Welcome back, readers! This past weekend I attended GP Charlotte and I thought I'd go over the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good

19 Vendors

With 19 different vendors in the room there was strong competition on both buylist and sell prices, which is awesome for the consumer. I checked prices on a lot of spec targets, especially my previously mentioned Spellskite and Fulminator Mages and it was easy to find price differences of $5-$7 dollars per copy (which equates to 35-50%) of the sell prices.

I'll give a special shoutout to the two vendors with the best prices in the room consistently: Aethergames and MTGDeals. Many other vendors weren't terrible (by any means), but these two stores were the cheapest on a lot of staples and most of my money spent went to these two guys (and of course SCG's HP section which was brimming with good value).

I hope that moving forward we continue to see a large number of vendors at these events simply because it's great for the player to have all that competition in the room at once. It also meant there was a huge amount of staples and rarer cards available for every type of MTG player (from grinders to cubers to collectors).

Infinite Challenge Badge (Concept)

This was the first time SCG offered what they called the "infinite challenge badge" option, which for $100 allowed one to play in challenges all weekend and even included a playmat. With four Sealed Challenges and three 2HG Challenges you could get 36 packs just for participating in all the Sealed challenges with no wins at all...so if the playmat is worth $35-40 then you paid $60-$65 for a box.

It was an insanely good value and a lot of players did that (myself included; though I did miss out on one of the 10am Sealed Challenges due to traffic issues). On top of that you even got two free entries into various 8-man side events (which are valued at between $10-$20). And last but not least there were plenty of Standard, Modern and Legacy challenges as well, so you could play any format you wanted if you so desired.

The Venue

The Charlotte Convention center is located in downtown Charlotte, which means you can walk to a whole lot of different restaurants nearby (to satisfy any pallet). Parking wasn't difficult and there are plenty of cheap parking options nearby (on the weekends most places only charge $5 a day, which is really cheap for downtown parking).

Card Prices

Thanks to so many vendors and the huge number of attendees a lot of staples could be picked up for less than TCG Low as these vendors were trying to flip stock and had lower profit margins (per card) in order to maximize revenue.

This is obviously amazing for anyone trying to speculate and stockpile on specs. Being in person even allows for some bargaining which you can't get online. This weekend I picked up the following cards at the stated prices from vendors:

• 4x Spellskite - $12 (Aethergames)
• 4x Ignoble Hierarch - $30 (Aethergames)
• 4x Ignoble Hierarch - $29 (MTGDeals)
• 6x Fulminator Mage - $15 (Aethergames)
• 3x Glittering Wish - $2 (SCG-HP)
• 1x Mikaeus, the Unhallowed - $5 (SCG-HP)
• 4x Goryo's Vengeance - $8 (SCG-HP/Foreign)
• 1x Regal Force - $8 (SCG-HP)
• 1x Umezawa's Jitte - $20 (Aethergames-HP)

While these prices (for the most part) are just barely below TCG Low, I heard many cases of players buying cards from one vendor and selling them to another for a small profit.

Chris Pikula

While waiting for my Legacy 8-man to start, someone mentioned that Mr. Pikula was actually in line a few people back from us and I turned around and sure enough he was. Luckily, I had my 2x Planeshift Meddling Mages in a Legacy sideboard and he was happy enough to sign them for me (he even carried around a few sharpies because I imagine he gets the request a lot). He was incredibly nice and a true ambassador to the game.

The Bad

Fakes

My friend Lance came across a playset of fake Dark Confidants just sitting abandoned on a table. He didn't know they were fake until he picked them up and felt them. He got a judge over and they started warning the vendors.

With the plethora of stories we've been hearing about all the Chinese fakes, it's not surprising for this to happen, but it's still upsetting. Unfortunately, these big events are sure to attract some less than savory people trying to make a quick buck, and it will most likely continue until the Chinese government really starts cracking down on the people printing them.

However, the worst part (from the player perspective) is that while the buyers from the vendors are typically well versed in spotting fakes, it's easier for these people to try to trade fakes for other real cards and then sell those cards to vendors, thus bypassing the biggest danger to them.

Tectonic Edge Cavern of Souls

For those who missed it, an awkward thing occurred in the Top 4 match between the two Splinter Twin players. One player registered a deck with a Tectonic Edge and then claims to have made a last-minute switch to Cavern of Souls. However, the decks are all checked in the Top 8, so this particular claim seems very questionable (how did the judges miss the difference?).

Unfortunately for Sam Pardee this issue didn't come into play until this Top 4 match where he got blown out by an uncounterable (thanks to Cavern) Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir. And when the decklist was reviewed and a game loss issued it was assigned to the finals (as the finals was the next available opportunity).

Now SCG did a good job of explaining the situation to those watching the stream, but here we have another example of cheating at a major event (caught on camera again), giving competitive MTG another black eye.

The Ugly

Infinite Challenge Badge (Execution)

I mentioned the Infinite Challenge Badge concept in the good section, but the overall execution had some major flaws.

The worst was that Friday and Saturday one was allowed to register for multiple events at one time, but you had to drop before you could participate in the next. (The badge did explicitly state you could not participate in multiple events at one time.) Then on Sunday they changed the policy to only allow registration for one event at a time. This meant that if you wanted to play in multiple events you had to wait in line over and over again.

The next major issue was in regards to how the formats were scheduled. Again, the major issue occurred on Sunday when a 2HG Sealed Challenge was scheduled right before a Sealed Challenge. The players trying to extract the most value obviously wanted to register for the 2HG one and then drop to go get into the Sealed Challenge. However, thanks to the new policy they would have to drop and then go back and wait in line at the registration booth.

As one might expect all the Limited challenges had the highest number of participants (many of whom dropped immediately to go play in the challenges of other formats) and this particular instance over two thirds of the 2HG participants dropped immediately, creating a huge line at the events registration desk for the follow up Sealed challenge.

To add insult to injury, the challenges all started late for the most part. The 2HG challenge participants (of which I was one) also didn't get their product for the 2HG challenge until about 5-10 minutes before the sealed registration was supposed to close (so there was a lot of players getting stressed out about missing their window)--quite a few players grumbled that they thought this might have been done on purpose to reduce the amount of sealed product handed out.

My Pulls (From Sealed Events and Prizes)

Below is a picture of all the stuff I got for my infinite badge. Overall I still came out ahead, but for cracking as many packs as I did...I got a pretty lousy pool.

The Beautiful

Normally, one would stop after "The Ugly" simply because nobody says "The Good, the Bad, the Ugly and the Beautiful", but I thought you guys might enjoy looking at the beautiful Force of Will Playmat Ms. Terese Nielsen had available (for a while).

I got incredibly lucky that we got to the convention center before it opened at 10AM on Friday and happened to pick the entry line next to where the artists were set up. I simply followed the throngs into her line and got through it in about 20 minutes.