PSISTORM Gaming Cup 6 Behind the Scenes

TheRealNanMan

United States1471 Posts

June 23 2018 01:06 GMT

June 9th and 10th was my return to casting with an epic LAN, PSISTORM Gaming Cup 6

I had been training for this event since KJ messaged me in January asking if I would like to return to my roots of casting a DC based LAN event. It gave me about 6 months give or take to work on improving my skills/game knowledge to hold my own with (Wiki)

PengWin &

Temp0 which was very intimidating. I took a 2 year hiatus from the Sc2 Scene (which you can read about in my previous blog) to focus on real life (getting married, becoming a full time teacher, going back to grad school for a masters in Special Education) and start doing coverage for magic the gathering specifically modern.

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2 Years now I've dived head first into the world of Magic the Gathering competing and casting. We started a league that has a 10 week long season, after the 10 week the top 8 players who have earned the most match wins over this time period battle it out for store credit and cash. The prize pool is directly proportional to the number of attendees during the weekly modern tournament. We average 5 rounds of Modern and average 21 players a week. Every now and again we will have crazy high numbers like over 30 on a Tuesday night.

www.twitch.tv/ModernMagicMondays

www.youtube.com/ModernMagicMondays

We are currently on our 8th season of Modern Magic Mondays with 6 unique champions with 1 two time champion. Every Season we've had At least 2 new faces in every top 8 invitational.

My casting style has evolved over the last 2 years, previously I was very focused on being the play by play commentator but I've since developed a more analytical style of casting. With Magic there are some very high level lines of plays that most people don't see on first glance or don't understand why the player would choose to play 1 card over another. I've enjoyed developing my skills to break down those plays during magic and wanted to bring something similar when I returned to Sc2 coverage.

6 months is not a lot of time to rise your game knowledge up to the level to break down the ins and outs of every match up and every map. Especially when the map pool was updated in May. I did all my old prep work of getting a bunch of Replays and casting the matches. (Solo casting is very different from having a co-caster and I'll take someone knowledgeable or someone with good chemistry over solo casting any day!) One new thing I practiced was pulling up VODs of matches that I might have missed and loading xsplit and record myself casting over the muted VOD. Then I would unmute the VOD and compare the information that the casters were presenting on the game to the information that I presented in my casts. I also jumped on that community coverage of WCS Challenge right before the event to get back into that game observing while casting. (It is so hard and I always feel spoiled when I get to have an observing with my casting)

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Fast forward those 6 months to the actual event. The event took place in the county government center for Fairfax Virginia. Which the lay out for the LAN was really cool considering where it was at. The event had 39 participants ranging from Gold-Grandmaster (Code S players) Instead of doing pool play quickly knock out the lower league players KJ and the tournament organizers decided we would do a Swiss style tournament. Swiss is the go to style for Magic the Gathering tournaments so I was very familiar with that style. If you have never seen it before it is designed to have everyone play the same number of games. So if you win your first round you will play against someone else who is 1-0. So by round 3 of the tournament the better players will have to face of while those that have been struggling 1-2 or 0-3 would have a more even match up. https://challonge.com/psistormcup6 With 6 rounds we were able to have a cut to the top 16 players advancing to day 2 of the tournament.

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Now day 1 I was super nervous especially the first two rounds of the tournament since I had never casted with (Wiki)

PengWin before and I had not casted an offline tournament in over 2 years. I was lucky to have worked with Temp0 back in the day when Ravi and I would do rotating coverage with him. So I wasn't that worried about having to find the right flow for our casting. However Temp0 was also participating in a D&D stream That meant that (Wiki)

PengWin and I would be marathon casting day 1. Which I had no problem with casting that way since that was what I was used to back in the old DC LAN days. I used to solo cast for 8-10 hours for a 1 day event. Luckily for me but unluckily for the viewers there was also a lot of down time on day 1. During the downtime I was able to take some videos which I threw together as a little behind the scenes VLOG style

Of course I had to walk around and take pictures of the players at the event.

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Day 2 I felt great going into the playoffs. I got to the event early and took a bunch of notes for the event. Just little things to help me during coverage I also went back through day 1 bracket to see if any player had meet to help develop a story line for the playoffs. + Show Spoiler +

That was my main goal of day 2 is develop the story of the event and the players so the viewers would feel invested and engaged in event. Luckily we had an epic story develop of True vs Neeb that allowed them to meet in the finals after they battled on day 1. It was an epic series that went all the way to game 7. If you haven't watched the playoffs or even the finals I recommend checking it out!

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/272275004

https://www.sc2links.com/tournament/?match=549

This event felt like I was coming home, I felt so welcomed by all the players and coverage team. I was lucky to catch up with people that I hadn't seen in almost 3 years. I was super lucky to get the opportunity from KJ to work with such a great team, Joe, GuantletSc2, PegnWin, Temp0, Miss Magitek. I'm hoping that I will be able to attend more LAN events like this one. LAN events have always been my favorite way to get involved in the Sc2 scene and I hope everyone has a chance to experience one.

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-Nan-

Freeedom

United States199 Posts

June 23 2018 08:38 GMT

u got all the pros and casual players in the vid nice job

LuckyFool

United States9015 Posts

June 24 2018 16:11 GMT

Awesome blog Nanman! Very happy to see you back in the SC2 casting scene, just like old times! Looks like good times.

TheRealNanMan

United States1471 Posts

June 25 2018 00:17 GMT

On June 23 2018 17:38 Freeedom wrote:
u got all the pros and casual players in the vid nice job

Thanks I hope next time I can add in some other behind the scenes from Joe's POV or down at the interview area where Tracie was

TheRealNanMan

United States1471 Posts

June 25 2018 00:18 GMT

On June 25 2018 01:11 LuckyFool wrote:
Awesome blog Nanman! Very happy to see you back in the SC2 casting scene, just like old times! Looks like good times.

Glad you enjoyed it ^_^ It feels great to be back making Sc2 related content again. Here's hoping I'll have more opportunities this year!

StorrZerg

United States13910 Posts

June 28 2018 01:30 GMT

Was great to see you man!
Sorry i didn't stick around for longer.

TheRealNanMan

United States1471 Posts

July 01 2018 19:44 GMT

On June 28 2018 10:30 StorrZerg wrote:
Was great to see you man!
Sorry i didn't stick around for longer.

It was great to see you as well~! I'm glad I was able to walk around a lot during the event to see you and others that I haven't seen in years

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