Hello everyone. It's been a while—I've been a bit busy lately. As usual, I've spent my summer judging Nationals and other largish events all around Scandinavia. I did Finnish Nationals in July. It was the hottest weekend of the summer in Finland, and I was stuck in a glass box with 200 Magic players, who all wanted a foil Figure of Destiny. A few days after Nationals was my 30th birthday, which was celebrated with a meal at a fine restaurant. The next weekend, I sailed to Tallin for Estonian Nationals and a nice afternoon at the movies—I just had to see X-files: I Want To Believe on its European release day. The week after that was my own personal gaming hell on earth, the Ropecon Gaming Convention. It's nice for the guests but much less enjoyable for some the organizers.
After 10 days of resting and enjoying my mom's cooking, Pasi and I flew over to Copenhagen for the Grand Prix. My goal for this GP was to correct the mistakes I'd made in Brussels earlier this year: I wanted to run a very organized deck check team, and make sure I fulfilled my mentoring duties as a team leader. Since this was a constructed event, we collected the deck lists in alphabetical order from the tables. To help us keep the piles in order, I asked each judge to take a piece of paper and write down the names of the first and last player in their pile. I also asked them to keep their uncounted pile face up on their left side, and the counted pile face down on their right. This way it was easy to find a particular list during the counting process, and to put everything together afterwards. I could also take a look at the table and get a good idea of our progress without interrupting the judges who were counting. That worked out well, unlike my mentoring goal—I should have spent more time with the judges in my team. I decided to try harder a couple of weeks later at Swedish Nationals.
Swedish Nationals was my favourite event of the summer. Preparing for it was a bit stressful because we had problems rounding up enough judges. A couple of weeks before the event, I expected to be working a 140 player event with three Level 1s and a two or three Level 0s. Soon after that, one of the L1s cancelled and another L0 signed up. Then, a few days before the event, I asked Falko Görres, the Level 3 judge from Germany/IRC if he'd like to come work with me. I didn't really expect him to take it seriously, but he phoned the TO and booked a flight a few hours later. Finally, on the Friday before the event, I found out that one of the L0s had missed his ferry from Estonia, so the final judge team consisted of two L3s, two L1s, and three L0s.
I arrived in Stockholm quite early on Friday. I met Falko at the train station and we decided to go check out the local store Dragon's Lair, where the last chance qualifiers would take place. Dragon's Lair is not just another boring old retail store—it's a vast network of caves filled with games and gamers. Their Warhammer tables stretch for miles and miles under the streets of Stockholm, and many a Yu-Gi-Oh! player has been lost forever in the maze of tables and movable walls. Who knows what ancient games are played in the far-away caverns? I didn't dare to go further than the Xbox room. When you first enter the store you see glass cabinets full of painted miniatures, and on the street level they also have computers for LAN gaming. Shortly after we entered the store, they lost power for about 10 minutes. The people on the computers sighed and groaned and rushed to buy caffeinated drinks. When the power came back on, we checked out the lower levels of the store, and found them full of gamers who apparently had been waiting patiently in the darkness. I recommend visiting the place if you're ever in Stockholm. It's not far from the Old Town and other interesting bits of the city.
While the local judges and store staff got ready for the qualifiers, Falko and I had a meeting with Linus the Tournament Organizer. We checked out the venue, a school cafeteria of questionable odor but sufficient size. We rearranged the tables, put up banners and made sure we had all the gear we needed for the next two days.
Most of the more experienced Swedish judges seemed to have either quit Magic or decided that they'd rather be players. At this event I would be working with the new generation of Swedish judges, and my goal was to give them an experience that would make them want to continue judging and improve their skills. I wanted to make sure that everyone was comfortable with the job, that they would ask for help if they needed it, and that they would all get some feedback about their work. For all of this, I was very glad to have Falko's help. He was also the scorekeeper, and the rest of the judges were divided into two little teams led by the L1 judges: Deck checks and Paper. Only about 90 players showed up, so the amount of work was quite okay for the size of the judge team.
I did something that I don't do often, and wrote down all the rulings that were brought to me.
The first question of the day was about Windbrisk Heights. A player wanted to know whether the face-down hideaway card should be revealed at the end of the game. There's nothing on the card that says you should, but the judge wasn't sure since morph cards are to be revealed. The rules for face down cards say: "504.6 [...] At the end of each game, all face-down objects in play, in the phased-out zone, or on the stack must be revealed to all players." A hideaway card is not an object in play, so it doesn't have to be revealed. Unlike with morph, there's no need to verify anything about the card—you can hide any card away.
Mistblind Clique caused the only appeal of the event. If the Clique is no longer in play when the champion trigger resolves, do you still have to champion a creature? The answer is no; you can choose to not remove a creature. The L0 who made the initial ruling got it right, and it seemed the player had appealed because he knew the judge was new.
