Jan 6-7, 2018
Team Trios
Players: 1,500

Saturday – Scheduled Side Event HJ – 11:30am Legacy & 4:30pm Legacy
I've done a few GPs now so I'm starting to begin to know what to expect, and the initial panic of not being able to find my team lead, or not knowing where to go didn't happen hit me as severely.
I was pretty pleased to be on Legacy, it's probably my favorite format to judge, so I'm glad I got it. I checked in with my scorekeeper and team lead about my event, they let me know that regardless of attendance, all scheduled events would be 3 rounds and then prize payout. This felt weird at first, but recalling the 7 round Legacy event at GP Toronto I think this is a good change. It lets players do what they want but doesn't lock them into a single tournament literally all day.
One thing that was cool were that CFB offered “fanatic” packages to different players, allowing people who wanted to hit a bunch of a certain format's side events some kind of discount. One of the problems was that my event, which was running roughly from 11:30-2:30 ended a half hour after the start of the 2:00pm legacy event. I got asked a little over a million times about whether that event would be pushed back to enable players in my event to attend. There wasn't really anything I could do about this, but I did let CFB know about the issue and hopefully it will be changed at the next GP.

The event ran pretty smoothly, another thing I really like about CFB sides is that they are all run at regular REL, which really takes a lot of the stress about issuing infractions and fumbling with decklists away. I only had a few calls, but I feel they went fairly well, the players seemed pretty content, and so was I!

From 2:30 – 4:30 I had my break and floated around the side event area, I took a few modern calls.

I also took an adorable Standard call which was probably the best call of the weekend

Both players called me over to the table
Player: Okay so, I think... I think I had too many cards in my hand
The player looked, like actually really worried.
Me: alright, whose turn is it right now
Player: Mine but it's really bad, I think I had too many cards in my hand during my opponents last entire turn!
Me: Okay, go through what happened
Player: I took my last turn, and then I think I forgot to discard, and then he took his turn, played and attacked me with this creature, and then I took my turn and realized I had too many cards, and then we called you.
Me: How many cards are in your hand now
Player: Uhmm 1,2... 8, 8 cards!
Me: ...And have you drawn for turn
Player: Yes but- oh wait that means I only had 7 cards.
The amount of relief on his face when he realized literally nothing was wrong was probably the most hilarious and adorable thing I've seen in a while.

The rest of the day was pretty placid until my 4:30 legacy, which in and of itself was pretty chill, a lot of the same players from my earlier event were there, which was nice. When we went to begin a bunch of my people's reg slips went missing somewhere, so a representative from CFB and someone from the kickstart team came by and paired these people. I asked if everything would be taken care of and they agreed that yes, everything would be fine. It delayed us a little, but overall it was okay. Until the next round, when my scorekeeper said that he couldn't pair anything until he got info on the “missing entries”. We had given the “missing entries” some blank pairing slips to fill out, and he needed all of them before he could even begin to enter anything for the event. To make it worse, my event was in a strange pocket very far away from the scorekeeping station, since side events were much larger than anticipated, some of the main event overflow was being stolen. So I had been hoarding chunks of slips and running them up in waves. My tournament was delayed for about 10 or 15 minutes. Luckily the players were in high spirits, and I swear I didn't hear a single complaint.

Near the end of the day I was feeling a little tired so I decided to sit on some matches, one in particular was the Red Deck Wins mirror. A few strange things happened while I was watching this match. We're going to call the players Ali and Nate. Ali seemed kind of inexperienced, he had no lifepad, just a spindown, in play he had two Pyrostatic Pillars. As I was sitting down Nate cast a Trinisphere into the Pillars and said “take 4” marking his life from 11 to 8. I carefully waited to see if he would fix the problem, and also to check the board to see if there was something else preventing a damage. The turn passed and Ali cast Lava spike taking four from the pillars. Nate moved his life to 5 at which point I asked him. “isn't 11 minus four, 7?” Nate looked at the lifepad and nodded “my bad” and changed his life to the correct number. Then he said “end of turn fetch, go to three” and completed his fetch action, he then untapped took his turn, drew and passed. I tapped his lifepad again and asked if he took one for his fetch. He apologized again and fixed it. A turn or so passed and Nate eventually drew a 4-mana burn spell and killed Ali.

Nate's two mistakes were pretty suspicious. He seemed like a more experienced player, and I didn't feel like he should've been making those kinds of mistakes. I wasn't really sure what to do at the time. Perhaps I should've discussed it with another judge. But what really was there to do? It was the final round, and the match was dragging, they very well could've been completely honest mistakes.

Sunday – Scheduled Side Event HJ – 12:00pm Team Sealed
Sunday was pretty placid, I had a team sealed event in which there were only 9 teams. The event was overall so smooth it was boring, for most of it I ended up watching a team trios event beside me and touching base with the judge running the 2HG sealed on the other side of me.

Until the last round that is, I guess my scorekeeper was completely overloaded in my last round or something, because oh boy let me tell you there were issues.

1st Pairings: So the first set of pairings goes up, people start getting seated, and then a team says to me “Hey, we have the wrong number of points” I went back, looked over the match slip and got it fixed.

2nd Pairings: I came back with pairings, players got seated, then one guy says “wait I've played these people already” okay, I went back up and got them re-scrambled

3rd Pairings: Everyone looks at them and another guy says, “Hey wait, my match result is wrong too” I went back up we checked the slips, yep it was entered wrong for some reason

4th Pairings: I called one person from each team over to carefully check everything and ensure that all the points were correct and no one was playing someone they had already played. Everything seemed fine until one guy said “wait no, we played them in round 1” I went back to my scorekeeper, at which point he told me “look can you just pair them manually and tell me where you end up”

I felt a little silly since I hadn't really thought of that. I went back and manually paired the players with the help of my Team lead, and finally we got my players seated and playing. They seemed okay with the whole kerfuffle, to be perfectly honest.

The rest of the day I spent wandering around in the legacy and modern area of sides since that was where we needed coverage. It was, for the most part, largely uneventful. A player did come up to me and compliment how I had run the legacy events the previous day though, which made me feel really happy, however the compliment also felt a little unwarranted, since there were some major delays in the second event I ran. I spent a lot of the time picking up trash and floating around tables. I sat on a few interesting legacy matches as the day wore on and got to see some really fun interactions :)

I think sitting on matches is sometimes the most fun I have because I get to really invest myself in a single game and watch where it goes, I get to interact with the players in a little more of a casual manner.

I know there was one match of Lands vs U/W control where the control player miracle'd Entreat the Angels for 8 and looked to his opponent asking “is this okay?” the opponent, who had been slowly losing for the past few turns, looked pretty down and nodded “yeah it's okay” I remember looking to the Lands player and joking “I don't think it's okay” which broke the tension a bit and got the lands player laughing.

This may seem super silly and kind of unprofessional, but I think fundamentally Magic is a game and the players are there to have fun, I feel like, yeah, our job is to solve disputes and hand out punishments, but it's also our job to make sure everyone is having a good time. It's our job to make sure that players are happy.

I remember at some point during the day someone from the coverage team did a short interview with me, it didn't make it to any streams or articles, but I remember him asking me something like “what do you think you did well this weekend?” and I replied “I think my players were happy and had fun.”

And I think this is an important thing we should always keep in mind when judging.

We want to make our Magic players, happy little Magic players. :)