Grand Prix Toronto Report – Feb 10-11, 2018
ChannelFireball | Toronto | Modern
Players: 1,600 | Winner: Dan Ward

Friday February 9, 2018 | Team: -
I wasn't working Friday, I did go 2-1 in a side event and made a floor judge sweat by casting a Brainordain though.

Saturday January 10, 2018 | Team: Product
This day started out very poorly for me, my alarm didn't go off properly in the morning so I ended up arriving 1.5 hrs late, which meant my morning was predicated upon chaos and stress. Being on Main Event was kind of a big deal for me since it was my first Main Event shift in... I think in ever. It meant a lot to me to be put on main event and I really wanted to take the opportunity to prove that I was a Main Event caliber judge. In addition to this I was feeling immensely ill and had a horrible headache that I couldn't really do anything about. By the time I finally got in product had obviously already been taken care of. And my team was just being released to do floor coverage. My team lead was fine with me being late but I wasn't and I think that attitude kind of colored the entire day a darker shade for me. I took a lot of calls, and because I was eager to redeem myself of the morning's blunder, I tried to answer everything fast and without double checking with others, which resulted in an incredibly large number of appeals. I got a good deal of relatively simple questions wrong because in my frustration and haste didn't take the time necessary to do it right.
I won't go through every silly little incorrect ruling though, I'll just go over some of the other more interesting things that happened. In round 2 I got called over to a table by a player who wanted to double check another judges ruling, after looking over the situation it seemed like the other judge was wrong, however, I knew I wasn't functioning at 100% that the last thing I wanted to do was to overturn another judges ruling, especially if I was incorrect. I decided the best course of action was to grab the appeals judge, since what was essentially happening here was an appeal on another judge's ruling. He came over and it turns out I was correct and the other ruling was overturned. In the same breath I got called over for a ruling about semi-transparent sleeves, I picked up the deck and looked through it, thinking that perhaps the call was about Search for Azcanta, so I was super surprised to see that I was looking at Jund. I didn't see any DFCs, so then I looked at the top card of the library at the time of the call. The card in question had a strange white square visible through the sleeve. I pulled the card out, a foil Tarmogoyf, with a price sticker of $110 on the back. I mentally went through the IPG and was uncertain if this situation was eligible for the upgrade. Tarmogoyf is a pretty relevant card, but can you really consider a single card part of a pattern? I wanted to make sure before I ruined someone's day and gave them a Game Loss. Luckily the appeals judge was still kicking around from the previous ruling and I quickly confirmed with him before issuing the infraction. The player was upset, but didn't want to argue or anything, so that was okay. At the time this seemed like a pretty honest mistake, I could see myself going “I just bought a goyf and sleeved it up not realizing my sleeves were semi-transparent”. But while discussing this later with another judge, he brought up the fact that a price sticker on the back of a card is really weird. It's unusual that a vendor would have the price there and not on the front, suggesting a player cognizance of the sticker. In retrospect I probably should have asked more questions.

The rest of the day was pretty busy, there were a lot of calls and not a lot of judges. I was assigned to a specific area but saw that the adjacent area seemed lacking in staff, so I spent most of my time there instead.
Another development is that FJ's can no longer access Purple Fox without a password. I was a little upset about this, having used Purple Fox at GP Phoenix I really liked the software and how it allowed me to tacitly communicate with EOR about what matches I was watching. Now I needed to go and bother someone with login info and be assigned to match, which felt very reminiscent of the archaic way of handling EOR. In round 3 the scorekeeper assigned me a list of names that had DCI's that were not showing up properly in the system, and asked me to double check the numbers with players. I quickly skimmed the list and organized it in table number. I pretty aggressively got their correct DCIs, in one instance the players were in the middle of another call, with their judge confirming something with another staff member away from the table. This resulted in the kind of amusing, “So I know you're in the middle of another judge call, but could I just have a moment of your time to check your name and DCIs?” The scorekeeper seemed really impressed that I managed to get all the names, which was kind of weird, since it didn't seem like a thing that wouldn't happen. But being able to complete a task competently made me feel a little better after a crummy morning.
My main take-aways from the minor disaster that was Saturday, are that I need to be more conscientious when disregarding my personal health during travel, as it can negatively impact the people I am working for and with. And also to always approach each call calmly and to seek help if I'm uncertain. It's a lot less lame to simply grab a nearby judge to confirm something than it is to have to run up to the stage to grab a red shirt for an appeal. The other thing I've kind of been pondering is when it is appropriate to get an appeals judge. By the book any time a player is dissatisfied with a ruling I'm supposed to grab an appeals judge, but in some scenarios (like a few of my more rudimentary flubbed calls) it might be more appropriate to simply consult with another nearby judge. I know another judge was very close when I ruled a missed trigger wrong and looked like he wanted to simply fix my mistake rather than let me bother the appeals judge. And that perhaps only when a player has a problem with a correct ruling, or if there is a policy grey area is it appropriate to notify the appeals judge. The other side of this is that all the FJ's can potentially be wrong and denying a player an appeal because another FJ also believes a piece of incorrect information is the worst thing ever.

