Ask the Judge, 08/19/2005: Feature Friday

PLAY, JUDGE, PLAY!

As you may or may not know, I'm the new editor for Chris Richter's daily Ask the Judge column. As part of taking over for Sheldon, I'll be contributing a Feature Friday periodically as well. Suggestions for topics are welcome.

Last week I attended my first US Nationals. It was a blast, no doubt about it. I got to work with a laundry list of great US and Canadian judges. I sat on my first L3 interview panel (which wasn't so much fun as very, very interesting). I judged the final 2 matches of the national championship. And I ate a ton of great seafood. And I played my first games of Type 4, which leads into my topic for today: why judges need to play.

It's funny that we even need to talk about encouraging judges. Nobody goes straight into judging without having been a player. But for a lot of judges, finding time and energy to play can be a real challenge. We may reach a point where our interest in the game has waned, but we continue to judge -- perhaps I intend to start playing again, or I have a commitment to my TO, or I like the extra bit of cash I can make selling the packs I get for working. Unfortunately, it's hard to be the best judge you can be when you don't play at all.

The first thing that makes judging hard when you don't play is knowing the cards. It's the role of a judge to be unobtrusive, to only intervene when necessary. When you can't recognize the cards from their artwork, that gets harder. It can be very difficult to read card names from across a table (though the new card frames help a lot). When you don't actually know what the cards do, you make your job that much harder. While it's perfectly reasonable to ask your opponent if you can read the enchantment hiding behind that attacker, it's undesirable to do the same as a judge. You don't want to inadvertently alert a player to some bit of strategic information that they were missing.

This kind of problem affects limited play vastly more than constructed play -- the playable card pools for just about any constructed format tend to be significantly smaller than for limited formats, especially full-block ones. I ran into this at Nationals, though my schedule spared me from too much of it -- I was off the floor for most of the draft rounds. I'd drafted CBS a few times when Saviors was released on MODO, but by this last weekend I was only really familiar with the most staple Saviors cards. The impact of that on my Standard judging was minimal. The biggest obstacle I faced was recognizing all the different Urza lands by their art. Since Tron decks, both Tooth and Blue, were everywhere at Nats and in the JSS Champs, this was both easy and necessary. It's a good lesson -- take the time to learn to recognize cards early in a tournament when you're floor judging. It pays off in later rounds or when you get called on to table judge. In the consolation match (determining which player would make the national team and which would be the alternate) I was able to quickly feed Randy Beuhler updates on when Jonathan Sonne had the full Urzatron out. Thinking back to last year's Extended season, before the extensive update to the banned list, it was a real challenge to tell if a land was an Ancient Tomb or a City of Traitors, but knowing the difference was incredibly important.

Reading cards efficiently and accurately has implications that go much deeper. When you know how a format plays, you are able to assess what is going on far more quickly and accurately than you otherwise would be. The human brain is good at associating several facts into "chunks" that can then be recalled as a single unit. Experiments have shown that chess masters are no better than anyone else at recalling chessboards with randomly placed pieces, but they have amazing recall of chessboards with actual game positions on them. The same is true for Magic. Playing is the bridge to understanding.

Understanding is a first step in another level of judging: assessing subjective penalties like Slow Play and Stalling. While the rules don't draw a distinction between playing slowly in a complicated position and playing slowly in a simple situation, knowing what the decisions are that need to be made can help you understand if a player is deep in thought or just running out the clock. Since it's the difference between a warning, and a DQ, this is really very important.

Ultimately, playing the formats you judge is the best thing for your judging, but playing regularly with Magic cards -- any Magic cards -- is probably a good step. If you really can't be bothered to find a draft group, or you hate the thought of your opponent activating Sensei's Divining Top one more time, then find a fun format. Prismatic Tribal Rainbow Highlander*, or Cube Draft, or Type 4, or even just play with old draft decks or World Championship decks. Keep that Magical brain-circuitry active, and it'll serve you well.

* I guess if this didn't exist before, it does now...