GP Report – Oct 27-29, 2017
ChannelFireball | Phoenix | Sealed
Players: 1,200 players (not verified) | Winner: Sean Miller

Friday October 27, 2017 | Team: On Demand Events
As always I was a little nervous on the first day of the GP. Finding the people I was supposed to talk to and acclimatizing myself to a new environment is always a little unnerving, but each time I do it, I'm a little less anxious, so I guess that's a good thing. When I got the run down on ODEs I found out we'd be utilizing the Kefka software, which allowed judges to work as de facto scorekeepers for single elimination events, abolishing the need for a lengthy paper trail when running single elimination drafts. I was anxious about the new software, and just working ODEs in general, my judging experience is almost exclusively in PPTQs and my few previous GPs put me on either scheduled sides or main event. Getting used to firing off multiple drafts was a little weird. I'm not at all used to the “one and done” style that you use to run these things. I'm far more used to sticking with a specific batch of players. And, honestly I kind of prefer it, when I'm on a single event I can kind of forget I'm at a GP and just focus in on the one thing I am responsible for. I don't have to constantly go back to a scorekeeper to find my next assignment, and I'm less likely to make a mistake because I'm not familiar with how x's particular event is being run. Also in the course of the 5-8 hours I spend with a single group of players I can kind of get to know them a little, and it feels more personal and cute that way.

But I digress, back to what I was actually doing. This was my first interaction with the little ODE buzzers as well, and I've got to say, that is a fantastic system. Rather than expecting people to remember a draft number and announce it over the speaker, just give them a buzzer that vibrates when the draft is queued up. But the real star of the ODE event show was Kefka, this software gets nothing but positive reviews from me, gone are the days of players asking where to put their slip, gone are the days of leaving janky paper brackets on the table. Kefka does it all, it even takes care of your seating, I love it and I hope we use it forever.

This was basically my day, collecting draft pack wrappers, going through the same five or so sentences that let people know how to draft, while letting Kefka take care of everything else. It was a quiet(ish) GP and I think we were a tad overstaffed, I felt like myself and the other judges were competing to find things to do.

There were a few times when players asked for specific seating arrangements (ie. I've played this guy in three drafts can I switch seats with someone else?) and after a little deliberation I decided that this was fine. Yeah, it could be slightly abusable, in that two friends could potentially maximize their combined prizes by not playing each other, but who cares? They probably just legitimately don't want to play the same guy again. The other thing about the day was the TURBO TURBO TURBO drafts, one round and done. The guy working at registration had an absolutely infectious amount of energy for these and had all of us saying “turbo turbo turbo drafts!” with much gusto and enthusiasm. I joked that CFB would kick us off staff if we didn't say turbo in increments of three.

In summary, Kefka is an amazing and powerful tool. ODE's were fun, but I prefer longer events that I can glue myself to, and TURBO TURBO TURBO is a fun phrase to say really loudly and all the time.


Saturday October 28, 2017 | Team: Breaks
Breaks team! I love these sort of multipurpose teams, I am the kind of person that likes to do a billion different things and these sorts of teams let me do that. It's great! I spent a little while on coverage, which was a weird combination of very boring and very nerve wracking. The last thing I wanted to do was accidentally destroy something on stream. If a player made a mistake, it would feel very disruptive to step in an issue an infraction, was there a different policy for camera? Would it be better to step in, fix the mistake and if minor enough skip the infraction? Or maybe it would be better to issue with brevity while on stream and go through an expanded explanation after the game. What if I did it wrong? The internet is excellent at cultivating and re-telling stories of malpractice. Luckily none of this happened, the most grievous error was someone accidentally putting a +1/+1 counter on a Sunbird's Invocation instead of their adjacent explore creature. Which I simply pointed at without saying anything and the players quickly rectified it. The other cool thing that happened is that my local players saw me in the background of one of the after-match shots, it's like I got to be a little tiny bit famous :3

Later at some point while I was wandering the main event, a fellow judge told me he read my tournament reports, to which I responded in my typical charisma 4 fashion, stumbling over some words in an attempt to express gratitude through embarrassment. Somehow it feels a little weird to run into someone who reads my reports, I always figured these reports were too boring and dry to bother reading. Mostly I write them because I know I need a certain number of them to maintain L2 status, and because when I apply to events it gives credence to the “I run lots of PPTQs” line in my cover letter. But for those of you who do read them, yay! Thank you and if you ever have any advice I'm happy to hear it :)

