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Removed From Game – Uncle Rich’s Magic Travel Guide

Read Rich Hagon every week... at StarCityGames.com!
Tuesday, March 24th – Part Two of your cut-out-and-keep travel guide to Magic sees us finally pack our bags, work out when we need to get to the airport, get the best seat on the plane, and sees us safely on dry land at the other end. Featuring yet more modern popular culture references from that arbiter of cool, Rich Hagon.

… in which I, your host, will nag you half to death about all the things you should do to ensure your Magic trip of a lifetime becomes precisely that for all the right reasons. Last week, we spent a lot of time getting our stuff together, and you might think we’re on the verge of actually, you know, flying somewhere, but there’s still some things that need sorting out.

As we left things, our two Pro friends were wandering round Kyoto in search of a room at the inn. Assorted concerned citizens have pointed out to me that I didn’t actually offer a decent alternative, so here’s a quick guide to places to stay.

Bed = Good

To my mind, there’s only one requirement that actually needs to be met when it comes to accommodation, and that’s having a bed. Plenty of you will have read that unfamiliar word (in this context), and have already begun translating it into other words that peculiarly manage to twist themselves into your definition of the word. Some of the words that Magic players use interchangeably with the word ‘bed’ include:

1/3 of a double bed
1/4 of a double bed
1/5 of a double bed
Two chairs
A chair
An ironing board
The bath
The wardrobe
The floor

Although the first three are at least fractionally related to the idea of a bed, be in no doubt. None of these things are a bed, and in my view, none of these things should be considered as a fair exchange for a bed. At the very least, the ‘double’ bit of ‘double bed’ should give you a clue as to the optimum number of participants in the well-known game ‘get 2 hours sleep before the most important tournament of my life’. The whole point about two people in a double bed is that it allows you to roll together to have sex, and roll apart if you’re in a huff with each other. Sex and tantrums — now doesn’t that sound just like Magic?

Well, maybe not.

Since all that I’m asking you to find is a properly-defined bed, there are plenty of options which vary from country to country. Most of the time it boils down to hostel, hotel, or offer from a friend. If you, like me, are set upon the bed route, that last option is full of pitfalls. There are many reasons along the life experience spectrum why you should accept an invite from Shuuhei Nakamura to stay at his house en route to the Pro Tour, but being well rested is almost certainly not one of them. The player-to-bed ratio in such situations is never good, but if you’re obsessive about it, you do have a chance to basically shout the loudest and shotgun the one actual mattress available.

For many, hostels are a great choice. Although they have an image of being exceedingly basic in the facilities they provide, in reality they are not the grubby, flea-infested scumholes you might be visualizing. (For an actual grubby, flea-infested scumhole, try the Legacy side event.)[I wish to make it clear that Richard Hagon actively loves every Legacy player and wants to have their children, and that even if he didn’t, these would not be the views of StarCityGames.com — Craig] Yes, there’s rarely privacy to be had day or night, but the sense of camaraderie can be awesome, and even if you’re not in with a bunch of players from your own country, the likelihood of mixing it with other Pro Tour competitors is high, provided you’ve done your research and checked which hostels are near to the tournament site.

Hotels will obviously cost more than a hostel, but according to Hollywood, there’s no sign of a franchise movie series reaching ‘Hotel 4: The Lavender Soap’ Extended Gorefest Edition. As long as you don’t end up in a back-street ‘hotel’ that really doesn’t deserve the name, your worst worry is likely to be whether or not wireless internet will be free of charge in your room, or an eye-watering price gouge that makes you wince every time you check your emails.

Quick aside — In my view, an absence of free wireless is one of the great discourtesies a hotel can pay you. If you agree, when you’re booking, make sure you ask if wireless is free, and make it clear to them that this is important to you. That’s the way things that need changing get changed.

