Balance 2020 TO's Report

Balancing Things.

It’s May 28th, and I’m seeing the George Floyd video for the first time. I’m extremely uncomfortable, angry, and sad.

It’s May 30th, and my wife and I are in the car out for a drive (look, quarantine while pregnant is tough, sometimes you just go driving looking to buy a Nintendo Switch that no one has in stock anywhere) and we come upon a Black Lives Matter protest taking up an entire 4-lane intersection.

It’s June 1st and I’m starting to feel dejected about not being able to fix the issues in the world caused by people who look like me: white men.

It’s still June 1st and I have an epiphany while power washing my deck (again, quarantine makes you do things you wouldn’t normally): I can help. The Old School community in America has made no small amount of improvement by holding charity tournaments. Just a few weeks ago I played in DFB’s Havenwood Battleground that raised what I thought was an amazing amount of money for a food bank. Surely I could pick a black-owned or at least black-supporting charity and maybe raise a few hundred dollars for them by having a webcam tournament, right?

I took my idea to the Philly OS Discord and was met with support from my fellows in the club who helped me hash out the details. The thing I was most interested in was what charity we could support. We were seeing calls all over social media to support bail funds and legal defense funds and things of that nature, but I wanted to make sure that we supported an organization that was doing direct work in Philadelphia and one that wasn’t maybe as well known on the national stage. One that might need more help. One of the guys suggested APEDF as he’d been in communication with them personally and felt like they were the kind of organization that could definitely benefit from what we were bringing forward.

With a charity in place, I made the decision to go full steam ahead, even though I knew very little of what I was doing. I reached out to DFB and asked him about the admin documents he’d used during Havenwood and was met with immediate support and a sharing of those same documents to use to create my own. I’m eternally grateful for this, because without that access I guarantee this event would not have gone off as smoothly as it did.

Around the same time I started thinking about streaming the tournament. I’d put my mind back to a few months ago when the Dice City crew streamed their Winter Blast event and how much fun it was for me to watch it even though I couldn’t be there. “I already have a Twitch channel, and I have experience streaming, if we can get enough people playing in this that I don’t have to play, streaming it would make perfect sense”, I thought. That way people who either couldn’t or didn’t want to play could still engage with the event (and engage they did, shout out to the Magical Hacks for tearing up the chat when one of their own got on camera).

The pieces fell into place quite quickly after that. We settled on ATL rules because we figured with the Summer Derby coming up we might catch a few folks who might not otherwise play wanting to get some practice in with their Derby lists, and we decided after a some discussion to make the event proxy friendly because an event about raising awareness for economic inequality definitely shouldn’t have had a financial barrier to entry. I’m happy to report, though, that even with proxies allowed most people seemed to be playing predominantly fully built decks. Shout out to those playing proxies, though!

Things quieted down for a few days, early registrations began to trickle in, I was snowed by the amount of money we were already raising, and I thought that would be it until tournament day.

Then it was June 10th, and Wizards did something that affected the OS community more than probably any other community of Magic players; they banned cards because of the societal implications of their existence. I’m not going to spend too much time on the optics of this decision, or on my personal opinions (I’m in support of it), but I was broadsided by it on the day and the following day.

Suddenly it seemed like the OS community was getting more press than we’ve gotten maybe ever, and a lot of it wasn’t good. Definitely difficult to see some names you like saying really negative things about your community, and really difficult to see edgelords trying to represent your community while doing shitty things. We put out a statement about our intentions for the event with the cards in question, several of our members spent more time than I could have lasted without an embolism explaining both why it’s important to be a decent human and why we felt that being decent humans compelled us to act, and things quieted down once more.

Then our registrations broke 33 and I had more than $600 in my PayPal and the event was getting closer and it looked like we might have as many as 40 players! I honestly couldn’t believe it. The support from the community has been crazy, with at least 5 people donating even though they had no intention to play and many people donating well more than the $10 we’d requested as an entry fee. We also received support in the form of donations of prizes for the event. When all was said and done we ended with an altered Braingeyser, a Legends Recall, and Unlimited Sinkhole, and a Revised Balance, which will be given in that order to our 1st-4th place winners. We were also donated two altered Kormus Bell’s bearing our city’s most famous bell, that cracked wonder the Liberty Bell. Our winner will receive 1, and our spiciest deck will receive the other.

Then all of a sudden the work week is over and it’s Saturday morning, and the tournament starts in a few hours. My wife finished our great stream overlay last night and I’m as ready as I can possibly be (shoutout to Florian for volunteering to play if we needed an even number of players come round 1). I have a quick player meeting at 11:45 going over some simple housekeeping and thanking everyone for what was at that point over $800 raised and we’re off to the races.

A whole lot of the day can be found at twitch.tv/SupraliminalFilms as a VOD, including my surprise 90’s commercials during downtime. I realized midweek that Magic tournaments have tons of dead time and that if I was going to be TO, scorekeeper, and stream host by myself (I’m fiercely self-reliant and stubborn when other people offer help) I’d want some time to breathe and decided that one of my passions, tv commercials from my childhood, would be the perfect thing to go along with the overall 90’s nostalgia trip that is Old School.

Then all of a sudden it's 7pm and we're done. We had some really cool matches on stream, we had 34 players play the whole event, and eventually I relinquished scorekeeping duties to my wife and was really able to focus on calling the matches on stream. During the event APEDF received 2 direct donations in the name of the event for $100 and $50, then as soon as the event was over one of the players contacted me to let me know that now that he knew more about APEDF he wanted to make another donation beyond his entry fee. Once that settled and I added my personal contribution we sat at $919 from the event proper and $150 in individual donations, adding up to a $1069 donation!

Monday morning Nate received a call from the Philly branch of APEDF expressing her thanks and letting him know that the national office of the charity had reached out to ask her what exactly was happening in Philadelphia, so good job, everybody.

And just like that, Balance 2020 has come to a close and we’re on to planning our next one.

Props: My wife for literally everything you did while 7 months pregnant, Jayrod for streaming with me for the first 4 rounds, Nate, Nick, Dan, Geoff, Ian, and Farb for being the best organizing crew a guy could want, DFB for being exactly the person most of us already knew you were, Florian for offering to play if we needed it, and every single person who donated, played, chatted on stream, or was involved in any way. You made the day extra special for me.

Slops: My own arrogance thinking I could do everything by myself, the police state and systemic racism for making this kind of thing necessary, and edgelords for making a lot of the rest of the Magic world have very much the wrong impression of us.

Dan Serwan - Balance 2020 Tournament Organizer