Rocky Mountain Yetis

And just like that…YetiCon 2.0 has officially concluded with a bang!

This year, the Rocky Mountain Yetis held a 3-day event, spanning Friday through Sunday offering various outlets for everyone’s nerdy needs including multiple cube draft opportunities, Atlantic Old School, Orb flipping, Pre-Modern and Sorcery.

We were joined by many other old school clubs including: Beasts of the Bay, Gaea’s Gang, SoCal Deep Spawners, Don’s Goblin Raiders, The Burque Balloon Brigade, The Burning Mountain Juggernauts, New England Old School, Sin City Fallen Angels and the St. Louis River Merfolk. Many of our attendees travelled from across the country and we are so thankful for their dedication!

Friday Cube Night:

We held our first event of the weekend at Enchanted Grounds in Littleton Colorado, a fantasy themed coffee shop and game store, where nine Yeti’s came together to draft the Dominaria Cantos powered old frame cube provided by Brandon McGill.

I made sure to pre-game at DonJuan’s across the street and came fully loaded on sub-par margarita and chips n salsa.

Games were epic and red burn took the trophy!

Brandon had made several changes to the cube to tighten up the power band and all of the games across the set were very close.

I drafted a mono red, 2 for 1 build, featuring pyroclasm, pyrotechnics, flametongue kavu and more with the hopes that my board clearing cards would net me card advantage. Great games all!

Saturday Main Event: YetiCon 2.0

Saturday kicked off our main event. YetiCon 2023 saw 34 participants in the main event with a wide variety of decks both spicey and spikey. We enjoyed five full rounds of straight swiss Atlantic Old School Magic action followed by a break out to Top 4.

David Merriam took first on ‘The Deck’ with Joe “Yeti” Nash finishing in second jamming an amazing variant of Robots.

SPICE OVERLOAD:
Brand McGill put together an epic tale of spice which accompanied his deck in perfect harmony!

Featured Card: Big Thanks to the Simpson brother’s for another year of creativity with their killer copy of Casa/City of Brass. As with all YetiCon events, these cards are legal to use at YetiCons moving forward.

We enjoyed early day snacks, copious amounts of beer drinking, a buffet style barbeque spread complete with a wide variety of sauces (cranberry?), and late night cheapy pizza.

Overall, the event ran smoothly and everyone seemed happy.

Best Wife: Massive thanks to my wonderful wife Sara who not only puts up with my hobbies, but supports them. Without her this tournament would not be possible in this way. She is truly the anchor and a cornerstone of YetiCon and I am forever grateful for her efforts, even if she is riding on no sleep and a crazy work week the days prior. Love you dear!

Lazy Sunday Premodern:

Sunday concluded our event with a lazy morning pre-modern bash. Hosted by Kyle Blankenship, some of our Yetis stumbled back to our event space to have some oatmeal stouts (breakfasty right?) and sling some slightly more modern cards. Event attendees were met with a sweet treat and plenty of action. Suicide black took down the event running plenty of zombie horrors and wretches to make everyone happy.

Guest Artist:

I want to say “Thank you very much” to Margaret Organ-Kean for joining us this year at YetiCon. Margaret was truly a champion and powered through two full days of excitement. I don’t think Margaret would have stopped working had we not called for a break to allow her to eat and relax. I was able to spend some time with Margaret on Sunday, to learn more about her, her past, and gain some insight behind her artistic works. I was happy to learn that Dwarven Pony was not in fact named Bill, but rather modeled after her pony from childhood named “Smokey”. Margaret even kicked in an original artwork for us to auction off during our raffle. Thank you so very much for your support Margaret, we would love to have you back!

Charity and Donations: Together, we were able to raise over $1700 from the event, and through the generosity of the WWP’s partner programs we were able to double it! We officially raised $3460 blowing last year’s total out of the water, for the Wounded Warrior Project!!! 

This charity provides a variety of veteran programs and services and we are thrilled to be able to contribute to their cause. We are honored to support this charity and are truly humbled at how the old school community came together to support our veterans.

I want to thank everyone who contributed to our raffle this year including our friends from across the world:

Mario “Merhans” – Germany

Joe Yeti Nash – Beasts of the Bay

Jason Mills – STL River Merfolk

Brian Urbano – SoCal Deep Spawners

Nich “Slum” – OS Guildhouse

James Portello – Sin City Fallen Angels

Brian Vegso – Sin City fallen Angels

Zach Olin – RMY

David “Derfington” Lee

Sam Morreale

Chris Drake

Forrest Yang

Sara Miller

Tim Moran – Hartford Hydras & NEOS

Luis Dominguez – Borque’s Balloon Brigade

Anson and Brenda Maddocks

Drew Tucker

Jeff Watkins – Burning Mountain Juggernauts

Tommy Ripper – Burning Mountain Juggernauts

Justin Shrank – RMY

Margaret Organ-Kean for the amazing auction/original art!

The Rocky Mountain Yetis for everything you do and everyone else who contributed!!!

Final Standings: After 5 rounds straight swiss

Rounds 1-5 plus top 4:

Huge Shoutout to Cory for putting these videos together, editing, and providing such amazing event coverage!!! You win the ‘Cooler’ ist Guy award!!

Deck Photos: (names appear in image caption once clicked)

Picture dump!!!

ORB BLOW CONTEST:

A tradition at YetiCon is to hold the annual orb flipping, or as demonstrated this year, Orb Blowing contest. Last year’s winner, Brian Urbano, got to decide how we ‘flipped’ and to honor his love for Sorcery, we were instructed to blow our orbs off our hands at a reasonable height in an attempt to hit our target.

This year’s Orb Flip Champ was David Daniel! See you next year! Make sure to get that orb altered !

If you asked me 3 years ago if I would be planning, organizing, hosting, and running an old school magic charity event every year, I would have laughed. If you had told me the Yetis have raised over $5,000 in charitable contributions in just two years I would not have believed you. YetiCon has become an annual event that I look forward to despite all the work that goes into it. It’s a chance to reconnect with old friends, meet new people, forge new relationships and enjoy a day of magic without the stresses of the outside world. I have no idea what the future holds for YetiCon, but I am very thankful for the people that have been brought together as a result, and I am even more proud of the people the Yetis have been able to help. Until next year?