Ask the Judge, 06/01/2006: Feature Friday

A Blast From The Past

Regionals came on quick, ran smoothly, and, having left its mark on the new Standard environment, is beginning to fade into the past. Since Lee took a pass on talking about his, I'll ask you to bear with me as I cruise down memory lane to a four-slot event that happened almost two weeks ago...

I had a generous staff available to me: two solid Level 1s, three good Level 2s, and Las Vegas Level 3 judging titan Matt Tabak flew in to help us hold it all together. Given that we had a turnout of about 130, we were probably overstaffed—for a Pro Tour Qualifier of that size, I'd expect half as many judges.

Too many judges is rarely a problem, though. Scheduling breaks is easier, we can run more deck checks, and I can spend more time observing judges. We used three teams of two, which meant we could easily deck check two matches every round without jeopardizing floor coverage.

I've been playing with opening announcements lately, trying to drive down the instances of several problems, of both minor and major varieties. In theory, we just tell everyone at the beginning of a tournament, "don't do this," and people will thereafter know not to do that. In practice, sound reinforcement can be inadequate to let everybody comprehend your instructions, or players may just fail to listen. Chances of a player tuning out run up proportionally to the length of the announcements, so I usually do my best to keep things as short as possible to minimize the number of useless announcements.

We made two special announcements at this event. The first concerned collusion/bribery rules and how they related to prize splits—an issue which has come up at several recent events. For the couple events we've run with special announcements about prize splits, there haven't been any issues reported to me, but the true test will come over the next couple prereleases, where we deal with casual players who really don't think about these things. Even if our few data points don't prove anything, it's a pleasant relief not to have any incidents on this front.

Any judge who tells you they enjoy disqualifying players is almost certainly lying.

The second announcement I made was a request for players to take a moment to count their deck list and also to ensure that the cards they were playing with were legal. Virtually every tournament of any size involves some game losses (usually at the beginning of round two) for what really are completely avoidable reasons (I don't want to suggest that there are arbitrary and unavoidable penalties, but failing to ensure that you have 60 cards in your deck or exactly 15 cards in your sideboard seems especially poor to me). I hoped that we could knock our typical number (3-6) down a bit. Card legality, on the other hand, is fairly rare, but seems more likely to happen in the large, competitive, and well publicized events, like Regionals and Grand Prix, which attract a much greater share of casual players than their smaller PTQ brethren.

Sadly, we were not entirely successful in vaccinating players against game losses. We had an average number—four—of miscounted decklists, and midway through the tournament one player was started to see his opponent play a Grafted Wargear. Ideally we'd notice that on the decklist and take care of it at the beginning of round 2, but that's not always possible. Despite the penalties, I was happy with the announcements, and I'll probably try the same set again next year.

What went well? Pretty much everything else, which is to be expected when you have a staff as experienced as ours. We finished at a reasonable hour; I collected good feedback on most of our judges. I wish all events could go this well. They probably would, if they were staffed like this. In hindsight, I wish we'd had one or two Level 0s around for training purposes.

I'd like to wrap this up with an informal survey on some of the issues that I thought about at Regionals:

• For qualifying events with multiple invites, should the event be played out all the way to determine a single "event champion"? Or should it go only as long as required to determine who's getting an invite?
• Do you feel like you have a good handle on the rules around Bribery/Collusion?
• Do you feel like you understand the rules about using outside notes? Do other players in your play circle?

I'll be keeping an eye on the forum thoughts, and I'll back on Feature Friday in a few weeks. Until next time, keep shufflin'.

Seamus