Spanish Magic

Currently, I'm attending a month-long Study Abroad program in Madrid, Spain. While this is going to hinder my ability to document/discuss Pittsburgh Magic (obviously), it should be interesting to compare American and Spanish Magic in general.

There is, of course, the issue of the language barrier. I'm luckily fluent in Spanish, but the language here is still difficult for me -- while I can understand what people are generally saying, they speak very quickly here, and use a number of different colloquialisms and slang that I still haven't quite figured out. This is even more pronounced among the Magic players here, who often seem impossible to communicate with at all. As such, I have been quieter during matches and using mostly hand signals to communicate, which I think has let me concentrate more on the game itself. I find myself catching mistakes that I usually see only after the fact, and the extra attention placed on my opponent has led to better reads and bluffs.

However, I have been surprised at the quality of the players here. On average they seem much better than American players, although they seem much more interested in Constructed than Limited.

I've attended a lot of events in the two weeks I've been here, in desperate preparation for GP Madrid at the end of the month.

The first was a 4-man LMM (not a typo) draft at a local store, where I managed to lap Leaf Gilder and Fertile Ground -- in the same pack -- twice. These were not high-caliber players and, to their surprise, I swept them easily with the monstrous Elf deck they basically handed me.

The second was a GP trial at a local store.

I'm not big on superstitions about Magic -- unlike one Steve Nagy -- but one of the few I do hold dear is my absolute inability to succeed at GP Trials. A GP Trial is the only event I have ever had a record worse than X-3, and I have never Top 8'ed one -- not even any of the multiple 12-player GPTs I've attended.

This one, however, was a healthy 34 players and I just barely missed Top 8 to little more than landscrew. I played U/B -- which is always a downer -- but had some bombs in Grim Poppet, UB Liege, and Incremental Blight.

Oh, Incremental Blight.

Over 5 rounds of play, with only one not going to three games, I never saw Incremental Blight.

Not once.

I swar I could hear it laughing at me from the remainder of my deck during every game.

The most recent event was the Eventide Prerelease, which I managed to 7-0 pretty easily with a monstrous RW deck. My pool was exceptionally difficult to build, but it was a matter of nuances and in the end Figure of Destiny and Nobilis of War picked up the slack and took it home. Particularly enjoyable was beating a person wearing a Worlds 2006 Competitor shirt in the last round, and hearing all his friends insulting me after the match -- only to have him inform them that I could understand them.

Overall, the Magic players here are also far more bitter than those in the US. Even at the Prerelease I found none of the usual happy-go-lucky guys that were just happy to be playing Magic. I had multiple people complain loudly about manascrew, the power of my bomb-laden deck, and just their bad luck in general. Cards were thrown, hands slammed down in frustration, insults tossed around. These players exist in the US as well, but in a much smaller concentration, in my experience.

I plan on attending many more events leading up to GP Madrid, and hopefully expounding on some of my thoughts on the format as I get some more experience with it. I'll also be posting my Prerelease pool to hopefully get some thoughts on it, as I thnk this is probably the most skill-testing Sealed format in, well, perhaps ever.

Overall, while Spain is nice, I miss being able to communicate with players, and have people to talk to between rounds and joke around with. I can't wait to return to the far more relaxed ambient of the Pittsburgh Magic scene.

~Andres