Hotels will mostly have breakfast available, allegedly the most important meal of the day. Frankly, I thought that pizza was the most important meal of the day, but what do I know? In any case, Wizards will most likely have a few hotel offerings linked from the relevant Pro Tour or Grand Prix page, and if comfort and security and a guarantee of other Magic players (or at least Magic staff i.e. judges, coverage, actual walking talking WOTC employees) is your thing, this is absolutely the best option.

Fresh Clothes and Fresh Money

With one week to go to your trip, now’s the time to make sure that whatever passes for your washing machine cycle at home is going to synch up with your trip. You can pack as late as the night before you leave, for sure, but finding that everything you want is in the bottom of the laundry basket is poor. Now is also the time to go get your foreign currency. You can do the convenience versus cost equation yourself, and if you like the idea of just picking currency up at the airport in exchange for a price hike, go ahead. That’s actually my preferred route, since it isn’t worth the hassle of going into my local town, taking my passport to prove that I’m not money laundering, and working out exactly what I need. There is no doubt that you get a better price away from the airport however. Remember to make sure that you have some local currency with you i.e. your own. I know tons of people who get home from a trip with a mix of Euros, Dollars and Yen in their assorted pockets, and can’t get a taxi home because they’ve got no Pounds. Like me, for example. Idiot. Some people like to take traveller’s cheques with them, and that’s fine, although probably unnecessary. The only really important thing when it comes to money is this — do not under any circumstances rely on the acceptance of your credit or debit card. So many things can go wrong with this plan it’s positively sweat-inducing. You forget your pin. The card gets scratched. The card reader can’t read the card. The machine is out of order. You can’t find a machine (although at airports at least that shouldn’t be a problem. You find a machine that works and can read your card, but it isn’t an international machine, and your target language isn’t supported, so you stare at a bunch of hieroglyphics and have to pray. This usually doesn’t work too well, at least when it comes to bank machines. Actual money about your person is what you want when you touch down in foreign climes. Anything else is courting disaster.

24 hours to go

Get yourself packed, doublecheck that you have all the important documents, and make sure that includes travel insurance. Peace of mind comes at a price, and you’ll always regret the expense until you wake up one morning in a foreign country with your appendix about to burst, which happened to a Wizards friend of mine last week in Hanover. Appendectomy Friday, playing Elder Dragon Highlander on Sunday. Everything taken care of by travel insurance. Please consider this a worthwhile expense.

Then comes one of the most important parts of your trip — counting backwards from your flight time to when you need to leave. Tastes vary, but I tend toward the school of thought that believes missing a flight is nearly always expensive and at least as hugely irritating. In some cases, missing your flight means missing the Pro Tour or Grand Prix, and that feels like reasons to try and do something about it. My formula goes something like this:

Flight time 11.55am (call it midday)
Check-in will open at 9.55am
Check-in will close at 10.55am (for an international flight)

Ideally, I want to be at the check-in desk when it opens. That way I have the best chance of choosing a decent seat. Generally, and especially if you’re tall, asking for an exit row is a top plan, since this guarantees you extra legroom and an altogether more spacious experience all round. Window seats have at least four distinct advantages. First, you only have another person on one side of you, unless something’s gone very badly wrong! Second, you can comfortably make a vaguely comfortable sleeping position with your head between headrest and bulkhead. Third, the crew trolleys are never going to hit you, nor will you have hot or cold drinks hurled over you by accident. And fourth, and this may shock you, a window seat provides you with cutting edge visual technology — yes, a window! Even the most hardened of traveller hearts can be won over by a great view of the Eiffel Tower, or a famous sports stadium, or mountains, or whatever floats your boat. All in all, well worth being on time to sort out. Of course, if you’re super-organized you can now do exotic things like check-in online, and reserve your seat. Good times.

Back to our time calculator. Since in our example we want to be at check-in at 10am, I’m going to ‘budget’ for being there exactly 1 hour before that. To my mind, this is a good compromise between safety-first and over-the-top panic. If I aim for one hour before check-in opens, that allows for a fairly substantial problem to arise and still leave me in with a chance of making the flight. A traffic jam, the car breaks down, the train becomes a replacement bus service — these are all things that, when coupled with your hour-long window of actual check-in time can give you a full two-hours of unforeseen additional travel, still getting your flight. Assuming that everything goes as planned, and you got to the right terminal at the airport, and you can see the check-in desk, and you have that hour to spare, great. Go get some breakfast, read a book, and come back utterly relaxed to still be first in line to get sorted.

