Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #94 - Invitational, Part 3

Episode Date: February 7, 2014

Mark continues his series on the history of the Invitational, taking about the ones in Sydney and Capetown.

Okay, I'm pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, today is the third part of our Invitational series. So I've been doing this mega-series in which I talk about the Magic slash Duelist Invitational. The first time I talked about the first two, which were in Hong Kong and then Rio de Janeiro. The first one was won by Ula Rade. The first one was won by Ularade. The second one was won by Darwin Castle. Both would go on to become Hall of Famers. The second podcast, I talked about Barcelona,

won by Mike Long, and Kuala Lumpur, won by Chris Bakula. Both of which I believe should be in the Hall of Fame, but currently neither are. And then the, today I'm going to talk about the next two, which are Sydney and Cape Town. Okay, so, where did we go? Oh, before I begin, somebody pointed out that last time I talked about Barcelona, but I didn't talk too much about the winner or the winner's card. So I thought I would talk about that for a second.

So basically, here's what's going on. The finals in Barcelona was between American Mike Long and Sterla Bingen from Norway. Barcelona was between American Mike Long and Sterla Bingen from Norway. Now, Mike Long, for those that don't know, is a pretty controversial figure in Magic's history. He's someone who I've been championing to be in the Hall of Fame, but he has a shady past and a lot of people do not believe he's supposed to be in the Hall of Fame. There's a lot of disagreement, I guess, in what the Hall of Fame is for. Although, one of these days I'll do a Hall of Fame podcast because there's a lot of disagreement, uh, I guess, in what the Hall of Fame is for. Um, although the whole, one of these days I'll do a Hall of Fame, um, podcast because

there's a lot of cool stuff. Anyway, I don't need to get into the Hall of Fame stuff right now, but, uh, um, Mike Long, uh, was on four national teams, three of which, or four, all four of which won. Uh, yeah, he's been in many, many winning, uh, world team championships. He has four Pro Tour top eights to his name. He won Pro Tour Paris. He's won at least one Grand Prix. Anyway, Mike is a pretty well-known figure from Magic's past.

One of the top deck builders of all time. Anyway, Mike had come in top two in Hong Kong. And he didn't win. It Uli beat him, but he managed to finally beat Sterla and win an Invitational in Barcelona. So the card he made was Rootwater Mage, I'm sorry, Rootwater Thief. And Rootwater Thief, he really wanted to be a merfolk. So one of the problems at the time was, the previous year, Uli originally had not turned in a card, and so the first person to turn in a card

was Darwin at Rio. And he had made Avalanche Riders. And because I was the guy who was concepting the card, I gave them a picture of Darwin and Darwin's picture appeared on the card. And that set the precedent of, okay, the winner appears on the card.

But Mike Long wanted to make a merfolk. And we were in, it was in Mercadian Mass, in which the merfolk really, really did not look human. And so the solution they came up with was that Mike was the one being attacked by the merfolk, by the

root water thief, and it was not the root water thief. So that was the first card that established that, well, the winner will be in the air, but not necessarily representing the creature. Because if the chosen creature wasn't something that was human-looking, well, then it couldn't be the winner will be in the air, but not necessarily representing the creature, because if the chosen creature wasn't something that was human-looking, well, then it couldn't be the winner. Okay, so let's

move on to Sydney. Okay, so remember last year, or last time, in Kuala Lumpur, the last invitation which was in Kuala Lumpur, Chris Pakula won, and when he won it, or in order to win it, I guess it's better to say,

he had gone to Dave Humphreys, and Dave Humphreys was a very good deck builder, and Dave had prepared for the event, and Chris had not prepared that much, and Chris knew that Dave had decks, he had made decks for the event, and so he went to Humphreys, and he said,

okay, if you loan me your decks, and I win, I will fly you to the next Invitational, no matter where it is. And it turned out to be in Sydney, Australia. So it was a pretty expensive ticket, but Chris Bakula, a man of his word, he, in fact, flew Dave Humphries to the Grand Prix.

And remember, there always is a Grand Prix done in association with the Invitational. That was true of every one but the very first one, because there were not, as I explained in my first podcast, there was going to be the very first Grand Prix ever was going to be in Hong Kong and it got cancelled. And part of trying to make up for the event was bringing

the Invitational there. But after that, all the other Invitational's were held. There were Grand Prix's at the events. So, we were off to Sydney, Australia. Now, I was very excited because I always always wanted to go to Sydney, Australia. It is one very excited, because I always, always wanted to go to Sydney, Australia. It is one of the countries I'd always wanted to visit. I would later, Worlds would later be in Sydney, so I would have a chance to go back.

