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Over the weekend I had some pretty insane experiences. I traveled down to Indianapolis in Mark Hinsz’s van with Forrest Ryan, Josh (the thunder god) Rayden, and Julian Booher. The ride was filled with sleeping and jamming games of Ascension on the three iPads in the car.

At one point during the trip Josh Rayden and Mark Hinsz were playing separate games of Ascension while I watched Julian attempt to satisfy his addiction to Starcraft 2 by playing it in a moving vehicle.

We arrived in Indy around 1:30am and went directly to the hotel to meet up with the 6th member of our party, Dan. He was asleep when we arrived, so we decided to make as much noise as possible and not give him any opportunity to sleep through our arrival. We missed him.

The first day started with waking up at 9:30am. I looked at Julian and asked, "Wanna have a drink?" He agreed and that's when the weekend began.

We decided that we would all meet up at 6:30pm to get Fogo de Chao, opting to just do whatever we wanted until then. We got our badges and some mixer and hit the scene.

Forrest and I spent the most of the day drinking while hitting up dealer booths. We ran into Kelly Reid and dug through dealers' 2-3 dollar binders and foil binders. I found some pretty good deals.

BROkens

We decided to walk around and check out the non-Magic related booths.

Julian, Forrest and I found a sweet booth where you could get your picture taken and made it into a Yu-gi-oh! token. So, of course, Forrest got in line at least 25 times and got a bunch of ridiculous tokens done.

Here are some of them.

I apologize for the quality but it seems the only picture that was taken of them was taken with a phone.

They also Had "Bro Cards" which had a picture of your face and your name. So we used names such as, ABROham Lincoln, BROver Cleveland, BROseidon, BROseph Stalin, and finally BROhammad (without a picture for obvious reasons).

Pretty much everyone in our crew made some sort of token at this booth. It was a very cool idea. Props to Konami for doing it.

After making more tokens than we could really ever use, we met up with Dan and Josh and looked at all the cool Steam Punk stuff.

Games of Chance

I'm normally not into cosplay, or any kind of dressing up, but I do appreciate looking at creative art and clothing.

The Steam Punk culture is pretty sweet and they have a ton of cool looking gadgets at their booths.

Dan and I were looking at these giant glass containers that had shoulder straps attached. We thought it would be funny to have one of us carry it around and drink from it all weekend. One of the employees was standing near it and he was trying to get us to buy it. He told us it was "only" $55 plus tax.

So, like the logical upstanding gentleman that we are, we decided to game for it.

The two of us put our cards in my hat and Josh volunteered to pull out the winner's card. The person who was last left in the hat was to be the one to buy the "Mead Jar" to give to the other. Josh reached in the hat and handed me my card.

I was the winner.

6:00pm came around and Julian, Forrest and I started making our way to Fogo. We stopped at CVS on the way and bought some (more) alcohol. After purchasing it, we realized that we didn't have a room key. After a little thought, we decided we would just drop the drinks off at the hotel after eating.

We arrived at Fogo and as we walked in the door, carrying plastic bags filled with over 5 liters of booze and 6 liters of soda, we strode by gentlemen in suits on dates with their wives and girlfriends. We laughed at how we looked like debauched children and continued on to our reserved table.

As we feasted on unlimited meat, Dan and I started getting a little itch for some friendly wagers. I told him that I would be willing to flip a quarter for $20 dollar bills. He agreed and we began the adventure.

Forrest was flipping the coin, Dan would call it in the air and we would pay each other immediately. On the first flip Dan called heads. It came up tails.

+$20 to me.

Second flip he called heads again, it again showed tails.

+$20 ($40 net) to me.

Before the third flip he declared that he wanted "double or nothing". I accepted his request.

As Forrest flipped the coin, Dan called heads. It came up tails for a third time.

$80 total for me.

Dan realized he couldn't beat me in a coin flip, so we moved on to rolling dice. Each would roll a six sided die at the same time and the highest roll would get $20. In the event of a tie we would double the stakes and re-roll.

We both rolled and I lost.

