PPTQ Report – July 17, 2017
Pastimes Langley | Sealed | Time: 12pm – 8:30pm
HJ: Tobias Durose | FJ: Jordan Sparks
Players: 24 | Winner: Chris Smith

attendance for this one felt low, sealed has kind of been the way to go for PPTQ's lately, but 24 is light for pastimes, they usually at least break 30, and at their zenith they were hitting numbers of 40-50.

the crowd was an experienced one, which put me both on edge and at ease. I knew that things would run smoothly for the most part, however if I made any mistakes they would know!
Before the tournament I briefed my L1 on some IPG stuff and some common rules interactions in the format because I knew his IPG was a little rough.

I walked them through the opening procedure which I'm pretty comfortable with at this point. There were minimal issues during registration. I did neglect to do the pack verification (show the packs to your opponent, ensure there is a stripe on them verifying that it's tournament supplied product)

in round 1 two interesting things happened, two players who registered each others pools were paired (while unusual I assured them that this was perfectly alright) also I had a call where one of my players had accidentally filled his green red deck with swamps. I issued the game loss and he fixed his manabase. While I was doing this, one of my fellow L1's informed me that there was a downgrade option for this, I thanked him and said I'd look into it. I investigated, but couldn't seem to locate the downgrade option in the IPG. I let my fellow judge know and said I'd stick with the GL for now.

The player was fine with this and returned to his game, I spent a little while looking around for the downgrade and managed to locate it after about 10 or 20 minutes. I let the other judge know he was correct, but that there was nothing to be done now.

There were a few pretty basic rules questions, for the most part it was fairly quiet.

In round one because we had time, we did a mid-round deck check. It's kind of weird in sealed, but doesn't really hurt.

In round 4 something interesting happened, I was sitting on the game at table four between two players, the active player had a zombie enchanted with the blue cartouche, and was attacking, the non-active player then declared no blocks, but before damage he played cast out and said “targeting the creature” and pointed at the zombie. AP then activated endless sands (2 T: exile a creature you control) saying, “in response”, NAP then said something I didn't totally catch, AP nodded and then NAP said “okay cast out enters, I would like to target that other creature” the two players started a light argument and I stepped in saying “AP was attempting to exile the creature in response to cast out's trigger” NAP said “yes, but I confirmed with him that he was activating that ability in response to cast out” at which point AP confirmed that he was attempting to act in response to the trigger. I said that what we were going to do was quickly rewind and go through the interaction clearly, as it seemed that the timing of AP's activation was interpreted differently by NAP. NAP didn't seem terribly pleased with this but the game proceeded fine afterwards.

I actually felt pretty okay about this. I felt like NAP was trying to manouver a very strange play from AP. Since all the information was on board I didn't feel a like a backup and go through the play with more clarity was damaging in any way.

In round 4 we ran our last deck check and my L1 found a sideboard card registered wrong, we gave the player a GL and he was kind of upset. He was in the 1-3 bracket getting a Game Loss for a mis-registered sideboard card. I kind of apologized and let him know that he does need to check the pool. Luckily he calmed down after a bit. He even hung out during top 8 and shared some of his food with me :3

Top 8 draft went well, there were no hiccups there. Typically after draft I let the players kind of scatter throughout the store and allow them to build in isolation from the other players. I'm not sure if this is correct, I can't really keep an eye on all of them, but at the same time they certainly don't want to deck build right beside their opponent!

I got them to register everything in their pool, but while chatting with one of the top 8-ers she mentioned that some judges only require you to register the cards you intend to use. Interesting... I might implement this. I generally don't get a deck check done during top 8 since it feels kind of disruptive, but I might try to next tournament, just to.. just to let them know I am actually checking.

The finals were pretty fun, it was four color bolas special vs. 5-color midrange. There were cat puns, there was bolas, overall it was a pretty light-hearted finals game, that both players seemed to enjoy.

I had a lot of fun at this one, the players seemed to be in high spirits, there was a lot of goofing around, and overall the atmosphere felt... fun.

Sometimes I worry I'm a little unprofessional, it's probably my biggest concern, but at the same time, we're playing wizard cardboard, how seriously should we really be taking this?