But this was my first chance to visit. I had a great time. I really, really enjoyed Sydney. It's one of my favorite places I visited, and all my magic travels. And my wife, in fact, my wife and I, and my six-month-year-old daughter, Rachel, all the time, my oldest, but at my six month year old daughter Rachel at the time my oldest but at the time my only daughter

took the trip and we went a week early so we could see all the sights and it was beautiful and we saw all sorts of fun things

and then as soon as the players showed up it started raining this downpour raining and so what happened was we always do a tour. The Invitational was broken up into phases, if you will. The first phase, which the first three podcasts are about the first phase of the Invitational,

which is the travel the world phase, where local offices would have us come there, we would fly there, and then we would always have a tour. And so the tour of Sydney, we were on a bus, and they were taking us to famous places, but it was a torrential downpour. Now, be aware, my wife and I had come earlier. It had been sunny and nice and beautiful, but as soon as the players showed up, just utter downpour. Now, we were inside for the event, so it raining wasn't a giant deal for the event, but it was a big deal for the tour day.

And, in fact, if you ever see the official pictures, what we had done was we had stopped in front of we were across the waterway from the Opera House. The Sydney Opera House is probably the most famous iconic building in Sydney. And so we were posed in front of it.

And so what happened was, one person would come out for the picture, and then I was out there helping wrangle the people with our photographer. And it was just torrential downpour rain. So you ever see the pictures, it is all the people who participated in the Sydney Invitational drenched

to the bone. And to be fair, the players were pretty good spirits. They were having fun, and we were goofing around. So it turned out to be a fun tour, if not a, you know, we didn't quite see the sights as well as we could have. The rain kept that from happening. But we had a lot of fun. It was definitely high spirits,

and people were very excited to be in Sydney. So the way it worked was, back then, when I had the luxury of time, we would spend four days in the Invitational. What we would do is spend the first three days playing five rounds, usually five rounds a day. That'll change here in a second. I'll explain. And then we'd play the final on the last day.

Because we were tied in association with a Grand Prix, we would always play the final two days at the Grand Prix on Saturday and Sunday. But the first two days often were somewhere else. In this case, we played at the hotel. Now, some previous invitationals, the hotel was where the event happened, but that was not true here. So we actually, we stayed at, it was called Star City Hotel, I think,

which is funny, because it had nothing to do with Star City Games, although Star City Games did sponsor one of our events, I'll get to that in a second. And we, it was like a casino, it was a very interesting hotel. So there were, we rented a room, and so what I had done was, instead of playing 5-5-5, I actually had 5, 4, and 6. The reason I had 4 is that we were doing Solomon Draft.

Oh, let me talk about my formats, I guess. And then I will explain. Well, let me finish the story, then I'll get there. One of the formats we were doing was Solomon Draft, which takes a long time, because before each round, you have to draft again, and the draft itself can take a while. So, and we also, we, I don't, uh, in the Invitational, aren't timed, uh, or back then it wasn't timed. Once we got online, it was timed, but it wasn't timed, and, um, so anyway, rounds would take like two hours,

so I had only put four rounds that day, um, but the person who was, um, booking everything looked at my schedule and said, oh put four rounds that day. But the person who was booking everything looked at my schedule and said, oh, four rounds, they'll be done early. And so they didn't book the room long enough. And in the middle of the third or fourth round, I think the fourth round, people come in to change the room over

because there's like a wedding party or something coming. And we had to get out and we ended up having to go to another room. But anyway, one of the things, by the way, that I always loved about Invitational is we had the luxury

of time that we could play. People didn't have to be rushed. There wasn't time limits. And it's nice. You get a little spoiled when you're doing

16-person tournaments where you just have, you know, we had all the ability to make things much, much easier than you can when it's 100,

