You Lika The Juice? – Your 2009 Richmond City Champ!

Are we having State Champs this year? According to the Twitter buzz from some folks at Wizards the answer is… maybe. For players like me, what I loosely call the “casually competitive” crowd, States was the highlight of the year. With Standard in massive flux from the rotation, it often felt like anything was possible… with the right mix of luck and new card technology, you could be champ even with a couple of Pro players standing in your way. I should know, because it happened to me once, and I came pretty close a couple other times.

Then, almost inexplicably, Wizards came around and said that States was a “failure.” It wasn’t doing what they wanted it to do – namely, attracting more new players to Magic. Well, sure – but that wasn’t what States had traditionally been all about. States was an entity separate for what came to be known as “the Road to Worlds” — winning States didn’t qualify you for a bigger tournament down the road, unlike PTQs, Regionals, or a Grand Prix. As such, it didn’t tend to attract as many of the “sharks” of competitive Magic, those who are looking for a reason to play Magic other than to just have fun. Winning States got you a trophy, some product, and a big smile on your face. That’s it, but it was awesome anyway. It was a “big” tournament with crossover appeal between more competitive players and those who you only see at prerelease tournaments.

I was thrilled when Wizards actually expanded States, adding Limited and 2 Headed Giant to Constructed championship. If it weren’t for an untimely mistake and a friggin’ Hex, Josh & I woulda been the first Virginia 2HG Champs!

But the States program suddenly became a failure and was unceremoniously dumped and replaced by the City Champs program, rolled out to select cities in the pilot run. Oh, how I railed against that decision! It was the topic of at least a couple columns of rants.

Thankfully, Premier Tournament Organizers came to the rescue last year and revived State Champs from the ash-heap of “failure,” and the Magic community cheered. I’m keeping my fingers crossed for this year.

So what happened to the City Champs program? Another “failure?”

Late this summer, Tommy Donovan announced to his regulars that Richmond Comix and Time Capsule (another game shop in Chester, Virginia) would both be hosting Magic tournaments with a variety of formats throughout the month of August, where players accumulated points to qualify for a final big tournament. The Top 16 points earners would play 4 Swiss rounds of Standard, and the Top 8 would do an elimination round draft to crown the eventual Richmond “City Champ.” Here were the formats:

8/1 Richmond Comix M10 Booster Draft
8/2 The Time Capsule Standard
8/8 Richmond Comix Standard
8/9 The Time Capsule Alara Block Booster Draft
8/15 Richmond Comix Magic Game Day Standard with Booster Draft Top 8.
8/16 The Time Capsule Standard
8/22 Richmond Comix Elder Dragon Highlander
8/23 The Time Capsule M10 2HG
8/29 Richmond Comix Vintage 15 proxies are allowed.
8/30 The Time Capsule Type 2 Standard

9/5- Richmond Comix Top 16 Type 2 with a top 8 M10 Booster Draft – City Champs!

How cool was that? Unfortunately for me personally, August was the absolute worst possible month this year for playing Magic, and I was unable to attend any of these tournaments. However, I loved the idea and kept close tabs on the tournaments and the points leaders. And for the day of the City Champs, Tommy was kind enough to keep us updated on how things went on Facebook and Twitter.

I got together with Tommy to ask some questions about City Champs:

Q. Where did you get the idea for holding this sort of tournament?
In any community where there is a competitive nature and multiple venues there is going to be a “my dad can beat up your dad” type of mentality. This isn’t unique to Magic at all but I’m sure anyone who has played around Richmond can tell you everyone thinks the store they play in is “the best” place to play. This can be a good thing in that healthy competition leads to better players but it makes for a poor community. What I wanted to do was bring these different groups of gamers together and show everyone that we can all play together and have a good time. The competitive nature of the players is still there but what we’ve done is foster a sense of community that will hopefully lead to a better tournament scene and more active player base. The loss of a DCI sanctioned City Champs was honestly a bonus for us. Being able to call the series “City Champs” lent a sense of legitimacy that had people excited.

Q. How long did it take to pull it together?
The idea came together late one Friday in June during a game of Elder Dragon Highlander. We were discussing the lack of City Champs and how much we enjoyed playing different formats. By Monday I had a rough idea that would become the City Champs tournament series. In early July I contacted the other gaming shops in town where I knew Magic was played and then waited for a call back. After a couple of weeks I talked to Rick Ralston at The Time Capsule and he was excited about the idea so we got into the logistics. We announced the formats for the series around July 24th.

Q. How did you decide on the formats involved?
I wanted to have a different format every week. I knew that not everyone would be able to come to every tournament so I wanted to include variety so people could pick and choose which games they wanted to come to. Initially we were going to have a sealed event in the middle but I forgot about Magic Game Day. We scrapped the sealed and incorporated Game Day into the City Champs series, which worked out perfectly fine. Rick was a bit more conservative with the formats than we were.

