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Editor: Marty Kay. Friday 22 Feb 2002
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Welcome to the first installment of MTGParadise's latest columnist, Dan Turner. You should recognise Dan from the reports he has written on tournaments he has attended around the world. Dan does a great job flying the Aussie flag overseas. His column is called State of Play and you can look for him at least once a month on MTGParadise.com. Welcome aboard Dan! - Webmaster State of Play: You don't care about us
We all have different reasons for playing magical cards. Some people play for fun, others play for the thrill of competition and a lucky few play for a living. Generally speaking the latter all hail from the Northern hemisphere as nearly all of the Pro Tours are held there in addition to numerous Grand Prix events. In Australia we have never hosted a Pro Tour and have only had 3 Grand Prix in the last 4 years. On the bright side we have had the Duelist Invitational and will be hosting this year's World Championship (which is in Sydney - hurrah!). However the thing that spurned me to write this article was the DCI's announcement last week that they are canceling both the Australasian and Latin American Championships due to the fact they wanted to redistribute the prize money back into their respective National Championships. This is all fine and well but the DCI then went on to say that only certain countries would benefit from this redistribution. The criteria being the number of DCI members and the level of DCI sanctioned tournament activity in the country (would this include weekly drafts?). Considering Australia is a fairly small country (in Magic terms) in the Asian Pacific region it is likely we may not benefit from this at all. Japan for instance will be having US$50000 ploughed back into their National Championship - I don't know about you but that is a lot of money for just one tournament, especially as other countries in the region may not be getting anything. The APAC's gave the opportunity for some players in the Asian Pacific region to duel against each other to determine a champion. This player would also earn the right to compete in the Duelist Invitational against some of the best players in the world, in addition to being invited to the World Championships. Now only the top 8 composite ranked players in the region will be invited to the World Championships and it looks like there won't be an invitational slot. I may be getting on my soapbox here but Australia does deserve a fair size piece of the pie for a few reasons. We have one of the best judges in the world - Chris Zantides (even though he does live in Seattle), an ex World Champion, the mighty Ben Seck, several Pro-Tour quality players and many younger players who have a real talent for the game. There are weekly drafts in Sydney where you can play against some of the best players in the country, regular PTQ's, lots of standard play and other events such as David Low's CANCON Magic extravaganza and Kieren Otten's Ryde tournaments. The Magic scene in Australia is possibly the strongest it has ever been and it would be a real shame for us to lose APACs and then gain nothing from it. Then again I guess we could all move to America. Dan Turner
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