200, 300, 400 person tournament. Okay, so let's talk formats, because there are some fun formats at this event. So to refresh everyone's mind, the way it worked is there was always, other than the very first invitation to Hong Kong, all the other Hong Kongs had five formats, two limited formats and three constructed formats. formats. Two limited formats and three constructed formats. The limited formats, up until we got onto the computer, there was always a duplicate limited. And what that is, it's a sealed pool where everybody gets the exact same cards. I'll talk about that in a second. The second thing we would do is we would do usually some kind of draft. In the early days

we did a lot of Solomon drafts. Then I would do a normal constructed, just a normal format that we supported. I would do a constructed, a deck builder's format, meaning I'd give you brand new constraints for something you've never built before and you had built toward it. And then finally, I would try to do something constructed that didn't take a lot of time. And this year, I came up with a very clever idea that would carry off through the rest of the Invitational. Okay, let's talk formats. So the first format we did was Duplicate Limited. So the thing about Duplicate Limited that is fun is Sealed, in general, has a lot of randomness and a lot of luck to Sealed.

But Duplicate Limited says, okay, let's take the luck out of it. You're going to get a card pool, but you and everybody else are going to get the same card pool. So there's no luck. And because you know that's what everybody gets, part of building your deck is figuring

out what the environment means so that you can figure out sort of, you know, it's not just a matter of what's the best deck, but what's the best deck given that everybody has the same deck. And that's an important distinction, that part of what you're trying to figure out is the nature of how the format's going to work, knowing that everybody has the same thing.

Okay, so one of the things I used to do, because that on itself is not enough, is I would mix things up. I would have some fun with Duplicate Limited. And so this year, what I did was every single card in the Duplicate Limited pool was an existing magic card, except I changed the cost. So what I did is I took some cards that were bad, that people never played, and lowered the cost. I took some cards that were really good, that people played all the time, and raised the cost. And the idea was, every card was costed such that, is it clear, you know, should you play this?

So the thing that guided me was, there's a card called Mishra's War Machine, which I always thought was a decent card, except it just was cost-decorally, it wasn't playable. In fact, a little trivia, I would try to remake the card and it would end up being the card Mastacorn. So it ended up turning into a very powerful card. So just tweak the numbers a little tiny bit and it went from being a not-played card

to being a very dominating card. Anyway, I wanted Mishra's War Machine to be something that half the people play. That's my goal. And the eight people played it, so I did it just right. By the way, I'm starting to get to the point where these invitations have online components that you can go look at. The very, very early ones, I think, have maybe to the point where these invitations have online components that you can go look at. The very, very early ones, I think, have maybe just the standings. You have to go to the actual Duels magazine to read about them.

But we're now getting to the point where there is coverage online. And so you can go look online and see what we've done. You can see DAX. You can see the limited carpool, I believe. And see what I cost the things. But anyway, that was Dupli Limited. You have to sort of make sense of the cost. Next, we had bring your own block.

Okay, this was the constructed format, the wacky constructed format. So the idea of this format was you got to have three sets. A fall set, a winter set, and a spring set. Now remember, this is before we started messing around with having large spring sets. So you had one large set and two small sets.

And the idea was, I think you had access to every block. You didn't have three blocks, though, but you had every block. And so the question was, oh, what do you want? What cards do you want? And so what happened was, people would pick archetypes they were interested in and then they would look at the availability and then pick their set choices based on what they wanted to play.

If you wanted, for example, to play Mono Red, well, oh, well Tempest had some really good Mono Red. And you would look at different things and go, oh, this set had really good Mono Red and you would sort of build off that. It ended up being very interesting. A lot of different sets were chosen. A lot of different archetypes were played. I actually was very happy. Oh, by the way, any card that was banned in its own block was banned in the format.

And this format would inspire, I would do other formats based on this, where you, This format would inspire, I would do other formats based on this, where you, one of the things that I was experimenting with is the idea that you have access to a whole large card pool, but you can't play everything, you have to pick and choose from the available card pool. Next is Solomon Draft. So Solomon Draft, unlike Duplicate Limited, we didn't do it quite every year, but we did it a lot of years. was unlimited. We didn't do it quite every year, but we did it a lot of years. I know we had done it in Kuala Lumpur, and we did it again in Sydney. For those who remember,

Solomon Draft is you take cards, I think you take five cards, and then you, one player divvies the cards into two piles, and their opponent chooses which one to take, and you get the other one. Then you swap, and then the other player divides the two piles, and their opponent chooses which one to take, and you get the other one. Then you swap. The other player divides the two cards, and you go back and forth. In my mind, this is one of the most skill-testing drafts there is. It's a two-person format. Everything

is open, meaning as you divide cards, everybody's seeing what's available. So your splits change over time, because you have to take into account what your opponent has had. Let's say your opponent has taken some really good green cards. Well, they now value green higher. So when you're making your splits, you have to understand that they value green higher.

