Day 1 in WCS 2013 (Event day 1)

Hi guys! Finally got the photos mostly uploaded and ready to do up my post, so here goes, click on!

Hall finally opened! Well managed to get in early ahead of the public crowd to take a look. Quite a nice area here~

Got my additional shiny pass so that I could head around to take photos of the stuff early~

Seems like they recycled good old Utopia to bring over here, nice to see him again. Wish they upgraded him into the V or Victory version though.

The other side view of the 'pillars' featuring the 4 main characters. Pretty cool, but they should have placed them in an area without the obstructions. Pretty hard to get a good photo of all 4 of them together without being lopsided.

   

Mini game time! Lots of mini games around here where you can play to get stamps for and get sleeves and mats out of the stamps, pretty nice! Too bad I dont have any photos of the games in action since I was busy at the main event the whole day, will try and get more shots tomorrow hopefully.

Giant Yuma is here too! Though maybe next to Utopia would have been a pretty cool idea. Then maybe give Yuma a kinda 'Utopia go attack that player and get him unconscious so i can steal his cards'   pose and place it next to the Utopia? lol! Nice that i finally got to see it up close and personal though

 And here we are at the main registration counter area, for everyone to register for giant card / win-a-mat tournaments. Though honestly, give me that banner at the counter anyway. I would totally love a mat out of that~

Good old token machine has been transferred here too~ Not sure if i caught it at a bad timing when i checked it during lunch but honestly queue was not as long as 2 years ago in Amsterdam. Maybe cause its not very new to US players already i guess

 Feature match video testing, we're ready to roll people!! Though half thought they could just stream the first day matches anyway. I mean, since they were doing the video-ing, im sure streaming it up wouldnt be that much additional work?

Nice wall banners again showing the 4 main series. I would like a playmat out of the Yugi / Jaden version please~

Personal thoughts: Instead of making the new prize cards as playmats (Not that they aren't nice), but I think i would appreciate a mat out of these banners infinitely more, anyone agrees?

 Troophy time! Utopia trophy looks pretty cool actually, i thought the idea was pretty awesome. Maybe they should make like a DM or BEWD trophy next time, would be cool~

After that I headed outside awhile to take a look at the crowd, and caught a couple of nice cosplay pics of Yugi and Yuma. Great effort put in guys!

Erm, Yugi mirror match anyone? (Yeah, bit lame i know, but that was totally my first thought when i saw them playing)

And heading back to the tournament area, they just gave out the sleeves for the players to use and sleeve in! Erm, not exactly exciting sleeves though since its the stuff TCG players can get from stores. Actually not very sure why didnt they just give the sleeves out the night before and instruct players to sleeve the cards earlier. Instead making everyone wait in the same room for instructions and sleeve their decks and risk letting everyone walking around see your deck? Not very cool IMO

 Time for rehearsals to get ready for the stage!

And the main event is about to begin, with Dan Green (best known in YGO for Yugi and Yami Yugi voice actor) and Erica Schroeder (best known in YGO for DMG, Akiza and Mai Valentine voice actor) It was pretty fun to listen to them here, though i was distracted at that point of time over the YES event page issue (More on that at end of the post) so I didnt enjoy it fully. Hope they do it again tomorrow~

And the main event begins! Konami chose not to post up any standings / results through the whole tournament and even pairings are just announced with a quick flash on the screen, so not much additional photos for this part since its mostly of people playing. Anyway had to do my main stuff there which was translating work, so mainly stayed on stage and did tons of translating stuff.

Interesting note was how the judges handled shuffling and deck searching today, since there were that many players playing Prophecy and Spellbooks. This is the shuffling method that was announced

After every search:

Cut the deck, then hand to opponent to cut, no shuffling

Prior to drawing by a card effect or at the end of the turn:
Full shuffling

Full shuffling refers to:
Riffle shuffle, right hand into left
Then pile shuffling in 4-10 piles in order
Collect piles in order then hand to opponent to repeats                      

 After round 2 was lunch time! Though in true blue YGO fashion, I headed over to check out the main event area to see if I missed out anything. Sure enough, they put up the giant card exhibit after i left. It was pretty cool since upon winning the card you can just give it to Dan / Erica for the signature. After that headed back in and had a quick sandwich lunch~~

 Tournament continues again and here's a quick look at how the pairings appear on screen~

 Not of me but of the other translators at the event. Resolving issues takes like 1 judge, and 2 translators to be present. No choice to it i guess, but it seriously felt resource consuming.

 Crowd really started to come in at about 5.30pm, though I guess thats about the timing the side events would have finished for the day.

And here are the top 8 participants! (Well, not exactly apparently according to the results on Konami's site, cause there was a discrepancy of the scores apparently. 8 and 9th place got switched, and the previous 8th, now 9th place guy will be pretty sad...

 And of course the top 8 Dragon Duel finalists! Not really sure why 4 round swiss was needed to find 8 finalists out of 12 but ah well.

And that marks the end of day 1's events, off to grab some dinner with my fellow asian resps at the nearby food court! In the end ate the same pizza place from Thursday night.

Finally, a quick sharing of some of the cards i got signed by Dan and Erica during the day today :)

And... For anyone who was following the live updates on Y.E.S (http://www.facebook.com/YuGiOhEditionSingapore), you might have noticed the event page getting killed off and a new one placed up. This was quite the demoralizing part of the day personally. Shan't explain too much since the reason was that a few of the photos were not appropriate to be placed up, but debating to the appropriateness aside for some of the photos brought up, think that I could have been just asked to delete those photos instead of having to kill off the event coverage totally. Sigh, so much for 2+ days of posting and stuff. Anyway agreed to it since I didnt want to cause trouble for the guys who brought me to the event, and i was seriously busy running around translating stuff for the judges since the main event was just about to begin, but yeah...

Oh well, just putting up that para so that those of you who were following the page coverage knows abit more of what happened. Didnt really want to explain it much there since the page will probably be under KDE scrutiny for the next 2 days.

Anyway, once again, im blogging past my sleep time lol, and im totally heading off to bed. Have to be at the event hall bright and early tomorrow since a few of my Asia players made top 8 and I need to be ready to help translate. Thats all for today and keep a lookout for tomorrow's end of event post!

(Seriously, i keep nodding off as i do up this post)