Q. Do you think Wizards should bring back the “official” City Champs program, or do you prefer taking care of it locally?
The player in me says, “Bring back City Champs!” but the TO in me loved having this series as something special we could do for our players. It worked out so much better than I expected and everyone I’ve talked to say they had a great time. If WotC does bring back an official City Champs we will find another way to have another series in Richmond. We’ll have to call it something else of course but we had too much fun to not do it again.

Q. How was the turnout for the tournaments?
I honestly didn’t know what to expect as far as turnout. The whole series was put together so fast that we didn’t really have time to promote it properly and I was a bit worried. We averaged around 16 players for each event. The smallest turnout being 11 for the Elder Dragon Highlander and the largest being 30 for the sealed Two Headed Giant. We had nearly 70 different people come out to these tournaments, some of them driving two or three hours to get here.

Q. What did you like most about how it all went?
The feeling of community that I wanted to try and bring to Richmond is here! I met a ton of players who are regulars at Time Capsule and I know a lot of my players went down there for the first time during this series. An unforeseen bonus came in the form of a trio coming down from Northern VA to play in the Type 1 tournament kick starting a bi-monthly Vintage tournament. One of the things I didn’t expect was that actual Type 1 players would be interested in coming down just for that event even though they didn’t know anything about the City Champs series. It worked out great, and I look forward to seeing those guys in October.

Q. What did you like least?
I didn’t get to play! Sometimes it’s tough being the TO and watching everyone have such a good time. The only other real negative I found were the angry wives. Five weeks of Magic tournaments with a game on both Saturday and Sunday were a bit too much for a few people.

Q. Are you going to do this again? If so, will you be doing it the same or changing some things?
We absolutely will be doing this again! Even if WotC brings back City Champs we will call it something else and keep going. We had such a good time with this series that I can’t imagine why we wouldn’t do it again. We did learn a few valuable lessons that will make planning next year’s event even better. We will be starting in mid June and running ONE event a week until mid August alternating venues.

Q. Have you seen anything you really like from the Zendikar previews?
I’ve seen a bunch of stuff I like. Like you, I am an old Green player so I am a little disappointed there, but I’ve seen so many cards that have me excited for EDH. Angels and Angel killers, traps and full-art lands. There is a lot of stuff in this set that will see a lot of play in EDH. I don’t really play standard but I heard a rumor that some of these cards might be good for that too.

I want to once again say thank you to everyone who came out and played at Richmond Comix and The Time Capsule this summer. We had a great time and I hope you did too. Congratulations again to Andrew Geiss, Richmond City Champion!

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention Nathan Groves. At the end of the series he was standing alone at the top spot as the points leader. Unfortunately due to circumstances beyond his control, he couldn’t make it to the top 16. I feel like he needs a little recognition as the City Champs points leader.

I also caught up with our City Champ, Andrew Geiss. I was thrilled to hear he’d won Champs because I knew the love of rogue decks beats in his chest. Some of you may remember me highlighting his Ad Nauseam deck before the Seismic Assault/Swans deck took off. Even when he netdecks, they tend to be off the beaten path. I asked him to give us an overview on his experience with City Champs, and then presented him with some Q&A afterwards.

“I knew going into the tournament series I was going to have to leverage on the Limited events because my Standard skills have always sucked,” Andrew said. “Overall I went 10-2 over the course of 3 drafts during the tournament series, taking first, second, and first. In Constructed I went 7-5-1…and one of those wins was a bye! So I guess I was right that I would have to leverage on my drafting skills. I was 2 weeks behind when I found out about the series. I went to a Shards-Conflux-Reborn draft to start my series off and drafted a mediocre Naya deck…well, until I got to pack 2 and drafted 2 copies of Behemoth Sledge! That card just gets there. Unfortunately I don’t have that list anymore. That put me firmly at 5 points, and with 5 points I knew I would get into Top 16 if I just attended a few more events.

“The following week I went and played Standard with a Top 8 Draft. That’s my style of tourney! I took a rogue-style deck based around a PTQ list that I had come across, and figured I could pull a 3-2 with it and then again let my draft skills shine. I saw this PTQ list and played the same main deck but changed the sideboard slightly. I always loved Primalcrux. I had played a similar style deck with Impromptu Raid and Dramatic Entrance and really liked it, so when I came across this it was perfect. I don’t remember what was in my sideboard although I remember gaining 48 life off a Phosphorescent Feast against a mono red deck in one game.” (That would be Adrian Sullivan Ivan Drago — Bennie)