Hi kids. This week I want to share a few stories from my travels in foreign lands.

For whatever reason, none of the Scandinavian countries have a Level 3 judge at the moment. What? I'm a Level 3 judge from Scandinavia? Let's not start that argument; you would lose. In any case, I ended up going to Estonia and Norway for their Nationals, because Nationals should have a Level 3 judge. I was the obvious choice because I'm so close to those countries.

For Norway, I was contacted about three weeks before the event. I said yes and booked my flight. Almost immediately after that, Kaupo from Procard (the Estonian distributor) asked if I could judge their Nationals—he original head judge had cancelled less than two weeks before the event. So, as a favor to Kaupo (who worked very hard for me on the Saturday of Worlds 2006), I decided to sacrifice my free weekend and go to Estonia.

The ferry trip from Helsinki to Tallinn takes about 1.5 to 3 hours, depending on the ferry. On the day before Nationals, the weather was a bit rough. The small, fast ferries all cancelled, and I had to transfer my ticket to a slower, bigger ferry. But even the bigger ferry sailed less than smoothly. Now, many Finns go to Tallinn for one thing: the cheap booze. The ferry trip is a great opportunity to get started on the drinking, so while the ferry was still in the archipelago outside Helsinki, everyone rushed to buy drinks from the bar.

Things started to get interesting when we got to the open sea, where the waves are higher and the ferry goes faster. I tried very hard to concentrate on my book (P.G. Wodehouse) and my music (Amy Winehouse and Take That), while crew members rushed around handing out sick bags (while wearing high heels!), and passengers would try to run from the bar to their seat without spilling their pint (and succeeding!).

We arrived safely in Tallinn, where I was picked up by Kaupo and Veigo, the second most famous recipient of a #mtgjudge banhammer. We had a nice dinner before I went to my hotel to get some sleep. This proved difficult because there seemed to be a disco somewhere in the building, playing sweet lullabies such as "You're My Heart, You're My Soul" by Modern Talking. The next morning, Veigo picked me up from the hotel, and impressed me immediately by bringing me a cup of coffee. The event was held at a local school. My staff consisted of Kaupo, Veigo, and Kristjan, a Level 2 judge. We had 56 players.

The biggest problem happened with the draft product. The cards had been stamped, rewrapped and put in boxes that were marked with "draft 1" or "draft 2". Unfortunately, some of the cards with "draft 2" stamps ended up in the "draft 1" boxes, and we noticed this during deckbuilding. There was nothing we could do except to make a note about which pods had this problem.

Then we found a deck that had unstamped cards. The player had two unstamped Time Spiral cards: a good common in his main deck, and something unplayable in his sideboard. The cards were on his decklist, and he seemed honest when he said that he hadn't noticed that they were unstamped during the draft. He also said that the good common may have been his first pick. I found a couple of other players from the pod. Since they all had two unstamped cards and the guy on his right had one, (and none of them were huge bombs), I was satisfied that no cheating was going on and it was simply a stamping error.

Because some of the "draft 2" packs had ended up in the first draft, we didn't have enough for the second draft. I decided to just use leftover "draft 1" packs to fill out the last pod, instead of delaying the event by stamping more product. There was a small possibility that some players could slip in cards from their first draft deck, if they noticed that the stamps weren't the same and really felt like cheating. I didn't think it was a huge risk.

Stamp problems often occur at smaller Nationals. The stamping is done by an overworked distributor employee who will get tired because he or she has to do it all alone. I've learned that I should always check the product before the event starts—not after round 3. At the same time, one should sort the product into draft sets and put those in piles of 8, ready to be set on the drafting tables.

The Estonian Magic community is much smaller and less experienced than the Finnish one. The players were clearly not used to decklists in Limited, because there were many game losses for illegal decks and some for people who couldn't finish the list within the time limit. The players seemed to have a very relaxed attitude about technically correct play. Many times, I saw players removing suspend counters after drawing, during combat, during the opponent's turn—and the opponents didn't mind. Since the game state was clear to both players, I didn't see a reason to interfere. Stepping in and handing out penalties would have been more disruptive than the error made by the players.

The relaxed attitude does cause some problems and certainly makes it easier for dishonest players to work their tricks. Many players would ask their opponent rules questions and just accept their opponent's interpretation of the rules if they weren't sure—for some reason, they didn't want to call a judge.

There was one somewhat interesting situation in the top 8. Player A had some mana elves, Scryb Rangers, and Forests, and player B had a couple of Windborn Muses in play. On his turn, player A played a Timbermare. With the triggered ability on the stack, he floated some mana from his Llanowar Elves. After the trigger resolved, he untapped things with Scryb Rangers, replayed a Forest, and played more mana abilities. Then he tapped his Timbermare and said that he would pay for the Windborn Muses.

