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More Draft and Standard action from StarCityGames.com’s baldest writer. In today’s installment Dave battles a poker hero, drafts an abysmal deck, and wraps up the weekend with a few words of sage advice.

Is it Friday already? It looks like my time with you is almost up, and so much I didn’t get to talk about! I could probably go one for another entire week or two about everything that Gencon had to offer, but I suppose all good things must come to an end eventually. Before I wrap up, though, let me drop a couple more game recommendations on you, especially for the multiplayer/casual aficionados.

When last we heard from him, Dave Meddish had just qualified for U.S. Nationals, which unfortunately coincided with his honeymoon, so there was no way he was going to attend. Right? Wrong. Today’s story tells the tale of how Dave ended up at Nationals, what he played there, and how he fared on Day 1.

One of the games I was most excited to see at Gencon – one of the few I actually knew I’d be looking for in advance – was none other than Your Move Games’ Battleground Fantasy Warfare, a game that co-creator Chad Ellis had talked about during his Daily stint a few weeks prior. Chad’s series had dealt mostly with the story behind the game’s creation, and I was anxious to see the end product. What I ultimately found was an abrupt lesson in the differences between Magic and minis, which left me thinking about how some of those differences could be bridged, and what they meant to me as a gamer.

As Magic has grown in popularity and dominance in the CCG field, other card games have started comparing themselves to it, which is only to be expected – it’s the big dog, the most mainstream of the genre, and other games should be using it as the measuring stick. Even so, it was still just the king of a kingdom labeled by the public as Dorkland. More recently, though, the surge in poker popularity (especially among our demographic) has given Magic its own publicly-embraced half-brother to latch onto when a player tries to “justify” what he thinks of as a shameful hobby. It’s not like chess anymore; it’s like poker! Like it or not, we’re leaning on poker now; I just never thought poker would lean back.

Thomas Rosholm teamed with Anton Jonsson and Johan Sadegphour (both of Pro Tour Top 8 fame) at Pro Tour: Atlanta and wrote an aborted tournament report about the experience. The editors originally rejected it because obviously it’s a bit late for PT: Atlanta reports, but once they read it, it had to be published. It’s difficult to argue against genius. Don’t believe us that a report can be so well-written and entertaining that it deserves to be published months after the fact? Read it yourself and find out.

One of the incredible things about Magic is how much is packed into each card. Almost any other game that includes interactions between cards can be thought of as a derivative of Magic. The only games that beat it to the punch were the 52-card-deck games, and only trick games like Spades, Bridge or Hearts could really be said to have cards “interact;” the rest are just straight up comparisons of value, like in poker or War. Nowadays, Magic covers so much ground that even the trick games can be done with Magic cards, as occurred to me when looking at Avatar Games Enterprises’ Mysticards game.