Nov 26, 2017 | Sealed | Time: 12am – 8:30pm
HJ: Tobias Vyseri
Players: 20 | Winner: Tony Lam

This was a little tournament. Because of a weird scheduling issue, there was another store that had rented out a hall literally across the road to run a sealed Iconic Masters PPTQ and neither establishment could change their time due to staffing and scheduling conflicts, both me and the store owner expected this to be one of those 8-man tournaments and were dreading it, but things kind of worked out okay and we got 20 people. The store had a bunch of extra Amonkhet and Hour of Devestation stock and wanted to use that for the sealed event. I gave them kind of a weird look and said “I don't really think people will want to play the older sets” after a little negotiation with the owner it was agreed that we'd let the players decide. Obviously the desire was to play Ixalan sealed. There was a little concern with the amount of product available, since the store was slightly short on Ixalan, but after doing a product count, I figured out that we had just enough to run the event, run top 8 and prize out with a little over a box of packs left.

I had a few kids there, which was... odd, they seemed to do okay with registration and an experienced player even helped a slower kid beside him organize his pool, which I thought was very sweet.

Something that happened that I didn't really know how to handle was I walked by and saw a player looking at his phone during registration, a quick flash of the screen showed me LSV's set review. I harshly told him to put it away and if I saw it again I would kick him out. I'm not sure if this was correct, should I have been more strict? Less strict? I wasn't sure at the time which part of policy it fell under, USC – Cheating came to mind, but the use of phones is something I am constantly having to mention because it is allowed at other events and is grey for many players.

My general policy is if I am uncertain to err on the side of caution, wrongfully DQ'ing a player is a much bigger issue in my opinion than wrongfully not DQ'ing a player.

I regret to admit I didn't ask him too many questions because again, I wasn't really sure what to do. I've seen him around before, so he's not totally new or anything, I'm reasonably sure he knew what he was doing was not correct. I kept an eye on him for the rest of the tournament but nothing else weird happened.

The rest of the event was pretty sedated, product opening and distribution went over without any problems (I would like to think I am getting very good at going through the opening procedure :3)

the actual tournament itself was pretty easy to run, the venue had a printer so no yelling out names this time! One of the staff members helped me with deck checks, so I got more done than necessary, which was cool.
Top 8 draft went smoothly. Literally zero problems. Overall it was a good event