Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #73 - Magic Invitational, Part 1

Episode Date: November 22, 2013

Mark talks about the Invitationals in Hong Kong and Rio de Janeiro.

Okay, I'm pulling away from the bus stop. We all know what that means. Actually, I don't know if you all know what that means. What it means is, my daughter, it was raining today, and so I drove my daughter to her bus stop, and so she just got on the bus, and I am now headed to work. On the plus side, it's raining, which means you might get a longer show, because as we all have learned from this podcast,

Seattle drivers cannot drive in the rain. Anyway, today I thought I would do a topic that's kind of a personal topic to me. I'm going to talk about the Magic Invitational, a.k.a. the Duelist Invitational. So I'm going to talk about where it came from and then share some stories, some of my favorite stories from the Magic Invitational.

Okay, so where did it begin? It began many years ago with a magazine called The Duelist. Now, I did a podcast on The Duelist, for those that have no idea what I'm talking about. It was a magazine that Wizards made. In fact, it was The Duelist that got me first involved with magic. I did the puzzles for The Duelist, and my entry point into Wizards was through the duelist. So I was very closely affiliated with the duelist. And in fact, when I went to get hired, there was an argument, or multiple people wanted to hire me, one of which is the duelist

was interested in hiring me. So the agreement we made when I got hired was that I was going to be the R&D liaison to The Duelist, which I was. And then pretty early on, the editor-in-chief, a woman named Catherine Haynes, left Wizards, and I ended up becoming the editor-in-chief of The Duelist. It is during this time that our story begins. So the producer of The Duelists was a woman named Wendy Noritaki. I'm sorry, the publisher. The publisher of The Duelists was a woman named Wendy Noritaki. And she was in

charge of all the business decisions of making things happen. So one day, Wendy comes to me and says to me that we have a little money. You know, is there something that I want to do that I thought, you know, could maybe bring some attention to the duelists, like an event the duelists could sponsor? Now, for years we had sponsored or invented

the Origins Convention called the Duelist Team Challenge, where it was a team event where you had five member teams. Each member was playing a different format. Usually two were playing different limited formats, and then three were playing different constructed formats. And we would run that every year. But she had an idea of doing something a little bit bigger, and so she asked me if I had any ideas.

Well, I did have an idea. And my idea was, the Pro Tour had started, and I said that if we were trying to imitate sports, I think we should have an all-star game. And the idea was that we would fly some number of players,

I think 16 was actually my very first suggestion, we'd fly 16 players, oh, I know, I wanted to do a round-robin tournament. And for those who don't know what a round-robin tournament is, it's a tournament in which every player plays every other player once. And I decided that we'd invite 16 players.

That means a 15 tournament. That's something we could run easily. We could do it in two days, or we could do it in three days if we wanted to be a little more leisurely about it. And so I pitched this idea of doing what I called the Duelist Invitational. Meaning that in order to get, you had to get invited.

It was a special tournament. Not just anybody could play. It was an elite tournament that only a small number could play. And I was modeling it after the all-star games of many sports. Here in America, we have a, you know, baseball has an all-star game. There's a pro ball, which is a football all-star game. And basketball is an all-star game. I'm sure in other worlds, soccer, I'm sure must have some sort of all-star game.

Anyway, so we started looking. And the idea was we didn't have a lot of money. And the reason this was, I was proposing it is, all we were going to do was pay to fly and put up the players and a little bit of staff that needs to run it. We didn't have money for a prize, so I got creative and I said, well, how about this? How about the winner gets to make their own card? You know, and with help from R&D, you know, they're not carte blanche.

And the card would be developed and, you know, it would go through normal channels. But, you know, they didn't have a chance to make a card. I thought that was pretty cool. You know, it would go through normal channels. But, you know, they didn't have a chance to make a card. I thought that was pretty cool. So what happens is we planned to have the event down in San Diego. There's a very famous hotel called the Hotel Coronado, which is this fancy hotel.

