Darkmoon Faire-The Experience

Before I get into the meat of today's post, I'd like to let everyone know that I will be reviewing decklists from Regionals across the country starting again this week, so if you have results from any of the Regionals held this past weekend, please let me know so we can start to get a handle on the new metagame.

Today, I'm just going to talk about the Faire itself. I will go into more details regarding the tournament later in the week along with my decklist for the event, and what our testing process was like.

Let me start off by saying to anyone who has been to premier events in other games, Darkmoon Faire is like nothing you have experienced before. It has everything you would expect (huge area dedicated to the TCG for the main event and side events, dealers, etc.) and so much more. The most impressive "side item" was the LAN set up for PvP tournaments. In addition there were carnival games like the ring toss, the game where you try to knock over the cans, etc. I was actually a little shocked to see how many people were playing these games throughout the day. There was also a lady there doing tattoos (which I assume probably had something to do with the online game, but I'm not entirely sure.

Unfortunately for me, this weekend conflicted with things that needed to be done in "real life" so the weekend was short for me. We drove down Friday night and got a hotel room ($194 a night for a Hampton Inn, sigh). After we checked in, we headed over to the convention center around 10:30 p.m. or so to see if anything was still going on, and sadly to buy copies of our heroes as they had somehow not made the trip with the rest of our decks. The scene had kinda died down for the night, so we got our cards and headed out to get something to eat. We ended up going to a sports bar where the Mavericks/Warriors game was on every tv and obviously everyone was rooting for the Mavericks.....who got crushed.....bad. After that, we headed back to the hotel to rest up for the big day tomorrow.

We got back to the convention center the next morning around 9:30 or so. The tournament was scheduled to start at 10:00. 10:00 rolled around and there weren't very many people around, so we though turnout was going to be pretty low. Then they announced that there was a marathon in town that was diverting a lot of the traffic toward the convention center so they were extending registration. Around 11:00, the tournament finally got started with 89 participants. Some people say that this was lower than expected, but it's not much lower than I was honestly expecting.

There were several factors, IMO, that led to the number of players being what it was. The first was that there were a lot of people at the Faire who simply chose not to play in the Dream Machine Tournament. People kept coming in all day and playing in side events, but I guess the super computer just wasn't enough to lure a lot of them into the competitive arena. The second factor is that Austin is really expensive. It doesn't have a major hub airport, so flying in is expensive. The hotels downtown are just ridiculously priced. Did I mention we paid $200 for one night at a Hampton Inn? One big factor (the biggest in my mind) is that it's hard to justify shelling out the money to travel to this event when you have such a small chance of making any of your money back. I hope no one takes this as me lobbying for money to be put into the game. I'm just pointing out that it's hard to justify the cost of the trip to Austin unless you just want to vacation at a Darkmoon Faire. Please don't think I'm being critical or negative here, just some things that I think contributed to what some called a low turnout. Also, the number of people at the event was far higher than the number who entered the Dream Machine tournament.

The highlight of the weekend for a lot of players and the thing that really separates Darkmoon Faire from other premier events was Quest-Austin. People were given a checklist of things they had to find throughout the town. You could play in teams of up to 5. When you found an item on the checklist, you had to take a picture with at least 75% of your team in it with the Quest List in the picture as well. A lot of the items on the list could be found in the convention center, but many of them required people to get out and actually explore the town which is a nice bonus. I didn't participate because I had to come home before lists were able to be turned in, but I would have liked to have taken part.

Everyone who played in the DM tournament got a Darkmoon Faire playmat. I ended up giving mine to someone who didn't play but was collecting playmats. I also gave him my Aspect of the Hawk mat from Regionals last month because he didn't have that one yet. I don't use them personally, so hopefully they've found a good home.

Well, that about wraps up the Faire overview. Tomorrow, I'll talk about what deck I played and some of the card choices that we made based on what we were expecting to see.