Dan was now only down $60 to me (not including the $60 Mead Jar he had purchased earlier).

We rolled again and we tied.

One more roll and he won.

He now was only down $20.

We rolled again and it was a tie.

We doubled the stakes and rolled. A second tie.

With each of us having $80 at stake we rolled one last time.

I rolled a 3. Dan's die spun around and settled on 2.

The whole table cheered and Dan literally threw his money at me.

We all laughed and continued to shove food down our throats. Julian exclaimed that I was "unbeatable" in games of chance.

I decided I would give Dan (another) chance to win a bet. Julian told us we should ask our waitress her favorite letter. If it was a vowel, I would win $20.

He had a 5:1 chance to win $20.

We asked our waitress and she said her favorite letter was "L".

I handed Dan a $20.

Julian then suggested that I should wager another $20 on if her first name started with "L".

Now Dan had a (statistical) 25:1 chance to win another $20. As the server delivered checks, I asked "What’s your name?"

She replied Laurel and Dan slammed the same $20 back on the table.

"Come on Guys. It's Only 300 Ounces."

After Fogo, Forrest, Julian and I went back to our hotel to drink.

We drank and drank and drank until we knew we were probably too drunk to go anywhere. Instead of staying inside our hotel, however, we filled the mead bottle with Captain and Coke, filled a flask with Vanilla Vodka, grabbed a few cans of Crush soda, and walked the 5 blocks to the convention center.

When we arrived we ran into a ton of local Minnesota guys drafting. We decided that heckling the draft was the obvious best plan. As the MN drafters passed the mead bottle around, we laughed and made light of another friendly player’s mother.

We got a phone call from Mark saying our friend Drew had arrived in town. We then met them at the local bar where they had ordered a "tower" of beer.

The "tower" was a 100 ounce container with a spout at the bottom.

They had made it a goal to take it down all on their lonesome. As they drank, I ordered a second tower to split with the crew. Some other MN guys stopped in to hang out and one of them offered to flip coins with me for $20s. I agreed and we started off with 2 wins in my favor.

I bet him the waitress’ favorite number was even and he took it. If she returned and said she didn't have a favorite number, we would give her all the money.

When she returned we asked her. She said it was 4. I took his $20 and gave it directly to her. We continued to gamble on a bunch of nonsense and even played games with 3 of us rolling dice for money.

We ordered our third 100 ounce tower of beer and struggled to take it down. Seeing as most of us had already been drinking most of the day, it was quite the challenge.

All of a sudden we realized Forrest was missing.

Kyle Stoll and I went looking for him and found him in the stall of the bathroom, puking into the toilet. He said he would be right out and ended up strangely walking back to the hotel alone. He says he remembers walking to the hotel but getting into bed was a complete blur.

We attempted to play Legacy Champs in the morning. When you split drinking 100 ounces of beer per hour of sleep you get, you tend to be a little hungover.

At the end of the weekend I added up my total winnings and I was up $240 including the flask, which I sold back to Dan for $30 dollars on the way home.

A staple in Legacy. It allows Green decks to abuse Natural Order. This card is already hard to find and will continue to get harder to find. As Show and Tell decks continue to improve, this guy may see more play if Emrakul continues gets hated out (Karakas anyone?). What more needs to be said about protection from everything?.

A land that’s also a Green creature that can be fetched?!? And it can pay for and sacrifice itself to Natural Order? Yeah. It's neat. Buy them now in case we never get a good reprint. At this price, it’s worth picking up a few for your collection. A little over a month ago this card was worth less than $.50, and you may be able to still find them near that range at a local shop. Foils are a little higher, they sit at about $15.00. I'm not sure if the foil will go much higher, but it may be worth a small gamble.

This card is used in Dredge and Breakfast. I like it a lot and it seems there’s a good chance that Innistrad will make this card even better in Legacy. Buy them while they’re cheap. As we continue to get new Dread Return targets, Dread Return itself will continue climb in price. As far as fair in Legacy goes, this is far from it. .

-Mike Hawthorne

Twitter: Gamble4Value

Email: MTG_Mike@live.com