And we were like, okay, San Diego's not too far away. A good chunk of the players lived in the United States, so that wouldn't be too expensive to fly them there. We had some international players, but we felt like, okay, we could pull the whole thing on a budget that Wendy could do. And so we were all set and all ready to start the Duel of the Invitational in San Diego. And then something happened. So what was going on at the time was we were starting to try a Grand Prix system, a system

of Grand Prixs, which obviously now are a big thing. But we were about to start it. And Hong Kong, at one point, they were talking about it becoming the first Grand Prix. And so they planned a big event in Hong Kong. And then it turned out the Grand Prixs weren't ready. We couldn't have a Grand Prix in Hong Kong. And so they were scrambling to find something to sort of, because they really wanted this high-focus thing. And they ended up making something called the Tournament of Champions. And so they came to of, because they really wanted this high-focus thing. And they ended up making something called the Tournament of Champions. And so they came to me, because I had been talking in R&D about this idea. And Scaf, who, I've talked about Scaf, Scaf Elias, one of the East Coast playtesters,

designed Antiquities and Ice Age and Fallen Empires and Alliances. Scaf worked in R&D for a long time. He was actually a brand manager of Magic for a while. He was very high up. He was an executive vice president. And Scaf kind of did the stuff Scaf did. He tended to sit in R&D, but he was the person who created the Pro Tour. Scaf was very highly involved. And Scaf came to me and said, so Mark, this invitation you want to run, how about you run it in Hong Kong? And I'm like, what, what? You know, and then I'm like, well, Scaf, we have a budget. I'm not sure we can, our budget can make it Hong

Kong. He goes, no, no, no, we'll cover the, we'll cover the everything, you know? And I'm like, oh, okay. If you cover everything, well, yeah. I mean, I went to Dr. Windy, but yeah, yeah. Okay. Hong Kong, Hong Kong sounds awesome. And I was like much, much grander than I thought. I thought we were going to be in San Diego, but I was excited. Okay, Hong Kong. Hong Kong sounds awesome, and I was like, much, much grander than I thought. I thought we were going to be in San Diego, but I was like, okay, Hong Kong, sure, we'll do Hong Kong. So I started the wheels in motion, and the idea of the Invitational was that some slots were

invited based on, like, winning certain tournaments, and some of them were based on voting from the fans, and there's a whole different set of criteria. Some had to do with ratings. And every year, exactly how it worked would change. And I think the first year, actually the first year was more a cabal.

I think that me and a few other players just picked the people. I think later on it would be a little more transparent. Here's how you got invited. But for the first year, I actually think we just picked people. And I was trying to get a wide spectrum of people, so we were from different places, and I wanted to make sure we had some international people and not too many Americans,

and I was trying to represent all the different continents as best I could. And so the first year, we invited everybody, and I remember at the last minute, Mark Justice, who was one of the big superstars, his brother surprised him with like a wedding, with like a month to the wedding, he's like, guess what, I'm getting married in a month, and so Mark called me, he was not so happy, I mean, he was happy for his brother, but he's like, okay, I gotta go to my brother's

wedding, and so at the last minute, I had to replace Mark Justice, so I replaced him with Mike Long, and so Mike Long ended up at the very first at the very first Invitational. And at the time, it was called the Duelist Invitational because it was for the Duelist. And really, there wasn't any online coverage at the time. So mostly, the coverage was in the magazine.

So if you go back and look at the magazine, you'll see we did coverage. I did a bunch of things. One of my favorite things is this grid. I'm not sure if I did this for the first one, but I made this grid where it showed everybody what format they played against who and how they did. It was one of the most tightly... There was more information in that densely one little graphic

than I've ever seen in another graphic. Because it talked about what the formats were and who played who and how they did. So anyway, the very first Invitational, the way we ran it was, I actually had six formats. Every other Invitational I would have five formats. But this one I had six. So what I did was

all the constructed formats, there were three of them, were three rounds. And all the limited formats there were three of them, were two rounds. Here's what I do remember. So one of the formats we ran, well, we ran something called Duplicate Limited,

and what Duplicate Limited is, or Duplicate Sealed, is I made a list of cards, and then every single person got the exact same list of cards. I'd always wanted to do this format. I thought it was a very skill-testing format because not only do you have to make a deck, but that's the environment. Everybody has what you have.

And so you have to figure out not only what's the best deck, but the best deck knowing that other people have the same cards. So I did Duplicate Limited. That was the only format played at every... Well, not every Invitational. We had some problems once we got on Magic Online. We'll talk about that later. But for every paper, everyone around with paper cards, we had Duplicate Limited.

