Origins two kay four. I had skipped out on Origins last year for a few reasons, the main being that the year before it sucked mad hardcore. I opted for GenCon instead and that worked out much better. This year I decided to give the big O a shot and I was not disappointed.
The Heroes of the Journey
Me – I am awesome
Greg – Awesome gaming friend from Bing
Lindsey – Gaming friend from school with tattoos that get looked at a lot (they’re on her back, sorry kids)
Conley – Tattoo artist who has done a lot of work on both Lindsey and Greg
Owen – Employee of Fat Cat Books in good ole Bing
Joseph – Former resident of Bing who decided to move to Albany. According to him it was a big mistake. I’ll take his word for it.
Baby Jesus – Name says it all
My planning for this trip was very, very poor. Luckily, I mised a whole lot and things went smoothly. I sort of never figured out a ride or a place to stay. Luckily, my friends ruled and just assumed I was going. I don’t know whether that’s good or just really, really sad. The joys of being a gamer. A week or so before the con I was, as per usual, hanging out at some unGodly hour at Denny’s with Owen and Greg going over the list of expenses for the trip and just getting the loose ends together. This is also where I learned how to play Satan*.
After doing all the math, I spend the next week getting ready. Unfortunately none of my preparations involved actually preparing for the trip, so I kind of did it all at the last minute. It’s very fortunate for me that I am so awesome and was able to remember everything and get it all packed away.
Carl – 1
Procrastination – 0
Tuesday morning the demons that reside in my stomach decide that they want to play basketball or something, and make me feel icky. This irritated me a lot. Obviously I didn’t miss the con, but I would have been so mad if I had. Stupid digestive system. h8 digestive system h8. I wake up Wednesday feeling just fine, though when we all meet up at Wal-Mart, I pick up a bottle of Pepto (cherry flavored, ick) just to be on the safe side.
We finish up the last minute shopping on time and are all ready to go. At least until Joseph decides that he really needs to buy some CD and wants to use Greg’s discount thingy he gets through work. Greg didn’t have a pay slip and since it was a different store, they had to call the one he worked at and basically just waste a lot of time. A half-hour later we get on the road.
We drive.
And we drive.
And we drive.
A few hours out of town we take a break in some podunk little town called Mifflinville, which consists basically of a gas station, McDonald’s and a strip club. In all fairness, that’s really all a town needs. We grab a bite at the Micky D’s and Conley and Greg make an observation that the prices at this random McDonald’s were significantly higher than the ones in our local mall, and mall McDonald’s is really overpriced as it is.
The only possible explanation is that Mifflinville must be some sort of commune where creepy little creatures called Mifflins charge high prices for crappy fast food and gas to fund whatever evil operations they have going on in their Secret Underground Catacombs of Doom. Fear of evil Mifflins wasn’t enough to stop us, so we get out of there as fast as we can.
And we drive.
And drive.
And drive.
The rest of the journey to Columbus consists of buying ice, some guy with a mullet talking to Conley and making him feel really uncomfortable, a sign for a gas station on the back of a broken car, and a construction area that somehow doesn’t slow us down.
We get into the Columbus area fairly early, giving us time to go to the convention center and grab our badges and then take forever to order dinner when we get to the hotel. I swear, I have some of the most indecisive people in the world as my friends. Eventually I pull out a phone book and call random pizza places until I find one that delivers to us (Thank you Verizon, evil as you may be, for free nights and weekends). We get meaty pizza, which makes Baby Jesus very happy.
Happy until morning that is.
Upon waking up, the stomach demons, fueled by the meaty goodness that was the pizza I consumed the night before, decided they wanted to resume their basketball tournament. Well fudge that. I drowned those little bastards in the awesome sauce that is Pepto Bismol and went about my business. Peptowned.
We get to the convention center at some time that really doesn’t matter and has no effect on the story whatsoever. I walk around blindly until I find the CCG hall, which is waaaaaaaaay on the side of the convention center, far away from the food court and the Subway that was my bread and turkey over the course of the weekend. Frowns. The up side is that I got in a great deal of exercise over the course of the weekend walking to and from said food court. Mise.
