PPTQ Report – Feb 03, 2018
Stronghold | Standard | Time: 9am – 5:30pm
HJ: Tobias Vyseri | FJ: Jovy Eramila
Players: 41 | Winner: Markus Thibeau

This PPTQ was pretty busy. I got in at 9:00 (start time was 10) and touched base with my FJ, as per the usual, I went through a few simple scenarios with him to ensure that he could nail the easy and common IPG calls, like looking at extra cards, mulligan procedure error, and simple missed triggers. I was super impressed with his policy knowledge, probably one of the best L1's I've ever worked with.
Usually I'll go through some scenarios and it will feel more like I'm giving them a crash course in the IPG than a light refresher. And stemming from that I usually feel like I need to be within earshot of the L1 whenever a policy call is being answered in case something goes wrong. But here I felt like Jovy would be able to take care of policy in a superb manner without anything catching fire.
Which was good because we had plenty of other things that caught fire!
Let me preface this with the statement, 'I haven't run a PPTQ since the end of November' so for me it's been a few months, and while I have been hitting a lot of Grand Prix's, running a Comp REL PPTQ and running a bunch of Regular REL side events are very two very different animals. We booted up WER and at about 10am, and were trying to print first round pairings, it took the both of us about 3 minutes to figure out it wasn't printing because we hadn't clicked 'enrollment complete' and 'create first round' yet. This was after checking USB plugs, running a test print through notepad, bringing up the print queue and considering a reboot.

This, however worked out okay, because at 10am I had 25 players and by the time I got the printer working I had 33. When I had come in the store had given me a stack of people that had pre-paid, I entered these people in WER. Unfortunately when those same people walked through the door many of them also collected an on-site registration form and also submitted that. This resulted in one player being entered twice under two different names. I ended up telling him to sit at the table that had him registered under the correct name, and I'd drop the other version of him. The other problem at the beginning was that while some players were so zealous they entered themselves twice, many more still didn't seem to get the memo that their registration slip needed to make it's way into the registration box in order for their registration to be processed. So after posting pairings I had a staggering 8 people walk up and proclaim they weren't in the event! What a disaster!
I panicked for a few moments, and then grabbed some of the leftover entry slips, wrote each players name on the back, shuffled them together and took out pairs at random. It's not a perfect solution but it got butts in seats and playing magic, which is usually the desired outcome. This the entire registration debacle ended with me about 10 minutes behind, which honestly, isn't that bad, normal tournaments run about 10 minutes behind because players wander in at start time still needing to pay and fill out a decklist anyways.
The entire pairing issue did however, have a very funny result of my opening announcements consisting of the phrase “...and today we have 33-ish players.” After that, I got Jovy handing out match slips while I collected decklists. After seeing Jovy's stellar performance on the pre-tournament mini exam, I figured I'd let him basically take care of the floor while I stayed back and did all the boring administrative stuff. So I spent basically all of round 1 fixing the player issues, organizing decklists and entering results.

Near the end of round 1 the Pokemon TO mentioned that one of my salty magic players was using a lot of coarse language, I sighed and said I'd go talk to him. I asked if I could speak to him away from the table and he immediately seemed to get what I was asking and apologized. Honestly, not a problematic interaction like I thought it might be. I made sure to mention language in the next round's announcements.

Round 2 appeared suddenly and we needed to do deck checks. Jovy expressed that this was something he wanted to work on, since he didn't have much experience doing it, I agreed and asked him if he felt comfortable doing the swoop or if he wanted to watch me do it once and then give it a try for himself. He said he'd rather watch me once and try next round. Which was a great idea in theory. In practice the start of round brought like 3 calls that he went and took while I was swooping. Then as we started checking he got called away 2-4 more times. In the middle of the check he mentioned being unable to find a second copy of a card, before he got called away. The check was starting to run into about 10 minutes so I quickly found the second copy and checked the SB but nothing else, we got one deck fully checked out, so I figured it was fine, issuing a 10+ minute time extension is basically death to the pace of a tournament and I wanted to avoid it if at all possible.
I was a little upset Jovy didn't get to participate in the entirety of the check, but I figured that actually sorting and checking cards was something he probably didn't need practice on, but more the swooping and procedure elements. Also I figured we would have more time in the next round for him to do a more sedated deck check.

I was wrong. The top of the next round I told him to swoop and I'd be around for backup, except I wasn't, I got a call and on my way back I saw that Jovy had been pulled away from the swoop by another player asking a question. I walked over and the short of it was the player said his match result was entered wrong, I told Jovy I'd take care of this, and to go grab a mid-round check. Turns out the players entered the result wrong on the slip. I confirmed with the guy's opponent. My first inclination of a fix was to check for a down-pair and rip it apart to insert my wayward player. unfortunately I couldn't find one, and time was ticking for the round. I informed the player that there would be a down-pair no matter what and therefore he should just play this rounds opponent. I fixed the result in WER and then realized that a much more elegant solution would've been to simply find his last round opponent and switch the two matches (so that similar records were playing). I'll do this in the future.
The other thing we needed to address was the new ruling on using dice for energy at Comp REL, I discussed it with Jovy and we decided we were going to make an announcement at the beginning of next round.
This was something we needed to mention to a lot of players as it was a new and a little unintuititive. As a side note, I got a lot of negative feedback regarding this rules change.

