I wont be at  GENCON this year... but I definetly enjoyed my little foray into Type 1. Even losing I got to do some fun things like tinker up a colossus and get a 'wtf' when Paul saw the disrupts. 2 of my favorite things.

It would appear that type 1 has died in Richmond however... and without playtesting partners I dont know that I'll be able to get back into the game in any serious manner.  We'll see how it goes though. You never know when some other old timer might decide to dust off his broken spells.

So after 2 years of not playing Magic, I was finally tired of World of Warcraft.   It seemed like with a Roanoke SCG just a couple weeks away, maybe I should give it a shot again.
Of course I had no idea what the metagame had changed to, what deck to play, or even any cards from the past 15 months or so.
Naturally TMD was my resource for looking at what had been winning, the state of the metagame, all that sort of stuff.   With no new cards, and nobody to playtest wtih...  seemed like going with an old favorite was my best bet.  I took a basic control slaver list, used disrupts for the couple of 'play' slots... mostly because I had no idea what else to use and it seemed like it would be good vs flash and combo, and reasonable vs other decks. 
With no practice or research going in, I was apprehensive... the biggest lesson from my 'glory days' with the Paragons and ShortBus was that tournaments were won or lost before you even showed up... with preperation and hard work...  with no preperation or even basic practice with the deck, it seemed like I was doomed before I sleeved up.   But a few days before the tournament, I got some great news.  Not only was Smmemememmenemenemmememen going to be there, but Kowal and the Brassman were coming down... and even Marc Perez was going to set aside his eternal quest for manlove and attend.   The good times of previous SCG's were just too much to miss a chance to hang with my old buds again.  So I took my slaver deck, got in the wife's Volvo and headed out to Roanoke at 6am.  2 and a half hours in the car later I came to a few conclusions.
1st - Once out of Richmond there are a tremendous number of country music stations... and even the very best  "Lost my dog, Lost my job, my sister left me" song wasnt going to cut it for the remaining 2 hours of my drive.
2nd - These tournaments were significantly more fun when the site was 10 minutes from my house...
So around 8:45 I arrive at the new SCG game center.  Wow, Pete and company have really outdone themselves.  The area is very spacious, the seating isnt too crowded, and they have TVs all around the room.   During the round the televisions show the time remaining, and between rounds they show the pairings.  Its better than even my experienes with the Pro Tour. 
Upon walking in a couple of the judges recognize me.   The last year of playing Magic I had really stopped playing and mostly gone to judging.  In retrospect this was an awful decision because it turned the game into a job and I think helped push me away from it. So one of the judges recognizes me and does a double take.  We catch up for a bit and move along to go register my deck.
At the other end of the tournament hall I find Kowal and the Brassman in the center of a group of people, carrying on with exactly the kind of redicuous behavior that I remember.  I immediately sat down near them and started writing out my decklist.  Immediately the conversation turns to hamburger throwing stars, and the greatest lucksack of all time, Eric Miller.  Perhaps I should just go with the Eric principle and put 1 trinisphere in a deck with mishra's workshop.. .and just always draw it in my opening hand.  Worked for him.
I finish up my decklist and recount just to be sure.  25 mana sources, 35 spells.  perfect.  Look around for Perez and he still hasnt arrived.  Apparently Smememememememen isnt going to be able to make it either...  big bummer.  One of the Meandeckers did show up, but its one I never met before, Paul Mastriano. 
The tournament begins and Perez has still not shown up.   I had expected him to cut it close, but not to actually miss the tournament.  oh well,  another disappointment.
I sit down for the player meeting and the guy across from me is Hill Redwine... another long time type 1 player I recognize from back in the day.  Great to see he made the trip up. Chatting with him apparently he has barely played in a while either. Hill was always a great guy,  winning or losing he was friendly. Glad to see him at the tournament.
Pairings for round 1 go up, and I am playing Paul Mastriano.   WTF.
Suddenly I'm remindied of why I started judging...    I am forever paired in the first round with the best players. Oh well, nothing but to go for it. It does occur to me that this is the first time I've played this deck in 2 years... and even back then it was as part of a testing gauntlet! What on earth was I thinking?
Round 1 - Paul Mastriano   with a TPS variant (from my observation)
Game  1 he wins the die roll and opens with Tinker, but I have the FoW.  I tutor up an ancestral and get the card lead on him. A goblin welder starts attacking as I have yet to find anything to weld. We trade spells and I dig further into the deck.  I find yawg will before bleeds away all my counters and seal the game with a tinker for colossus.