I catch up with a few people when I poke my head into the hall just to make sure that everything is alright. I get introduced to Joe Bushman, Hi-Val, Klep and a few others at some point during the day, which was awesome.
After I caught up with all the kids, I decided to check out the exhibition hall with Lindsey. She came to the con hoping to find some deals on Magi Nation cards. I told her we could start with the Star City booth and make our way around. I get to talk with Ben, Pete and Ted for the first time, and we talked a lot over the course of the weekend. That was awesome. I also buy random foreign cards that I needed to get anyway, and find out that they unfortunately don’t have any Magi Nation cards in stock. I wasn’t too surprised, as Magi Nation is a fairly dead game due to a lack of ability of the manufacturers to like, market the game to any specific group. Mise well not know what your target audience is, amiright?
We make our way around the room meeting up with Greg halfway. We stop at random booths and I ask for cards for her, silly shy kids. We find like, one box at this t-shirt stand for eighty bucks. I told Lindsey about it, but I don’t think she bought it. I stop at every booth selling Magic singles to try and find any kind of bargains. My friends are also very impatient however and decide that it’s bad that I spend two minutes every once in a while do that. Frown. I still heart them anyways.
We stop at a few more booths that I have little to no interest in (Ogre Bash anyone?) and ditch them to go do stuff that I wanted to do. I do the browsing thing, checking Magic booths for singles and a few random booths for interesting stuff that isn’t Magic related. That ate up a bit of time, during which I pick up an Intuition because I felt like it, and sold a few things. To my great delight, I see that Mark Poole and Ed Beard are in attendance and bother them multiple times over the weekend to get various things signed. They were really awesome about it though, so that was good. I heart artists, they’re so cool.
Time flies by fairly quickly and as 7 PM draws nearer, I scramble back to the CCG hall to register for the Type 1 at that time. Baby Jesus cries when he hears that we have to buy tokens to pay for events. Tokens. I didn’t know that Origins was an arcade. My bad. I rush back to the registration booths, which are waaaaaaaaaay back and far away from the CCG hall. I get to the line and get kind of annoyed that I’m going to have to wait like twenty minutes to get six dollars worth of tokens to play in the tourney. But who do I find in the line but Ben Kowal and Aaron Kerzner! Huzzah! I also see Jeff Anand as well and get happy, and there was much rejoicing in the Smurf Village. Some random dude tells me that I can buy tickets in the CCG hall, so I run back and forth a few times and eventually all of us, minus Jeff Anand who gets to do the trading (a.k.a.”mising”) thing, get entered into the event.
I meet up with Menendian and Kevin Cron along with Joe Bushman and a few others and talk some Type 1 before the tourney starts. I have 4 Color Control built and ready to go, but Steve talks me out of it and tells me to play Draw7. Sure, why not?
Draw7
4 Brainstorm
4 Force of Will
4 Diminishing Returns
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Timetwister
1 Wheel of Fortune
1 Tinker
1 Windfall
1 Memory Jar
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Mind’s Desire
1 Yawgmoth’s Bargain
1 Necropotence
1 Chain of Vapor
4 Dark Ritual
4 Elvish Spirit Guide
1 Fastbond
1 Crop Rotation
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
1 Lotus Petal
1 Chrome Mox
1 Mox Diamond
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Emerald
4 Gemstone Mine
4 City of Brass
1 Underground Sea
1 Undiscovered Paradise
1 Tolarian Academy
Sideboard
4 Xantid Swarm
2 Naturalize
2 Oxidize
3 Hurkyl’s Recall
1 Lion’s Eye Diamond
1 Time Walk
1 Future Sight
1 -BLANK-(team secret)
I somehow forgot to put Yawgmoth’s Will in derf derf. Undiscovered Paradise should be a Glimmervoid, I just don’t own one, though I did have Undiscovered Paradise in some situations where a Glimmervoid would have died and I really needed the land. Go anti-Back to Basics tech! I’m usually pretty good at playing combo, but I wasn’t in a very good Magic mindset after all the crazy traveling and stuff, and I played very conservatively. I should’ve done better than I did, but oh well. What really sucked was that I turned down a chance to go snag some sushi with Ted, Ben and Pete. I love sushi. I hate scrubbing out. Baby Jesus spent some quality time crying over that. [We even had the hot patron tech going on at the sushi place, so there were good times for all involved except Carl. – Knut]
Highlights included a round 1 match win because both my opponent and myself were late and by winning game 1, I won the match. If that hadn’t been the case I’d have drawn instead. In another game, I was into extra turns and needed to go off ASAP to grab the win instead of the draw. I ended up comboing out and putting a Diminishing Returns on top of a Tendrils after a Brainstorm. After some more stuff, I end up one spell short of killing him. I get one more turn to kill him. Tendrils is under Returns. So instead of an easy kill, I have to try to combo him out. I remove all my Tendrils from the Returns. Sigh.