Then Jovy came back with the mid-round check. Similar to last round we had a plethora of calls while checking. Jovy found that one of the players had forgotten to register 2 God-Pharaoh's Gifts in his.. ahem, God-Pharaoh's Gift deck. I called the player over and informed him of the game loss, he was upset but honestly fine, one of those scenarios where he's more upset with himself than anything, which was good considering it also decided the match. I felt bad for the player but also slightly grateful because with all the interruptions it would've been a 12 minute extension had it gone through. The rest of the round went by okay with a bunch more infractions. We had one guy with 2 looking at extra cards penalties, so me and Jovy got to discuss what happens on your third violation of the same category (GL upgrade) which was.. kind of frightening, since I've only gotten that close to upgrading once before.

In round 4 I decided not to do a deck check since the previous rounds had been so harried and we both needed a moment to breathe. This round was quieter, except for one thing, the call regarding Search for Azcanta, Jovy went over to a table and I went along as well because we finally had a moment where something wasn't burning to the ground and I did legitimately want to shadow him on some calls. A player was pointing to his opponent's Search for Azcanta, which was clearly visible through the back of his sleeves. This was.. unfortunate. I turned to Jovy and asked him what the ruling was, partially to give him a bit of a mini test, but also to give myself a minute to double check. I don't like giving game losses and want to be totally sure I'm not wrong when issuing one. Also it's handy to have the IPG open in case the player disagrees. Jovy issued the correct ruling and I backed him up on it. The player was super upset. I asked if he would like checklist cards and he said he would, I also asked if he would like to discuss or clarify policy, to which he responded “Well it's like it would change anything” and I didn't really have anything to say to that. I was half hoping to calm him down through the course of a discussion about policy, but he seemed pretty resistant, and I felt like trying to approach a conversation in a different way would only be kind of insincere. He kind of got up in a huff and stalked off as I went to get checklists.
About 5 or 10 minutes later Jovy noted to me that the guy still seemed super salty and implied perhaps that action needed to be taken, I asked if the player was actually doing anything, to which Jovy kind of shrugged. I looked over, the player was upset, but wasn't really causing any problems, and I felt like talking to him again was going to only exacerbate the situation, I figured he'd calm down eventually, which he did.

The fifth round was when the food the store ordered came, I sent Jovy on break and watched over the tournament. Things were quieter this round, though I did get to go through a downgraded deck problem involving sideboard cards in the opening hand, which I am pleased to say I executed properly! In this round I also received the excellently morally ambiguous question of “Can I sell positions on my team if I win the RPTQ invite?” To which my immediate response was “I can't think of anything in policy that explicitly prevents that, but it feels incredibly incorrect!” I thought about it for another beat and then said, “Let's ask Nixon!” A fellow L2 who was playing at the time, since I legitimately didn't know the answer. He seemed to have the same reaction as I did, “You can choose your teammates however you like but selling the positions is a little disingenuous...”

Round 6 occurred and I went to post pairings at which point a bunch of players started making a bunch of noise, most of which consisted of “but what about standings”
Have I mentioned I haven't done one of these in a while? What a silly oversight! I grabbed the pairings and crushed it for dramatic effect before posting standings. Afterwards I got to sit down for lunch and watch a control mirror which was cool. The amount of calls seemed to sharply decrease during the last two rounds and I regretted not getting another deck check in. I also worked out prize support during this round. There was a weird number of packs in the prize pool, so for a while I had second place at a box and 1 pack. Which while comical, was also ridiculous, Jovy suggested putting the errant pack in 9th place, which was actually a good idea, since 9th usually feels the most shafted. Near the end I explained to Jovy about 18 times on how to distribute prizes to places 9-16 not because he didn't get it but because there had been so many little hiccups I was starting to feel very anxious.

And then we went to top 8.
So this was one of those seasoned grinder top 8's.
In that, I posted standings, and then I turned around and my top 8 players were already seated across from their opponents and were playing. I shrugged and put down the 'non-winner packs'
I told Jovy to pull out top 8 decklists, since the TO typically to posts them online. After he pulled them out, I paused for half a beat, and asked him to quickly check them over to make sure nothing weird was going on, mostly because in the previous event, the TO contacted me post tournament to let me know that a player had listed “Ulamog” on a modern decklist, and that he'd needed to contact the player to verify which Ulamog was actually being played. This makes both me and TO look kinda incompetent.
And this is where sadness happened, Jovy found a deck with a 14 card sideboard, which is legal
but strange. I walked over to the player, who was just going into game 3. I pulled him aside and asked to look over his sideboard, and lo and behold he had a wayward, unregistered Chandra. I really didn't want to issue a game loss, but, well there was kind of no options here. For saying I issued him a game loss that knocked him out of top 8 he took it pretty well, he obviously felt bad, but said “well at least I will never do that again.”
Then I went to tell his opponent who he would be playing next round and somehow told him something not right. Being a seasoned grinder, he said, “No I don't think that's right” I went back, and Jovy had the WER bracket open and was like “Here is the bracket, how are you having problems?”
I mean that is not what he said but that is how I felt, I sighed, ate my mistake and let the players know the correct bracket. At that point, I felt pretty crummy, and kind of embarrassed. There had been a lot of little issues and mistakes on my part, and not only was I trying to mentor an L1 but one of the very competent local L2s was also there. I told Jovy to watch over the top 8 for a moment while I went to launch a side draft. I also spent some time cleaning up the area and touching base with the TO to see if anything else needed taking care of. After doing a few minor menial tasks I felt a little better and did a post tournament review with Jovy.

Overall it felt quite hectic, probably largely due to the fact that my recent GPs were comparatively chill. Overall I was grateful for Jovy, whom I could just leave in charge of something and be confident that it would be taken care of.