Game 2  he leads with duress which snags my tinker... and reveals my disrupt.  It occurs to me that disrupt is significantly less good when the opponent knows its there. He misses his 2nd land drop but drops a lotus.  I end-step a brainstorm and he responds with a FoF off his lotus.  Mistake on my part as he was waiting for me to tap that blue in order to fire the FoF free from my disrupt.  He reveals 2 lands 2 brainstorms and a ritual. I split the pile into business and mana.  He passes on the mana to take the brainstorms.  Disrupt kills the first one and I am off to the races with brainstorms and thirsts for knowledge.  No business though.  Just mana.  His 2nd brainstorm resolves and he sets up a few cards.  Leads with a duress to take my mana drain and the following turn double rituals into bargain.  Bargain gives him the game.
Game 3 I keep a hand I probably shouldnt have.  It has 2 force of wills a brainstorm and some other blue card. The FoW +mana + brainstorm seemed like a good idea at the time... but in retrospect I should have mulled to something a little more powerful, like a chalice.  I brainstorm and see a thirst +  lots of mana.  Pop a fetchland next turn to shuffle it away.  Thirst for knowledge into yet more mana.  My hand is 2 FoW and an Underground sea.  With 8 mana on the board already.  Paul starts to go off and pops a small tendrils for half my life.  Yet then shows the yawgmoth's will. I Force of will the Will and he uses his last card to pyroblast it.  I look at the 3 mana on th etable.  The FoW and land in my hand... and the match is done. 
0-1.    Not the start I was hoping for... but given the mana floods, my own lack of preperation, its better than I would have expected. Plus now I'm in the losers bracket...  so I should at least get a few good games.
Round 2 - I'm paired up. vs Kevin Binswanger.
Shuffle and present my deck when the judge comes by.  Sure enough he'd like to see my deck.  I'm thinking I got the random deckcheck for the round but he doesnt ask for my opponents deck... oh uh... I've done enough of these as a judge to know whats coming....   I screwed up my decklist.  Cant be right though. I double checked it...  60 cards.
I was right... I didnt screw up my 60 cards.  I screwd up my sideboarrd.  Somehow I managed to include my entry for 1 Sundering Titan twice.   Now, Hi-Val's nicely modified Sundering Sliver is indeed a special card, but the judge didnt seem it was special enough for me to include it twice and I was given a gameloss for illegal decklist.
Stupid mistake... the kind of stupid mistake that you just cant afford to make even when you're at the top of your game... especially when you're a random guy with a deck and no practice. 
I follow it up with a bigger mistake.   I let it get to me.  I dont know that I made any mistakes vs my opponent, but I didnt make any brilliant plays either, and the fact that I barely remember the game tells me I wasnt playing as well as I should. His first game win means the match is over. 
0-2. 
My opponent was quite polite and I wish him goodluck. He takes the matchslip up and I sit at the table a bit to collect my thoughts. At this point I'm out of the running for any prizes and decide to go ahead and drop before I manage to set my cards on fire.   Side events wotn start for some time and the handful of people I know are still in the running. So I go chat with a few people and say goodbye. 
Before I do, I talk to Kowal and we get Mr Perez on the phone where we discuss at length whether he is in fact a bi-pedal vagina, or merely some lower sort of manwhore lifeform.  This lengthy conversation cheers me up quite a bit.  and I head out to start my car drive home.
Not willing to face another 2 hours of music regarding a life of  unemplioyment and incest I mull over the days events in my head instead.
I came to a few of conclusions.
First - Magic as a hobby in and of itself isnt that great.  The game has a tremendous luck based element in the factors of pairings and mana flood/screw.  In my fond remembrances of the game I had forgotten all of its infurating little quirks. Yes quality players can minimize these things, but there is a random element at the heart of the game that will simply always be there.
Second - Magic as a hobby for a group of friends is awesome.  Even several years removed from my teammates I was still able to have a terrific time talking with them, and the social aspect of the event/game is phenomenal.    Gamers are dorks, but they are friendly dorks, and have a terrific sense of humor.  Had a few more of my old crew been around I think I'd have sat and lost all day and been just fine with it.
Third -  Type 1 remains every bit as competitive and serious as when I left it.  You have to do your homework, you have to bring your "A" Game... or you're just going to be a speedbump in somebody else's tournament report.
Fourth - I am getting way too old.  My decision to leave following my 0-2 drop was just as largely influenced by the recognition that I could get home in time for my wife to make something awesome for dinner as it was by the lack of side events.     