We had a few problems with the usual suspects: Chameleon Colossus with +1/+1 counters can seem very complicated if you stop and think about it too much, and Mirrorweave and Figure of Destiny produce all sorts of interesting questions. The Figure of Destiny and his foil buddy Demigod of Revenge also caused some headaches to the deck check team, because they had to decide whether the bending of the foils was making various decks marked. However, as far as I can remember, no game losses were given out for any foil problems.
We had a weird problem in the first draft. Everyone had drafted the first two cards when a player called us over and pointed out the Eventide common in his Shadowmoor booster! We decided to switch the Eventide card with a random Shadowmoor common, and reveal the new card to the two players who had already picked from the pack. The same problem showed up in a couple of other pods. It seems that when the cards were being stamped and the foils were replaced with non-foils, the stamping crew (who were not Magic players) replaced the foils with cards from a pile that contained both Shadowmoor and Eventide cards. We also found a lot of cards with ink on the back; instead of replacing every pack with inky cards, we made proxies for those cards that actually ended up being played in a deck.
Some of my judges wanted to apply the Improper Registration of Limited Card Pool infraction to some mistakes made by players during deck building. They registered a limited card pool improperly, so why shouldn't this be the right infraction? Improper Registration only applies to Sealed deck events that have a deck swap or a similar procedure, and only to mistakes made before the swap, with a card pool that someone else will play. It's important to learn the definitions of infractions and not just the names, but I do wish this infraction had a name that made its purpose more clear (Pre-Deckswap Registration Error, perhaps?).
One of the more interesting decklist problems was a list with 16 Eventide cards. We checked the deck, and it turned out he had two cards that were not on the list, and two cards on the list were not present. The two non-listed cards were blue/red hybrids from his sideboard, and he was playing both colors in his main deck. The missing cards were green/black hybrids. We checked the stamps, and he had the correct number of cards for each stamp position. The player didn't really have an explanation beyond "I don't know, I'm really tired", but it didn't seem like he was cheating. Finally, I realized that the blue/red and green/black columns on the deck registration sheet were right next to each other, and he had simply marked the wrong column. The 16 card was also a card that had been marked in the wrong column.
During deckbuilding, I had seen two players (who had already submitted their decklists) looking at a deck that was laid out on a table, and apparently discussing what would have been the correct way to build it. This is perfectly legal, but I decided to do a targeted deck check on the owner of the deck anyway. He presented a deck with the wrong number of basic lands, and he also had a problem with his sleeves—two or three of his best creatures were in marked sleeves. He was given two game losses, one for Deck/Decklist Mismatch, and the other one for Marked Cards Pattern. He had no problem with the Decklist penalty (he even said he was happy that we were doing non-random deck checks), but he argued a bit about the Marked Cards penalty. He was aware that his sleeves might be in questionable condition, so just before the round started he had asked a judge whether there was time to resleeve. The judge, who had seen that I was ready to start the round, had told him no, so the player simply found his seat and got ready to play. It would have been nice if both parties (the judge and the player) had made a little bit more of an effort to make sure the sleeves were okay. We could have changed the sleeves and add extra time to his match.
After the second draft we had a case of Outside Assistance. Falko had been on the floor, and he had seen a player, with his deck laid out on the table, make a gesture that seemed to say "what should I cut from this deck?" to another player. The other player had looked at the deck and pointed at two cards. Both players were interviewed, and they admitted that advice had been asked for and given. The penalty according to the Penalty Guide is Match Loss at Professional level. The player who had given the advice was undefeated at the time, and he complained a bit about the harshness of the penalty. I pointed out that the penalty used to be disqualification, and he had nothing more to say after that. I have a feeling that this kind of outside assistance during deckbuilding happens fairly often, and it's hard to catch.
The second draft also had many cards with ink on the back, so quite a few proxies were made. When round 7 started, there was one player who couldn't find the originals of the proxied cards anywhere. We told him to start playing, we could always get the Oracle texts for him. The mystery was quickly solved when he drew his opening hand and called a judge; he'd shuffled in both the proxies and the originals. The Deck/Decklist Mismatch penalty was downgraded to a warning since he called a judge on himself.
I was very happy with the local judges. They were motivated and well-prepared. Local L0 judges Eskil and Patrick both took the Level 1 exam and passed (Eskil's interview was done a couple of weeks later on IRC, because he was sick on day 2). Everyone seemed to have a good time, and I think Falko and I succeeded in showing the new judges that judging can be a lot of fun. We finished the weekend with a few drinks and a few games of Elder Dragon Highlander at my hotel bar. Many events make you tired, but Swedish Nationals 2008 was the kind of tournament that recharges your judging batteries.
That's all I have this month. Thanks for reading!
Johanna Virtanen
DCI Level 3 Judge, Finland
flame- on Efnet's #mtgjudge
flame at bore dot org
|