The other format that I ran in a lot of the formats was something called Solomon Draft. And what Solomon Draft is, is where it's a format, it's a two-person draft format, where you take, how many cards is Solomon? You take four cards, I think, you take four cards off the top and divide them in two piles and the other opponent chooses which pile to take. Is that right? Four?

Is it four or six? I think it's four. Anyway, it's a very good two-person format because it's very skill testing, figuring out what you want and because you are the only two people drafting, anything you don't take, you know your opponent gets. And so, with time, cards start changing their value because different players are going to value them differently. For example, if my opponent's taking a lot more green cards than me and a really good green card comes up, I know that they want it more than I want it, so that I can take that into account when trying to do the divide. Anyway, and the third limited format

we did was called what's it called? Backdraft. Backdraft? Where the idea is you're trying to draft the worst possible deck, and then your opponent plays with the deck you draft. And that format taught me a very important lesson because

it is a fun format to kind of think about, and it's kind of fun. The draft itself is kind of fun, but the games are, oh my God, painful. Painful, painful, painful. And I learned that part of doing a good spectator thing is that the games have to not just be fun to watch happen,

but watch being played. And I think that's an important lesson of any kind of invitational thing in which you want people to watch the games. I mean, here we were reporting it, so I guess it was a little less painful. But later on, we would start covering the imitationals online.

Oh, the other funny story about Backdraft is, so one of the people I invited to it was a guy named Bertrand Lestray. Bertrand Lestray had come in second at the very first Magic Worlds, being beaten by Zach Dolan. And then he came in second at the very first Pro Tour, being beaten by Michael Locanto. And so I felt like, oh my God, he's one of the, you know, if we're talking about all-stars of the game, you know, the guy who came second at the first of two

major, major things. And I invited him, and it turned out that he had kind of stopped playing Magic, but hey, it was a free trip to Hong Kong, so he, you know, he dusted off his cards and the problem was that he just was very roughy. So he lost every single match he played, except he went 2-0 in the backdraft. I mean, he went undefeated in the backdraft. He went undefeated in the backdraft. And the running joke of the tournament was no one told him it was backdraft.

But anyway, I like Petron. Petron was a lot of fun. And in fact, Petron didn't even come in last in that format. A guy named Emil Feldman came in last. Emil was a three-year Swiss champion, I think, or had been on the Swiss team three years in a row. Might have even been the Swiss national champion three years in a row.

Anyway, we were looking for more non-American players, and he had a really good record at his nationals, and he, too, had kind of not stopped playing at the time, so he also was kind of rusty. In the future, we'd get more actively playing players. But anyway, Hong Kong was cool. In Hong Kong, we had the tournament in a mall

because it turns out a popular thing in Asia is that you have big events, especially game tournaments, in malls. So we were in a mall. I remember when we were going there, there was this giant curved elevator, escalator that you had to go up. It was really

cool. I'd never seen anything like it. And it was a fancy mall. And I remember it was very funny because at that event, not only did I come, Scaf came and Richard Garfield came. A bunch of people came. And Richard was in, I believe,

Richard's first trip to Hong Kong. And he was inspired by that trip to make a game. I'm not going to remember the game. The game was called, and the design was called Hong Kong Signs. What was it called? It's a game in which you have signs, and you have a folder of card sleeves, three-by-three card sleeves. And the idea was you were trying to get advertising space, but as people got cut in front of you,

they might block your sign. And it was called, ah, I don't remember the name of this game. It's something we put out, Richard made, it's a wizard product. Ah, I'm blanking. This is the joy of me doing a podcast. I'm sure in my comments, all people like telling me 8,000 times what the name of this game is. So anyway, in Hong Kong, I don't remember the constructed formats. One of the things I would always do back in the day is I would make of the three formats, well, usually what I would do, this is the very first one,

so this might not have been true, I would do one normal format, meaning a format that was just applicable. I would do one format where you had to build something in which was a weird deck building format. and then I would do a third format usually that had some constructed component to it, but didn't force the players to have to build it ahead of time. When I get to that, I'll explain how I did that. I think for the first year, I just had them build three decks, and so one of the big complaints

