Hello! I have yet another Nationals report for you this week. Following Finland, Estonia and Norway, I travelled to Sweden.

The event was part of a local gaming convention, held at some kind of cultural centre about 5 minutes away from central Stockholm. Before they would let me in the building, I had to fill out some forms and sign something that made me a member of a local gaming club and gave me insurance (for gaming-related accidents, I guess). Quite different from Finland: we just take your money and put a wristband on you. But the Swedes, with their state-sponsored gaming, have to do more paperwork. I also got a badge and some food coupons.

The room we had was nice enough, with enough room to comfortably seat around 150 players. There was a PA system, and I was very happy about that. I'm used to doing announcements without a microphone, but shouting to over 100 players is hard, and having to do it in a foreign language makes it a little bit harder.

The judge lineup went through some changes even the day before the event, but I was pleased with the final team: two Level 2s, five Level 1s and a Level 0. I divided the judges into two teams: deck checks and paper, led by the Level 2 judges Daniel Ahlberg and Johan Osbjer.

This event was held the day after the new Penalty Guide, including the Player communication guidelines, went into effect. The judges had all done their homework, but most of the players had probably never looked at a policy document. Although I didn't expect any major communication issues, I posted a few copies of the player communication and shortcut sections around the room, so that those who were interested could take a look. I talked about the policies with a few players during the weekend, and after some initial confusion over what needs and doesn't need to be answered truthfully, they seemed pretty happy with the guidelines.

The first really interesting judging situation came before we had even finished registration. A player approached one of my judges and spoke with him. The conversation was short, and the player rejoined a small group of players who were handling cash and writing things down in a notebook near the judge table. Alarm bells went off in my head, and I asked the judge what the player had wanted.

He informed me that the players were doing a "fantasy top 8", ie. making bets about who would be in the top 8. They'd asked if the judge would like to join, and he had declined, feeling that it would be unethical. It's a good thing he did, because wagering is not just unethical, it's also against the DCI rules.

I grabbed a copy of the Penalty Guide and walked over to the group. I asked what they were doing and showed them the Penalty Guide entry for Wagering and Bribery, and the guy in charge immediately started giving the participants their money back. I explained that wagering was not allowed, and that he should return everyone's money and give me the list, and that if I saw any evidence of more bets being made, I would be forced to disqualify everyone involved. He explained that he'd had no idea that it was illegal, and that betting was quite common at large events in Sweden.

Since the players quite obviously didn't know that betting was illegal (otherwise they wouldn't have done it right under my nose, or asked a judge to participate) and I had the chance to put a stop to it before it could affect the results of the event, and because the participants were quite cooperative, I didn't disqualify anyone. I felt that this was the best decision for the local community and for the event itself, and handling a dozen disqualifications before round 1 would have caused a bit of a delay. I addressed the issue in my opening announcements, and asked the local judges to keep their eyes open and to educate their players.

Wagering is not something that gets talked about a lot, unlike bribery and collusion. People like to speculate about the metagame and the results of an event, which is of course completely fine—but when money or other objects of value become involved, it becomes a problem. Wagering is disallowed because we don't want Magic to be associated with gambling, which is illegal in many areas, and because we don't want any bets influencing the results of the event.

If you're thinking that I just let a dozen players get away with cheating, I assure you that I had the same thought later during the day, and it wasn't a pleasant feeling. However, at this moment I'm happy with the ruling I made.

We started the event with 142 players, making this the biggest Nationals I've ever head judged. Unlike Finns, Estonians, and Norwegians, the Swedes sometimes appealed the rulings made by floor judges. There were several "new" judges working the event, and some appeals probably happened because the veteran players didn't trust the new guys. I upheld most of the rulings that were appealed. The judges also came to me for backup quite a lot, so I was quite busy.

Using the same tables for drafting and playing always creates a nice little logistical puzzle. We had four players per table, but the tables were actually big enough to seat three on each side and one at each end. I considered using one table per pod, but Daniel figured out that we could just move a couple of tables and end up with 18 units of two tables and eight seats. He also suggested that we keep the normal table numbers on the pods, and just add a pod number in the middle of each unit. I liked this plan since it minimized the set up time. Daniel and Johan called the drafts, and they did a very good job. The only problem was that I got confused when we needed to stop and wait for a pod that had a problem, because Johan was making his draft announcements in Swedish and I didn't understand what he was telling the players to do.

One of the more interesting situations happened during the draft rounds. Player A had played a Judge Unworthy during the opponent's turn, revealing a Corpulent Corpse. The opponent passed the turn and player A drew for his turn—and realized that he'd drawn something other than the Corpulent Corpse that should have been on the top of the deck. They called a judge and found that the Corpulent Corpse was in the graveyard, under the Judge Unworthy.

