PPTQ Report – Oct 14, 2017
Stronghold | Standard | Time: 10am-6pm
HJ: Tobias Vyseri | FJ: Alice Bailey
Players: 52 | Winner: Duncan Fukawa

The beginning of the tournament was pretty rough, my buses connected poorly, which resulted in me contacting my FJ & TO while on the skytrain to ensure that all per-tournament stuff was taken care of, and then running from the skytrain station to stronghold (doing more exercise in 10 minutes than I have in the last 6 months), to arrive exactly at 10am, the scheduled start time. Luckily for me my FJ took care of all the essential stuff, and it only took a few moments to resolve some minor DCI problems. We were ready to start on time, a few players filtered in late so we let them in.

Decklist collection and announcements went well, for the first time I feel like I didn't miss anything huge. My first call was for kitesail freebooter “etb, exile a card from target opp's hand until [cardname] leaves the battlefield”. A player asked me “if I fatal push while the ability is on the stack, does a card get exiled forever or does nothing happen? I answered nothing, to which a nearby player said “Wait I think the hand still gets revealed” but only after I had made the ruling and was walking away. The other player kind of said it loud enough that the two involved heard it and so I had to walk back over and fix my ruling. This involved backing up through a card draw (I used the GRV fix and put one on top at random) and had the player reveal his hand.

It wasn't a huge mistake but was still kind of stupid and didn't reflect great on me. The other catastrophic thing that happened was I addressed a call regarding scarab god, he had missed the trigger to return it to his hand, and it was now the next turn, the FJ ruled missed trigger, but the player seemed to believe there was a different fix, I looked in the IPG and even read the line about zone-changing triggers, but somehow I read it without actually absorbing the relevant information and upheld my FJ's ruling. Later a spectator seemed to also agree with the scarab god player and contacted another judge via facebook and asked him, who answered by referencing the fix for delayed zone-changing triggers, which allows the opp to either put the trigger on the stack now or later. I felt pretty silly, and went back to inform the players of the mistake. Obviously it was too late to fix (their games were already done, the entire transaction with the other L2 took the whole round) but I felt like it was correct to admit my mistake and inform the players we would be ruling it correctly for the rest of the event. The scarab god player *seemed* fine, but I think he also might be the type of player that doesn't express anger or frustration outwardly. He was also in the 0-2 bracket and decided to drop. I feel like that player may have been very internally upset and I felt very frustrated with myself. Since his game was basically flushed down the toilet because I made a very correctable mistake. I felt bad about it the rest of the day and wrote him an apology this morning.

The rest of the day I kind of tried to forget about it, my other calls went smoothly, deck checks went well, in my spare moments I quizzed Alice on IPG stuff, I usually like to go over common cards and common IPG situations with my L1 beforehand but didn't have a chance to so I just squished it in whenever there was a spare moment. Alice seemed, like most L1's pretty solid on the rules and kind of unfamiliar with the IPG. A few times she was appealed, I upheld once and overturned once. I organized prize support and had the TO look it over, he shuffled some things around, I left prize distribution up to Alice, who took care of it very well. (I mean I wasn't paying much attention but no one was complaining about not having packs so I can only assume nothing went wrong) Many rounds when to time but we still managed to finish in a nice healthy 8 hours.

Top 8 was quiet, there was a discrepancy after seating them, I was speaking to my FJ about something when one of the players asked me “can we start yet?” I just looked confused and said “yes, it's un-metered, why haven't you started?” to which he said “the other judge told us you would let us know when we could start” I laughed and told them they could begin, and told Alice about how top 8 players for the most part take care of themselves, since their rounds are un-metered they're allowed to start basically whenever.
Overall it was a kind of stressful day, I wish I had arrived early, like I normally do and had some time to wind down, but that was not the case, only half-way through finals did I realize that I didn't do my post-tournament wrap up like I normally do with my FJ. Which was unfortunate. Reflecting on it now, the tournament went well overall, the rest of my players seemed fine.
Working at stronghold is always pleasant, the staff is always helpful and I feel like I'm given everything I need to run a successful event (a visible round timer, printer, paper, pens, scrap paper, FJ) the players at stronghold seem to judge call more frequently than at other stores, so it's always a busier event, but the players are also very friendly and kind.