Non Essential Bowl 2020

Written by Mike Frantz… Thursday, May 7th, 2020

We all are affected by Covid-19. Some of us are not allowed to work. Others are trying to work from home. Many still working but with reduced hours. We are all getting a bit crazier having to stay at home more. The Non-Essential Bowl was created to break up the monotony of home life by offering a midweek 1-day online 93/94 tournament whether you are essential or not. We had 11 mages get together on a Wednesday morning (or afternoon depending on time zone). 2 Europeans and the rest were from the Northeast US. We gathered in an online Jitsi room for some pre-tourney chats where many beers were cracked open. Some of which were for breakfast.

The Old Order Old School group of Pennsylvania have been using a new meeting website Jitsi.org (Thanks Svante) for several weeks now for our weekly meetups and general drunken “rumtog” shenanigans. It’s free and you can create as many rooms as you want. Since this tourney was going to be a small group it seemed like the perfect spot to give it a test run to see if it is reliable in a bigger setting. Many did not use the service before, but everyone picked it up really quick. We only had one issue and it may have been cause by a computer reboot but, it did cause a lot of lost time and we switched that match to a Whereby room. The next round we continued to use Jitsi with no other issues. It may have just been a fluke, but I think it needs more testing.

This was a charity event and we raised $130.00 for New Hope Ministries Food Pantries of South-Central PA. Food banks all around the world have been hit really hard because of Covid-19. It’s not even safe to do a food drive these days. I’m thrilled to be able to make this donation to my local Pantry. Thank you all for your generosity. Please take a moment and think about donating to your local food bank. I guarantee they need the help. Even the smallest contribution will ensure someone doesn’t go to bed hungry.

We had an amazing group of guys to sling old cards and with a super sweet trophy on the line, there was very little spice in the room. This was a gentlemen’s Atlantic tournament, so Library of Alexandria and Mind Twist were banned. We even had several instances of giving a gentlemen’s mulligan (back to 7 cards) and gentleman’s Chaos Orb targeting (no flip needed). While we all were gunning for the top prize, we were still very polite and gentlemanly.

Whether you were playing in your eclectic fear bunker, kitchen table, or garage with the birds chirping, everyone enjoyed stepping away from life for a few hours. Some even used some vacation time to pull it off and I thank you for doing that. In this crazy world we are in right now we need to find ways to make Covid-19 suck less. This tournament did just that for me. Thank you.

I look forward to seeing everyone in person soon.