But they know that they value it higher, but you don't value it as highly. Anyway, that's a very interesting point. Next, Auction of the Champions. Next, Auction of the Champions. Okay, so my goal was, I wanted to figure out how to have a constructed event that didn't require a lot of prep from the players. Turns out, in the previous year, we had finally gotten 17 constructed high level tournament decks. And by high level, I mean either Pro Tour and or Worlds.

The reason I go and or is 96 Worlds forward were Pro Tours, but 94 and 95 Worlds were not. But in order to have enough decks, we included 94 and 95 Worlds. So basically what happened was, it was the 17 Pro Tour slash Worlds winning decks. And then this is how the auction worked. The first person, we seeded you based on how you were doing in the tournament. You came midway through the tournament. The bottom seed went first.

They chose a deck. They must then bid on the deck. What bidding on the deck meant was you bid some number of starting hand size and a starting life total. Obviously, the highest you could bid, I believe, was 7 cards, 20 life. We would later change them in future ones when we have more stacks that we'd let you bid above. But anyway, for this one, I believe it was 7 cards, 20 life. These were good decks.

Then, you made a bid. Let's say you bid 7 cards, 20 life. The next person had to either bid lower or remove themselves from the draft. They all would stand up, and when you dropped out, you would sit down. And so what would happen is the first person would make a bid,

the second person would either go lower. Let's say they want to go lower. They might go, okay, seven cards, 18 life. And then people have to keep bidding lower or dropping out until there's only one person left. And the way it worked was those cards were superseded life total. So if someone bid 7 cards, 15 life, you could bid 6 cards, 20 life. And then each player would go until they had a deck, and then the

final person had a choice between two decks to take it 7 cards, 20 life. And so what happened was, um, the, the, the story of the thing was, um, John Finkel ended up getting Zach Dolan's 1994, the very first world championship winning deck, uh, at a steel, I don't remember exactly what, what it was, but it was like seven cards, 19 labor, 18 labor, something super, super high. Um, and, uh, that would come in, in finals, that would become very important. Okay, so the final format was what at the time we called Classic, and previously it was called Tape 1, and we now call it Vintage. Yes, so at the time there were very few high-profile Vintage tournaments,

and so the Invitational occasionally would play Vintage. The players, the pros loved playing it. They were very happy with it. So we also played vintage in this match. Okay, so we played the first couple days at the hotel. And then we played the last day at the site. And the finals were also at the

Grand Prix site, which was in downtown Sydney. Okay, so the finals were between John Finkel from the United States and Ben Rubin from the United

States. So you don't know who John Finkel is. You probably don't know much about competitive magic. John, if you were going to say who

was the best magic player of all time, it's either John Finkel or Kai Buddha. I personally think it's John Finkel, but it's a great

argument to make for Kai. Kai has some better results. Kai has some better results. Kai has seven wins, and John only has three wins. Although John is only one of three people that have three wins,

and only he and Kai have three individual wins. Dirk Babarowski has one individual and two team wins with the Phoenix Foundation. Two of Kai's seven wins are team wins with the Phoenix Foundation, which is Dirk Babarowski and Marco Polo. But once you take out the team stuff, only two people have three individual wins, which

is John and Kai, as it should be. So John is from New York. He played in the very first Pro Tour in the juniors. He quickly got up in the seniors. At one of the New York York's he won his very first pro tour he won his second pro tour at Worlds

in 2000 in which he both won Worlds he was the US national champ won Worlds and his team won the event

wanted a few people to win both the team title and maybe the only person to win the world champion title and the team title the same year

and then he won his third one. Somewhere in Asia, I think it was. And John, by the way, I believe, has won a Pro Tour in three different decades. The 90s, the aughts, and the teens. Anyway, the finals was all five formats. That's how we used to do it back then.

I believe it went down to the fifth format. It often went down to the fifth format. And the final format was the auction of the champions. So, John Finkel had Zach Toland's deck, seven card, 18 life,

and his opponent, Ben Rubin. Oh, Ben Rubin, by the way, also in the Hall of Fame from America. Ben is famous for a lot, I think he had a team win, uh, but no individual wins, he did, um, come in second at, um, Worlds in 1998, being beat by Brian Sullivan, by the way, in the semis of that Worlds, of 98 Worlds, he played John Pickle, and it's a very high profileprofile match. This was a repairing, obviously, of that matchup.

