Hello and welcome back to another installment of Ask the Judge: Feature Friday, or as I like to call it these days, Ask the Judge: Fitchburg Was Fun, But My Legs Still Hurt!

I've just returned from a week's vacation across the country. My significant other and I spent several days on a train heading out to beautiful, sunny Bloomington, Indiana, where we visited an ex-roommate. We then headed on to a short stay in Chicago before I flew out to Logan International Airport in beautiful, sunny, cold Boston. Because what's a vacation without putting in 30+ hours of work at a Magic Tournament?

GP: Where?
For those of you who haven't been paying attention, last weekend was the first North American Two-Headed Giant Grand Prix. Fitchburg, Massachusetts is about 45 minutes northeast of Boston, which is to say: the GP was about 45 minutes from anywhere you've ever heard of. The GP was not held in Fitchburg proper, however, but rather in a small hotel-and-convention space just outside Fitchburg, which is to say: the GP was just outside a place about 45 minutes from anywhere you've ever heard of. Fortunately, it's not necessary to know where you are when you're working a professional Magic tournament—you're not going to have too much time to concern yourself with spaces outside the venue.

Before you get too far into this report, let me encourage you to take a peek at Johanna's report on GP Amsterdam. We were very lucky to have the benefit of the Amsterdam experience. I've no doubt—seriously, none at all—that we narrowly escaped all kinds of harrowing difficulties as a result. I'm told that the head judge's report from that event was slightly longer than the Magic Comprehensive Rules.

In addition to a large pile of "do not, under any circumstances..."-type warnings, we had one of the key elements for a successful Grand Prix: a fantastic judge crew. From the most experienced judges—head judge Sheldon Menery and right hand John Carter—to the least experienced—Joe Bernier, congratulations on your promotion to level 1!—everyone showed up ready to work. And work we did. From 7 AM Saturday, when the Level 3 and higher judges met for a working breakfast until the finals concluded at 11:30 PM on Sunday night, the staff gave it their all.

While we avoided the multi-hour delays of GP Amsterdam, we still ran into some challenges. By the mid-afternoon of Sunday's play, the staff was clearly tuckered out. We soldiered on, but perhaps without the crisp steps of Saturday. I was guilty on this score. I spent the weekend unassigned to teams as a "floater." My job was to keep an eye on everything and help out where needed, while collecting as much data for judge feedback sessions as possible. On the surface of it, I had more opportunities to get off my feet and stay rested and refreshed, but I think that the reality was that I spent more time on my feet, not less. I'm quite sure that I took fewer breaks than I normally would at a similar event. Lesson for next time: better pacing.

DCI Reporter is the software used to run sanctioned Magic tournaments, and in many regards it is fantastic, the best application of its type. It's like a sports referee (or a Magic judge, I suppose) in that you often won't see the name in print unless there are problems. The latest and (theoretically) greatest version had some (read an arbitrary amount of understatement there) issues at Amsterdam, so we erred on the side of caution and used a slightly older version for this event. Interestingly, the older version didn't have any support for 2HG drafts, so Sunday's drafts were broken into pods with the assistance of an Excel spreadsheet (developed on the fly at the Dutch event and refined since) and pairings were generated by hand and entered manually.

That system worked really smoothly, until a team dropped from the tournament between the two rounds of the second draft and left their pod-mates with a bye. It turned out that each of the teams in the pod eligible for the bye had already received a bye in the event. Playing in pods means that teams have opportunities to get byes that wouldn't be legal in normal Swiss play, because it is often the only legal pairing. Since Reporter didn't know that we had pods, it tried to enforce the usual restrictions, which meant that we weren't able to assign a bye to either team. This threatened to create the first significant delay of the tournament. Scorekeeper and Elder Dragon Highlander fan Scott Larabee saved the day when he discovered that dropping a team from the event and reentering them convinced Reporter that they were fair game for a bye.

A little scary, but that's living on the edge.

Other interesting tournament tidbits for me included showing up Sunday morning to find that the round clock had disappeared. If this was an April Fool's joke, it was poorly executed. We never did find the clock. If you have any idea where it might be, I strongly suspect that Wizards of the Coast would make it worth your while to tell them.

I called all four main event drafts on Sunday, without significant incident. We did pause the draft in mid-pack at one point after both members of one team each drafted out of the same pack. I'm not really sure how that happened, exactly. Note to judges: if you're working the floor during a multi-table draft and an issue comes up, signal to the caller to stop. There are lots of good opportunities to pause a draft, so it doesn't really hurt anything to pause for a few seconds.

When it rained, it poured. During the second round of play on Saturday, I manned the stage while Sheldon took appeal after appeal. Five of them came almost simultaneously. Meanwhile, there was a barrage of player and judge questions up front. The same situation repeated itself towards the end of the day. I don't believe there were more than one or two overturned rulings, so it's hard to assign a meaning to all of it. But it was quite the zoo for a bit.

A couple pleasant surprises for me were seeing StarCity events manager Matt Villamaino and forum regular orcishartillery. Matt was in town interviewing a number of candidates for the recently posted position. I don't know how many, exactly, but all of the candidates I am aware of are good, qualified folks, so Roanoke is likely to be growing in size by one highly-qualified events person in the near future.

This event marks the beginning of a lot of Magic-related travel for me. I'll be head judge of the Future Sight prerelease in Salt Lake City in a few weeks, and this summer I'll be attending both Pro Tour San Diego (the site of my very first Pro Tour, a few years ago) and US Nationals in Baltimore. I'm also optimistic that I'll be attending another three or four professional events this year after Nationals. This event was a good kickoff for that tour.

I'll be back here in a month with my thoughts on my first away-from-home prerelease and what I'll be doing to prepare for Regionals. Until then, keep shufflin'.