Japan Nationals

by Bill Stark | posted at 2010-07-12 04:22:00
tagged: MTG, Magic, Magic the Gathering, Bill Stark, Japan, National Championship

 

I am the hardest working man in Magic. I don't mean that hyperbolically or in a table-flopping epeen fashion. I truly am the hardest working man (person) in Magic. Consider my schedule presently: I wake up at 8 a.m. (on a good day), eat breakfast, grab a shower, and head in to the Wizards of the Coast offices by 9 a.m. I often work for them on short-term contracts on projects like Duels of the Planeswalkers, Magic development, editing, video work, promotional efforts, and all manner of things. I put in an eight hour day at the office, then head home at 5 or 6 p.m. That provides time to grab dinner and relax with my girlfriend (watching "Futurama" on a good night, "The Hills" on a tragically bad one). By around 10 p.m. it's time to go to work on TheStarkingtonPost.com scouring the web for the major news stories of the day and updating them in a timely fashion. That also means editing articles, podcasts, and videos and uploading them. If it's one of those good days around 2 a.m. I wrap things up and have time for five or six hours of shut-eye before waking up to do it again. And the weekend? I haven't got one. Friday afternoons I leave work early to head to the airport for a flight to somewhere in the world, then spend Saturday and Sunday working 12-15 hours a day covering a Magic tournament or gunslinging, returning on Monday (the airplane ride on the way home is my "weekend"), updating TheStarkingtonPost.com each night as stories dictate. Wash, rinse, repeat.

 

So when I say I'm the busiest person in Magic? I mean I'm the person working 15+ hour days seven days each week on Magic: The Gathering. And I mean it.

 

Accordingly that means eventually things start to give out. You'll notice on the front page our feature articles have slowed, but not because we don't have some great submissions. Instead, my inability to spend the 1-3 hours on each piece editing, whether it's published or not, has prevented me from providing them to you. That's being worked on, as well as an exciting new Legacy project I can't quite detail just yet (but is a first-of-its-kind effort and is going to be AWESOME).

 

Most importantly I feel my voice has been missing on the front pages, and that's a shame too in as much as I can say that without sounding like bragging. What I mean is that I occupy a very unique place in the Magic world, perhaps the only person who has ever occupied that space. As a former Pro Tour player I know the professional circuit intimately, but to have been (and occasionally be) involved with the day-to-day operations of Magic while having a public forum AND being attached to covering all of the major tournament circuits the world has to offer, be they Pro Tour, National Championship, StarCityGames.com Open, or Grand Prix, I have a lot of stories to share that few others get to.

 

My hope is that over the next few weeks I'll have the time to share those stories with you more often (my guess is that that means sacrificing my "weekend" on those plane trips back home) but I can make no promises. Today, however, I'd like to talk a bit about an event very few American and European players have ever been able to see inside: the Japan National Championship.

 

Japan

 

This year marked the third straight time I have covered the Japan National Championship. Covering Nationals in Japan isn't like covering any event anywhere else. At a Pro Tour or Grand Prix you're surrounded by players from all over the world. At any given event I spend my evenings with the coverage crew, Wizards staff, the Belgians, the Seattle crew, the Iowans/Midwesterners, even an occasional meal with Matej "Big Z" Zatlkaj. At Japan Nationals? None of those people are present; instead it's you, an artist or two, and Ron Foster (Ron is the guy in charge of the event for Wizards).

 

So instead of having a variable group of communities you know and regularly interact with you're left with only a few people, some of whom you don't know and certainly not enough to, say, draft with. Why not hang out with the Japanese players? It's a fair question and if you've never interacted with the Japanese players on the Pro Tour I can see why you'd ask. But the reality is that there still exists a large language barrier between the Japanese players and non-Japanese speakers. This isn't a positive or negative thing, it simply is the reality of the situation.

 

I should point out that many of the Japanese players have gone to great ends to learn English. In particular Tomoharu Saito and Shuhei Nakamura have had their English skills greatly improve over the years as they became some of the best players in the history of the Pro Tour. You can have a functional conversation with a number of Japan's biggest names, but it's not like having a conversation with European or South American non-native English speakers. In those conversations one might struggle to come up with a difficult translation for a word like "octopus" while trying to describe it in a meaningful fashion, but you managed to have a conversation that necessitated explaining the concept of an octopus (and I have done this; in Dutch it essentially amounts to the word for "ink" combined with the word for "fish,"). That's simply too complex a topic for conversations with the language barrier level of most players in Japan, though again they deserve credit for making all the ground in crossing any language barriers by taking the effort to learn English while few non-Ruel pros have bothered learning Japanese.