At check-in, you have the emotional wrench of saying goodbye to your hold luggage, perhaps for the very last time. Even here there are ways you can improve your chances. As someone suggested helpfully in the forums last week, put a piece of paper with your destination address details prominently inside the suitcase on top of everything else. Externally, make sure your own name and address are clearly marked. If you haven’t done this, ask the check-in staff for a label that you can tie round the handle.

A seriously important message now, and I’ve rarely been more serious. Check-in staff will always ask you if you’ve been given anything to carry by someone else. There are almost no circumstances under which this is a good idea. Your parents want you to take a much-loved cardigan to Uncle Jack? Fair enough, but anyone who asks you to take something sealed should be treated with extreme caution. It’s entirely possible that you think I’m over-worrying about this one, but let me share a true story. At one of the early Grand Prix, MagicDave came to with me to cover the event, we were sitting in our hotel room, about to go and have dinner with some (nameless) friends/acquaintances. As we were about to go downstairs, I said, ‘Look, this is just a rumor, but X has been known to ask people to take boxes of cards back through customs (to ‘help with the weight’) which might or might not contain more than just cards.’ Yes, this is a drugs story. We went downstairs, and less than five minutes later Dave was being asked about how much luggage he had with him, and whether he might have some extra space… The rules may be Draconian, but they exist, and you will receive no mercy. I’ve only ever taken one package overseas for someone else, and I told them explicitly that if I couldn’t empty it myself in advance it wouldn’t be going. I trusted (and trust) that person completely, but this is too important to risk. Please, don’t do this.

Once you’ve dropped off your hold luggage, it’s time to go through security, which quite frankly is a right old circus and no mistake. Talk about jumping through hoops. The idiosyncrasies of different testing regimes around the world vary hugely, but you can expect to dump laptops, belts, phone, money and often shoes through the X-ray machine. If you’ve got a morning flight, when traffic is at its heaviest, I suggest going airside straight away. There’s usually plenty of stores/food outlets/seats at any major airport, and getting stuck behind a large queue is a nightmare. As someone else pointed out in the forums, most of the time this is where any liquids you have with you get confiscated. I know I said you need water on the plane, and you do, but that needs to be purchased after security. Tedious. You’d be amazed at how many people leave items at security, so make sure you have everything.

After security, there’s only one thing left to do, and that’s to make sure you get yourself to your gate on time. Depending how far you’re travelling, the flight can open up to one hour ahead of the advertised time of departure. In larger airports, especially hubs like Schipol or Frankfurt or Chicago, getting lost is very easy. It’s not that airports want you to get lost, it’s just that gate B76 and D67 could be a 35 minute walk away from each other, so going to the wrong one can be very costly. In an unfamiliar airport, I suggest going to your gate straight after you get through security, just so you know where it is. You can always wander around the shops once you’ve got where you need to be fixed in your mind. Remember, most airports don’t now announce gate numbers, so you’ll be expected to keep an eye on the computer screens around the place. My number one tip for this section of your travel day is not to fall asleep. You’ve often been up for five, six, seven hours by the time you get all the shenanigans out of the way, and psychologically you’re ready to relax, knowing the hurdles have all been negotiated safely. Sleep on the plane.

At last — the Flight!

