During the weekend of April 5, Seattle hosted a Magic: the Gathering Grand Prix, a four-day series of high-level tournaments plus assorted side events that is basically a Magic-focused nerd convention. It's the sort of event where you can usually find a number of LoadingReadyRun fans, and sometimes even LRR cast members. So when I realized the GP was coming up, I texted a friend I'd met through the LRR community and asked her to help me plan a meetup.
We picked a place and time--Saturday afternoon at GP registration--and persuaded the LRR cast to spread the word for us during their Magic streams, with LRR members James Turner and Cameron Lauder also announcing that they would be there.
On Saturday I went to the convention center a couple of hours early to run some...I guess I can call them errands. The first and most important one was to give my resume to the people at the Wizards of the Coast recruiting booth. They don't have any editing jobs open, so I didn't see that actually going anywhere, but afterward I was able to tweet at a Wizards employee I follow and ask him about next steps. After that, I went and found the free Spellslinging event and played a round of Brawl against a Wizards of the Coast R&D employee who won by casting all three Modules to make arbitrarily many creatures.
Then I went looking for Dana Fischer, the 7-year-old Legacy Elves player and absolutely inspirational pro Magic prodigy, to ask for her autograph. I'd tweeted at her official account beforehand and made sure it was okay to come find her during the tournament; and when I got to her table, her dad recognized me from my tweet and made chitchat. Dana herself was about to start a match, and seemed overwhelmed, but she still signed my Arbor Elf and gave me an Elf Warrior token with a drawing of her dressed as the elven planeswalker Nissa on it.
Then I wandered around the artists' tables for a while and bought some custom tokens, plus a Dwarven Ruins, a land from the old and much-maligned set Fallen Empires, autographed by card artist Liz Danforth for the Geek, who loves the Fallen Empires lore. I found a quiet place outside the main event room to catch my breath, bought the worst soft pretzel I'd ever eaten, and took some pictures of cosplayers while I waited for the meetup to start.
And then it was three o'clock, and people were gathering, and I found myself having an actually intelligent conversation with Cameron Lauder while we stood in line to sign up for a Masters 25 draft. I'd met him the year before at GP Vancouver and been too awkward to actually say anything; this time I had things to say and I felt much better about how I was presenting myself.
For the draft, I put together a lovely black/red deck with Phyrexian Obliterator and a Grenzo, Dungeon Warden Cam passed me. While it was lovely to get deckbuilding advice from Cam (the day was full of "senpai noticed me" moments like that), the draft games themselves were a letdown. I got none of my good cards in the first round and lose very quickly, and then I found out the draft was single-elimination. So I spent the rest of the afternoon playing Commander with other people who had also lost the first round. Which was a whole different kind of interesting; one of my opponents played a card that declared that the rest of us couldn't attack for most of an hour.
The Commander game ended at about the same time the draft games ended, and then a group of us from the meetup went out for dinner at a nearby sushi buffet. That group included Cam and Shivam Bhatt, a Magic blogger best known for his Commander podcast and his commentary on the use of Indian historical and cultural imagery in Kaladesh block, which he summarized on LoadingReadyRun's own Magic podcast. The food was tasty but expensive; the conversation (both while waiting for a table and while eating) was excellent; and I went home feeling really good about myself. I planned a social thing, and it worked, and people enjoyed it. That's a new feeling for me.
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