After I scrub out, I chat with Ben and Kerz for a while. We decide that the 9 AM tourney Friday would be Fun Deck Day! This was Revenge’s chance to shine.
Revenge of 1997
4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Time Walk
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Future Sight
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Braingeyser
1 Amnesia
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Mind Twist
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Fastbond
1 Regrowth
1 Sylvan Library
1 Holistic Wisdom
1 Decree of Justice
1 Balance
1 Swords to Plowshares
1 Dismantling Blow
1 Fire / Ice
1 Vindicate
1 Kaervek’s Torch
1 Burning Wish
1 Zuran Orb
1 Staff of Domination
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Emerald
4 Flooded Strand
2 Underground Sea
2 Tropical Island
2 Tundra
2 Volcanic Island
2 City of Brass
1 Island
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Strip Mine
1 Undiscovered Paradise
1 Tolarian Academy
Sideboard
1 Primitive Justice
1 All Sun’s Dawn
1 Timetwister
1 Gaea’s Blessing
1 Obliterate
1 Wrath of God
1 Tinker
4 Exalted Angel
4 Flametongue Kavu
I don’t have the exact list I had built then, but this is the current list. It’s so good. Sooo good. If you can, build it and give it a whirl. Don’t play it in a tourney mind you, but to fling around and play with friends, it’s amazing. I originally wasn’t playing Burning Wish, but Jeff Anand insisted upon it. I have yet to cast it, but it allowed me to fit in All Sun’s Dawn and to fulfill my promise to Ben to add the card to a Type 1 deck when I picked one up. I am not one to go back on his word. I obviously haven’t cast that yet either, but I did play it during a Type 4 game, and it was awesome. I was winning at the time so it really didn’t do anything, but I still got infy card advantage.
I end up not making the 9 AM tourney because no one in my room wants to wake up that early for anything at the con. Frown. It’s beginning to dawn on me that Baby Jesus cries quite a bit on this trip. I should probably kick him for being such a baby.
I get to the con around 11ish and chat with the boys. Kerzner has a temper tantrum because no one showed up to play. I send him to the corner while I talk with his mother to settle on a suitable punishment for his freshness. I don’t take that kind of lip. Sorry Aaron**.
Early Friday, myself and Aaron at some point decide to build up GAT and make it good. We end up doing it before getting stuff signed by Mark Tedin, which was amazing. The stuff I got signed over the weekend (not to mention my playmat), included: Mana Drains, Sol Ring, Mana Crypt, Mana Vault, Balance, Braingeyser, Fastbond, Psychatogs (which I had already signed myself. I’m so vain), Amnesia (so good), Timetwister, and other things that elude my memory. Most of this was while hanging out with Klep and Aaron, who also got lots of things signed.
There’s some gaming, some eating, getting more stuff signed, and lots of generally good times. I spend a good amount of time playing Type 4 with Kevin, Stephen, Kerz, and a lot of other people that were around. Type 4 is so much fun. I’d explain it, but either Steve or Kevin will have a primer up sometime soon I think. To give you a little taste, my board position at one point consisted of Holistic Wisdom, Vedalken Orrery combined with some instants in my hand with a Dismiss in the graveyard with a Cognivore biting away at my opponent all the while. I somehow got to that point despite my opponent having Yawgmoth’s Bargain and Tower of Gain Lots of Life in play. Good times.