 

So in many ways covering the Japan National Championship is a much lonelier experience than covering a Grand Prix or Open. Compounding that is the fact that the venue for the tournament generally closes each night after the final round of the National Championship is played. In the U.S. and at most large international events the tournament hall stays open late into the night providing for plenty of time for drafts and camaraderie. In Japan that's not the case, at least not for their National Championship, and it cuts down on the time you have to bond with players, language barrier or not.

 

Generally there is time for one draft and it's on Sunday afternoon following the playing out of the Top 8. You can generally count on me getting my 40-card groove on usually stuck in a drink draft. That format, if you're not familiar, began at Japan Nationals during my second event. It's a regular booster draft with the stakes being that the losers have to chug a foul-tasting beverage provided by the winners at the next Pro Tour/Grand Prix/Nationals all parties are in attendance at. Each summer in Japan the Pepsi company has a promotional soda flavor, and a few years ago they began selling Pepsi Shiso. The shiso leaf is a strong minty type flavor commonly used as Americans might use parsley on a meal. The soda version? Tasted FOUL.

 

I generally try to be open when I travel and try new experiences as they present themselves to me. When I had the chance to try Pepsi Shiso at my second Japan Nationals I bit and gave it a shot. It. Was. TERRIBLE. I mean, REALLY bad, so bad I actually wondered to myself if Japanese consumers could really stomach drinking it. For the untrained palate, Japanese cuisine can seem a bit…strange, but over the years I've learned to enjoy its (to an American) oddities. Pepsi Shiso was just not bearable and I had to ask around amongst the big Japanese pros if they liked it. I was relieved when to the person they said no, some laughing out loud at the notion.

 

So for our single draft that year I convinced the teams to agree to stakes with the drink and though my team featured Kazuya "The Chief" Mitamura and Chikara Nakajima (if my memory serves) and I 3-0'ed, we went down in FLAMES and at Pro Tour-Austin had to chug the shisoey awfulness right on down. Since then drafts have been for Red Bull Cola and Clamato. This year we weren't able to come up with the drink but agreed to agree on one at a later date and drafted.

 

My deck was a super hot one, one of my favorites out of the many Rise of the Eldrazi drafts I did:

 

2 Phantasmal Abomination

3 Stalwart Shield-Bearers

2 Mnemonic Wall

1 Dawnglare Invoker

1 Makindi Griffin

1 Halimar Wavewatch

1 Echo Mage

1 Wall of Omens

 

1 Narcolepsy

1 Sphinx-Bone Wand

 

1 See Beyond

1 Reality Spasm

1 Staggershock

2 Heat Ray

1 Deprive

1 Smite

1 Shared Discovery

1 Survival Cache

 

2 Mountain

1 Evolving Wilds

7 Plains

7 Island

 

My teammates were The Chief and Yuuya Watanabe and we battled against Naoki Shimizu, Yuuta Takahashi, and Jun'ya Iyanaga. We went down by the slimmest of margins and I actually played against the mirror in the hands of Naoki Shimizu. The Chief and Yuuya had a good time giggling at the cards in my deck, shaking their heads in disbelief as my "last pick" walls pumped each other +0/+2 and I kept a Pelakka Wurm at bay with a Phantasmal Abomination that was far too large to swing through long enough for my Echo Mage plan to let me go infinite or for my Wand to seal the deal. I truly love it when a plan comes together.

 

 

I can't say I was surprised to lose, though. It seems I ALWAYS lose these things (I'm 1-4 lifetime) despite playing with some of the game's best and having personal winning records in most of the drafts. But they are the highlight of the weekend, and the good time you have playing them makes that Clamato go down a TINY bit smoother. In fact, I would argue they are the Timmiest form of Magic I play; the goal is having a good time and drafting odd strategies you feel can win but can get a chuckle out of your teammates/opponents.

 

The event itself went smoothly. The Japanese national team is a very good one. We managed to finish up the Top 8 in a timely fashion despite starting a bit late and good meals were had throughout the weekend (Wizards's Ron Foster is key in this, and the best weekends in Japan involve having him around because he's the best tour guide in the world). I hate when I can't get all four Quarterfinal matches covered but when you're covering in Japan you don't have the benefit of extra English coverage reporters from the crowd who can pitch in; instead I had to make due with the two matches I can cover at a single time meaning only 50% of the Quarterfinals were covered. This is a personal pet peeve, but for the Japan National Championship I accept it as an operating loss and do the best I can.

 

And that was my Japan National Championship in a (very small) nutshell. I hope you'll be reading more about my experiences at events in the near future, but why not consider sharing your experiences from your events? We're still accepting submissions and articles, tournament reports, op/ed pieces, something rejected by your normal column site, just send it to me on email using the link below. Or you can contact us on Twitter and Facebook (also through the links below).

 

-Bill

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