Crikey, I’m making it sound like the D-Day landings, aren’t I? The reality is that travel, even with a complicated itinerary can be very straightforward, and should be, provided you plan sensibly. The reward is when you finally get yourself settled onboard. I think it’s fair to say that even the dullest Magic player can find something to entertain themselves for a couple of hours. It’s the long-haul flights that can drag. If you’re travelling with another player, now is the perfect time to do a Winston Draft. I’ll not lie — Shards is not a great set for Winston, as the color requirements lead to some very odd Drafts, and a preponderance of games where whoever gets the most fixing to go with their five-color abomination usually wins. Generally though, Winston rocks, and is the absolute perfect format for airline seats, since you can each play directly in front of you, glancing across to check the opposing side of the board. I’ve literally spent hundreds of hours playing Magic on planes, and it rarely disappoints as a ‘time-chomper.’ Add in a couple of movies, a bit of sudoku maybe, a read, or a much-needed sleep, and even a twelve-hour marathon whizzes by. Oh yes, and all that in-the-seat-pocket advice about keeping hydrated and doing exercises in your seat and walking round the cabin every couple of hours — this is good advice. As for food, fussy eaters (as opposed to dietary requirements, which are well-catered to) are almost universally destroyed by airline food, which mostly has what I scientifically refer to as ‘bits’ in. This random fruit/vegetable/seasoning product has the unfortunate tendency to render otherwise perfectly-acceptable dead animal product null and void. It’s at least a decade since I last got on a flight without some supplies of my own, but then it’s also at least a decade since I was thin…

Landing and Immigration

‘To run for President.’
‘To hold Congress accountable.’
‘Murder. Death. Kill’

‘To play this really cool card game for $40,000.’

Are you spotting the common thread yet? These are all incorrect answers to the question, ‘And why have you come to the United States?’ You will find these answers similarly incorrect in other countries, but nowhere is this more important than when standing in front of your immigration official to get into America. It can be hard to understand when you’re really excited about being there, and actually are just bursting to tell anyone who asks that you’re there for the Pro Tour and that Magic’s the best thing ever, etc, etc. Here’s the thing… Not only is there a culture of anti-terrorism as the first, second and third thing that Immigration officials look for, right after that comes illegal Immigrants.

A lot of people don’t live in America, and quite a few who don’t would like to. Profiling suggests that a typical potential illegal Immigrant would be someone from a poorer nation. They might be male, young, and looking for work. They might be single, with no fixed address, and no personal contact in the US. Worlds in New York in 2007 led to some qualified players unable to take part, because Immigration deemed their likely flight risk (and by flight I mean absconding into the underground, never to be seen again) to be unacceptable. This is a serious business, and you should do them the courtesy of treating it seriously. Jokes are distinctly not needed.

So why not talk about Magic? Well, as we all know, Magic can be very difficult to describe. It gets worse when you think of how often people tell you that Magic is ‘a cross between Poker and Chess.’ Poker = gambling. Gambling = bad. If you’re coming into a country to gamble, that makes it more likely that you’ll lose all your money, and start doing stupid and/or illegal things. Gambling, if done professionally, makes you of major interest to the tax authorities. None of this is good times. My recommendation? A games convention. Most major events are held in convention centers, and Immigration officials deal with people coming in from out of town all the time for events. You’re there for Pleasure, not Business, even if you play as a Pro. You’re there to have a good time, meet friends, go to the convention center, and come home again. Spreading the gospel of Magic is a fine and worthy thing, but this isn’t the place or the time. In my experience, mentioning your wife, child, job or ideally all three is a fine way to allay suspicions. If you’re a regular visitor, they will have a history of your comings and goings, so don’t be surprised to get a question like, ‘So how was Chicago in May?’ If they ask you about Magic, by all means tell them about a game, and how you won a holiday playing the game. However Pro you feel, though, leave the Business of Magic out of it.

And that’s your lot. You move through to collect your hold luggage which has delightfully made it right along with you, and then it’s off to your hotel/hostel/street corner drainpipe, depending which accommodation option you’ve chosen. All the planning and common sense has got you to the point where you can make it all worthwhile by accumulating memories to last a lifetime. How to go about doing that, whilst also attempting to win games and influence people, coming up in seven short days, in what will be my 100th article here on the premier strategy website. Awesome!

Until then, as ever, thanks for reading…

R.