PPTQ Report – June 10, 2017
Bastion Games | Standard | Time: 11am-4pm
HJ: Tobias Durose | FJ: Casey Miko & Tim
Players: 12 | Winner: Geoff Derksen

The first thing I want to mention about this tournament is, holy crap Chilliwack might as well be on Mars. This place is so remote public transit doesn't even work out there on weekends. It's nuts.

I was pretty excited to do this one because, well, it's a store I've never been to before, and since it's so remote there would also probably be some players there I'd never met before. I love doing tournaments, but when you see the same faces week after week the tournament scene can get a little homogeneous, and I'm sure the players don't want to be forced to be subjected to my sorry face every time they want to play magic!

The next thing I want to talk about is the fact that we had a miserable 12 players, this was for a few reasons. I picked up the job after their previously scheduled judge realized he had a commitment conflict and had to back out. Which unfortunately was publicly announced on social media, so the threat of the event not having an officiate was pretty real, and if players are going to travel 1-2 hours they want to be certain that there will be a judge and an event (this game store chronically has problems scheduling judges). The other strike against it was that a more accessible store in Vancouver decided to run their event on the same day. The final nail, so to speak, is the fact that the popularity of standard is kind of flagging right now, the WotC banhanner is all over the place and the Aetherworks Marvel deck is (perceived as) oppressive (truth to this statement is debatable).

Ergo turnout was 12 people. I've never really thought about the negative social repercussions of a judge backing out of a tournament commitment publicly, and I think it's something for us to be conscientious of.

I got to work with the local L1, Casey Miko and there was another judge trainee who was there for experience (to be honest I felt gratuitously overstaffed, but didn't have the heart to tell Tim to go home, so I kind of took a back seat and let Casey take care of everything and assigned Tim to random tasks)

Casey's IPG knowledge was pretty good from what I saw. There were two times where he really impressed me, the first was in round 4 when he noticed an entry slip was entered wrong before the players did, which is great, I love fixing problems before the players realize there is a problem. And then in round 5 when two players had finished their match but because of strange tiebreakers there may have been a way for them to draw into top 8 if another match ended in a certain way. Casey noticed that they were dithering on filling out their slip while absently chatting and watching the game beside them. I was completely engrossed in a very quirky match of Esper Angel-Vehicles vs. Rakdos Control when he brought to my attention that he thought the two players were stalling for time.

I nodded and told him 'yeah, now that you mention it, it really seems like they're waiting. Just go over there and ask them to fill out their slip.' We got the result with no further incident.

We did three rounds of deck checks because we had the people for it. Notably someone marked 6 Aether Hubs. Yay Aether Hub. Someone else only registered 6/15 sideboard cards.
Come on guys. Registration being a skill testing part of the tournament was a joke.

The SB card thing was kind of weird, but after a little investigation I didn't think anything strange was going on. And we got him in R2 so even if he was planning on having a fluid SB he only had 1 round to capitalize on it.

In R2 there was a match that went to time, (it was won in turns) where I felt a player might be playing a little slowly, there was on turn in particular where he tanked for a while, I waited until his turn was finished and was going to say something but... didn't, I think I wanted more data at the time, but in retrospect I should've at least told him to play faster, it literally can't hurt. His opponent seemed to think he was rather slow. He was playing a very removal-heavy control, which definitely contributed to at least a feeling of sluggish play. I kept a loose eye on him for the rest of the tournament but none of his other games went to time, in the finals I did mention to him that he needed to play a little faster. But reflecting on it, I should've just issued a slow play warning in R1. Slow plays are so hard to give out, because they are so subjective, but honestly, I think I'm pretty patient, if I think someone is slow then they are probably slow.

Other than that the tournament was very quiet. The local players seemed nice, there were some neat decks to watch, definitely not the Marvelgasm that everyone thought it would be. Working with the trainee and the L1 was fun, I felt bad for the store owner (he operated the tournament at a heavy loss due to the poor turnout) but he seemed okay with it, and seemed to be happy I took the job.