And then Ben... Ben would come in second one other time. And then he came in second here. Ben classically had a bunch of very close, you know, almost victories. Ben is a very strong player, like I said,

in the Hall of Fame. Good deck builder. Anyway, the two of them were facing off against each other. We joked it was the grudge match from the world. Anyway, in the final match, John was playing Zach Dolan's deck,

seven cards, 18 life, I believe. And Ben was playing Dave Price's Tempest Wheelie deck from the third Los Angeles Pro Tour. That was a Tempest-only Pro Tour. And he had it at seven cards, I think 15 life. So, he had a lower bid. He was, like, a very fast Aggro deck, so he bid lower in life

than he needed for his opponent to beat him. So, turn one, I don't know if it's game one or game two. I'll have to say it's game one. John goes, land, mocks, Black Lotus, Sarah Angel. And Ben Rubin's just doing the math in his head. Like, okay, assuming I have

perfect draws, what's the quickest turn I could kill a Serra Angel? And I think he figured out, like, turn four. Because, like, Kindle. He had Kindles for his kill card. And, like, you know, he had to be able to do two Kindles in one turn, or he had to burn two Kindles in. Oh, that's maybe he could do two Kindles on one turn, or he had to burn two Kindles, and, oh, that's,

maybe he could burn two Kindles, and then, anyway. It required, like, turns were for the fastest he could kill it. And what turned out was, while Zach Dolan's, people like to laugh at Zach Dolan's deck, that John's line was, it's, there's some cards in there that are kind of

janky, but they work well together, and John had an admiration. He said the deck worked a lot better than you thought. There was a lot of synergies, and a lot of things that didn't seem like they made sense when you started playing it really did make sense. The Zax deck was not as grand as people wanted to think. Plus, it was a vintage deck. You know, it just could do crazy things

like turn one Serra Angel that the other deck never could match. So John Finkel went on to win. He would turn in a card called Wrath of Letniff, L-E-K-N-I-F, Finkel backwards, which was an uncountable wrath of God. Development goes, ah, no, and we made him come up with another card.

So he turned in a card he called Shadow Mage, which was one blue-black, what is it, 2-2? It has fear and it has curiosity, meaning when it hits you, you draw a card. John, actually, here's an interesting trivia. The card John turned in, other than we changed the name and maybe tweaked the creature type, did not change. Cost didn't change. The ability didn't change.

The card, as John turned it in, is what got pricked. Okay, so now we move on to Cape Town. So, one of the interesting things is the Invitational actually managed, over the course of its 11 years, to visit every single continent. This was our one trip

to Africa. In fact, I've only been to Africa and South America once. And both of those trips were for the Invitational. The Invitational actually got me to every continent in Antarctica on the planet Earth. Anyway, I was very excited to go to South Africa.

It was a long travel. It took me 30 hours of travel. I had to fly through London. If you ever go look at a globe, you'll say, that seems kind of crazy, but not a lot of places fly to South Africa. So I had to go through London. It was a hoot. It was very, very interesting.

I had never been to Africa before. Our tour day was amazing. We went to see wild animals. I petted a cheetah. We went to different wine, wine, what do they make wine? A fancy term for vineyards. We went out and watched sharks.

I mean, it was, it was pretty, it was, it was impressive. In fact, by the way, my favorite, here's my favorite, this wasn't on the tour date,

this was the day before. We got there and the local people, you know, the local officers said, hey, you guys want to go out and see something cool? And I'm like, of course. And so they took us in a van, and we went to, like, a beach,

and got out on, like, the pier, or the walkway, and on the sand, as far as you could see, penguins. Just penguins. It's like a beach full of penguins. Now, you think of penguins as living in very, very cold climates. This wasn't cold. They actually can live in other climates. But anyway, it was like this sea of penguins.

By the way, when I was there, somebody from the office took a picture of me with the penguins, which I never, ever got the picture. So if anyone hearing this has that picture of me with like a billion penguins, I would love to have that picture. It was amazing. It's one of my most interesting things I saw in Cape Town.

When she said to me, what's the most amazing thing you saw in Cape Town? Penguins might not be what you expected. Okay, so the formats for this one, we also get duplicate limited again, but this time the twist, sorry, it's a twist. What I did was I, every single card in the format was one drops.