about the Invitational, I mean, one of the things I would get from the players was, there was no money on the line, it was fun, it was for honor, and so the players, one of the things I would get from players was, there was no money on the line, it was fun, it was for honor, and so the players, some of the players would put in some work, but a lot of the players did not put in a lot of work ahead of time, not like a pro tour or anything. And so, you always could tell the few players, like, some

players came really dedicated, they wanted to win Invitational, and the thing that's interesting is when I made Invitational, I didn't really know, like, I wanted to be the All-Star game, and I had high hopes for it, and it really took off. Well, outside the walls it took off. Inside, I'll explain, it had some issues. But outside the walls, it became very popular,

and the card ended up being very exciting. Although, as you'll see in a second, the card was not exciting out of the gate. So, okay, the finals of Hong Kong was Ularade versus Mike Long. Now, for those that don't know, let me set the scene. Ularade, at the third Pro Tour ever, was in Columbus. First one was in New York, second one was in Los Angeles on the boat, third one was in Columbus. In fact, it was at Origins, and we were running both U.S. Nationals and the Pro Tour the same week. So we had like two days of U.S. Nationals and the Pro Tour the same week.

So we had like two days of U.S. Nationals and two days of the Pro Tour, and then a split final day. Anyway, Ula Rade is Swedish, and the Swedish team, something happened to their plane, and all of them, minus like two players, were late, got there late. But Ula was on a different plane, and he got there early, and they called him the littlest Viking because he was very tiny, and he was at the time very young.

And he went on to win, and now he didn't go on to win, but then he went on to top four worlds. He topped four worlds. He made top eight at Dallas. After Mark Jostice, who probably was the first kind of phenomenon, he was the second. And he won the first pro player of the year. He ended up getting voted in by the players

the first year of the Hall of Fame. So Ula's now in the Hall of Fame. Anyway, Ula was a really good player. And so he was in the finals versus Mike Long. For those who don't know Mike Long, one of the most controversial players of the game. He was the bad boy of Magic. I believe he deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

A very controversial stance. A lot of people believe... The thing about the Hall of Fame is some people see the Hall of Fame as a metric by which others should measure themselves. And some people, like myself, see it more as a museum, something that marks history, something that's sort of there to say, this is what the game was. And to me, he was

a big part of the game. I'm not saying he didn't do lots of things he shouldn't have done, I'm not saying that elements of what he does were good for the game, but I do believe he was part of the game, and a big part of the game, and that I don't believe you can tell early stories, for example, I'm telling a story right now, without his name coming up. So anyway, it was a tight-fought battle,

and I think it went... The way I used to do the Invitational Finals was, you would play all the formats. Later on, I'd have you play just the constructed formats, but I believe for this one, you were playing... I guess you didn't play all the formats because there were six, but I think you played five of the formats. You didn't do the backdraft because, love of God, I thought not to make you

play backdraft again. And so it came down to the final format, which I think was vintage at the time, and Ula Rade beat Mike Long in the nail biter and became the first winner

of the Duelist Invitational. And at the time, I didn't make them make cards ahead of time. I would later make them cards ahead of time. And when we were done, I said, okay, Ula, you've won a card. And Ula was like, eh, no thanks. So I was a little bummed. I'm like,

okay, I thought this actually was a pretty cool thing. And Ula literally turned it down. Turned it down. No cards for the winner of the first... Well, some of you might go, wait a minute. Isn't there a little card called Sylvan Safekeeper? There is. But if you'll notice, Sylvan Safekeeper came out later.

And I'll explain why when we get there. Well, I guess I explained why now. What happened was, the next year, Darwin would win. Spoilers. And he would make a card. It would be Avalanche Riders. It went over really well. You know, it was a good card.

People were calling it Darwin. And like, Ula sort of, after a couple years, saw that the cards really were becoming this cool thing. And he came back to me and he said, look, I was wrong. This was something that was valuable. I would like a card. Could I have a card? And so I said to him, I go, yeah, you can have a card. You earned it. I go, the only, my only requirement was, we have to picture you as when you won. Because when he won, he had really long blonde hair. And by the time he asked for the card, I think he was in the army and shaved his head. So I'm like, you need to look like when you won.

