Dreamblade

So, today, in a somewhat last-minute decision, me and my wife decided to play in a Dreamblade 1k tournament at Your Move Games Somerville. Attendance was a pretty low 14, probably due in part to the New York 10k also happening this weekend. Due to a good amount of luck on my part, both in my pairings and in my dice rolls, I managed to get 3rd place, with a $100 prize. (My wife, unfortunately, didn’t do nearly as well, although I thought that she had the better warband.)

Another completely random thing that I wanted to mention is that I’ve written some test questions for use on Magic and Dreamblade judge tests (they solicit questions from all judges to continually improve their question database), and while it’s taken them a while, not only are a couple of my questions actually being used on tests now, some of them have been translated into some other languages. It’s just kind of neat to see a question I wrote in Italian, Chinese, and Portugese, as I can’t read it but I know what it says, since I wrote it in the first place.

• 1/3/07: Judged Magic City Champs season Standard event at Wonderland Comics.
• 1/10/07: Tried to judge at Magic City Champs season booster draft event at Wonderland Comics, but not enough players showed up.
• 1/13/07: Judged Magic Scholarship Series event at TJ Collectibles.
• 1/20/07: Will judge Magic Planar Chaos prerelease at University of Hartford for TJ Collectibles.
• 1/21/07: Will play at that Planar Chaos prerelease in the afternoon.
• 1/27/07: Will play at Dreamblade Chrysotic Plague release event.
• 1/27/07: May play at Magic City Champs season booster draft event at Wonderland Comics.
• 1/31/07: Will judge at Magic City Champs season Standard event at Wonderland Comics.
• 2/3/07: Will play Magic Planar Chaos release event at TJ Collectibles.
• 2/10/07: Will judge Magic Extended Pro Tour Qualifier for Pro Tour Yokohama at the Gamingetc Tournament Center for TJ Collectibles.
• 2/11/07: Will organize and judge WPI Planar Chaos event for the WPI Science Fiction Society.
• 2/17/07: Will head judge a Magic 2 headed giant Sealed Deck event at Templecon, as well as likely work with other events (drafts, Dreamblade) there. (I’m particularly looking forward to this, as it’ll be my first REL3/32k head judging event.)
• 2/25/07: May play in a Dreamblade 1k at Your Move Games.
• 3/30/07–4/1/07: Will judge at Magic Grand Prix Massachusetts in Fitchburg.
• 4/21/07–4/22/07: Will judge and/or play at the Magic Future Sight prerelease.
• 5/5/07–5/6/07: Will judge at Dreamblade 10k Hartford.
• 7/26/07–7/29/07: May judge at Magic U.S. National Championship in Baltimore.
• 12/6/07–12/9/07: May judge at Magic World Championship in New York City.

And that’s just what’s on my calendar so far… I expect it to fill up more as the year continues.

• My brother moved out to Palmer a couple weeks ago to be closer to his job. With the house came a pinball machine in the basement. It’s a Williams Earthshaker, from 1989. It seems to mostly work, although the score display on it doesn’t seem to work right now. It looks like the current plan is to transport the machine to our house next weekend, and I’m going to take on the hobby of pinball machine restoring. I’m looking forward to it.
• This weekend, I’m going to judging a Magic Grand Prix Trial and Dreamblade $1k at TJ Collectibles.
• Jessi and I are working on filling out an adoption application. Hopefully this will accelerate our plans for growing our family.

Last Friday, Jessi and I played in the first sanctioned Dreamblade event in Massachusetts that actually ran, and now I’m ranked number 8 in MA. (Those players with 100 points played at the release event at GenCon, as one got 100 points just for playing in that event.)

I doubt I’ll stay that high, however.

On Sunday I finally managed to play my first games of Dreamblade, the new collectible miniatures strategy game from WotC. While my wife and I are really rather dismayed at the creative flavor of the game (it’s all horror and nightmareish stuff), it’s fun to play, and has a huge depth of strategy that we’re just barely starting to scratch the surface of. Wizards is really trying to push this game, and is giving thousands of dollars in prizes out for it. I may start trying to play it competitively, although if I do as good as I do at competitive Magic I may just end up judging it primarily.