Sin City Open 2024

As 2023 ended, Brian Vegso and I prepared to host the Opening 93/94 event for North America: “The Sin City Open.” Being a tournament organizer means I analyze every event I go to to see what Brian and I can do better. One change we made this year was doing a limited number of artist’s prints for our event instead of a playmat, as we have both amassed a Scroll Racks worth of playmats (all pun intended, looking at my shelf of playmats is what gave me the name for this website). And have heard similar reflections throughout the community. We also cut down the cap of attendees this year, so players had more legroom and provided a more intimate experience due to the venue size if you read my “Years End Review article.” You’ve seen what awards I gave clubs based on what they did best in the community.

This year’s event started differently for me; Justin and Kyra from the Arizona Desert Twisters stayed with me and my family for the week. They were the first people I met when I joined Old School, and since then have become like family to me and my household. They arrived on Monday after I got home and stayed through Sunday evening. It was like a weeklong slumber party in the 90’s. We stayed up late watching movies, played Magic: The Gathering and Sorcery: Contested Realm until 2 am, ordered pizzas, played video games, and even went to CES; Kyra cooked a couple of amazing dinners as well. It was a week I won’t soon forget.

The Friday before the event, I hosted my annual Sin City Open BBQ at my home, with an invitation to anyone and their family attending the main event on Saturday. Matt Monroe and Nick Fox from the LA City of Angels were the first two that arrived, and before you knew it, most of the clubs representing the West Coast and even one Canadian were all in my living room. Around 5 pm, things began to wrap up for the BBQ as half the room went to play in the Friday night Premodern event hosted by Brian. Anyone who wasn’t in the mood to play premodern was welcome to hang out at my house until they felt like calling it a night. Once everyone cleared out, Kyra, Justin, and I stayed up to watch “Race for Glory.” At the same time, Kyra altered my Recall into a “Total Recall.” (picture included). We all decided to go to bed after the movie, as I needed to be at the event space early, and we wanted to play well.

We arrived at the event space an hour before the doors opened, and Kyra helped me set up the table numbers I made the day before. In 2023, I exclusively played Power Monolith apart from the AZ Showdown. For this reason, I decided to change it up and build a Guardian Beast Control deck with the help of Justin Coffy on one of the “90’s Slumber party-like nights”. I mentioned above. The deck ran well when I didn’t overextend and caused myself a loss as I did with my round-one opponent. (lessons learned the hard way are often the best ones learned). My best game of the day was against Brian Urbano, where I won 1-0 after game one, going to turns and finding my answer on turn two of five! It was a chess match of discipline and drawing out your opponents’ counters and removal strategically. I played Austin from the SoCal area and made quick work of his counter burn deck by flipping our life totals in game 1 with Mirror Universe and then in game two, denying him all resources with Beast Orb, chopping up a 2-0 win. Matt Monroe cut through me like a hot knife with his “Pony Shops.” Deck. Going into round six, I was 3-2 and looking to close out a win (I was wrong). My weeklong roommate, Justin Coffey, decided to put me out of my misery with his SWE legal mono-white deck. It was fast, super-fast. I’m pretty sure the entire match was less than 10 minutes. And he killed me with a Mesa Pegasus in one of the games, and if you know Justin, that must’ve felt great.

My deck photo

The Champion Brian Bogdon won with Reanimator

After round six wrapped up, we promptly started the raffle. The charity raffle was stacked this year! Everything from Artist Prints, Spell Ground playmat, Amy Webber altered artist proofs, Scrye life counters, mystery booster, numerous altered cards, and more! PJ Melies and Tommy Ripper cleaned house in this raffle, but I say, “If you want to win the prizes, you got to buy the tickets.” And buy the tickets they did indeed. I had my eyes on one raffle prize and one raffle prize alone, the 1994 Reaper Scrye Life Counter, so I threw $50 worth of tickets at it, and “I won it!” I’ve been in the community since 2020, and this is the first raffle I won (besides the Chalice incident in 2023, you had to be there.), so I was extremely excited.

I even gave the raw pewter life counter a paint job the following day. Like I said at the beginning of this, Brian and I decided to do a print instead of a playmat for the swag bag this year, and like years past, we auctioned off the original painting from Anson for Charity. Matt Monroe would be the victor by outbidding himself from $2300 to $2400 and ultimately sending $2,500 because Monroe said, “It’s for charity.” Sir, you are a legend. Me and I had one surprise left: a limited edition 3 of 3 playmat. We own the first two and auctioned off the third for the charity. Zevon took home the playmat with a generous winning bid of $425. All in all, we raised $4,300 for the Shade Tree Charity.

After the event, we went to a little upscale Italian restaurant on the edge of Vegas called Table 34. It was a great way to end the weekend with talks of upcoming events, who’s going to what, cards that were eyeing, and where we see the future of 93/94. I see innovation in the future of Old School, either being new rulesets, smaller clubs hosting events together, one-time specials like Shawn Sullivan does, or, who knows, maybe a multi-club mega event on the West Coast? I know that Old School is thriving and in a good place.