That was my only thing. That it has to mark, you know, to mark the, you know, you winning the event and how you looked. Anyway, we'll get there in a second. So that was Hong Kong. Hong Kong was awesome. It was great. And Hong Kong sort of set the tone for the Invitational. So what happened was I got contacted by the South American or Brazilian office.

And they were like, oh, we, or maybe they contacted Wendy. Anyway, they contacted us and they said, we would really like to host the Magic Invitational, sorry, the Duelist Invitational. So year two, Rio de Janeiro. Originally we were working on this budget, we were going to be nearby San Diego and all of a sudden it starts taking off

and local offices were very excited to host. So what was happening is the Duelists would pay for part of it, but because the local people really wanted to have the Invitational, we were getting sponsored by other people. And so the Brazilian office co-sponsored it with us. And so the second Magic Invitational, sorry, the doulas Invitational,

still wasn't the Magic Invitational. The second doulas Invitational was in sunny Rio de Janeiro. Now, I had never been to South America. In fact, I've never since been to South America. This was my one trip. Oh, I should point out, this is to me an awesome fact, that the Magic Invitational has been in every continent save Antarctica. That's pretty awesome to me.

In fact, I often talk about how magic has guided me to every continent save Antarctica. And the funny thing is, the Invitational has guided me to every continent, you can say that in an article, and the funny thing is, the Invitational's guided me to every continent. In fact, both my single trip to Africa and my single trip to South America were both for the Magic Invitational. I've been to Europe and Asia and Australia multiple times, but I was Rio de Janeiro, later I was in Cape Town,

those are my two trips so far to South America and to Africa. Okay, Rio de Janeiro, you'll find later I was in Cape Town. Those are my two trips so far to South America and to Africa. Okay, Rio de Janeiro, it was fun. So one of the things that we did that started in Hong Kong was because we were invited by the local people and we wanted the players to get adjusted to the time, we would come in early and we would have a tour. So in the early invitationals, we would always have a tour. So in Hong Kong, they took us out, we saw all the different

things, we saw temples and all sorts of cool things. And then in Rio de Janeiro, they took us out, and we saw, once again, it was a... Where did we go? Actually, did the tour get cancelled in Rio? Oh, I know what happened, was they were going to do a tour and something happened.

So I ended up taking out the players on the tour. Although a more abbreviated tour. But we went out to the beaches and saw a bunch of different areas. I guess the Rio tour wasn't as fancy as some of the later tours. But anyway, we had Rio. We had a bunch of players. But anyway, we had Rio, we had a bunch of players. So this time, there were two players that weren't able to make it,

one of which I found out ahead of time, a guy named John Yoo. And so I replaced it with another player. I forget who replaced him. But one player, a guy named Jason Zila, who was out of Los Angeles, a young kid, who top-aided a couple pro tours. He canceled at the absolute last minute, and I was not able to replace him. So Rio only had 15 players, and the joke of the tournament was that I kept Jason Zila. To play Jason Zila meant you got the bye, because Jason wasn't there. But every round, as I called up pairings, I would just pair them against Jason Zila.

And that meant that you got the buy. And that tournament, the finals of that tournament were, can I remember this? What? Darla, oh yeah, right. Darla Castle versus from the Czech Republic,

Jakob Schlemmer. Jakob had won, Jakob Schlemmer. Jakob had won... Jakob won the world championship the year before? I think he had. I think he was the world champion. Anyway, oh, so Rio, by the way, so we go down to Rio, and it is 104 degrees in the shade.

No, in the shade and the sun. Maybe in the shade. It was hot. I guess the shade would make it hotter. It was hot. So we the shade would make it hotter. It was hot. So we were together with this Grand Prix. And in fact, John Finkel and Steve Omen Schwartz and

Adam Katz, a bunch of pro players came down to play in the event. They weren't in the Invitational, but they were playing in the event. So the Invitational, by the way, so we were in this old building. And so they stuck up in this glass room that was the only air conditioned room in the whole building and mind you, mind you, Rio was hot

hot, hot, hot, hot maybe the hottest I've ever been I remember being in my room and I was just like sweat dripping off me and I opened the window and like just hot air blows in Rio was very hot, Rio was lovely, it was gorgeous it was beautiful, but it was hot and we were there in, I think, their summer.

