GenCon, The Return

Ah, GenCon. How I missed you. After a nearly decade absence after going every year for a decade, and my first trek to Indy for the Con this year taught me one thing.

Never again.

Never again do I want to miss GenCon. This is my freaking Christmas. These are my people. I just love the Con and everything around it, I just wish it was longer.

I haven't blogged in a while, but I imagine my next few blogs will revolve around some of the stuff I played or bought at GenCon. But this one will be more or less limited to a brief summary. The majority of the Con I spent in the Exhibit Hall trying out demos of new games or ones I had been eyeing but wanted first hand experience at some gameplay before laying down the cash. Also enjoyed the time the Con can give you directly interacting with game designers and talking to them about their design choices or upcoming projects. You can always tell which studios have the real passion for their games when you interact directly with them.

We also played in a Magic 2012 Sealed Celebration event on Friday night. As my first organized Magic event since the Unglued Pre-release of many, many GenCons past .... this one blew chunks. It was horribly organized and not worth the time really. I mean yeah, I pulled a Chandra the Firebrand in my packs but we wasted a ton of time. We sat around for like almost an hour before receiving our packs and ended up dropping after the first round (lost to a pure red deck). Yes, we dropped after 2.5 hours from an event that was scheduled to run merely 2 hours and when we left hadn't even posted the start of the 2nd of 4 Swiss rounds! I think next year, we'll stick to some small draft or sealed 8 man pods. Probably enjoy that more.

This was also a year for a couple firsts. First year I gave the BattleTech VR pods a go. Very enjoyable, but will need some return practice and probably not jump into the tournaments of people who know what the hell they're doing right out of the gate. Played in a Medium-class tourney and pulled down four kills, but somehow did a lot of damage to myself (I think I may have auto-destructed at one point!) In the Heavy-class tourney only did three kills but a much better score. Also the first year I purchased any real art. Bought a nice print from Steve Argyle, very cool piece from the Magic: The Gathering universe (but if its on an actual card, I haven't seen it) with Chandra facing off to prepare for a duel with Jace's arm in the foreground with water floating around his hand. I'll have to get a good pic of it and post it later. Also bought a custom Magic playmat for my companion of the Obsidian Champion from Legend of the Five Rings, pictured below. Both signed for very reasonable prices - I'm sure we'll be revisiting this talented artist in the future.

Obsidian Champion II. I wish I had a demon mantis to play with!

I was going to blog about a bit more of the stuff we did, but running out of time here. So I suppose I'll just leave with a pair of money shots of all the stuff we bought for ourselves or as gifts, stuff I bought for other people was not included.

Everything as of Saturday night. That a lotta stuff!

Stuff from Sunday, or was in the car.