I ended up spending the majority of my day prowling main event, since each other team we were breaking seemed to basically have taken care of all its responsibilities by the time we arrived to release them. Main event was interesting in it's own right, though, here we used a different software, one that let us know which tables were still outstanding, as well as which tables had time extensions. There was also a color system you could utilize by clicking on the squares representing tables, to let other people know if there was already a judge watching a specific table or not. This saved loads of time, we didn't need to go up to the front to find out which tables were still playing, and we never ran into the problem of two people going to attend to the same table. It was really, really great and massively expedited the end of round procedure. Main event was also interesting because of a number of smaller things that happened throughout the day that challenged me. So the next section is going to be a series of little incidents.

In round 1 a girl was using the pile shuffle method to counted her deck and called me over when she realized she was short a card. It was the beginning of the day and I was a little flustered, I wasn't really sure what the correct fix was so I ended up running to the deck check station and grabbing her decklist after instructing her to look around. In the end after consulting another judge we had her play with a basic land in that slot and at the end of round we would have her fix her decklist. I felt like I handled this kind of messily. I should've simply told her to insert the basic land at the beginning and looked around while she was playing. The entire ordeal resulted in a lengthy time extension, and I feel the process could've been greatly expedited if I'd known what I was doing to begin with.

In round 3 or 4 a guy came up to me and asked if he, as a spectator, was allowed to ask his friend's opponent to be a little less aggressive. I said, “let me look into it” I stood by the table for a match, I felt like the player wasn't horribly aggressive but, his demeanor could be interpreted as such, he had a heavier build, stood about 1.5 heads taller than me and probably had 10 years of life on his 16-year-old high school opponent. After the match I took him aside and let him know that while I knew he wasn't trying to be aggressive, his entire presence kind of exuded an air of aggression, and to be mindful of that while playing, even though I have to admit, he intimidated me a little bit too >.< He seemed okay with being talked to, but responded that he did get upset with the kid once because the kid was late to the match and was being kind of a disorganized mess during the game. I didn't really feel like I did anything, but after the match both the kid and his friend thanked me and seemed really grateful for... whatever it was that they think I did. So that was really nice.

In round 2 I was called over to a table, player A had side-boarded, after which player B side-boarded put his deck down, and then after seeing A finish and present, picked up his deck and decided to sideboard again. Player A called and asked if this was okay saying something like “now that he knows I'm done side-boarding he's decided to change his mind, I thought we were both done.” and I said “naw, as long as he hasn't presented he's still good to sideboard.” Player A seemed a little disgruntled but was okay with it.

In round 4 a player called me over, let's call him Nate and asked me one of those weird nebulous questions where you're not really sure what they're asking. You know the type, they'll give you a word-garble and you kind of have to parse out what they're trying to ask you so you don't accidentally answer a different question. I eventually got out of him that he wanted to ask if he had priority after damage assignment order had been declared in the combat damage step. I didn't think so, but double checked just in case, which confirmed my assumption, I told him no, but it was such a weird question that I had a concern that perhaps his opponent was trying to expedite combat to prevent a post-blocking combat maneuver, which players are not allowed to do. I asked if he was trying to do something after declare blockers and he nodded, so I shrugged and said “Yeah I'd be okay backing up so you have a chance to do a thing”. I went over and let the players know what was happening. The opponent, let's call him Andy, looked pretty upset. He said “wait what? No, after blocks Nate picked up his creatures and said 'okay so everything is dead' and put everything in the graveyard, and then looked at me and said 'and your creature is dead too' and I said, 'no' and that's when he called you. My opponent did bad combat math and wants a re-do.”
You know that feeling of encroaching dread you get when you realize that something is not going to be as easy as you initially thought? That was how I felt at that moment. I looked at Nate and said “Is that what happened?” and he said, “Well I picked up my creatures, I didn't say they were going to die,” Right here I knew that no matter what I did the ruling was going to be appealed. That and I felt a little under-qualified to deal with this situation. Rather than dither and see if I wanted to overturn the ruling I had already made, I stopped them and said, “Okay well, this is the ruling I made,” Andy looked upset, I asked him, “Are you satisfied with this ruling,” Obviously he said no, I then asked him, “Do you want to appeal?” And of course he said he would. I grabbed the time on the clock and ran over to the stage and grabbed the red shirt guy.
He sat down with both players individually and got their sides of the story. While he was speaking with Nate, he said something very similar to “if you are lying to me, you are going to get kicked out of the tournament. So, what happened after blockers were declared.” At which point Nate agreed that he did move his creatures to the graveyard. Watching the appeals process play out is not something I have ever really seen, so it was a very interesting experience. I feel like I may have handled the situation rather poorly, but I definitely learned a lot from it. On the walk back the appeals judge, I guess sensing my inexperience, walked me through the process a little, which I really appreciated.