Friday night I find myself in a bit of a pickle. I want to play a game of Kobolds Ate My Babies, but I also had the opportunity to go watch Fahrenheit 911 with a bunch of Magical card players.
I eventually settle on eating babies, seeing as how I could go see the movie whenever. I was very disappointed in that I wasn’t able to actually eat any babies, but I did get my trousers set on fire. And almost get pushed into a bottomless pit. Twice. The goal of the game turns out to be disrupting a wedding by stealing the wedding rings. I lie so good, so I convince an usher that I’m a two foot tall orange jeweler and I need to see the rings. The mayor (game master) was not amused and set the priest, along with the wedding party, on me after his attempts to set me on fire failed to kill me. I died pretty quickly. Stupid bridesmaids.
Saturday morning, myself and Kerz hammer out the final touches on the deck, namely adding Mana Drains because they counter so good. I had started out with four Fire/Ices(woot!) and then cut one of the Fire/Ices for Fastbond. Fastbond sucks and I really want to fit in the Drains so I cut it and the third Fire/Ice to squeeze the Drains in.
GAT
4 Force of Will
3 Duress
2 Misdirection
2 Mana Drain
4 Brainstorm
4 Night’s Whisper
3 Cunning Wish
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Vampiric Tutor
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Gush
2 Fire / Ice
1 Time Walk
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Sapphire
4 Underground Sea
3 Tropical Island
2 Volcanic Island
1 Library of Alexandria
3 Flooded Strand
3 Polluted Delta
Sideboard
1 Berserk
1 Oxidize
1 Naturalize
2 Artifact Mutation
3 Red Elemental Blast
1 Rack and Ruin
1 Fact or Fiction
2 Tsabo’s Web
1 Smother
1 Fire / Ice
1 Misdirection
I think there might be one too many Wishes, but I really like them so I’m leaving the third in. The sideboard is OK, but I’m going to add another Artifact Mutation and maybe a Skeletal Scrying, as I felt the Wishes were unable to help me out with drawing cards and stuff. Aaron originally had Pernicious Deeds in his sideboard, but I talked him out of it. My reasoning is that GAT is an aggro-control deck, and you don’t want to be boarding in reactive cards like Deeds when you want to be pro-active as much as possible, which does not involve casting reactive cards like Deed. Some people scoffed at the Naturalize, but it saved Aaron from a Circle of Protection: Black in the Saturday tournament, so nyah.
Carl’s Sideboard Building – 1
World – 0
I also played this with a sideboard a little bit different from this one in the Saturday event. Aaron was right in saying Mana Drain was really good, as it plays a dual role of disruption and acceleration. Mana Crypt was mostly an off-color Mox that bolted me once in a while, though it did enable some amazing Dryad/Night’s Whisper plays that Sol Ring wouldn’t have. Fire/Ice is amazing. Wish is really good, but I just found it doing nothing every once in a while. Vampiric Tutor could be moved to the sideboard, as it really didn’t need to be in the maindeck, and a Cunning Wish could be cut to add two Merchant Scrolls. I love Merchant Scroll and it just gets pretty much everything that you’d get with Vampiric Tutor in most cases. The life loss part of Vampiric Tutor also is much more significant in GAT because of the Night’s Whispers and the random bolts from Mana Crypt. It shouldn’t disrupt the deck’s game plan too much, and gives you a bit more tutoring power between the added Scrolls and access to Vamp with Cunning Wish.
I pulled off an awesome 3-3 performance that belies the deck’s power and potential. Despite my awesome showing, Saturday was still really fun. I got a chance to play a little bit more Type 4 and eventually a good amount of people moved down to the food court to eat some cookies provided by Hi-Val’s lady friend. [The lovely Erin. – Knut, who received zero cookies] I like cookies. More Type 4 wackiness ensued and I decided I wanted to play 4 Color Control in the midnight tourney.
