#95. Grand Prix Montreal (Saturday, March 15, 2014)

What was your best day…of doing well at something, despite not being the best?

Despite having gotten into competitive Magic: The Gathering pretty late and still being fairly casual, I had always been a good player at the Limited formats (i.e. when you use the cards you open then and there, rather than build your own super-powerful decks beforehand, #113). My best performance was at Grand Prix Montreal 2014.

Grand Prix¹ were basically these big open events that were held across the world about 40 times a year. They were huge events: over 2000 people, including a large number of professional players, took part in the main tournament. Back when they were around, each year there’d be about one Limited format Grand Prix within a driving distance from me.

Grand Prix Montreal 2014 was taking place only two weeks after I had moved back to Canada for my job. Perfect. So on this Saturday morning at six, my brother² and I up loaded up into the car for a two hour drive to Montreal and a full day of Magic.

The Grand Prix was being held on the top floor of the Palais des Congres – this giant convention center in downtown. And at events like this, they don’t mess around. Right at the start, everybody has to go through this complicated, hour-long card-checking process to eliminate any possibility of cheating. Also, the Rules Enforcement Level is “Competitive”, meaning you can get automatic Game Losses/Disqualifications for minor play errors (i.e. the type of things that happen at least a dozen times in a game a casual Magic).

For this event, we used packs from the most recent set of cards: Born of the Gods. I ended up building a green-white deck around my three Akroan Skyguards that I thought was really, really good. I won my first three best-of-three matches (two against guys from Boston³), which got me pretty excited to start. But then I lost the next match that I maybe could have won had I played perfectly, then lost the next match (to a guy who worked at my local store) because I got “land-screwed”⁴.

For the Grand Prix, the cut-off for Day 2 (which narrowed it down to 200 or so players) was 7-2 or better. So I now had to win each of my next four matches.

The next match I won in two games against this guy from Quebec City⁵. The next one I won against one of those marginal pro players (from Madison, Wisconsin⁶) who had a bunch of byes but had gotten unlucky with the cards he opened. So, I was 5-2 now. Two wins to go; although a massive stomachache had come on⁷.

My next round was against this guy named Alex Lam. And he was extremely well-versed in the rules and the nuances around them⁸. And as usual for a competitive player, he announced his actions really fast; you really had to try to slow down the game to your own pace, otherwise if you didn’t respond with the exact right word to any one of them, it was implied that you had taken some game action that you hadn’t intended to take.⁹ So that’s basically what happened: I messed up a critical interaction late in the first game, and lost. I then lost the second game, and that was it.

Still, all things considered, 389^th out of 1603 wasn’t so bad.

Since renamed the uncomfortably juvenile “MagicFest”, before being discontinued in 2020 (for obvious reasons).
Who ended up placing in the middle of the pack, with two wins and three losses, which was pretty good for a fifteen-year-old. (He then did better than me at the Grand Prix in Ottawa later that year.)
Meeting and playing against people from all across the continent was another big reason why I loved Grand Prix events.
Basically, getting a bad draw of cards where you don’t have the resource cards you need (the “land”) to play the stuff you need to play.
He had complete control of the second game, when I played a powerful card, Fated Retribution, that destroyed everything on the board. His shocked response: “Je ne savais pas que tu avais un Fated Retribution” [I didn’t know you had a Fated Retribution].
Oddly, the Magic hotspot, with about half the top American pros at the time living there and testing against each other regularly.
These events are literally hour-long round after hour-long round with no food breaks in between, and I forgot to bring snacks.
Magic, as the original trading card game, got developed with a very, very loose set of rules; to the extent where a lot of card interactions became just: “You figure this out”. They cleaned it up a lot in the years since, but the original framework has a lot of nuances and unusual legacy aspects that make the rules a very complicated thing to navigate (the Comprehensive Rules is 242 pages long), that wouldn’t be in a new card game designed today.
Magic, at the competitive level, is an intense game that requires an extreme amount of mental focus; after a Grand Prix like this, you just feel physically exhausted.