And, not only that, I made up some of the cards. Not all the cards, but I made up some of the cards. For each color, I made up maybe a handful of cards, eight cards or so. And so, it really was, remember, I gave them the normal amount of building time, half an hour or something. So, not only did they have to build the deck, they have to understand the environment. But what does it mean when every single person

playing only has one drop? What does that mean? What's your curve like? How much land do you play? You know, you have to figure that all out. We did a format called Five Color,

which was very popular at the time, also known as 250. It was a format where you had to play 250 cards, you had to play a certain number of cards of every color,

and you played for ante. The format lets you play contract from below, what I think is the most broken card in all of Magic. And the way the format worked was winning was not winning the most games, but winning the most value of the cards you won in ante. So we used Scry Magazine to determine stuff. And then whoever had the highest value of cards they won

would win the match. That would come in to make a very wonky final. We'll get to that in a second. Next, our draft was called Artistic Draft. This is a draft I made for the event. So normally when you draft, you draft 15 cards of a booster. Artistic Draft, which is based on fantasy football drafts, you have the entire roster, or in this case, the entire set. Odyssey was the set in question for this

event. So you were drafting an entire set. Eight people, there were two drafts that split in two, and that eight-person person would draft the entire Odyssey set, and then you would play. By the way, the rotisserie format's going on to actually have a little life of its own. do patriciary drafts now and I'm very excited I used to use the invitation

to make up formats so I'm very excited when formats would catch on next we had standard you know nothing new at the time

by the way the pro tour was not playing standard so having standard at a high level event was something that was a little bit different

and we did get some high profile people playing standard finally it was auction of the people so what had happened was I loved the auction, and we did get some high profile for people playing Standard. Finally, it was Auction of the People. So what had happened was, I loved the auction format, but we didn't have, you know, there weren't 17 more constructed winning decks. So I came up with the idea of what I called Auction of the People.

I wanted to find a way to get the audience invested more, so what I did was, I said to the audience, okay, I want you to build our decks, and I picked a theme. So the first day, the theme was tribal, meaning you had to build our decks. And I picked a theme. So the first day, the theme was tribal, meaning you had to build your deck, build it around a creature type. And people had a great time. We chose 17 different decks. I had a series of judges. And there were the decks you would expect, you know, goblins and elves and stuff, you know. Like, all the decks were 60 cards. Someone had made a 40-card dwarf deck. Jay Moldahara Salazar,

who would later go on to write the very first deck of cards, the Johnny Column, on our website, and this is one of the places I first learned about him, made a clam deck

with one Mox Pearl. There was a chicken deck. There was a knight deck. There was all sorts of decks. It was a lot of fun. The players drafted just like they drafted auction champions. Except I think we started with eight cards. Maybe even eight cards for 25 life.

Just because some of the decks were, let's see, more challenging. Because auction of the champions, they were all good decks. Some of these decks we picked were more fun, and so we allowed players to start with a higher life total. So, you know, maybe you get a wacky deck, but you could start with eight cards and 25 life. And so that would make people willing to take a little crazier decks, you know, to do that.

So the event was held, I think, at the hotel. It was a very, very poshy hotel we stayed at. And the finals ended up between Kai Buda from Germany and Dan Clegg from the United States. So Kai Buda, for those who do not know, the German juggernaut, considered by some to be the best Magic player of all time. He won seven Pro Tours. He's been in a couple other, I think he has nine or ten top eights.

John is 13. I think he's 13. Maybe he's 14 now. I think he is 13. What else to say about Kai? I mean, he was a dominant, dominant force. Obviously, he's in the Hall of Fame. He is just an awesome, awesome, awesome player. I mean, not much I can say

about Kai if you don't know much about Kai read some like I say he's one of the true all-stars of the game if not the best

Magic player ever Pro Tour player ever he was playing a guy named Dan Clegg Dan Clegg was from the United States Dan Clegg was

a tournament regular obviously he made it to the Invitational he's kind of known for being slow that was kind of his rep in that Um, Dan Clegg was a tournament regular. Obviously, he made it to the Invitational. Um, he's kind of known for being slow. That was kind of his rep in that. He was very methodical, but just, he played very exactly and was slow. Um, Dan didn't have a lot, he didn't have any wins, big wins to his name.