We were there in our winter, but it was their summer. And so we were in this air-conditioned room. And up above, the Grand Prix was on the second floor, pretty much in the hottest place. Like, not only was it hot in Rio, but they were in this building, and the upper floors, it didn't have any circulation. Like, it was just an oven. And I remember Charlie Catino, who was the head judge for that event, would come down to our booth and just lay on the floor for a couple minutes

every once in a while, and he was, you would think you had dipped him in a pool. He was just like, it was all sweat, but it looked like he'd gone swimming. That's how wet he was. And Charlie probably lost some weight that day. And the other thing that was funny is is because we had a glass closure, that all the players that...

In the States, you know, seeing pro players wasn't that big a deal. But in Rio, it was almost unheard of. You know, especially the named players, the top stars of the game. And so all around us were faces pressed up against the glass. You know? And the thing I thought hilarious was at first I thought that they were just so excited to see everybody, which they were. But also I realized

later that, oh, the glass was cool. But anyway, and when the players would leave, they'd be sworn by players and won autographs. It's the first time I think some of these people were true, true celebrities. People were clamoring for attention. And they ended up, they had a first time I think some of these people were like true, true celebrities. People were clamoring for attention. And they ended up, they had a good time.

So the finals of Barcelona was Darwin Castle versus Jakob Schlemmer. And Darwin was sick as a dog. In fact, we had multiple times where we had to pause gameplay so Darwin could go throw up. Because he was sick. But despite it all, it was kind of impressive, actually, that Darwin, despite being I mean,

crazily sick, beat Jakob and won to become the second Invitational winner. Now, unlike unlike Ula, Darwin wins, and then two seconds later, here's my card.

He had made it. He hands it to me. He was excited. And the card he had turned in was very, very close to his card. So his card is Avalanche Riders, which is a creature with Echo. I think it's a 2-1 with Echo. Then when it comes into play, it destroys target, I think it's non-basic

land? I'm not writing all these cards down. But yeah, anyway. It destroyed a land when it entered the battlefield. I think what happened was I think he turned it into a 2-1, and we changed it to 2-2, and then we made it Echo. So essentially, his card was a little

too powerful, so we depowered it by adding Echo. And one of the things we always tried to do was add whatever the mechanic was that was on the new set. We tried to take the card and weave it in. So we would take the essence of what they wanted. In fact, when he turned it in, in fact, I think his name was Avalanche Rider. He turned it in as Avalanche Rider.

We decided we liked the name. Oh, and it turned out that card was in Urza's Legacy. And I was the person who did the card concepting for Urza's Legacy. Through a fluke of events, I did the card concepting. And so, I just said

that we had never, at the time, we had not promised the players that their picture would appear on the card. That wasn't, in the early days that wasn't something we promised. But I said, you know, it's a human, because it ended up being a human nomad or something. And I'm like, oh, well, it's a human. Can we just show Darwin? I mean,

someone has to be the model. Why not make it Darwin? So I got a picture of Darwin, and I got the artist to do it. And that ended up being a giant deal, and we incorporated it into the prize. And I think it added something special in that, you know, literally, like, Darwin was in the card. And so the card came out, and people called it Darwin, and the card was actually very good and got played. And it did exactly what I wanted it to do, that it really sort of excited people.

And it, like I said, my hope was this card would become something really special, and I was happy that when the dust settled, it did. It did, I talked about this in my podcast during Odyssey, when I talked about Shadow Mage Infiltrator, that I had a conversation with Chris Bakula, where he admitted to me that of all the things he ever won, that this was the prize that really emotionally meant the most to him, and that, you know, money was nice,

and yes, he was glad to win the money, but that, you know, years later as he's looking back, who knows what he did with the money, you know, but this card is like he'll always have it, that this card made him part of the game he loves, and that that's a really, really big honor. In fact, it's such a big honor that one of the things I get right now is people are very upset that we don't

make this prize anymore. And it's tricky, and there's a lot of things going on. But a lot of people have really wanted to try to transfer the prize somewhere else. I guess right now we have the World Championship that, well, not the Invitational, has some similarities to the Invitational.

It's not a round-robin tournament, but it is Invitational 16 players that has a similar invite structure. It's a little more merit-based. We had more voting. We had voting. There's no voting in the World Championship. We allowed the players a little more input.

