'Fun' with d-travel and gadgeteering

This game just isn't going anywhere. We had a session of the GURPS Neverwhere game that I'm running, and once again, not much happened.

Most of the night was spent with Murdock looking up the rules for designing his gadgets. Since, you know, it takes him a few minutes in game-time to build more or less anything he wants, but hours or real-time to figure out what exactly it'll end up as. v.v

( game summary )

Betrayers' Prerelease Tournament of Tedium!

I decided to go to the pre-release for Betrayers of Kamigawa, charmed by both the promise of a free Ink-Eyes promo (such a ky00te little ratty!) and the possibility of winning a few boosters before they were out on the street...

It was in Seattle Center, so I had to pay for parking. I got there at about 9:30, just missing flight five, but I signed up for flight six, little dreaming that it would be THREE HOURS before flight six filled up and we actually got to start.

While waiting, I mostly... well, waited around. I tried playing a few games with other people who were waiting, but they were all testing their tournament decks for the type I tournament happening next week (or so Havoqx informed me later on) and their hideously broken combos destroyed everything I could bring to bear. One guy did play a standard deck... but it was full of crap like duplicants and solemn simacrulums, yay. Still, that deck was at least fun to play against, even if I didn't have much of a chance.

Oh, there was one guy who had a 'bad deck for playing against stupid people' that he pulled out after his heavily proxied monstrosities proved too tough for me... but it was *really* bad, and completely not fun in the other direction, as several of my decks in succession shut it down without trying. Gah.

Anyway, on to the tournament itself. The process for passing out the cards and building decks was amazingly tedious -- at each step, you had to wait for the judge's prompting. "Okay, flight six, now I want you to open your product..." pause "...only after I tell you to, or you'll be disqualified." And so on.

We had to open the packs, count the cards inside, swap boxes, verify the count, and then build a deck in 30 minutes after spending longer than that on tedious accounting. I quickly eliminated red and white, which were lacking in creatureage, and eventually settled on Green/Black. It was a really simple deck, with lots of good creatures, and a little removal. No theme, just beef.

( I went 3-0-1... )

After that, and after picking up my prize, I headed home to eat and get some damn aspirin, because my head was killing me. x.x

BUT! I won 13 packs, and bought 8 more off someone for about what I'd pay in the store. Plus the three that I got as part of the sealed-deck event, that's... more than I'd normally buy for a set. So I think I'm set for Betrayers, although I might buy the Fat Pack to get the die. A d-20 with a shuriken on the 20 should be neat. q:3

I think I'll go to Crossroads tomorrow -- I could go back to the pre-release, which is two-days long. Everyone else that ever goes to the crossroads gathering to play magic was at the pre-release, though. We were all in different flights, unfortunately, so we never got to actually play each other. I did see Havoqx's huge stack of boosters and cash... just from trading. I didn't bring stuff to trade, and in a way I think that's probably a good thing, because I'd have gotten raped. Er, not by Havoqx, probably, but by the other people trading, who all knew a hell of a lot more about the value of the cards than I do.