The last two years it was part of Akon, so it was ... interesting. Huge hotel that let them use a smaller conference room, the rest of the place was a lot of cosplay, lots of other events, some minor razorburn here and there. The big problem they ran into was that Akon was a younger audience and they got a pretty hard restriction on alcohol, which I believe is one of a few reasons they broke off from Akon.

They did a decent job of putting together their own missions in 5th. The scoring was a little weird - Day 1 was WLD seeding to determine which bracket you went into, Day 2 was battle points to determine bracket winners (feels like that's backwards). Their ratio of judges to players is a major selling point; there's never a reason to look a rule up, because there's at least one, maybe two judges within 10 feet of any table at any time. Last year they experimented with community dice, I think the reaction to that was negative enough that they're not going to do it again this year (though I'm not sure).

My one complaint from last year was that they needed a better matchmaking system. Out of 7 games, I played against two people who I didn't know before the event, and I played Russel and CRP twice each. There's a lot of games for the turnout they've had the last two years, and while they're trying to grow the event... they need to either cut back on people from the same city playing each other day one, or make some adjustments to pairings for re-matches. They commented at the end of the event that they need to work out some issues with their tournament software, so hopefully that's addressed.

Overall the event was fun. I don't know if I'd call it a big DL tournament; I think they're going for a more serious verion of Alamo, they just don't have the turnout yet. Two of the big barriers they've had in the past have been alleviated by breaking away from Akon (alcohol restrictions, being within 1 month of both Alamo and WGC). It's fairly close, so I'd say it's worth the trip.