Creator Webcam Tournament

I was recently invited to participate in a creator webcam tournament hosted by PrairiePirates. Myself and seven other creators faced off in Premier ladder with best of three matches. The winner would take home bragging rights.

Camera?

Anyone that has been following Porg Depot at all may know that so far all of our content has been written. We’ve always figured that there are many others out there that handle the streaming arena. Actually, we even wrote about streamers previously.

The biggest issue going into this was how to actually get on video. Not being a streamer and not ever really worrying about video content meant that my best webcam was in a laptop which wasn’t going to show a table terribly easily. The solution ended up being to borrow separate USB camera from work.

The next trick was how to get the proper area of a table or desk to be the area of focus for the game. This required some packing tape and an 800 count card box standing on its end.

Recording

Not having any practical clue on how best to capture the video I decided to basically leave this part entirely up to my opponents as the other seven had at least some inkling of video prowess. Could I have figured this out? Probably. However, if another person already has a solution it didn’t seem to make sense to solve it twice.

Deck

Creators create. Admittedly I am not normally one to brew decks up from scratch. I knew however that this event should be more fun than just throwing Sabine ECL out. I wanted something more interesting and off base.

Decided to go with a Cassian deck as a showcase variant of him has been sitting in a hard case on my desk for a while with zero action. Poor guy needed to get out and stretch his legs a bit. Some searching gave me a fun deck that I believe was a top 8 contender over in Europe as a starting point. After some tweaks for personal preference I came up with the following.

The idea with this deck is straight forward. Throw out as many space units as possible, attack with them, and boost them up when you can. Resources should never be left to waste as Cassian’s ability can help keep your hand full with the card draw to get even more ships and pumps. If your opponent doesn’t figure out quickly what your game plan is then it can be over rather quickly. Best of three makes it tricky as they have that much more time to learn what you are trying to do and counter it.

Playing

For the most part, playing on a web came was pretty similar to playing in person with a couple interesting caveats.

Initiative cannot be passed back and forth normally or at least not unless you can throw a token across multiple zip codes, or even hemispheres as was the case in my first round matchup. Each player kept a token handy and maneuvered it depending on who has the initiative. In my case it was pretty easy to move the token off camera when my opponent claimed initiative and back on camera when I took it back.

The other interesting difference was the deck cut. Clearly you cannot reach through the screen to touch the opponent’s deck. Instead shuffling first was normal. Then the deck was split into three parts and a numbered die was placed on each pile. The opponent then determined which pile would be on top, middle and bottom. Was a pretty intuitive way to handle the deck cut after I knew what to do.

Preview Video

Here’s a link to the intro video. Porg Depot part with yours truly is at ~2:04 mark. Volume for my part is a little wonky due to the web cam mic and not something a bit higher caliber.
Creator Clash Intro

First Round Match Video

Here’s the first round match that I participated in. I admit right up front that I have no idea what I’m doing on camera and how much of a boomer gamer I am.
First Round Match

In fact, writing about being a Boomer Gamer was the first spark in what has become Porg Depot.

Closing Out

Very much enjoyed playing an off meta deck against another off meta deck. Winning of course would have been nice, but being invited to participate and playing against an opponent on another continent was pretty darn cool.

One thing that would have been awesome would have been if our Porg Depot playmats had arrived in time for the match. Had to go with the “Get Off My Lawn” one instead. A second would have been drawing better and actually advancing to the second round.

Overall the event was fun. Hopefully whether I am involved or not we will see continued collaboration in the creator community for events like this plus other content as well.