Last weekend, the Realm Championship Season 5 took place. Or at least it was supposed to; due to the licensing situation between Upper Deck and Blizzard, no official tournament could be held. Instead, the tournament organizer from Reutlingen, Matthias Jedele, took it into his own hands to run a tournament.

The “inofficial Realm Champs” attracted 53 players and pretty much all of the better German, Swiss and Austrian players showed up (well, OK, only 1 Austrian showed up). I was lucky enough to make it to the tops, but lost in the quarter finals.

You can read a lot more about the tournament in my tournament report that will be published as part of my weekly column (that’s taking a break from its break): Suppe für den soul – Realm Champs tournament report.

My team, the Bootcamp L.E. has put together an open letter directed to Upper Deck. This way, we wanted to make the company aware of some things that are extremely disappointing to us.

We started an online petition and already saw more than 150 players signing it. Additionally, we were already able to add a Dutch translation thanks to the help of Jeffrey Verwoerd. We hope to see more of the amazing support and would like you to sign it, too!

You can find the open letter here.

P.S.: In case you wanna spread the word on Twitter, please make use of the Hash Tag #WoWTCGPetition!

First things first: Merry Christmas to everyone!

It’s been quite a year – yeah, this might sound a little weird as there’s still another week to go, but I want to get this blog post done now as it’s highly unlikely that I’ll find the time next week. The most obvious new development (looking at things from the perspective of the webmaster of this page) is that I got my own homepage. Yay! It’s been a project I wanted to start quite a while ago and I’m glad I eventually did in April. While I haven’t really taken (I want to avoid the term “found”) the time to keep this blog as up to date as I wanted it to be, I hope it was still able to entertain you from time to time and give you some updates about what’s happening in my life.

Speaking of which… back in April, when this whole thing went online, I was still employed by Upper Deck. After more than 4 years, this relationship came to an end in June and I had to look for a new job. It’s been the first time I had to look for a job and I want to thank all the great people who helped me writing applications, making connections, etc. Without all your help, this would not only have been infinitely harder, I think I would have also been a lot less successful.

Eventually, I was hired by Station54, a Berlin based company doing Community Management; mainly for Electronic Arts. At first, this had been an amazing job, but it eventually came to a close at the end of October (I blogged about this: 4 Months with BattleForge). Well, I learned a lot regardless and my CV looked a little better as I could then claim I had been working as an Event Manager, Community Manager, Translator, Author, Customer Service Rep and some more stuff. Seems like life turned into a hunt for fancy job titles…

In the past 2 months, I was looking for a job again and I’m glad that I can now tell you that I’ve found an awesome new opportunity! Starting January the 4th, I’ll be doing Online Marketing for smava. It’s the market leader in a pretty new field; it allows you to get a credit financed by other people rather than by a bank (in case you’re interested, you should check out the homepage: smava.de). As this is quite new for me as well, the employment is only of limited duration. However, if I do good, I can turn this into something permanent, so wish me luck (any tips are welcome!). I have to say this is quite an amazing Christmas present.

Fortunately, life’s not all about work. I’m more than happy that I spent the whole year with the same girl and I couldn’t be asking for more. In case you weren’t lucky enough to meet Wincy so far, stop by whenever you’re in Berlin and I’ll be glad to introduce her to you.

What else? Well, I not only kept up my work for the Card Master and the Kartefakt, I’m recently writing for an English magazine, the Yu-Gi-Oh! World, too! On top of that, I’m still writing weekly columns. While my Yu-Gi-Oh! column Unter den Hut geschaut ended (thanks to Upper Deck’s loss of the Yu-Gi-Oh! licence), I started a new World of Warcraft TCG column on Warcraft-TCG.de: Suppe für den soul. I also stepped in for another author and continued the column for players new to the WoW TCG: Der Versammlungsstein. So even when I was without a “real” job, I was rather busy.

All in all, it has been quite a year. I’m glad I was able to make new friends, spend so much time with my existing friends, have a blast playing the WoW TCG and that things turned out the way they did. I’m more than certain that 2010 will be even more exciting!

I’ll celebrate the turn of the years in Leipzig with my best friends and I hope you’ll also have a blast partying into the new year!

I’ll leave shortly to catch a plane. Just wanted to let you guys know that I’ll be doing the (hopefully) live coverage of the Austrian WoW TCG Nationals tomorrow. As always, the content will be published on Warcraft-TCG.de.

Additionally, I’ll also try to keep you up to date with a live-feed from my Twitter account (soul_warrior) so you might want to check that.

Yesterday, the Realm Championship Season 3 final took place. We had a great winner with Patrick Binka who won this tournament series the third time in a row now! I provided live coverage on site and was able to provide a few good insights of what was going on. At least I hope so, but 18 articles in a 17 hour day is quite something, so give it a look.

From today on, I’m officially hunting for a job. The contract between Upper Deck and me has been terminated in mutual agreement (officially ending at the 30th of June due to the period of cancellation).

I have updated my profiles on Xing.com and LinkedIn.com and I’m looking for contacts. So if you would be so nice to add me (in case you know me), your help would be much appreciated! My CV should be up to date and now I’ll have to start writing job applications.

It has been a great time at Upper Deck and I’m looking forward to the new challenges in front of me. I am certain that I am well-prepared for everything ahead of me, after all, I learned quite a lot at Upper Deck.