My Saturday plan was quite flexible, as my one big activity was the 2007 Magic Amateur Championship. Were I to do well, I'd expect it to eat the rest of the day. Were I to do poorly, I could drop out early and go do something else. Given how terrible we were all expecting the day to be on the Exhibit Floor, spending many hours in the gaming rooms didn't seem like a bad idea.
We began our Saturday the usual way, with breakfast at The Field. I went for the Ulster fry, which is an exciting combination of meat, meat, and more meat, with ancillary non-animal product items (the full listing - sausage, rasher, black pudding, white pudding, eggs, potatoes, fried slice of tomato, bit of toast, beans). Thus fortified, we headed toward the convention center, and were already surprised by the relative calm of our side of the street (most of the attendees being, inexplicably, on the other approach to the convention center).
I headed straight off for the quick draw event, which was fun as always. I have quite a few pictures even though I only stayed for an hour. I'll cover it in a different post.
From Quick Draw, I moved on to the Amateur Championship. Although the event had a cap of 140 participants, the final tally was less than 90, meaning it would a short event with a rigorous cutoff for the final 16. Basically, the thought was one loss and you're out.
Not really a very crowded field.
She was meant to win me games...
Naturally, I lost my first match. That was largely a luck loss, which happens. In the second match, I had my first game win off of a rule violation. I played a Head Games which let me look through my opponent's deck, and immediately noticed a card that I was pretty sure wasn't in Standard anymore. I was right, and he took a game loss and had to swap in some basic lands to replace the incorrect cards.
...but this ended up doing the job.
I won that match, then lost match three fair and square (no luck issues there, nor bad play, just a bad matchup that I probably could have been better prepared for deckwise). With two match losses, I ducked out of the tournament and headed for the Exhibit Floor.
Shockingly (let's bold that) shockingly the Exhibit Floor was relatively calm -- calmer than Friday, certainly. Based on what kwc, m, and bleusky saw, the real business was in the big halls, especially Hall 20. Despite Saturday's biggest-day-of-the-con, sold-out-first status, Hall 20 siphoned off enough folks to make it easier going on the floor than either of the two days preceding it. It used this time to check in with the small press area, including picking up the latest work from Elephant Eater Comics, home of the not-at-all depressing slice-of-life comic (no sarcasm here -- his comics are slice-of-life without the usual emo content of the genre).
Visions of the small press:
I wandered all over the place today. I picked up some card signatures from Terese Nielsen, Cyril Van Der Hagen, and Rebecca Guay. I had a nice conversation with Ms. Guay about illustration, fine art, and a potential resurgence in representational fine art. If you're interested in that exact thing, there are a number of Guay pieces that are just lovely, if well out of my price range. I think this conversation might actually end up being the highlight of my day.
Other wandering included a bit more swag-acquisition work at the Wizards of the Coast booth, where I wandered into four more Magic boosters.
At the end of the day, we met up for the Masquerade, which I will also cover in a separate entry.
All in all, Saturday ended up being fun and oddly relaxing. Weird, but nice.