by: Jason Waddell
Last month riptidelab.com purchased its first MTGO cube(s), and while as a community we are still in our infancy in terms of online drafting organization and video content production, things are moving in a positive direction. Community members are firing Grid Drafts a couple times a week, and we’ve organized several 8-man drafts over the course of the last month or so.
My streaming skills are still developing, and this weekend’s drafts were not without its headaches: my internet crashed, computer was straining under the stress of running Skype, MTGO and stream software concurrently, and my draft was a bit of a disaster. Well, a salvageable disaster.
If you want to watch the actual draft portion, replays are available here (part one) and here (part two). The audio levels are a mess (Skype callers are barely audible… my bad), but if you’re so inclined.
What generally turned out better were the matches. Match 1 is still a mess (stream crashed and missed part of Game 1), but Matches 2 and 3 are pretty watchable. Here’s a playlist (below). I’ve started it on Match 2, but feel free to click through and watch the first match (at the end of the playlist).
As mentioned, we’re still new to this, so if you have any comments or suggestions for how to improve the quality of the stream, YouTube channel or commentary, please let us know in the forums.
(Note: a forum member had created a RiptideLab YouTube account for us, but I had to create a new one so that I could complete the verification process and upload videos that were longer than 15 minutes. If you subscribed to the old YouTube channel, please subscribe to this new one)