You all know how this works by now. I’ll jump right into my choices…
1. Masashi Oiso
2. Tsuyoshi Fujita
3. Gerard Fabiano
4. Osyp Lebedowicz
5. Neil Reeves
Masashi Oiso:
The criteria for this vote were talent and personality. Masashi doesn’t need much explanation on the talent part; the fact that he ended third in the Player of the Year race while skipping a Pro Tour says enough, especially when the numbers one and two traveled all over the world for Grand Prix in the majority of continents.
Back at the Ninth Edition release event in Moscow, sixteen players were invited for a great trip. Masashi was one of them. At first, I thought that they should have invited another Japanese player too, as Masashi wouldn’t have anyone to talk to because of the language barrier… but not many words needed to be exchanged to make the experience amazing. Some of Russia’s finest delicacies made sure everyone had a great time. This opened up a new friendship between Masashi and foreign players, and since then Masashi has shown us some of Japan’s treats.
Tsuyoshi Fujita:
He’s one of Japan’s prime deckbuilders and proved his deckbuilding quality again this season, highlighted by the aggressive Boros deck in Extended for Pro Tour Los Angeles. He piloted his creation as far as the final eight players. He also made his first Day 2 appearance in a Limited Pro Tour since Mercadian Masques, and lost only to Siron’s monstrous Draft deck in the finals.
Tsuyoshi could be described as the craziest of all the Japanese players, always joking around and never in a bad mood. Kenji Tsumura and I needed a third for a three-on-three Draft once, and we asked Tsuyoshi to Draft but ended up with his girlfriend instead. She was definitely not the weaker link of the team though, as Kenji and myself both won one out of three matches while she got the double of our records.
Gerard Fabiano:
Gerard is famous for his last-minute creations for big tournaments. For Grand Prix Mexico City, he’d just used the list Mike Flores posted on StarCityGames for the UG Gnarled Mass deck, and for Worlds he beat me with his BGW rock-ish build that he’d put together only minutes before the event had started. Of course, it’s not the best approach to build your deck at the last minute, but the results Gerard posts with his five-minute-builds show that it can work out if you have enough feel for the game.
Last season, in between Grand Prix Salt Lake City and Mexico, Gerard invited Rogier Maaten, Frank Karsten, and myself to come over to his house and stay there for a week while he showed us everything he liked about the United States. This included a trip to the US Open Tennis that had just started, and even going to a concert of Frank Karsten’s favorite artist Hilary Duff. [No wonder Gerard has his own Fan Club… – Craig]
Osyp Lebedowicz:
While it’s true that the last result counts most heavily and Osyp has not performed up to his supposed mastery for quite some time now, I recently found out that he has won a Pro Tour even though he forgot to play a second turn Lightning Rift and tried to hide it from the cameras. The talent part might be hidden somewhere deep inside, but it is still in there somewhere. Who knows when Osyp will get his groove back and start to win matches again…
Anyone who’s ever read one of Osyp’s tournament reports, commonly known as “the Black Perspective” series, knows that Osyp is quite the joker and loves to share funny stories about some of the Pro Tour’s well-known competitors. If he feels that there aren’t enough tales to tell, he’ll slightly bend the truth – only slightly – and share another entertaining story.
Neil Reeves:
As I’m writing this, Neil is looking over my shoulder and I can’t really write bad or embarrassing things about him when the man is ready to punch me in the face. If anyone, Neil would be the one to write the book on the “Pass and Cut” strategy in Team Booster Draft formats; whenever he wishes to mess things up for his left-side neighbor, he will… regardless of how it will affect his own deck. More recently, he’s started to pick up the game again after not really having played for a long time, and the results speak for itself: second at US Nationals (no playtesting involved), Top 64 at Pro Tour LA, 17th at the individual World Championships, and runner up in the team World Championships.
Along with retrying high-level Magic, he’s turned into the biggest casual player on Magic Online, enjoying many fun formats like Singleton and Prismatic, and breaking the format of Vanguard Type 2. Knowing that the invitational is all about this type of formats means that if he gets voted in, there’s a good chance that we’ll see his face on cardboard in one of the next expansions.