That about wraps up my tournament report.   There are maybe a dozen people on the site who even have any idea who I am, but hopefully they found it amusing. 

Thanks to Brassman, Kowal, and Hill for coming to Virginia... it was worth riding out to Roanoke just to hang out with some old friends.
Thanks to Starcity for hosting the event... fantastic venue and well run.

Slops to me for not having the patience to wait a few months and really get prepared before I went back to a tournament.
Slops to Marc Perez for being a bi-pedal vagina

Our priests decided to take a few weeks of vacation... but since their return we've made good progress.
Smoked C'thun last night.   I got the eye and the cloth belt thanks largely to an error in master looter.
Going into Naxxramas tonight

Saw C'thun last night.

Killed the Twin emps last week but did not have time to clear the trash.

I have to say the fight sounds really fun, if unforgiving.

One of the players I'm most happy to have met in my time in Magic.  Best of luck in the future

Update:
Major guild drama, lost a good month or 2 to a quitting spree and subsequent recruitment drive. Got things back together and finally dropped Huhuran last week.

Started making attempts on the Twin Emps last night.

Seems like a very winnable fight.  Just going to need some practice with keeping the bugs clear and timing the teleport... for some reason our mods werent warning us.

Has anyone found a trick to avoiding the Unbalancing Strike? It seems fairly random, so I'm not sure if it is avoidable... but like Onyxia's Deep breath it can really screw up a solid attempt.

Huhuran to 3%... so we tried a potion run...  18%... LOL
I'm confident we'll get her next time, just a little more NR gear and she'll be down.  It feels silly to go farming for greens, but whatever it takes.

AQ20 is stupid... obnoxious fights for so-so blues
but you have to go for the books

You CAN kill huhuran without loot from the dragons... but tell me that malfurions signet and all the acid inscribed stuff isnt hugely important.

I cant imagine trying viscidious without it.

For the gloves TracerBullet, dont forget the archanid gloves in RFD. easier to solo-farm

Gate has been open 1 week, we are taking our first huahuran attempts tonight
I dont like the Sartura encounter... mostly because you can die for no good reason at all.
Loot in AQ20 is horrid for the difficulty
Loot in AQ40 is mediocre at best.
Not very enthused at all.
Also very upset that blizzard is making encounters that are dependent on loot from contested bosses (NR gear from green dragons)

New art on my full Nemesis set + Staff of Dominance is awesome...  The nefarion fight is really fun once you get past phase 1... phase 1 just annoys the hell out of me (exactly like razorgore)

Anyone been able to beat Hakkar since the patch?  You cant outrange the corrupted blood anymore and it fires off at lightning speed.  The rest of the zoned got pretty nerfed... but Hakkar is nuts.   oh and the berserkers are bugged and crash the whole raid about 50% of the time.

Still on Nefarion.   Holiday schedules and some idiot players screwing up the instance reset have really hurt our attempts.
Last time we got there we absolutely punked the drakonids (bringing along sulfuras seemed to help, go figure). He may go down this week.  I think we'd have gotten him last week except that we missed a fear ward and lost control around 63%.

