So I felt like it would be cool for you guys to see what it's like on the writer's perspective of an event. Going into this event I was fully prepared to play until Jim asked for some writers, and well I personally enjoy the writing aspect of the game more than I do playing so I instantly accepted it.

Thursday

It took forever, and after a series of delays and having to stop by our locals so people could get cards, we head off to Charlotte around 8:30 PM and after quite a bit of struggling we manage to get to the hotel at around 3:30 AM. When we go to check in though, the hotel apparently had this rule that there had to be at least someone over the age of 25 in order to check in. Just great. After a bit of negotiating we were finally able to get a room in the hotel next door for a bit more than we wanted, but at least I can go to bed! Nah, nobody ever checks in at the hotel and goes right to bed. So after a few hours of watching everybody build their decks and play a few matches we finally turn off the lights and go to bed after the seeing the sun come up.

Friday

After arguing about where to eat I was finally able to introduce the people that came with me to Cookout, and apparently they liked it so much that was all we ate Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. Moving on, we ventured to Hobbytown where I was able to hangout with everyone from NC that I don't see very often and had some fun playing the local tournament that night. After splitting the top 8 because it was getting late I get back to the room and then it happened, my laptop gave me a heart attack by pretending to die on me... after what felt like ages I was finally able to get it to start working again and went to bed hoping that it would last the weekend.

Saturday

I probably pressed the snooze button from about 6:30 am until 7:30 because I just didn't want to get out bed. However after a lot of struggling I finally manage to roll out, take a quick shower, and suit up before making a mad dash towards the convention hall. Once I get there I tried my best to help out Trevor in setting up the equipment before I went around asking people if they wanted to do some Player Profiles for the event. I kinda felt like the beginning of this event was rushed because the feature match area wasn't set up completely because we didn't know if we could steal some tables to set it up, but after the round started we just decided to take over one of the tables in the back and see if that worked. We planned on doing rotations of the rounds so that one person could write and the other could edit, and hopefully that would let us get the matches up faster.

I ended up skipping the Round 1 coverage and letting Joey do it so I can do a little "Welcome to ARGCS Charlotte" post.

Round 2 I was given Mermails and Geargia-Karakuri as the feature match. The two decks I absolutely hate to do a feature match for is Geargia-Karakuri and Spellbooks, and with my luck I was given one of them to start off my day. This match really didn't have anything special to it except that in time the Mermail player could've won if he had realized that they were in time (Feature matches are on their own clock and I had told him two times that they were in time, but I guess he didn't hear me). Well that ended up costing him that match. It's just disheartening taking notes of all these matches knowing that most of the time, the winner shouldn't have won because of just how far they punt the games at times.

Round 3 Joey was up so it was my turn to start editing. I looked over that match and didn't think it would be that much work, just 2000 words of short hand that I have to edit... Well it ended up taking almost the entire round and I was starting to feel bad that I didn't get the match up fast enough, especially when Jim came over and started the initial phase of "where are the feature matches?"

Round 4 Well moving forward, yay! I get an easy matchup to type out. It was a FF mirror where both players it seemed wanted to play their cards at warp speed. I'm not sure if this was a bad thing but somehow I managed to come back after being behind 2 turns to catch up and start typing up nonsense as the match finished up. Some of you might ask why I didn't stop play on them in order to catch up because as someone that used to play a lot, that was my biggest pet peeve was when a writer had me stop what I was doing and in doing that would cause me to lose my chain of thought. So it was kind of my goal throughout the weekend to not have to stop the duels unless I really had to.

Round 5 I really didn't have to edit much in the last match as I basically fixed it as I went along throughout the match. However Jim started to get a little mad that the matches weren't going up fast enough, and the coverage was a bit slow so I kept that in mind and thankfully we ended up churning out match after match pretty quick. I also managed to run around and get all the decks at the top tables. It's actually a lot harder than it seems. In the system we're only able to pull out the names, but not the deck that's associated with them. So I had to run around the top tables and write down what everyone was playing while trying to match up a name to a face. It wasn't fun at all.

Round 6 I remember this match the most throughout the day because one of the players just came over angry at the world. Everytime I told him to slow down a little bit he seemed to start playing a little bit faster, before I eventually gave up trying to get the cards he drew and concentrated more on what was happening in the match.

Round 7-9 Around this round we were starting to figure out who was able to make it to Top 16 so I started scrambling and getting decklists typed up. I think I ran more across the room the next few rounds than I've ran in the past month.. I basically spent the next few rounds running around like a chicken with my head cut off figuring out who won their matches and pulling out decklists to type up. A good thing about most of the fire fist decks was that for the most part minus 3-6 cards almost every maindeck was identical. I kinda just copied and pasted and switched up the cards around for those decklists. Once Joey finished with his matches I started to hand him the rest of the decklists to type up while I scrambled to figure out the rest of the players in Top 16 and pull their decklists. I kinda felt like it was a personal goal to get all the decklists up before I left the convention hall because I knew a lot of the players would be up all night until the decklists dropped so I managed to get them up around 11pm. (Once again I'm sorry about some of the typos... I tried guys :[ ).

Sunday

Basically today I felt like I could type at 1000 wpm so I ended up covering each round of the top cut. I honestly can't thank the players I featured enough for how easy they made it on me. I never had to stop play because I was behind, and I never had any problems following along with what they were doing. This was a writer's dream because they all played pretty well and they allowed me ample time to basically edit as I typed the matches. What impressed me the most today was just how well Bodan outplayed the Harpie deck in Top 4. There was nothing more beautiful than watching him play out that match. Once we got to the finals match though, I was just burnt out. Writing takes a toll on someone believe it or not. Having the top cut untimed made finishing up my weekend easy because without the constraints of time both Hoban and Bodan were able to slow their moves down and think letting me basically sit there and look pretty for the camera.

Well that was basically what goes on for the writers at the Circuit Series. If you guys have any other questions feel free to ask them below!

Props:

The Tri-State!

Getting to Write

Catching up with everybody I haven't seen since Nashville or Earlier

Tahmid bringing me Hot Chocolate in the morning

Jim not making Wigley and Dalton play because seriously, we wouldn't have left until Midnight.

Meeting Jono and Bodan

Having an amazing Top 8 (seriously look at how stacked that top 8 was)

Somehow getting the bed to myself in a room of 6

Slops:

Tyree for not finding me any good quotes to use.

Too much cookout, not enough steak.

Not getting to play in the 16 person MTG 1k.