4 Color Control(4CC)
4 Mana Drain
4 Force of Will
4 Brainstorm
3 Cunning Wish
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Fact or Fiction
2 Swords to Plowshares
1 Balance
3 Exalted Angel
2 Gorilla Shaman
1 Decree of Justice
1 Mind Twist
1 Time Walk
1 Yawgmoth’s Will
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
1 Mox Jet
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Library of Alexandria
1 Island
1 Strip Mine
4 Wasteland
4 Flooded Strand
3 Tundra
2 Underground Sea
2 Volcanic Island
2 City of Brass
Sideboard
2 Blue Elemental Blast
1 Gush
1 Fire / Ice
1 Swords to Plowshares
2 Disenchant
2 Rack and Ruin
3 Red Elemental Blast
1 Vampiric Tutor
2 Coffin Purge
4CC is sooooo good right now. It has all the tools to deal with the top decks in today’s more structured and predictable metagames.
Tog
Skeletal Scrying makes their Red Blasts worse in counter wars over your non-Blue card drawing, while your Blasts retain their normal effectiveness. The lower Hulk land counts also don’t like having their jewelry munched on and their lands Stripped. The GAT matchup plays a bit differently because you leave in Plows, which you do not in the straight Tog matchup.
Dragon
Plow, Coffin Purge and Blue Elemental Blasts give you seven one-mana answers to the combo itself while for the most part being useful against the rest of the deck.
Draw7
Red Elemental Blast is amazing against Draw7. Why you may ask? The deck relies heavily upon Brainstorm and most of the draw7s are Blue. Some good. Mana disruption can sometimes buy you a bit of time when they would normally be setting up, but are unable to go for the kill right away.
Belcher
Something I’ve never come up against. I’ve seen some 4CC lists playing Null Rod in the board, so I’m assuming it’s a rough matchup, but it can afford to pack the anti-combo measures in its board.
Workshop decks (Slaver/Stax/Aggro)
Rack and Ruin is the awesome sauce. As we all know from previous articles of mine, awesome sauce is really, really good. Disenchant and Shaman give 4CC multiple varying casting costs answers to their stuff helping get around Chalice of the void, which for a while gave control decks hissy fits, shutting down their Mana Drains and Rack and Ruins.
Fish
Plow is really good, but with an Angel in play it becomes a juicy Misdirection target. Luckily Exalted Angel puts out so good and once she gets to work, you usually don’t need to use your Plows. As I learned first hand in the last Waterbury, Gilded Drake is really, really good against her. Red Blast is obviously really good being creature removal and really good disruption, also helps against”The Gilded Drake Problem” as I like to call it.
After a bunch of hemming and hawing I eventually decided I didn’t feel like playing in the tourney, which apparently was very poorly run and not so fun to be in. I spent the evening playing Type 4 in the food court and making jokes about Kerz’s mom. Around 1 or 2ish we moved things into the CCG hall to be able to better view the midnight event. As far as I know, Rich Shay ended up winning the event with his Control Slaver creation that he loves so dearly. Rich gave me the privilege of playing a few games against him before he turned in. I got smashed. I’m not really sure why, but I did. I thought I might have better chances post board for the same reason I think I do against Hulk, the reason being my Red Blasts are better than theirs.
The rest of the night was spent playing even more Type 4 and getting really, really tired. Around 7 AM, I head out to a Waffle House (mad ghetto) to get some nasty greasy breakfast that infuriated my stomach demons. What a beating.
Crappy diner food – 137
Me – 0
Before we headed out, we made a half-hearted attempt to find Kerz that ended in failure. I leave with Jeff and upon reaching the exit of the parking garage, we find out that for some really, really bad reason Jeff needs to pay another seven dollars. To leave the garage. How bad. This is doubly bad, as it also entails having to pay another seven dollars to get back in. I hate Columbus. Regardless, we make good time on our trip to the ghetto Waffle House and scarf down awful diner food that fuels the burning rage of stomach demons. We get back around 8ish and I find Kerz kind of stumbling around. He tells me he has no memory of the past twelve hours. I laugh for a bit and give him a slightly altered version of the events. After disturbing him a great deal we both decide we’re exhausted and find a table in front of some obscure card game’s booth to watch each other’s backs whilst we sleep. Card gamers are mad sketchy, you’d all do well to remember that.
