It seems, these days, that I only unpack my suitcase to make room to repack it for the next trip. By mid-December, I'll have spent five of seven weekends out of town. There are worse problems to have, in our current economic climate, than travelling the globe to attend Magic tournaments, but at the moment I'm very thankful that I've got a weekend to myself before Thanksgiving travel and a trip to Tampa to tackle policy issues before the community has the year-end blowout that is the World Championships in Memphis.

I won't be at Worlds, sadly, but that's probably for the best. December 13th is the annual holiday party for Free Geek staff and volunteers, and I've made a habit of closing the night out with a DJ set.

That said, Berlin was great, but busy. My foot, somewhat miraculously, healed itself over the long weekend of the Pro Tour, which was not a result of spending any less time than usual moving about the hall. Our split-level space, which was charming, if a little smoky by the end of the day, meant plenty of stairs between breakfast and evening socializing, but I felt better each day. By the end of the weekend, I was tired but healthy.

My first Pro Tour as a card-carrying member of the L4s was eventful on that front. We had roughly half of the L4/L5 group, and with the recent shuffles to the Judge Manager position (Andy Heckt having stepped up to a supervisory role) we had a lot to talk about. There was spirited discussion and debate at basically every opportunity through the weekend. The high-level judge dinner ran close to six hard-working hours (no exaggeration!). I was a participant in two L3 interviews, which are fascinating but hard work, and on Saturday I was the Public Events Lead, which—particularly in Europe—is akin to running the biggest, most chaotic prerelease ever. Turnout was light by Euro standards, which is to say, for an American: pretty darn busy. We filled the public events area and shipped a 140-player Legacy tournament upstairs to the empty half of the Pro Tour part of the hall.

All of that work meant little time for breaking in the EDH deck I wrote about a few weeks ago. I filled my deck out with the help of fellow judges and some cards from the vendors (possibly not all great values there, but so it goes). The first game was a sputtering mess that saw me cast only a couple spells before the other players, in a rough stall with one another, finished me off. Saturday night, though, I ended up in an engagingly chaotic six-player game, chronicled here by Kelly Digges. It was a long, swingy game, and I had nothing more than vague impressions of who might win, right up until the end. For eliminating second-place finisher Dave Guskin, I received five Euros from Brian David-Marshall, for reasons that are explained in the article, but were lost on me at the time.

My EDH deck reminds me a lot of the Toby Elliott decks I used to borrow regularly at tournaments here and there. The deck is really good at accumulating a lot of mana, and is fairly mediocre at anything else. It will occasionally fumble its way into doing something vaguely degenerate (active Crystal Shard + Spellstutter Sprite + Door of Destinies + a handful of Oona-generated tokens, for example) but mostly it looks menacing by virtue of the large amounts of blue mana it makes. I'm a fan of the intentionally depowered EDH deck, which is partly why Sensei's Diving Top didn't make it into mine. I do currently have Mana Drain, but that's mostly so that I'll feel like my purchase of several Italian Legends Drains a few years ago wasn't a total waste. Bitterblossom would be a fantastic card for the deck but I don't want to spend the cash on it and it might make those silly combos a little too common. I was surprised to hear that in parts of Europe, two-player EDH has taken off as a competitive format, and I wonder how responsible Magic Online is for that phenomenon. In my heart, it's always going to be a social format, and breaking it just isn't the point. Winning is nice, though.

Speaking of winning, I survived my second stint as Grand Prix Head Judge, in Atlanta last weekend. My ride in the cockpit was smoother and easier than my last tournament in Vancouver, despite having half the experience (or more) on my judging staff and nearly double the player count. This is in part due to having some experience under my belt, no doubt, but also due to the hard work and careful preparation of Jeff Williams and Erik Mock at Unity Entertainment. My only complaint is that I spent the weekend haunted by the sound of the Rock Band setup they brought for players to use between rounds, drafts, etc. Rock Band and Guitar Hero are basially pure crack for me. I'm convinced that if I ever live with a video game console capable of playing them I will lose all of my income-producing jobs and most of my social relationships. On the upside, the appeal of the game went steadily downhill as we heard the same songs over and over.

As fun as it was, I don't have a ton of stuff to talk about from the GP. We worked long days, and I didn't have a lot of time for socializing outside the event. I expect that each GP I'll do will leave me with a little more time for games, dinner, etc, as I internalize the extra details that go into running an event of that scale. But it really is rewarding to spend that much time focused on my staff and giving them everything I can.

I'm still working at wrapping up paperwork for both tournaments, mostly in the form of reviews. Once I do, it's likely that I'll be done with tournaments from the HJ end until Conflux prereleases at the end of January. Hopefully, I'll be able to use that time to get my draft game back in shape. Gabe Walls told me last weekend that in his opinion, triple-Shards is the best draft format ever. It's certainly skill-intensive.

That's all for this week. Until next time... keep shufflin'.