Pro Tour Theros - Coverage

For the first time ever I watched a significant amount of Magic event coverage on the weekend. Previously all I had seen were grainy videos where it was really hard to tell what was going on and 90% of the time nothing was happening. Watching people thinking, shuffling or talking to a judge is not exciting.

I started watching Pro Tour Theros because my friend Levi was playing in it. I quickly realized he wasn’t going to get camera time even though he made day two. I really enjoyed the coverage and was amazed at how professional it was. I think Theros is a great set to cover because it’s quite fast in both formats and there are not a lot of counters so people tend to only go into the tank before something really significant is about to happen.

I only play limited and Modern but I still enjoyed the standard coverage and some of the decks were fun to watch. In particular the two Japanese decks. Mihara’s green red deck was fun to watch with some really splashy plays but the mono black devotion deck featuring pack rat had me checking my binder to see how many cards I would need to make the deck (way too many).

The way they handle the feature match area is awesome and I enjoyed some of the features like the deck techs and 1^st pick 1^st pack. When there is a pod with only a couple of “name” players I wouldn’t mind a feature that goes into there 2^nd and third picks etc until the archetype they are into is obvious.

You can get that via the draft viewer but that breaks up the flow for me because I had the coverage showing on my TV set watching it just like I watch a football game.

There are a few articles about the coverage and I was surprised (though I shouldn’t have been) that a lot of people complain about it.

There is a good piece on Star City by John Butler.

That unfortunately was very poorly edited (like I can talk) that raised some pretty good points.

Implementing a ranking system looks to be something Wizards have already taken on board.

A lot of Butler’s suggestions would give the games a lot more edge and we might lose a bit of the “nice’ vibe about how the major pros treat each other. I think that would be a little sad but it really would increase the drama if more players showed that they really wanted the win and acted more like Poker players rather than the awesome collection of nice guys we seem to have now.