Btw, the corrupted infernals in the warlock call are enslaveable... our raid leader doesnt want me screwing around with them during the encounter, but it seems like this 'special ability' of nefarion's is to give me an extra 150dps...

I'm currently on 7/8 Nemesis... my only remaining loot in the zone is on nef(robe,staff,trinket).

Good night last night, Got Nefarian to phase 2 on every attempt... fewer guards left each time. Healers,MT getting practice on the transistion... the rest of us getting better at controlling the leftovers.  30 minute timer = colossal pain.
So far we've had red drakonid's every week, which bothered me at first, but I figure if we can do it with reds we can do it with any... just like learning on time lapse chromaggus.
One of the raiding guilds on the server had just killed nef the first time last week, but never had to fight time lapse chromaggus.. this week they got him and now they're stuck. Is it wrong that I enjoy that?

So we went back last night to take more attempts before our timer expires and we are doing so/so trying to perfect the drakonid zerg.  After the 3rd or 4th attempt Nefarian decides that we're doing too well and refuses to talk to us anymore.  He didnt de-spawn  like a failed Phase 2 attempt, he simply stopped talking to us so we couldnt start the event.  We tried to reset the instance by staying out for 30 minutes to no effect.

I think this is a clear indication that he was afraid of us and knew our utter ineptness at handling the drakonids was a front all along.

Thats interesting.. it seems like you load up on warriors for the zone.  3 or 4 to each door is 6-8 in the raid.
Our guild currently has a lot of drama about who gets to go to and who has to sit for our raids.  Do you guys try to use any particular class balance for BWL? do you swap people in and out based on the boss?
We aim to have 5 of each class in the raid, but for some bosses you defiently want more of a certain class... curious how you guys handle it.

Well we took our shot last night... tried a few different strats... none of them really worked that well.  The best success we had was splitting the raid to each door and destroying them as they came in.  Our warriors seemed utterly unable to keep the drakonids in one place though for AoE.  For some reason the mobs would come out of hte door hellbent on running to the other side.
Could you ask your warriors exactly what they do to keep multiple mobs clustered up like that? Do you use the hunter slowing trap?
Our counters were screwed up but we were right around 40 drakonids down... does anyone know for sure what makes phase 2 start?

when we went back in tonight only 1 had broodpower green and we rolled them fairly easily.

Then tried chromaggus and found out we had the extra fun time lapse / ignite flesh version.

So we killed him and took his stuff.

On to Nefarian.

Dynasty Warriors (any) - kill thousands of people, ride an elephant, turn the tide of battle

Gran Tourismo (any) - drive real fast, curse the license exams.

Either of you guys have any tricks for handling the wyrmguard trio's?  We hit double green and a bronze this week and it wrecked us. We had already had a rough run and decided to go kill thunderaan instead, but I was curious if either of you had a specific method for dealing with green brood power wyrmguards. We have previously treated them like the spider boss in zg, having a warrior remain behind to taunt and drag back, but with 2 of them the aoe stuns got out of hand.

They finally fixed the Nemesis set....   the art, the stats, and the set bonuses are now actually worthwhile.  Still not ideal, but such a dramatic improvment that I expect to be nerfed.

As an officer all I get is complaints already... I shudder to imagine the drama that would go with appointed loot.  You must have a very team-oriented group to not get swamped with complaints and accusations of favoritism.

Gratz Jebus.   We're a good month behind you guys, but we're making progress.  We downed Ebonroc and Flamegor last night... Got flamegor on the first attempt... wow what a joke that guy is.   On to Chromaggus and a bunch of wiping.

I assume you guys also use a DKP system, how do you handle tier 1 vs tier 2 epics (or epics vs epics at all).  it seems unfair that someone should pay the same price to go from blue to a tier 2 epic as someone who already has a tier 1, as it really discourages people from spending hte DKP on tier 1 items.  Do you have any system in place for discounting the cost  if you already have an epic? Do you forc epeople to take the tier 1's?