In round 8 I was watching a win and in match at the end of the tournament, it was the end of turn 5 and one of the players opened his mouth to say something. Another judge at the table gave him the bribery collusion speech and went over what he was and wasn't allowed to do before he even got a word in. I felt a little embarrassed that I hadn't thought of doing that, and even if I had I was probably too polite to actively cut a player off. On the walk back the judge basically told me interrupting players was better than DQ-ing them and to always make that speech after turns, especially on a win and in match.

Overall I was really grateful at the level of education my fellow judges were willing to give me, it was very kind of them to take time out of their busy schedules to explain different things to me and I am very grateful for it.

In round 5 I was watching a game, Player A attacked with Adanto Vanguard and a 3/2 vanilla. Player B tanked for a bit and blocked the vanguard, which resulted in some combat tricks being cast, after the dust cleared player A paid 4 life to regenerate the vanguard and they moved on to player B's turn. I carefully examined everything and said “excuse me, could you explain what happened in that last combat?” player a told me about his regeneration of the vanguard and the combat spells, in tandem with player B, who then added “and I took 3 damage” noting the 3/2 and marking it down on his life pad. Player A stopped and said “oh yeah” and noted it as well. This is a situation that stuck in my mind, I didn't issue an infraction, and these kinds of situations come up a lot with me, where I'll be kind of be placidly watching a match and see a mistake (a PTE creature enters the graveyard, combat math is done weird etc.) sometimes I'm wrong, so rather than jumping on them and embarrassing myself I will often ask players what happened instead, and have them go through the process, or usually, immediately notice what went wrong and fix it.
I usually don't issue an infraction when I approach a situation like this. And I'm not really sure if that's right, I mean when I was there I thought nothing of it, I almost missed the 3 damage as well, which is why I spent a moment double checking myself to ensure I wasn't interrupting a perfectly legal game. But upon reflection Player B seems rather suspicious. There's a part of me that doesn't want judges to be the boogey men, jumping on players every time they fail to turn their exiled card sideways, or accidentally tap their vigilance creatures, but at the same time, that's what the infraction system is for, what if this guy fails to take damage like three more times? Without the infractions logged we would have a hard time catching him. Does this happen with other people? Are there borderline cases you feel don't merit an infraction?



Sunday October 29, 2017 | Team: Sides
The whole weekend was kind of chill but Sunday was definitely the most chill. Our team lead had a piece of software for us to use, it had a day plan in it and let us know what event we were to be helping with at any given time. I felt like we were pretty overstaffed, my morning consisted of answering the same Dire Fleet Ravager 2HG question like 4 times and picking up pack wrappers. At noon I got the standard double up event which was a nice comfy feeling, 50 players, all mine for the duration of the event. Definitely the most familiar assignment I'd had all weekend. There were a few latecomers which came just in time to be paired together. One guy came like 12 minutes into first round, I considered pairing him with the bye player, but like, that is totally not fair to the player with the bye (and is against policy). Instead I reluctantly followed the book and gave him the round 1 match loss. After my little event was done I spent the remainder of my day in the 2HG and modern section.

In conclusion I had a lot of fun at GP Phoenix, it was by far the most placid GP I've ever worked, and also one of the most smoothly run, the sides, the scheduled events and even main event all ran like a well-oiled machine. The people there were in high spirits and were a joy to be around, and as always, with every event, I learned a lot from being there. I'm excited for what the next season of GP's will bring and hopefully I'll get to work with CFB more in the year to come!