I haven’t dusted off my city of brass or leviathans in a while, but this fall has given me reason to seriously reconsider.  Philadelphia, a city where you typically find cards heavily laminated in wheel spokes or in suburban tabletop hideaways, has a mob of CCG events shacking up in the Philly Convention center over the coming month, and a lot of them offer you prizes based less on encyclopedic collections than on a clever turn of a rule or a little-outside the booster pack thinking.

Abbreviations explained below!

CCG – Competitive Card Games – Started out waaaay before Richard Garfield unleashed Magic:  The Gathering on the world in 1993, but the idea is really simple – take a board game and lose the board – encapsulate all the rules of the pieces in the game on cards with an internal logic and strategy, and then use your collection against those of your friends (enemies?).   Far from simple, however, is the mathematical strategy utilized by people who hone their decks to lethal efficiency, often using sophisticated statistical techniques.

I’ve seen Magic cards being let loose in indian buffets, in dorm basements, and in tables at the back of storefronts  around Center City and West Philly for some time now, but only recently realized how active the convention center was for supporting larger gatherings, contests and tournaments.  Here’s a primer:

This OCTOBER 3rd, Yu-Gi-Oh fans had a shot at the Philadelphia Regional Tournament, hosted by Blue Bell PA’s Alternative Universes store (http://www.alternateu.com/).  Prizes, slide shows, trading and and such are commonplace at these events, and I’m sorry  if you missed this one. However, looking at the Philly convention center’s events calendar should placate any raw nerves, as there’s a whole MESS of CCG coming back over the next few months.

On October 10th you can head back to check out  Star City Game’s $5,000 open tournament, part one of a weekend that will hand out $10,000 in prize money for MTG deckmasters. Saturday hosts the $5,000 Standard Open, while the $5,000 Legacy Open contest happens the next day.  There will be a bevy of other games going on during this time, with rules that mix and blend from preconstructed decks to random draws, all with their own buy-ins and payouts.  It’s like Vegas – with giant monsters and sinister magicians!

One last bit –  A whole bunch of MTG/WoW CCG card artists will be around as well, so if you have Obelisk of Bant tattooed on your butt, you can shake the hand of the man who inspired your passion for body modification.

http://forums.starcitygames.com/viewtopic.php?t=315516&sid=294ac4c97ffdb169c17f6a917f1ab30f

The October 10th event coincides with the VGExpo as well, which should provide a good time over at the convention center, should you get a little overwhelmed with stacked effects and interrupt damage mitigation.  And while these events will probably give you a good flavor of the competitive side of major CCGs,  remember that most of the time, you’re playing with your friends for fun – and not for statistical optimization.

If you think you like the idea, brace yourself for November, where it looks like we’ll be privy to not only a weekend WoW CCG tournament (NOV 14 -  15), again sponsored by these Alternative Universes guys, but also a special Magic the Gathering Tournament on that same Saturday.  The nice thing about a lot of the main tournaments is that you don’t need to walk through the door having spent tons of money on thousands of cards – for the entrance fee, the organizers will usually give you a set of packs to work with, and it then comes down to strategy and planning a path to victory.