I spend the next three hours in a stupor, stumbling from sleeping spot to sleeping spot, eventually ending up outside the CCG hall. At about eleven Greg and Lindsey come up to me and yell out”Satan!” My dice are three feet away and I can’t lift my head six inches, so I scoop. They ask me to wait about an hour while they tie up loose ends and try to find Conley. I agree and end up crashing in front of the registration booths. At about noon, I see a shadow come over me and look up to see Conley, arms full of notebooks and loose paper. He also asks me to wait for about a half hour while he goes to a seminar on something related to pimping out your art. I figure, why not, so I go back to”sleep” and wait for everyone to come back.
About twenty minutes later, Greg and Lindsey show up and start picking through the stuff they bought over the course of the weekend. Some really shady character comes up to us and gets really friendly and talks about gaming stuff that I really didn’t pay attention to. His friends come by and holler at him to leave about five minutes later much to our relief. Conley also shows up around this time and we pack up our stuff and head to the parking garage.
When we get to the car I tear into the trunk to check and see if they got my chargers like I asked, and to grab my toothbrush and toothpaste to brush my teeth. I hate going more than twelve hours without brushing my teeth. Much to my chagrin, my MP3 player’s charger is missing, along with my travel toothbrush and paste. Frowns. I grab my Strongbad hoodie and curl into a ball and get a little very low-qual sleep for a couple of hours. When I wake up, I’m feeling fine and dandy, if not a little woozy and begin cracking jokes and listening to stories. Apparently Conley paid a visit to Ed Beard’s booth, who was very impressed with Conley’s work. He advised him to go to a comic convention early next spring and to say that Ed sent him. Conley now gets to spend about eight months cranking out as many copies of his comic books as quickly as possible. But good for him. As I said earlier, I heart Magic artists.
We stop off in Mifflinville again to gas up and to”accidentally” miss their urinals. Owned. The tires apparently need air, and obviously the Mifflins hid their air machine from us in an attempt to strand us in their capital to force us into slavery. Well, we still had air in our tires, and as long as we did, we’d drive as far away from Mifflinville the tires would allow. We are quite fortunate to not get hit by the Tesla death machine outside of Wilkes-Barre, which upon sighting said machine, prompted a flurry of discussion about the possible Mifflin/Tesla alliance. We couldn’t think of what kind of goals they hoped to accomplish, but we were sure they weren’t good.
Midway between Scranton and Wilkes-Barre we get stuck in a construction zone for about a half hour. Over that half hour we saw no less than a dozen fire trucks, police cars, and ambulances rush by on the other side of the highway towards some unknown disaster. I was very frightened, but luckily traffic started moving again and we had an uneventful last two and a half hours of driving back to Binghamton.
Origins 2004 was the suck when it came to gaming. It was awesome for hanging out though. I look forward to seeing many of you at GenCon and until then, do not trust the Mifflins under any circumstances. We may not know what they’re up to, but you certainly don’t want to be enslaved to help them accomplish whatever evil goals they have.
Carl Winter
Moderator on www.TheManaDrain.com
Member Team Mean-Deck
Member of the former Team Paragons (yes, we finally died)
comments welcome at carlUNDERSCOREwinter at hotmail dot com
* Satan is my new favorite game. The game is made by an awesome company called 9th Level Games based out of… somewhere. Anyway, the game is very simple. A Satan game beings when someone playing the game yells out”Satan!” Each player then rolls three six-sided dice and leaves any sixes they roll alone until all three of the dice have rolled to six. Upon achieving the goal of rolling three sixes the next step is to yell out”Satan!” and make the metal sign with your hand. They sell a set of three custom D6 and the rule book and a nifty little pin to show that you’re playing. It’s really amusing to be in a crowded hall and when someone yells out”Satan!” to see a bunch of people drop to their knees and start frantically rolling dice. It’s hell on the knees however to drop to the ground upwards of twenty times a day. Make sure you wear nice, soft pants while in possible Satan playing grounds.
** It’s time to let the cat out of the bag. I am not in fact Aaron Kerzner’s father. Notice how my last name is not Kerzner but Winter. That honor instead belongs to Jeff”Kerzner” Anand