The Observor: A Day in the Life

Alright, kiddies, it’s time to gather once more ’round the virtual fire (also known as a monitor) for a little story about Pro Tour-San Diego. Last week, I left off right where my written coverage on wizards.com begins. Most of what happened at the actual event can be found there, so I’m not going to really go into it too much. Instead, I’m going to give you an inside view into what an event is actually like for us on the inside. Trust me when I tell you it’s not all rainbows and sunshine like the days leading up to the event. Once the alarm goes off at 7 AM on Friday, we’re in for a long weekend of fast-paced work.

As far as mornings go, I hate them. Single-digit hours are meant for drinking and afternoons. Waking up and knowing that I have to be somewhere at 8:30 AM might be one of the most dreadful feelings I can imagine. With this in mind, a little after 7 AM on Friday the air raid siren that Bill Stark uses for an alarm went off, sending me scurrying under the bed looking for an anti-aircraft rifle. After talking me down, Bill and I hopped in the shower (one at a time…I like Bill, but not that much), and we head out to the event site. I take a slightly different path to get there, since I am unable to function before noon without some form of caffeine in my system. As an insomniac, I usually avoid caffeine as much as I do waking up that early in the morning, but it seems like combining those two wrongs makes one hell of a right, so I usually give in. The concierge tells me about a great little café around the corner, so I stop in for a nice vanilla latte. Scrutinize my coffee selection at your own peril.

Once at the event site, I head back to the coverage area. It’s kind of like the Wizard’s chamber in The Wizard of Oz. You think it’d be all mysterious and cool, but it’s just actually some dudes behind a curtain. We use the pinnacle of technology, such as the recently-developed “dry erase board” and the “pen and pad” to determine who is going to be responsible for what over the course of the day.

With eight rounds, we get assigned to roughly two feature matches a piece. Also on the board are about ten different ideas for various features to cover during the day. We’re always looking for information that could be valuable to readers at home, such as metagame breakdowns, interesting decks, entertaining stories, relevant public event results (such as PTQ Top 8s), and those kinds of things. One of my big interests, and something I think is of relevance to a good portion of the coverage readership, is an understanding of the work behind qualifying for the Pro Tour. Many of the Pros on tour are qualified through rating or Pro Club level, but most of them are either fresh off of a PTQ win or even a Last Chance Qualifier win from the previous night. Consequently, I signed up for the LCQ piece. With two rounds before I had to do my first feature match, I had roughly two hours to complete the piece.

I really like doing interview pieces, mostly because I think I’m horrible at them. It might sound a little strange, but I know that the only way I’ll ever get better at them is by doing them time and again. My biggest problem with interviews is that, while I know the types of answers I’m looking for, I haven’t quite figured out what questions to ask to get them, especially since many Magic players are not very, shall we say, eloquent. It’s amazing how much that matters. Some interviewees are fantastic, and will make a great interview regardless of the quality of the questions coming their way. A couple good examples are Patrick Chapin, Luis Scott-Vargas, and Gerry Thompson. All three of them are fantastic because they can easily answer any questions you give them, and sometimes will drive the interview by making their own segues. The hardest thing when interviewing them is just keeping them on track, which doesn’t really take that much effort.

Now, with people who aren’t used to being interviewed, it gets harder. In those cases, you have to tailor your questions a bit more to lead your subjects to the types of answers you’re looking for. It’s a subtle game of manipulation that I have yet to master. For this piece, I set out to interview the four winners of the LCQ that took place on Thursday night. It took about an hour to get a chance to interview them all, and about an hour to prepare the piece, which is about Standard for larger pieces like that. For the smaller ones, we try to get everything done in a single hour. The readers are pretty demanding about info being put up as fast as possible, and we bust our asses to make sure that it gets done. Some people don’t seem to realize that pieces can’t go up immediately because little things like talking to people and typing seem to find a way to get in the way. I love you, my devoted forum trolls!

