Coolest Geek Week!

Okay so I had an extremely cool week - and all of it in Seattle...

First off I got to hang out with my friends at Hidden Path Entertainment, and especially cool is Mark Terrano's Tiny House. Every time I stay there it is amazingly comfortable and I sleep so well. It always makes me think about how to get smaller in footprint.

Next off, i got to meet Jordan Weisman the creator of FASA (Shadowrun, MechWarrior, etc)... got him to sign my first and third edition Shadowrun pen and paper RPG books that I have been carrying with me from place to place since 1989! Oh crap that is 20 years now. Anyways Jordan is a very cool and creative guy and is up to creating some very neat new products and I had to chance to see what he is up to.

Magic the Gathering. Seiously, I am so lucky that I finished college before this game came out. If I was still in school I would have filled out every student loan application I could grab a hold of and buy massive amounts of booster packs. As it was I think I spent about $4k out of my first $24k a year game job buying magic cards. So I got to meet Richard Garfield at the DICE convention in Las Vegas, and then as a follow-up meet him again in Seattle.

There I got to go to his home (a castle as if it was designed by a hyper modern Scandanavian) that inlcudes geothermal electrical power generation. His brilliantly active and funny home-schooled kids demanded a house visitation tax. So I handed them some very nice hotel soap that I couldn't leave behind from one of the countless trips that I take.

Their son demanded that I play him a game a magic. I carefully selected my favorite Thallid deck (a mono-green deck that involves scores of counters of fungus creation). The son's deck? A random collection of 300 cards that included many rare alphas and betas signed by his Dad and many other early MTG founders and artists. Well, lets just say that the boy came learn respect for the lowly Saproling.

After that we played a variety of board games, Richard like many of us is a local hub for a weekly game night that turned out to be super cool for all involved. Especially fun was the game of Werewolf. Later we played St. Petersberg and that was cool but Richard showed off way too much his superior PhD skills...

At the end of the night i got to play Richard 1v1 MTG. He gleefully ran downstairs and came up with his own totally hand-written deck. It was super cool. It was an agnostic deck that had a touch of blue but other than that it was like an alien creature. It had crads like The Exchange Student, 1 blue and 3 colorless sorcery, when brought into play exchange for a creature of your opponents. The old Switcheroo, takes a card at random from your opponent and switch with this one. I played a mono-black deck but I took 20 points of damage by the time I could deal just 6 to him - from no creature damage, simply tool cards that caused me damage from the number of HIS cards that I had in my hand or in play!!!

But the coolest part is after I asked him to sign 5 basic lands - he ran downstairs again and came back up with another hand-written card - a Secret Achievement - I accomplished by asking for the signing of the 5 basic lands - very cool huh?

-Erik <div

Originally posted on LiveJournal