer and trying lots of different things, but also trying to keep it entertaining for the audience, because, like, you didn't get bored. You know, you watched a couple rounds of something, that, new format, you know, and a couple rounds of something that new format you know and it was made to be very

spectator friendly so anyway I'm almost to work and I realize there's two more invitations so I will definitely talk about those

in the last my last podcast on the invitational I need to save the two though because there is I need enough materials to drive all the way

to work and there's traffic that's one of the ones by the way that like when you to work. And for me, there's traffic. That's one of the ones, by the way, that when you're driving, you're like, I hope there's not traffic. I have maybe 30 minutes. So let me wrap up today sort of recapping the three events we talked about. So let's talk about the cards. Silence of Simulacrum went on to be a very popular card.

It showed up. In fact, here's a little interesting trivia, which is most of the Invitational cards would go on to appear in a Pro Tour winning deck. If not Pro Tour winning, sometimes just in top eight decks. Solemn Sill and the Necrom appeared in

I believe a number of them. It went on to be a very powerful card. The fact that it's an artifact and can go in any deck, land fetching and card drawing is good, and so it ended up having a lot of use. It was particularly useful in Mirrodin where you also cared that it was an artifact, but even when that wasn't so, in formats

where that's less so, it ended up becoming very good. Dark Confidant, like I said, it is one of the best creatures we've ever printed. Forget Invitational card, one of the best creatures we've ever printed. And Dark Confational card, one of the best creatures we've ever printed. And Dark Confidant went on to be a defining card. I mean, obviously it's a major, major player in Modern.

It shows up in older formats. It's played in Legacy and Vintage. It's a pretty powerhouse card. Raptor's Augur Mage, eh, two out of three ain't bad, as a meatloaf song goes. We were trying really hard. So, the interesting thing was Solemn Simulacrum

followed Yen's cards exactly. We just turned it into an artifact which made it easier to play. Dark Confidant, we had worked with Bob to make a card. Terry So Made, I mean,

we shifted it from a mono black card to a red black card. He made the card. The fact that it was red black, I mean, we were trying to make it fit in the set made the card. The fact that it was red-black, I mean, we were trying to make it fit in the set we were doing. The fact that it was red-black instead of mono-black

definitely impacted the card. He also, the problem was, I mean, Terry made the card, the card you see. I mean, we changed it, you know, three mana from two mana and three-two from two-two in first strike,

but mostly, especially the ability was his card. So, I mean, this is, like, sometimes we tweak the cards a lot this one got tweaked a little but really the heart of it was terry's card the problem is and mike long had the same problem which is when you make a card that does something that we don't think we want to push because it's not that fun if it's too good um we are a little more skittish about pushing. And so, you know, I mean, Terry had made a card that was something that development didn't want to push too much. And we made a little better, but it wasn't, it just wasn't something that, like, they

were more willing to push Solum Simulacrum and, you know, Yarkonfan. Like, they were more willing to push Solemn Simulacrum and, you know, Yarkonfron. And they weren't willing to push Raktos Augur Mage, because it is definitely a card that can be very, very unfun if you're constantly taking cards out of your opponent's hand. So anyway, that is why

poor Terry's card is not quite at the... I feel like as we talk about these three cards, like, two, like, you know, like, legacy quality cards and, eh, cards that saw a little bit of play. I mean, to, legacy quality cards and a card that saw a little bit of play. I mean, to be fair, it's a Terrier.

The Ratchet and the Ardent Mage wasn't a bad card, but it wasn't the powerhouse that a lot of other Invitational cards had been historically. The other thing that was very interesting

is the shift that we went through, which is Invitational from being kind of a world-skipping, global thing, to being a little more about, like we shifted the, the thing with Magic Online,

which I did like, was, we went global in a different way, rather than being something where the players, the players were kind of, being much more, sticking around our neck of the woods, but,

it, it allowed us to have more reach. And that's something I really, really enjoyed was that the idea that lots and lots and lots, thousands and thousands of players could now actually watch imitational games. I thought that was really cool. And I liked that a lot.

And like I said, there was pros and cons to Magic Online. It restricted the format a little more than I was happy, but it did greatly extend the reach. And thank you, thank you, thank you, Magic Online, for footing the bill for these years of the Invitational. I was really in a tough place. It's very hard to run an event when you have no money.

And so I was very happy for all their help. Also, by the way, E3 was a lot of fun. The players actually had a huge amount of fun at E3. And that turned out to be, we were there for three years. When I talk about number 10, we were also at E3. And then number 11, we went somewhere I had always wanted to go. So next time, I will talk about the final two Invitationals, and I will talk about why there are no more Invitationals.

A lot of people are always curious about what happened. I will explain the story of what happened. It's a sad tale, but you'll have to wait for the next time. I'm almost to work. You can tell this is one of the days where I had traffic today. Yes, I had a little extra traffic today. I had enough material probably for about 30 minutes, so I will openly admit I am stretching. Um, any final thoughts on the Invitational? Um, I miss the Invitational. Um,

I, the Invitational had started as something that we could show off in the do list, but it really soon morphed into something that had a much bigger life than that. And that, um, morphed into something that had a much bigger life than that, and that I miss Invitational. I really liked what it represented. That it embraced...

I mean, it kind of took the best of the best, but also with that mixed a bit of fun. That it definitely sort of... I mean, one thing I know of talking to the pro players is they really enjoyed the Invitational because it was fun. You know, these were players who loved to play Magic, and I would throw a lot of challenges at them. We definitely did some

things they were not used to, in that, for someone who really loves something, who loves the game of Magic, they liked the challenge. You know, they didn't do a lot of prep work into it, just because there wasn't that much on the line, but they really, really did enjoy it, and I, it saddens me to this day that...

Anyway, it is something that... There are a few things in the history of magic that I have a very personal connection to. You know, the unsets are one of those. There's sort of things that I just have a very strong personal tie. And the Invitational was one of those things. As we'll talk about next time, when I explain why the Invitational went away,

I think my personal attachment to it actually ended up being somewhat detrimental. But anyway, we'll explain that next time. Now that I part. So, I love talking about magic. And I love talking about the Invitational. But the thing I like even more is making magic. So I'll talk to you guys next time.