Sweet Tweets: Tweetin’ ‘Em Black And Blue

Hello fellow social network Magicians, and welcome to another edition of Sweet Tweets! I am Reuben Bresler, aka @MoxReuby inside Mainframe (anyone else remember ReBoot?), and I will be stepping in for Glenn this week to guide you through the Magic-related Twitterverse. Glenn is unable to write the Sweet Tweets article this time around, as he is traveling across the country for some reason. I didn’t hear why. I imagine he is either doing lots of Magic coverage for all of us to enjoy or he became a roadie for Metallica. One of these is a more likely scenario, but the other one is a better mental image for me.

Anyway, there have been a lot of Magic-related happenings on Twitter in the last seven days, and the most exciting tidbits have to do with Pro Tour Avacyn Restored in Barcelona. Many players showed up early to test and to take in the beautiful Catalonian sights:

That’s a snappy looking gentleman right there!

Much of the excitement building up to the tournament had to do with budding team rivalries, which came as a result of not one but two teams representing StarCityGames.com were going to storm the Pro Tour. These two juggernauts would go toe to toe with team ChannelFireball, Team ManaDeprived, Team Sputnik, and more over the course of the weekend. This of course led to discussion of which team would prevail as the top group at #PTAVR, which continued through the entire weekend. Here are some choice cuts of prime grade-A Tweet beef:

As the tournament got underway, several trends began to emerge. One of the trends I predicted on the @InContention podcast, which was the dominance of Wolfir Silverheart. Showing up in both Star City teams’ lists, the five mana for (theoretical) twelve power monster was too much for many opponents to handle, and players fell by the wayside left and right as the Wolf Warrior stomped his way into the top 8. Here’s some opinions shared on Twitter about Wolfir Silverheart:

One of the more interesting and dissected moments that happened in Barcelona occurred in the quarterfinal match between eventual champion Alexander Hayne (@InsayneHayne) and Pro Tour legend Jon Finkel (@JonnyMagic00). When Hayne presented an illegal deck in the penultimate game 5, Finkel could have said nothing, and no one would have thought him any less of a nice guy. But when he stated to the Head Judge that he didn’t want to win ‘that way,’ the response was overwhelming. In fact, it even spawned a new meme: #goodguyfinkel! Here’s some of my favorites:

Hey, the guy in that last Tweet looks familiar…
Alexander Hayne took advantage of Finkel’s stumble on mana and continued to win in dramatic fashion, going to game 5 in all three of his top 8 matches, until finally he took down the title, which also gave him the Rookie of the Year title and the position as top Canadian for the World Magic Cup. It also sent the Canadians into a frenzy, whose chants sparked the creative stylings of @PolishTamales to make a new t-shirt design inspired by the unlikely path to the championship:

Well that’s all for this week, folks. I’m Reuben Bresler, and remember: don’t feed the (Twitter) trolls!

Reuben Bresler

@MoxReuby

Video and Coverage Content Associate at SCG