Gifts Ungiven

...and tire of temples, you can always head over to Pulse Plaza and check out Pro Tour Kyoto 2009.

Here's the full information page

The PT itself runs from February 27th through March 1st, and if you're feeling really motivated you can come on the 26th for the last-chance qualifier, which is sealed this time around (and, per usual, will likely run well into the AM on the opening day of the PT).

Barring some wacky, last-minute business trip, I won't be anywhere near this PT, so I'll just watch the top eight (which conveniently will start at 5:45pm on a Saturday evening, my time, which totally beats out when European events start...). However, if it's reasonable for you to make it out there, I recommend it -- the public events are a lot of fun, and it's great to be able to walk right up to the feature match area and check out the pro play.

The artist guests are Jeremy Jarvis and Todd Lockwood. I'm a big fan of Lockwood's work.

There are lots of public events listed in the Gazeteer for this event (click here for the PDF), including quite a few that funnel winners into a Sunday morning Beta draft. Sounds like fun.

Luis Scott-Vargas has been on quite a run, with two GP wins and a Pro Tour win in the last few months, in addition to a standout performance at Worlds. This weekend, he's had a crushing performance at Pro Tour Kyoto 2009, with an 11-game undefeated streak before Matteo Orsini-Jones finally took him down in round twelve.

The day before the PT started, Rich Hagon channeled James Lipton and did this nice little interview with Luis:

Luis looks to be playing in the top eight tomorrow while our area PTQ - which he'd be helping judge any other day - will be nearing its own top eight.

I was surprised at how excited I was about PT Kyoto, given how much my mind hasn't been in a "Standard" space of late (what with the Extended PTQ season going on). It turned out an excellent top eight and some interesting deck choices (although I might have preferred more variety).

For those who didn't keep up, you can watch all the Wizards YouTube clips as a playlist here:

...and you can check out all the decks that did reasonably well in Standard here. I'm looking at them right now, hoping for more interesting choices (but really, what's going to be better than Doran backed by Rafiq?).