Grand Prix - Magic Game Show

I've been to all Grand Prix in Prague but this time I couldn't play in the main event as I attended a different event. But anyway I had to come to see the site, chat with few players, draft and have some fun.

On Friday afternoon we attended Prague Retailer Convention where WotC told us something about their marketing strategy. They it was our local distributor telling us about their strategy. After this we had the opportunity to talk to other store owners and discuss how the Magic community behaves in the region. Players are not participating in the tournaments as they used to and new players quickly become independent players (they know all the prices of the cards, they get the cards where it is the cheapest etc. - that usually does not mean a local store).

I also talked to Kajko who is a store owner and also does awesome Magic Alters. I always liked his alters and I wish to become as good as he is.

After that I went to the site. When I arrived there I realized that many store owners went there as well.

I spent some time looking at Maelstrom Pulse and trying to decide what is supposed to be on the card and then proceeded to registration. Tobias - a young player coming to our store was there and started to ask me million of questions. Together we decided to attend the Magic Game Show. Text from the official GP Coverage follows.

"The Magic Game Show, brought to you be the curly-haired ginger wonder, Rich Hagon, has fast become an institution. Players form up into teams of 1-4 people to tackle an array of cruel and challenging conundra, such as working out which Planeswalkers spend more Loyalty points when they activate their "ultimate" ability, which Magic expansion all the "Construct" cards came from, and the legendary "art" round."

We had a team of four. One a long time player of Magic, Tobias, me and Tom who's more into competitive Magic. This combined old cards knowledge, flavor and storyline knowledge and new cards knowledge. First question though was though for all of us. Figuring out what construct was printed were was too much for us. Our start was really a disaster.

The question noted above with the Planeswalkers loyalty counters was easy but still I made a mistake not really knowing Sarkhan the Mad well. I haven't seen that card in ages... Actually it might be a year or so and I already forgot its game text? Eh.

There was also one question that was meant for Czech players I guess as we had to write down names of our pro players. We did not manage to write down one of them even though we knew the players brother and we had no problems with him (sorry man! next time I won't forget you). Even with this question earning us 10 points we did not manage to win. We managed to come up fourth with a huge point difference between us and the team on the fifth place.

This is how it looked like, there were 21 teams with the last team being probably Levy and Nakamura, who in the end won the whole quiz and got their hands on a booster box of Worldwake. (if you can distinguish a girl out of that crowd than it's most probably going to be me^^ (hint - on the right))