Anyhoo, after turning this piece in, it was the start of Round 3, which was my only feature match of the day. You can read it here, if you’d like. With it in the bag, it was time to start on a quick blog entry before the drafting began. One thing that we’d wanted to discuss was the relative lack of people talking about Jund, especially considering that it was still the most popular deck. This was an intriguing piece to work on just because of how true it was. At Worlds, Jund was everywhere, and you knew it because it was all people seemed to be talking about in Standard. At San Diego, talk was about Naya, or Zvi’s Mythic Bant deck, or how Jace, the Mind Sculptor was going to shape Standard. No one talked about Jund, and it was really interesting to talk to people about why that was.

As a side note, most of our blog entries end up about this size, making it easy for us to get things turned around in about an hour, but most of that time is spent in front of a computer. A simple four hundred-word blog entry takes about 30-45 minutes to write, mostly because we’re being extra careful that we like what we’ve written (at least that’s what takes me that amount of time). After all, all of this stuff is going up for the world to read with our name on it. It’s going to get archived, so it’s not going anywhere. We want it to be entertaining and informative. We want it to be something that we can link to and not feel like idiots when people go and read it. Even on the small things, we still want to make sure that it’s something that we can be proud of. Writing at these events isn’t just squatting over a toilet and making words come out.

After finishing that up, it was time for my favorite part of the day—Draft! As I have said numerous times, I love watching the drafts. It’s a test of sorts, both for me and of the person I’m covering. I’ve learned a lot over the years by watching people draft and talking with them about it afterwards. The Draft coverage of these events is done in such a manner that Rich and BDM record picks for the two people they will be interviewing on camera later, while the rest of us just snag whoever is left on a first-come, first-served basis. I have a tendency to gravitate more towards the Japanese players, mostly because I think their drafting style is a little different than I am used to, and I love having the fresh perspective to think about.

Once we have all of the picks recorded, they can start to be put into the Draft Viewer. It doesn’t usually go up until after the Pro Tour since so much formatting work has to be done, but for PT-San Diego, we did get one cool new trick involving the Viewer. BDM and Rich were able to have the first four picks of their interviewees and used them as a visual aid during their video interviews. As far as I’m concerned, this is one of the coolest and most useful tools for improvement that we’ve come up with for a while. After all, while knowing relative card strengths is important to drafting, learning the thought processes that should be going through your mind while drafting is far more important. It’s the general knowledge that will be carrying over from format to format.

After watching my drafter pass up on the opportunity to have a pretty sick mono-green deck, I headed back to the coverage area to pick up my next assignment. With the Public Events area running events nonstop, we get an extraordinary number of decklists from the various events, and someone has to type them up. Lucky me! We’re mostly focused on the major events, such as PTQs, big constructed events, and some of the more colorful casual events, such as the 2HG tourneys that are held over the weekend. Two hours of writing up decklists later, and it was time for a well deserved break from writing.

Friday Night Magic! I cover the Super FNM at virtually every event I’m at. FNM just has a special place in my nostalgic dreams of Magic. I met a few of my closest friends at FNM when I was younger. I also developed better as a player thanks to the constant battles. After all, how can you get better other than by playing, playing, playing? Right now, Wizards is on a big kick to promote FNM and get more people into their local stores. I love this. As an old school FMNer myself, I know how important it can be to leveling up your game, as well as becoming a fixture in your local gaming community. Super FNM is like that, but with people from all over the country. I spent four rounds talking with, and playing against, people from California, Las Vegas, DC, and even Japan. It was a great time.

After finishing up my FNM experience, it was about 10:30 pm. I had spent thirteen hours watching, playing, and writing about Magic, and I had another two days to go. I was mentally exhausted, though I did have a ton of fun. Usually, this would be time for drafts, but as tired as I was, I decided I would take a break and just call it a night.

Hopefully, this gives you a better idea of what goes into a typical day for coverage writers at the Pro Tour. Fridays are always the busier days for me thanks to Super FNM, so I don’t really get to enjoy myself beyond work on them. As for Saturday and Sunday, though, it’s on. Next week, I’ll give you a collection of some of my favorite goings on at the Pro Tour that didn’t make it into the coverage!