And there were certain players, for example, Chris Pakula being one of them, who he went to a lot of events partly because he was very popular and people wanted to see him there. And my big thing on the Invitational was, look, it's a spectator event. In fact, the little tagline

I used on it was, it's the tournament where every match is a feature match. Where like, you just want to watch everybody. Everything's cool. Like, you know.

And you knew because of the Ron Robin that whatever, whatever two players were your favorite, they were going to play. That was going to happen. And one of the things, by the way,

let's talk about logistics a little bit. So I became an expert running round-robin tournaments. They are very tricky. And the reason is that in the later rounds, there are people that no longer are in contention

playing people who need to win to get to the finals. And in the Invitational, there was just a final two. Just the final two advanced and they played. So we had 15 rounds of Swiss, which was a lot of rounds.

It wasn't that we weren't finding the best players. It was just a matter of... So I did a couple things. One thing I did was I allowed players to pick their roommates. And then the tradition was you would always

play your roommate on the first day, often in the first round, but if not the first round, at least the first day, meaning the person you were closest to wasn't someone that near the end of the tournament could be in a position to go, oh, well, my friend needs to win. Also, there was a policy of no intentional draws

that you had to play, and there was kind of a general rule saying, guys, look, you know, it was... I used to say at the beginning I would sit them down. Oh, one of the things interesting about the Invitational was I was the head judge for many years. Later on, we would go on to get another head judge, and I would be there, but for most of the early years,

I was the head judge. In fact, I ran the tournament. I would make all the, you know, I would assemble all the decks and make the Ducalette Limited and figure out the formats. I mean, I had help from R&D, but I was the head judge, and I would be running things. Not only that, one of the things I tried really hard to do was make the event more than just the event.

I would always bring products for the players and make sure that they felt pampered. This was a special, this was the all-star game. I mean, also, we were traveling around the world going to exotic locales, and we had tours. I mean, I felt the Invitational was pretty cool. Oh, the other thing I did was, normally at the Pro Tour, we used to give away T-shirts.

And what I did for the Invitational was, we would make polos, which is like a nicer knit collared shirt. So the idea was, for the Invitational, we just make polos, which is like a nicer knit collared shirt. So the idea was for the Invitational, we just would give away slightly nicer shirts. And one of the reasons we did that, in fact, you would get multiple shirts, because we made you wear the shirts every day

while you played, because it was a spectator thing. It was always at an event where people could spectate, and also we took pictures. So if you ever see the pictures in the duelists, everyone's all dressed in the same shirts and the staff would have,

like, usually contrasting shirts or shirts of a different color. Um, anyway, I'm looking at my list. So I, my list here,

let's see, there's one, two, three, four, five, six, seven,

eight, nine, ten, eleven. There were eleven invitationals and I got through two. So,

so, um, I guess what this is going to be is I'm going to turn this into another ongoing thing. Now, so, um, I guess what this is going to be is I'm going to turn this into another ongoing thing. Now, I don't think I want consecutive because I don't know

how many days in a row you want to listen to me talk about the Invitational, but I think there's a lot of cool stories and a lot of fun stuff that goes on. And,

uh, so I'm going to make this an ongoing thing until I get through all the, uh, the Invitational stories. Um,

uh, the early ones have a lot more stories, I think, than the later ones, just because we were more exotic locales. Although, I guess there's stories in every single one. So anyway, I've been winding up. My color one and my car type type

are both winding up very soon. So anyway, I need to start some more ongoing stories. So the invitation will be another ongoing one, unless I guess I get radical feedback. No, no, stop talking about the invitation! Um, but I'll do it every once in a while. I love the invitation, and, I mean, it's neat. I can talk about formats, and there's, it's just, it's top players playing, so, uh, there's name players.

So, it, people seem to like my Pro Tour stories. I'll cut this as being like the Pro Tour stories. Anyway, I'm now at work, and, uh, let's see how we did today. Oh, oh, a few extra minutes. I, I'm now at work and let's see how we did today. Oh, a few extra minutes. I guess the rain was not as bad today. Actually, it stopped raining quite as hard so my commute wasn't too bad. Anyway, guys, thanks for listening

but it's time for me to be making magic. Talk to you next time.