Announcing Pro Tour Gatecrash Top 8 Commentary

Hello Everyone!  As I previously alluded to, school has been extremely busy for me this term and as such it's been hard for me to dedicate a chunk of time to writing my first big article.  Rest assured it is coming, but I can't give you a hard timeline.

However, yesterday I was thinking about the upcoming pro tour, and how excited I was to see what happens in the new standard.  I'm pretty sick of the current format and I'm ready for some new decks to shine and make me love standard again.  However, with the awesome new decks and familiar faces playing a new format at the highest level that we've come to associate with each Pro Tour, also comes the coverage itself.

While I have nothing against the current WotC coverage team of Rich Hagon, Zack Hill, BDM et al, I believe that I (and many other competitive players) are simply not the target audience of the official commentary.  Obviously the Pro Tour is Wizards' biggest marketing expense, and they want to make the coverage as accessible as possible to everyone who plays magic, which means a lot more low-level commentary than some  of us would like.  Again, this is what WotC should be doing if they want to get more people into the pro scene (which in turn sells more packs, etc) and I don't fault them for their commentary style.

Consequently, every PT I hope someone would give me something more in terms of audio commentary.  I want to hear a more in-depth analysis of the incredibly high-level games being played out, rather than the fundamentals of magic that I've known forever and are not new to me.  So I figured, why not do it myself?

How is this going to work?
The concept of an audio rebroadcast is already widely used in the Starcraft 2 community, mot notably in the SK Planet Proleague where the community has voiced similar discontent with the commentary team.  First, you'll have to open the official video feed at twitch.tv/magicprotour.  Then, mute the official audio.  Then, fire up my stream at www.twitch.tv/zturchan and leave the audio on, but minimize my stream (or have it on another monitor if you want a smaller, more intimate chat experience).  Enjoy!

When is this happening?
Because this is my first time doing this, I will only be casting the top 8 on February 17th.  This is for a few reasons.  First, I get to watch the first few days of coverage on my own and learn the story lines and deck archetypes of the tournament, and prepare some sort of notes so as to bring you a more informative, exciting and smoother top 8 cast.  In addition, top 8 decklists are  public information, which makes doing analysis much easier.  Conversely, during the swiss I don't know the decklists of everyone, so any commentary would feature a larger amount of guesswork.

Will this happen again?
If all goes well, I would like to continue doing this for Pro Tours.  I'm uncertain if I will expand to doing other events.  I'd rather do a great job of a few events per year than an okay job of more events.

If you want to help with this (or any other endeavor) or have any questions, feel free to tweet me (@zturchan) or email me (zak.turchansky@gmail.com).

I look forward to the broadcast on the 17th.

Cheers,

Zak