Of course, this doesn't work. The payment for the Muses is made during the Declare Attackers step, so he couldn't use the mana he floated in the main phase. Player B didn't realize this, so I stepped in and told player A that he couldn't pay, and that he would take mana burn. Player A didn't like this—first he argued about the payment ruling, and then he argued about the mana burn. I went to deal with another situation at another table, and when I came back, player A was apparently still waiting for me to change my mind. He even asked if he could get another judge. I'm not happy with the way I handled this situation, because I was rather close to losing my temper and didn't even issue a penalty for Unsporting Conduct.

The event finished very early, so I hung out with Kaupo for a couple of hours before catching a ferry home. The weather was much nicer but the ferry was still delayed a bit. My taxi driver in Helsinki obviously thought this was my fault, because he wouldn't stop asking about the reason for the delay.

The next Friday, I flew to Oslo for Norwegian Nationals. In Oslo, the airport train is so fast that they have airplane-style safety information cards and sick bags in the seat pockets. I went straight to the local store, where local judge Are Saxrud was running a last chance qualifier. He gave me the good news—Linus the distributor had shipped some basic land—and the bad—the package was lost. Plan B was apparently to call a few local organizers and players and ask them to bring everything they had. Since there wasn't much I could do to help, I decided to hope for the best and go find my hotel.

My hotel was on the top of a mountain. Really!

To get there, I had to take a train. The train crawled up the mountain for 30 minutes, and I admit that the view was quite nice and there were some very pretty houses on the way. I like looking at buildings, but not enough to become an architect like my father always wished. Instead, I sit in a basement and think about card games. Sorry Dad! After the train ride, I had to drag my suitcase half a kilometer up the mountain. The hotel was in the middle of a forest, and from the breakfast room window I could see the Holmenkollen ski jump ramp.

The event was held at the lobby of an university building. We used a random collection of tables from the lobby and from nearby lecture rooms. Some of the players (who were also organizers and/or judges) helped me with the setup. We had 62 players, and the staff consisted of myself and local L1 Erik Hagen. Linus the TO and Daniel Ahlberg the Swedish L2 would be arriving a few hours later. A couple of spectators volunteered to count the Standard decklists for us, which was really nice.

Linus brought the draft product with him, and we got the draft started on time after some minor glitches with the logistics. We had to drop a player after getting everyone seated (the poor guy was very sick), but luckily he was from the last 8 player pod, so we didn't have to move people. Also lucky was that he didn't need a doctor, just a nap.

Norway used to be the realm of Rune Horvik, and nobody really stepped in to fill his very big [But very narrow, I imagine... Rune is quite the beanpole. -Seamus] shoes after he moved to Florida. Tournaments seem to be somewhat informal; just like in Estonia, there were players who were unfamiliar with the use of decklists in Limited. I ended up upgrading an Illegal decklist penalty to a match loss. In the first draft, the player registered all the cards in both columns, although he was playing a normal-sized deck. I considered that to be the same as not registering any cards at all, and made him redo the list, with a judge watching. In the second draft, he didn't register anything in the "Played" column, and I decided to upgrade the penalty. I have a feeling that "39 cards in maindeck" doesn't get upgraded a lot, but in this case it was appropriate.

Day 2 was quite uneventful. We finished quite early again, and I went back to the mountaintop hotel after dinner. Another hotel guest was walking up with me, and he asked whether I'd picked the hotel myself, or if I'd been sent there by someone. It turned out that we had both been sent there by the Oslo Tourism office—he had asked them for something "close to the center of Oslo". The place is definitely a bit shady: my Windows-based laptop couldn't connect to the WLAN there, but Daniel's Apple laptop could. What's up with that?

That was Estonia and Norway. I'm going to finish my Nationals season in Sweden this weekend. I expect it to be the biggest Nationals I've ever judged, so I want to eliminate any logistical problems that might slow the event down. I'll have more main event judges than for any other Nationals I've worked. Most of these judges are inexperienced and not used to working with other judges, so one of my challenges is bringing them together as a team. The new Penalty Guide and the player communication guidelines are another challenge: it will be interesting to see if and how they affect the event. I'll share those experiences next month.

Next week: [Something new, I think. -S]

Thanks for reading,

Johanna Virtanen
DCI Level 3 Judge, Finland
flame- on #mtgjudge (Efnet)
flame (at) bore dot org