But he, um, like I said, he was just a solid performer. And obviously, he had done well this year enough to get into the Invitational. So once again, I went to all five formats, and the final format was five color. So remember, this is the format where you had a 250-color deck, you had to have so many of every color card in your deck, and you were playing for ante. So what happened was... I forget who won game one.

I think Dan won game one, and then Kai won game two. But what happened was, Kai's win, he just got a card of a higher value than Dan. And so what happened was, in the final game, Dan had a win, and had to get a card of value high enough that he would add it to the other card he had gotten would be better than Kai's card. And so the game came down to Kai Buda casting a card called Jeweled Bird, which

goes back to, I think, Arabian Nights. Anyway, it's a card that allows you to swap your ante for another ante card of your choice. And so what Kai did is he just swapped his card for a card of lesser value, so no matter who won, he was going to win because Dan wouldn't be able to get

past the value of his card. And so really it was anticlimactic. I mean, we joked about it being Jules Bird for the win, which essentially it was. I mean, they finished the game, and I think Kai won the third game, but it didn't really matter. Everyone understood that Kai had was. I mean, they finished the game, and I think Kai won the third game, but it didn't really matter.

Everyone understood that Kai had won. So, anyway, Kai made a card called Voidmage Prodigy. What happened was, we tweaked it a bit because we were trying to tie it into the theme of Onslaught, which was tribal, and so we made it a wizard tribal card, so it cared about wizards. It actually was a pretty good wizard tribal card, but because blue had been so good in the metagame R&D had nerfed wizards and so we made it a very good card

in a tribe that didn't have support. And so the card at the time did not get played. It's since been played in some larger formats because it is a good card. Oh, another thing that happened was when we got the art back, we weren't super happy. Not that it didn't look good, but it didn't look enough like Kai. We wanted it to look like Kai.

And so we later did a promotional card to redo it to get it to look a little bit more like Kai. And whenever we've been reprinting things like that, such as on the bonus sheet, we use that picture of Kai. Anyway, so I'm here at work. So let me wrap up my story. of Kai. Anyway, so I'm here at work. Um, so let me wrap up my story.

So, uh, Cape Town was the last of what I call, well, not the last, but of the world spanning. The first portion

of the Magic Invitational was us traveling all around the world, going to every continent, and, uh, Cape Town would be the last of that

era of the Invitational. Um, as we'll talk about next time, which, by the way, this is a mega-series, so it won't be next week, but when we come back to this, I'll leave this little story, which I'll pick up in my next podcast, which

is, right after Cape Town, I get called to the office of the head of Organized Play, and he says to me, he goes, Mark, sit down. He goes, Mark, I want you to know, I am a fan of the Invitational. I like the Invitational. I want to see the Invitational continue. The only problem is I have to cut your budget. And so I say, oh, okay, you know, I can

well, so what's the budget? He goes, nothing. You have no budget. But I would like to see you find a way to keep it alive. And that, my friends, is where we end for today. I was told that the Invitational had a budget of zero. But I was not going to give up the fight. So next time, we'll talk about how exactly did I run

an Invitational with a budget of zero. Anyway, thanks for joining me today. It was fun talking about both Sydney and Cape Town. Interestingly, it was the Invitationals won by the two best Magic players to ever play Magic. One of the things, by the way, real quickly I wanted to mention is that one of the reasons I think if you look at the winners of the Pro Tour, I'm sorry, of the Invitationals, look at the first six years.

You have Hall of Famer Uluwate, Hall of Famer Darwin Castle, Mike Long, who should have been in the Hall of Fame, but obviously he's not. Chris Bakula, who's missed getting in the Hall of Fame by votes numerous times. And then John Finkel and Kai Buda, both in the Hall of Fame. And the reason I think that such high-caliber players win the Invitational is it's a hard format. Winning a Pro Tour, winning a high-level event is hard. Winning a high-level event with one format is hard. Winning a high-level format with five formats is even harder.

Winning with five formats that are crazy, wacky, very you've-never-done-them-before formats is even harder. Doing that against the best 16 players in the game is even harder. And doing that all in one period of round robin thing it's a challenge, I think the Invitational is one of the hardest tournaments to win, I know players

would come in with a fun attitude and there wasn't the prep that you would normally see in a Pro Tour but it is a very hard thing to win, that's why the caliber of the player was so good, anyway thanks for talking to me today, I'm glad like I said, I love talking about Magic I love talking about the Invitational. But you know what else I like to do?

I like making magic. So great talking with you guys, and I'll talk to you next time.