Year II Invitational and Conspiracy thoughts.

Ever since Gilles Labelle and Vincent Laplante graciously handed over the reins of Sunday events to Ryan Carnegie and Stéphane Bisson, people have been clamoring to know whether there would be such an event at the end of the year. While Ryan has been fairly cagey on the topic (as a veteran Grixis player should and would be), the general impression has been that it’s being looked at, that there’s going to be something that might happen and that...they need to work stuff out first.

From this player’s point of view, a Year II Invitational needs to happen for several reasons. First, it creates a buzz around the community and pushes players to excel over an extended period. Second, it’s just a damned cool event overall and it’s nice to be surrounded by your peers and to see what absurd piles of 100-card magic they can put together. Last of all, it helps grow the game of Commander. If you know there’s going to be a higher strata of performance to reach, you’ll want to be there. If you want to be there, you’ll make an effort to show up. If you’ll make an effort to show up, you’ll improve. It’s just gravy for everyone you play EDH with on a regular basis if you play well, since you’ll bring up the level of your peers throughout the area.

There was a lot of worry early on that people might be excluded and that people had no idea about the event, but those concerns would be allayed fairly early on. People more or less know an event is being tossed around, so there should not be any worry about missed opportunities. The categories are all fairly decent too: top Gauntlet performer, players of the month, best sportsmanship and then we get down to the more debateable categories. Do you reward someone that plays a different deck every week or do you prefer someone that dedicates themselves to one cause? Personally, as someone that likes to pimp out one or two decks, I’ll show up for Gauntlet with either Mogis, God of Slaughter or Thrun, the Last Troll. Either deck can just savagely facehug an opponent and hey, who doesn’t like gigantic, uncounterable, hexproof beaters? Oh yeah, blue. Oh well, as stated so eloquently in Some Like It Hot: “Nobody’s perfect!”

So where am I going with this? How about a player’s choice vote for one of the spots? Have everyone submit a vote for a player they feel exemplifies the kind of player they enjoy playing against or that brings it on the most consistent basis, or that they just think of when Commander comes up. Have them send a vote to Ryan toward the end of the year and votes get tabulated, a player gets chosen by their fellow gamers, magic! (Pun intended, of course.) I realize there are disadvantages to this method: more frequent CBS attendees will likely be getting more votes; gregarious or popular players can sway the process as well. Still, it would be a nice way to reward that steady attendee, or that guy/gal you just like playing with or whose decks you just detest.

How about it Ryan and company?

 Conspiracy and Chronicles done right.

So everyone is abuzz about the funky new draft-focused set coming out in a few days. Cards that focus on the cards you’re drafting, when you draft them, how you draft them. Confusing but very fun stuff.

Interestingly, the magic gurus have also taken the opportunity to release a bunch of staples that will please Commander and Legacy players and that might lower the prices somehow on somesuch cards (Hello, foil Brainstorms!) as well. We all know the Reserved List and why it happened. Chronicles threw a massive wrench into the collectibles aspect of the game.  Popular cards and hard-to-find gems like Nicol Bolas or City of Brass were now flooding the market and prices were dropping like stones. So Wizards made sure our old cards could keep their values by insuring that the dual lands, moxen and a whole load of older cards would never see reprint status, or at least not as functionally identical reprints. So Time Walk never gets reprinted, but Time Warp variants are fine. Except that there are still a ton of good old cards that aren’t covered by the Reserved List. Cards from Saga block for example. Or from Onslaught block. Or from...well, any set that might have some heavily played rares or even lower rarity cards you might want or need. I know I'm excited at the possibility of opening a Stifle, a Pernicious Deed or a foil Altar of Dementia!

So where does Wizards go from here? Well, they can have stuff come back with Modern Masters (on a limited print run) or they can come out with new box sets like the From the Vault series, or they can make a new Conspiracy-styled set. Hey, they have to reprint those fetchlands eventually, don’t they?