You are cordially invited...

I haven’t been here for a while.  I shut up shop on this blog on July 5^th 2013 with no intention of returning.  I am glad to see that despite my absence we have had another 5,000 hits since I stopped working on it last year.

This guy was in standard last time I did this...

I am also very aware that a lot of you will be going “who is this guy?” as you have started to play in the last 18 months and have quite possibly never met me.  In answer to that question let me just say I am a guy who has a lot of awesome friends who play magic, some of them are even quite good at it.  At one point I had a lot to do with running MTG in Sheffield and that seemed to go quite well.

The other question which I need to answer as it was asked several times over the past weekend – “So is this you back playing Magic?”  Well not exactly.  I have played games day over the last weekend and enjoyed it managing to come 8^th both days with my slightly powered up event deck and enjoyed the games despite my numerous play mistakes and that I ended up with only 22 lands in my deck on Sunday (DOH)!  You won’t be seeing me at PTQs, PPTQs or FNM each Friday (although if Mark Smith will have me it would be good to get the 2HG team back together again).  However, I may drop in for an hour or 2 to play some EDH when I have the time.

Apparently this guy is still not banned in legacy...

So why resurrect a sleeping blog?  Well it seemed the best way to talk about something I hope you are going to be excited about; the Patriot Sheffield Magic Invitational!  Two years ago we held the inaugural one of these and it was a great success.  Last year we had another and that went pretty well too. 

For the uninitiated the Invitational is a special tournament over a weekend, in this case the weekend of 8^th – 9^th November 2014, where a selection of Magic players in Sheffield are invited to compete to win one of the places on the official Steel City Patriots Magic Team.  On the Saturday there will be 4 rounds of sealed deck play using Khan’s of Tarkir products, followed by 4 rounds of Standard constructed play.  When the scores have been tallied the top 16 will be invited back to play day 2 with 4 rounds of modern followed by 3 rounds of draft and the crowning of the winners.

And Rosewater thought this was a good idea to put back in Standard!

So here is the list of players for the 2014 Patriot Games Sheffield invitational:

Joe	Alexander
Wale	Awelenise
Edward	Barker
Patrick	Bateman
Greg	Blackburn
Mike	Boon
Dave	Bradburn
James	Brook
John	Butler
Andy	Callander
Ailiah	Carr
Adam	Clark
Daniel	Cocking
Tom	Colier
Sean	Crowley
Theo	DeBray
Stavrina	Demosthenous
Dave	Eaveson
Laura	Fitzgerald
Grzegorz	Flis
Oliver	Frith
Richard	Fuller
Gideon	Hamlett
Henry	Hart
Tom	Hogg
Jordan	Hunter
Jaisal	Jivabhai
Stephen	Kay
John	Kay
Alistair	Kennedy
Sean	Li
Quinton	Lip
Sam	Luca-Rolf
Andrew	Mather
Steve	McAleer
Abbey	Moore
Chris	North
Lee	Parker
Ben	Pearson
Ian	Picker
Steven	Pickles
Jon	Potts
Matthew	Presley
Fabian	Quinn
Mike	Radford
Ian	Richardson
Matthew	Riggall
Jake	Scott
Mike	Shillitoe
Mark	Smith
Luke	Southworth
Ash	Thompson
Richard	Tinsley
Robert	Tinsley
Andrew	Varg
Diarmud	Verrier
Sam	Waters
Chris	White
Jimmy	Wild
Jordan	Woodward

This list has been put together by a panel and represents a cross section of the players in Sheffield.  We have a limited number of places and the top 16 from last year along with a number of others auto-qualify.  This year in the same way that the first invitational was run, people have been invited due to their services to Sheffield magic play as it has not been possible to run any qualifying events in 2014.  Hopefully next year we will have some qualifiers again.

Apologies for any dodgy spelling, names were taken from the FNM record books and may not be 100% accurate.  I will have more details for you next week, till then feel free to message me/shout at me on face book.