This past Saturday, December 4 marked the Romancing the Stones Season 4 Invitational. Each season, our best and brightest players get invited to this annual event, typically by winning a tournament or league (though some other feats of strength can win you a spot). We’ve held these every season since 2018, but historically have done a poor job documenting them, mostly due to alcohol intake. Not this year! Posterity has won at last!

We returned to Tweedy’s. Players showed up early Saturday morning for coffee, beer, and breakfast tacos generously provided by Tweedy himself.

The Invitational is designed to represent our club’s unique blend of Middle School and Vintage. The 10 invitees played 6 rounds of Swiss – 3 Vintage, 3 Middle School – followed by a cut to a Vintage Top 4. We played with open decklists that everyone got the day before, so while many people were shocked by their opponents’ choices, we had a pretty level playing field on the day.

What were the stakes? Why did people travel from across Texas, California, Colorado, and Ohio to play? Well, we had some cool swag, which counts for something: our proxy artist Bobby designed a great foil Treasure Token, as well as amazing tarot-renditions of Swords to Plowshares and Timetwister. More importantly, the winner of the Invitational gets to brag about it all year. We play with all proxies and/or $50,000 decks for glory, and there was glory to be had here. The winner would be the Season 4 Romancing the Stones Champion.

Our players were:

  • Andrew Webb: Season 3 champion
  • Mike Klements: 2nd place in the Dance Party league
  • Kai Schafroth: 1st place at RTS 23
  • Luke Tooker: 2nd place in the School’s Out league
  • Woodrow Bogucki: 1st place at RTS24
  • Miguel Angel Garcia: 3rd place in the Summer School league
  • Mike O’Malley: 2nd place at The Hurricane
  • Bryan Hockey: 1st place at RTS26
  • Brian Tweedy: 2nd place at RTS26
  • Patrick Vincent: most Top 8s

Take a look at their list here. When you ask 10 players to pick decks, you never know exactly what you’ll get. From an entertainment perspective, we couldn’t have asked for anything more. Both the Middle School and Vintage choices were surprising and diverse, which made for good gameplay and quality streaming coverage.

On that note, our streaming head honcho Rob Connolly generously offered to livestream the whole damn thing! Rob’s the man behind our weekly Middle School webcam streams, which is a feat in and of itself. Building out an entire rig and doing it live, in person, was a huge new challenge for Rob, and he crushed it – while also doing commentary!

We can’t thank him enough for the work he does on the stream: our locals love it, and it’s given us a chance to really bond with players outside of Austin and share the magic. If you’ve got 5 hours to kill, do yourself a favor and check out the broadcast on our Twitch. (https://m.twitch.tv/videos/1669286551)

It all culminated in a finals between Season 1 & 2 Champion Bryan Hockey, and the less-decorated Mike O’Malley. Mike brought his tried-and-tested BG Hogaak, while Bryan had shocked us all by registering the spicy new White Initiative deck. Hockey emerged victorious, unbelievably securing himself his 3rd Invitational Win!

The 2022 Invitational was everything we’d hoped it would be: fun, competitive, inebriated, dramatic, and brotherly. Thanks everyone for coming out, playing the season, and making this event happen. Let this report stand testament to its glory.