We are currently 7 Elementium Ores away from our own Thunderfury - so  we'll keep experimenting with Cripple for the time being...  any info that I get I'll pass along.

We ran an experiment this weekend in Molten Core that may be of interest to you guys.  We summoned a Doomguard before engaging Golemagg, and the Doomguard's "Cripple" ability appeared to work on him.   If it works on Golemagg we're thinking it will work on other bosses and plan to test it accordingly.
The "Cripple" debuff is -30% attack speed, it lasts for 20 seconds and is on a 30 second cooldown, so you can keep him crippled 2/3rds of the fight... a pretty major boss nerf for those it works on.
No confirmation if it works on other bosses (and obviously some dont do much melee damage anyway) but thought you guys might like to know.

Like I figured it just took a few wipes to get the feel for the pulls, and then we moved right on up to ebonroc.  We had lost so much time learning the other pulls though it was already past raid time...  we took a few attempts and I can see why people say he's easy.  1% wipe on our 2nd attempt. then people started getting sloppy because of the hour and we had to call it. Ebonroc is so dirt simple... and yet so frustrating when the taunts are resisted. We'll definetly be on Chromaggus next instance (ours resets sometime tonight).

Firemaw was in the way of our goblin pull, so we killed him.   It really was that simple.  If Ebonroc and Flamegor are as easy we'll be on chromaggus this coming week.
Honestly I expect learning those ridiculous goblin pulls to be harder than learning Firemaw was. We killed him on our second pull.

We finally got our last rogue a purple mainhand recently, a dragonfang fell off vael.  Still missing some offhand purples, but the rogue dps is really beginning to take off.

Congrats on Nefarion.  Looks like you'll have just enough time to get him on farm status by the time AQ comes out.

Have you gotten Perditions yet?

I got your message Pat, thanks.   

Personally I found that I had to treat Broodlord like Onyxia in the level of dps I could dish out. Mostly used wands, with a few bolts thrown in when I felt bold. The autoattack on wands is exceptionally fast so judging light and wisdom on Broodlord is very helpful for alliance raids. It gives an extra mana boost to your regenning priests, and the light helps keep the ranged dps topped off without priest support. We judge wisdom on almost every serious raid boss... it just adds too much mana over the course of the fight.

As I figured the Broodlord went down with little trouble last night.  Our only real problem was the burst damage he puts out on the tanks occasionally (the mortal strike).  We used flask of the titans as a short term crutch to give our healers more breathing room, but I can already see where with more practice and a touch better gear we wont need them. A bit of practice on the goblin pulls and I see us at Chromaggus within a couple of weeks. Onyxia cloaks will likely be a bigger problem than the drakes.

PM me that bit about respeccing Pat

Good luck with Nefarian guys, I look forward to catching up so that I have some clue wtf you're talking about.

Broodlord will probably go down tonight, as we've pretty much figured out the obnoxious suppression room and taken a few good swings at him.  Any advice regarding the knockback de-aggro and how to deal with it? Do you have your ranged folks wander in from time to time to get de-aggro'd also, or just go with uberlow ranged dps?

For what its worth, Level 2 judge, and I happen to HJ most of Starcity's Richmond events.

First of all you did the right thing by signing the slip and letting it go. The judge is the final arbiter, even when you disagree with the ruling. In this case the judge's ruling was within reason, although not the direction I would have chosen to go.

You screwed up the Uba Mask effect... screwing up an effect, procedural error...  Warning.  You could make an arguement that its drawing extra cards, but its not really an extra card, its the draw for the turn, you just failed to modify it with Uba Mask. I think the judge in your case was more focused on the results, and the difficulty in resolving the situation. This is definetly a judgment call for him to make, however whats 'irrepairable' to one judge is 'inconvenient' to another, and someone else may have ruled differently.

If the other player was lobbying hard for a game loss like you said, I'd issue him a warning on unsporting conduct as well. 

But I'm a hardass that way.