Greetings! The annual Scandinavian Grand Prix is one of my favourite events. Last year we partied at the slaughterhouse in Malmö, and this year the event took place at Scandic Infra City, a very nice hotel/convention centre combo just outside Stockholm. While a GP in Scandinavia normally attracts about 20 to 30 Finnish players, this time the Finnish contingent was 60 players strong. Stockholm is particularly easy to travel to from Finland: there are plenty of cheap flights, and two ferry companies to choose from. The Finnish judge contingent was at its normal strength of two judges, six levels and one surname.

Pasi and I arrived on Friday night and discovered that local taxi companies do not all have the same pricing system: the trip from the airport to the venue seemed to cost anything from 270 SEK to 450 SEK. Something to keep in mind if you ever visit Sweden. David Vogin, the Head Judge, held a short meeting, and I found out that I would be the leader of one of the deck check teams. I didn't do very well the last time I had this job, so I was happy to get an opportunity to fix some of my mistakes.

David invited all of the team leaders to join him for breakfast at 7:15 on Saturday morning. I think the team leader breakfast is an excellent idea: the team leaders and the HJ usually need to discuss various things such as event logistics, and doing it over breakfast saves time.

Because Adam Cetnerowski's Logistics team was helping with registration and crowd control, the deck check teams were assigned to set up the product. This invoves opening displays of tournament packs and boosters, and putting the packs and a foil Spiritmonger inside a deckbox. I set up a kind of assembly line: one group opening cases of deckboxes, another group putting tournament packs and boosters inside the deckboxes, and a third group adding the Spiritmongers and keeping track of how many sets we had. My job was to give my Assembly Workers +1/+1 and occasionally run back to the registration desk to find out what the current total was.

Halfway through registration, David decided to see if he could start the event half an hour early. He asked me to pre-register about 50 decks for those who would show up for the announced starting time. So I assigned some of my judges to do that. Then 200 more players showed up, and the assembly line suddenly had more work to do. The guys doing the count forgot that we were preregistering 50 decks, so when we had all 713 players seated and ready, we discovered that we didn't have enough non-registered product for all of them. Of course this wasn't a huge problem since we could just give them a deck registered by a judge.

After deckbuilding, we settled down to count the decklists. We found about 40 lists that had some problems (registering less than 40 cards), and we needed to hand out all the decklist penalties at the start of round 2. We had about 13 judges to do this, so everyone had three lists to deal with. We got a copy of the pairings, marked the table numbers on the decklists, and grouped the lists so that each judge would get three tables from roughly the same area. One mistake we made was not getting two or more copies of the pairings, because that would have saved some time. I explained to everyone that they should find all the players first, take them aside, and then deal with all the problems (instead of spending 10 minutes with the first table and then going to the second table).

Unfortunately, some of the judges found the first player they needed to deal with and told them to go wait near the main stage, without telling them why. Soon David was asking me why there was a group of confused-looking players standing around, and telling me to correct the situation. Of course, these players couldn't really say which judge had sent them there, or what table they came from. We called all the deck check judges back to the main stage, and I sent the players to look at the pairings to find their table number. Finally, we managed to reunite the players, judges and decklists, get the penalties handed out, and the decklists corrected. But it took more time than it should have, and was not very smoothly handled.

We sorted the lists during round 2, and after that we started doing normal deck checks. We also did mid-round deck checks. For these, I asked my judges to just pick any table that was shuffling for game 2 or 3, and swoop them when they presented. When doing mid-round deck checks this way, it's a good idea to take the result slip with the decks, so that you'll know their names and can find their decklists. We didn't catch anything interesting in the deck checks.

The day finished quite early (around 9 pm, as far as I can remember). I felt pretty good and my feet didn't bother me as much as usual.

For Sunday, I was assigned to side events. Falko Görres (L3 from Germany) was the side event manager. He originally assigned me to HJ a Juniors event with Stefan Wrammerfors (a Swedish L1), but since we only got 8 players for that event, we let Stefan handle that on his own. I helped out with scorekeeping and other administrative duties, because Falko didn't have a real scorekeeper. When a huge line formed for the Two-Headed Giant event, I fetched my laptop from my hotel room so that we could register those people faster. I also talked to some of the judge candidates that Carlos Ho (from Panama, currently residing in Spain) and Adam Cetnerowski (from Poland) were sending to us from the Judge Certification booth. Most of the candidates I spoke with were quite good and seemed to have some previous experience. If you go to the judge certification booth at a GP (or PT), you probably won't be tested that day if you have never read the Comprehensive rulebook or the Penalty Guide. However, you can always ask the judges at the certification booth about other testing opportunities and how to prepare for them. Anyone who is genuinely interested in judging may be asked to help out with side events for a while, even if the testing judge decides that the candidate is not ready to test at this time.

A tip for judge candidates everywhere, inspired by GP Stockholm: in most cases, the testing judge really doesn't want to see your underpants (that's all I'm going to say about that. Ask me in person if you want to hear the rest of the story. Or ask Carlos).

Around 4 PM, David came to ask if I wanted to help out with the top 8. I ended up calling the draft: nobody else seemed to want to do it. I'm not a huge fan of calling drafts, but it went fine. I then watched over the quarters, some of the semis, and the final match. I even got to answer a couple of rules questions, which is somewhat rare in a top 8 match. In the semifinal match between Oliver Oks and Nikolai Potovin, both players had huge numbers of creatures in play. Oks had an Icatian Crier enchanted with a Gift of Granite, a bunch of Citizen tokens, a bunch of Goblin tokens, and some other stuff. Potovin had various creatures and a Serendib Sorcerer. First, Oks called me so that he could ask a question away from the table: he wanted to know if the Crier would be 0/4 if Potovin used the Sorcerer on it. The answer is yes: effects that set power and toughness to a specific value are applied in layer 6b, and effects from static abilities such as the Aura are applied in layer 6d.

Then, a few turns later, Potovin played a Crookclaw Transmuter. Before putting its comes-into-play ability on the stack, he called me over to ask the exact same question, and received of course the same answer. He then thought for a bit, and targeted one of Oks's Goblin tokens with the Transmuter's ability, and used the Sorcerer to kill it. I'm not sure if he thought that he couldn't kill the Crier because of the Gift of Granite, or if he just decided that killing a Goblin was the better play. He didn't ask me about the Transmuter's ability, so if I had mentioned it, I would have been coaching him. Of course, he ended up winning the game, the match, the next match, and the whole Grand Prix.

Overall, this was a good event for me. Both days finished early, which is nice. I felt reasonably good about my performance, had a few nice learning moments, and had a chance to work and hang out with some old friends. The location was excellent; everyone was there under the same roof. The only problem is that the site is far away from central Stockholm, which is a very nice place to visit, but I hope Wizards Europe returns to this location for another Grand Prix.

That's all from me this week. Next month, I'll talk about working some local events with my local judge candidates. Next week, you will meet a shiny brand-new Feature Friday author.

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