getting serious about the card game
Yesterday Harvey and I went to our first competitive Pokemon tournament. He's been thinking about Pokemon for a while—I have too!—but only recently have we felt ready to take on serious players in anything more than a prerelease tournament. With traffic and parking troubles it was a stressful trip to downtown Salem, but eventually we managed to find somewhere to leave the car and made our way to the comic store where the event was being held. Once there we were directed to the basement dungeon, where we were welcomed into the company of all the other people who chose to spend a beautiful late summer Sunday afternoon playing a card game on folding tables under florescent lights.
For our first tournament we came in with goals. I actually achieved mine as soon as the event started, since all I wanted was to play! Harvey, a more ambitious soul, hoped to win a game and maybe even come in first. His goal didn't take him much longer; in a field of only two Juniors, he was guaranteed to place, and when he beat the only other Junior in the first game he was pretty much guaranteed first in his division. Maybe it was the lack of nerves that let him go undefeated for the rest of the event, finishing by taking two games from Seniors. He came away with four booster packs, a 1st-place promo card plus a couple other promos, and his first championship points. Those 15 points are enough to put him into a tie for 233rd in the US and Canada!
Embarrassingly, I also got some prizes and points, without winning a game. I brought a deck I just put together Saturday, and without much time to practice—and, unlike Harvey, dealing with lots of nerves!—I stumbled in both matches I played. But I did have a bye one round, which gave me an auto-win... leaving me in fourth place, ahead of the folks who apparently only tied or lost? I don't know. The fact that my 4th-place promo card is mistakenly in Spanish—and so not legal to play in US events—is a fair reflection of my actual performance.
Emerging blinking into the sunlight after everything wrapped up, we figured since we'd come so far we might as well take in the sights. According to the map (before my phone died) we were just a couple blocks from the ocean, plus Salem is kind of a tourist destination for all the witch business. But we didn't know which direction the ocean was, and the witchy atmosphere was actually a little weird. Plus we were hungry. So we went home. We're looking forward to the next tournament... and hoping it's somewhere with a parking lot.
Harvey: 15/???
Dada: 10/???
Pokemon tourism in Salem