I leave very early Friday morning for the 2013 World Championship in Amsterdam. I’m pretty excited, both because the event last year (then called the Player’s Championship) was awesome and because it’s my first time to Europe in a while and Amsterdam is a great city.

I started my preparation this past weekend by traveling up to San Jose, CA. I stayed with Josh Utter-Leyton and got in a good amount of Modern testing as well as some M14 drafts. This year’s World Championship is in an interesting spot, because it comes just after the release of the new core set, which stands to have a significant impact on three of the four formats – Standard, Modern, and M14 draft (obviously). We decided to spend our time this past weekend testing Modern and draft because Standard is likely to react at least somewhat to the results of the SCG Open and Invitational events over the next couple weeks.

I decided I wanted to try something new for this particular tournament as far as sharing my experience with you. Most of the time, the testing process for major events gets distilled into a post-event recap which is colored by hindsight. While I’m certainly not going to share my testing results online as I go, I want to chronicle the actual process more. To that end I plan on recording a short video each day talking about the testing process and the tournament itself which I will cut together and share when I return. I think it seems like a cool opportunity to share a different kind of behind-the-scenes look at the tournament experience.

Hopefully my new laptop actually arrives in time (it’s due to get here on Thursday and I leave early Friday), but if not I can try recording with my iPad or my phone. No promises about the quality, since this is my first time doing anything like this, but I just wanted to try something different to give a fresh perspective on things.

If you have any particular questions you’d like answered or any ideas of how to make this as good as it can be, please share them in the comments.