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Trick ain’t no GP Nostradamus

By Trick Jarrett ⋅ November 5, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

I feel like the prom queen who just showed up for a blind date and the date looks like Rainn Wil­son: dis­ap­pointed, but not totally unhappy. Last week I put for­ward my guesses for the Grand Prix sched­ule in 2010 and with the offi­cial sched­ule now released, it’s time to see how I did. Also of note, we are main­tain­ing a direc­tory of “pre­mier” tour­na­ment events here at Man­a­Na­tion. Check it out: Pre­mier Magic the Gath­er­ing.

Where as I had pre­dicted more Grand Prixes than ever before, 29, we instead get 18. Ouch.

That hurts.

A lot.

Magic is soar­ing and, well, we thought that next year we’d see them stoke the fires and really push the pre­mier events. Alas it is not to be. Obvi­ously Wiz­ards has a lot of smart peo­ple work­ing for them, and the Orga­nized Play divi­sion is no dif­fer­ent, I trust they have done their home­work and that there is a rea­son we have less GPs than we’ve had in recent years. Maybe the game isn’t doing as well as we thought. Maybe GPs aren’t as empow­er­ing to new play­ers as we thought.

When I stop to con­sider the num­bers, I real­ized some­thing. Even with this years sched­ule, GP atten­dance really is a minis­cule amount when it comes to the num­ber of Magic play­ers. 20 events, con­sider each GP, on aver­age brings in 600 unique play­ers (inten­tion­ally low) and that means it’s really only reach­ing 12,000 unique Magic play­ers. And yet, Wiz­ards spends over half a mil­lion dol­lars on the prize pool! That’s rather gen­er­ous if my esti­mates hold up.

In any case, back to my pre­dic­tions. Out of 29 GPs, I cor­rectly picked a few (and missed on a lot more.)

GP Atlanta, GP Orlando? — Wrong. The south­east sees a big fat goose egg when it comes to GPs. 0–2

GP Bal­ti­more — Cor­rect! 1–2. Hello Charm City!

GP NYC — Nope. 1–3. I’m look­ing like the St. Louis Rams!

GP Port­land — Yes! It’s a great loca­tion in a vibrant city and is some­what acces­si­ble to the west coast of the US, and of course closer to Asia than other US GPs. 2–3.

GP San Fran­cisco — Yes! But this time it’s called GP Oak­land. They’re just across the bay, don’t quib­ble with me, I’m tak­ing it. 3–3.

GP St. Louis — Alas no. 3–4

GP Hous­ton — Yes! 4–4. I’m bat­tling, scrap­ing and claw­ing my way to try and get a win­ning record.

GP New Orleans, GP Mon­treal, GP Mex­ico City, GP Rio, GP San­ti­ago, GP Lon­don — Talk about a los­ing streak. 6 wrong guesses in a row. And I was so close with Mon­treal, if I had just picked Toronto. *sigh* 4–10. Ouch.

GP Madrid and GP Lyon — Cor­rect! 6–10.

GP Leipzig, GP Zurich, GP Bologna, GP St. Peters­burg, GP Shang­hai, GP Seoul, GP Taipei, GP Nagoya, GP Hiroshima — Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong… 6–19. Not look­ing good folks.

GP Manila, GP Syd­ney — Yes! The last two which I guessed cor­rectly, 8–19.

And then I missed on GP Bris­bane and GP Paris. 8 out of 29 guesses cor­rect, 28% cor­rect. Ouches. Unless I take the 11 extra cities out of the 21 I missed, and then I’m look­ing at 8 out of 18… not bad. That’s.. almost.. half. Sheesh.

Maybe I’ll do bet­ter next year.

Trick Jarrett is the host and founder of ManaNation.com, he writes, edits, covers, and spoils Magic for a living. Playing it whenever he can manage to find the time. He is engaged to a lovely woman who refuses to learn Magic, and they have a cute cocker-spaniel puppy who is all too eager to play Magic.

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