My initial ruling on this was a warning for Game Play Error - Game Rule Violation, a warning for Failure to Maintain Game State for the opponent, and leave the Corpse where it is. Howeer, the opponent then pointed out that the Corpulent Corpse and the Judge Unworthy had been placed in the graveyard face down, and the graveyard was not next to the library where most people keep it, but on the opposite side of his play area. There were no other cards in the graveyard. I asked Player A why the graveyard was face down, and he said it was a mistake. I asked why it was on the "wrong" side of the table, and he said that it had seemed like a nice empty spot. He said he was somewhat new to tournament play and didn't know that the graveyard was supposed to be next to the library.

I believed that it was a honest mistake, and because it was a mistake that the opponent had no chance of noticing (because the graveyard was face down), I upgraded the warning to a game loss and advised the player to be more careful in the future. It was quite an unusual situation.

Another interesting situation (for me) happened when one of the judges made a ruling, regarding Nacatl War-Pride and Sudden Spoiling, that was appealed. The question was whether the Sudden Spoiling had been played before or after the War-Pride trigger resolved. When the floor judge presented the situation to me, I was confused because I thought that Sudden Spoiling targeted and affected a single creature. I even went to the table to read the War-Pride, but didn't think of reading the Spoiling. However, the floor judge argued with me very politely until I realized my mistake. I went back to the table, apologized for the delay, asked both players to confirm what had been said, and walked them through the resolution of the stack. Then I thanked the floor judge for being persistent and reminding me about the importance of reading those fine cards.

A few rounds into the day, we realized that there wasn't a lot of extra space in the hall for spectators. Once players were finished with their games, they were milling about in the aisles and blocking our view. It was very hard to see or hear players calling for judges, so we started asking players to leave the room when they were finished. Unfortunately, the hallway outside our hall wasn't very big, and it was lined with dealer booths and demo tables. When we kicked the players out, they had to go quite far away from the room, and when we posted pairings for the next round, they didn't always hear us. We ended giving quite a few game losses for tardiness, and I wish I'd given the players a few extra minutes before enforcing the game loss. It would have been more fair, considering the circumstances.

Day 1 was finished sometime after 9 pm. The judges had a dinner followed by short debriefing and a discussion about the current state of the local judge community. Most of the judges were sleeping on site, while a couple of the locals and I took a bus "home". Continuing my tour of cruel and unusual hotels of Northern Europe, I once again ended up at a really interesting establishment. The building was very old and charming in its own way, and my room had everything I needed (an electrical outlet for recharging my laptop, and a bed for recharging me), but it happened to be in a very noisy area. The Friday and Saturday night bar-going crowds kept me awake for several hours. The walls were very thin, and every morning I was woken up by the TV in the room next door.

Day 2 was relatively smooth. The floor judges were very diligent about checking whether a player had previous warnings for the same offence, and at one point we discovered that a player who already had three or four Game Play Error warnings was about to receive another one. We checked his penalty record and saw that they were all for different things. Therefore, I didn't tell the judge to upgrade this warning, but I did talk to the player and tell him that since he had so many warnings already, he should be really careful for the rest of the event. He didn't commit any other GPE infractions after that.

Once the Swiss rounds were over, I announced the top 8 and we moved to another part of the building for the single elimination rounds. I assigned a judge to each match and spent the quarterfinal round talking and giving feedback to the rest of the team. Everything went fine until the semifinals were almost done. The convention staff even gave us a big pile of leftover food (sandwiches and some fruit) from the cafeteria they had been running. However, around 7 pm they suddenly told us that we needed to get out of the building in 7 minutes, before security would arrive and lock us in.

Earlier, we had been told that we could stay as long as we needed, and the TO had already left, confident that we could handle the rest of the event without him. So, what to do? I certainly didn't want to stay and argue with security guys, or spend the night in a renovated factory building (well, at least it wasn't a slaughter house). Luckily the last semifinal match was between games, so I told everyone to pack up their stuff and meet me outside the building. My plan was to get out of the building first and figure out a solution later—find a bar or a restaurant, or maybe to go to my hotel.

Once we got outside, we saw a bunch of tables, chairs and parasols right next to the entrance. The players suggested that we play right there. The weather was quite nice and we had those parasols in case it started to rain. Since everyone was quite happy to play outside, I decided that we would stay there. Of course, the final match went to the full five games, and eventually it started to get a bit chilly. Some jokes were made about removing shirts and socks for the final game, to speed things up. Instead, we got a couple of mulligans. Finally, the winner received a handsome Kiki-Jiki statue and whined about it, because there was no space for it in his car. I thanked the judges who were still around, and went back to my hotel of sleep deprivation.

That's all from my Nationals season this year. I want to thank the judge team: Daniel, Johan, Janne, Tobias, Erik, Mattias, Martin, and Niklas, and Linus the TO. I had a good time, but it was also exhausting. I learned a lot, but I still need to process those lessons in my head and figure out what to do next. I'll be back next month, and next week another guest writer [Likely Jason Lemahieu - Seamus] takes their turn at the Feature Friday slot.

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