Sunday January 11, 2018 | Team: PTQ/ Top 8/ Breaks
Sunday was much better, I was on a pile of painkillers and had gotten a good nights rest!
I was on the PTQ in the morning and breaks/top 8 for the rest of the day. The PTQ was fun, there ended up being a staggering 400 players so it was a very exciting event to be on. Before we started I raced product preparation with my fellow judges. I am please to say I won.
In the first round I got to answer about 5 questions about Searing Blaze before I transferred over to my actual team.
Breaks, breaks are cool because I get to do a little bit of everything. The first bit of everything I got to do was deck checks. In the second round of checks we were given four numbers to grab, and so I went out and ambitiously grabbed one of them, and then had a judge call at 1, which was the other table we needed to grab, I gave the two decks to another member of my team and went over to the call, the guy needed to go to the bathroom, I let him go. I thought another member of my team was grabbing table 3 so when table 1 came back I didn't even think about swooping. Of course, the other members of my team thought that was why I was standing at the table, and thus didn't grab table 3 or 6. So we ended up doing one start of round check and three mid-rounds. Silly me.

I took a lot of calls and nailed all of them, I was careful checked with others when I needed to, and as a result I only got appealed once, on a tardiness Game Loss. The player was very unhappy about it, I issued the warning and he told me he was in the bathroom and that the pairings had just gone up online. I asked if he had told an official about the bathroom break, and he said he had not, I then let him know there was no waiving it in this case. He started to tell me about how there was only so much time in each round and just seemed generally dissatisfied. I was pretty sure this wasn't going to get overturned, so I didn't spend too much longer arguing with him, since he would just need to re-argue with the appeals judge anyways. Instead I firmly let him know that this was my ruling and would he like to appeal? Obviously he said yes and I grabbed the red shirt. As you can guess my ruling was upheld.

The next interesting thing that happened was top 8. I've never done a top 8 before so I wasn't really sure what to expect. Luckily the other members of my team were more qualified/experienced than I was so they took care of getting decklists out and organizing the players. I ended up watching elves lose to burn on a mull to four and five for games one and two. However! I got a judge call on a much more interesting top 8 game. I was sitting watching elves not draw land when I heard someone whisper “judge” I looked around, didn't see anything and was about to settle back in when I heard in again, I looked around and one of the spectators waved me over and said “hey, there was an error in the game that is streaming” and I thought 'oh no. I was specifically not watching that game so I didn't accidentally make an idiot of myself on stream'. I asked the player what was wrong and he said “they distributed Arcbound Ravager counters when ravager went to exile because of rest in peace.” I sighed. Now this was my problem. I quickly checked Ravager on my phone to ensure that this was the correct ruling (like I said I was super nervous about being a top 8 judge and the last thing I wanted to do was interrupt the stream for no reason) and stopped the players with a “Can I ask you a few questions-” They went through what happened with ravager which, by this point was a few turns ago, they confidently told me about how Ravager 'died' and distributed it's counters. At which point I said “Did it die, or did it go to exile?” which elicited this hilarious 'OH NO' face from both players who then began to exhale a menagerie of phrases,“I totally forgot about rest in peace” and “aw man, it is only when it dies”. I confirmed that it was a few turns ago now, and one of the players suggested that perhaps we just remove the two +1/+1 counters from Blinkmoth Nexus, at which point I said, “No, it's either a full backup or no backup”. There were two other judges watching me at this point, so I said “I think what we're going to do here is just issue a GPE-GRV and a GPE-FTMGS and leave it as is... unless anyone else thinks otherwise?” I did a sweep of the other judges and got nothing so they continued. Overall sunday was buckets better than Saturday, I felt much more on top of my duties and in control of what was going on. I'm still a little upset about my performance on Saturday, but hopefully I don't encounter that specific blend of unpleasant cocktail for some time.

In the end I still learned a lot and don't regret going at all! With every mistake I learn a little more and cement my knowledge. I'm excited to keep working GP's and am looking forward to Seattle already! This day started out very poorly for me, my alarm didn't go off properly in the morning so I ended up arriving 1.5 hrs late, which meant my morning was predicated upon chaos and stress. Being on Main Event was kind of a big deal for me since it was my first Main Event shift in... I think in ever. It meant a lot to me to be put on Main Event and I really wanted to take the opportunity to prove that I was a Main Event caliber judge. In addition to this I was feeling immensely ill and had a horrible headache that I couldn't really do anything about, since my morning ritual consisted of roll out of bed, check phone, panic, call uber, panic some more.
By the time I finally got in product had obviously already been taken care of, and my team was just being released to do floor coverage. My team lead was fine with me being late but I wasn't and I think that attitude kind of colored the entire day a darker shade for me. I took a lot of calls, and because I was eager to redeem myself of the morning's blunder, I tried to answer everything fast and without double checking with others, which resulted in an incredibly large number of appeals. I got a good deal of relatively simple questions wrong because in my frustration and haste didn't take the time necessary to do it right.
I won't go through every silly little incorrect ruling though, I'll just go over some of the other more interesting things that happened. In round 2 I got called over to a table by a player who wanted to double check another judges ruling, after looking over the situation it seemed like the other judge was wrong, however, I knew I wasn't functioning at 100% that the last thing I wanted to do was to overturn another judges ruling, especially if I was incorrect. I decided the best course of action was to grab the appeals judge, since what was essentially happening here was an appeal on another judge's ruling. He came over and it turns out I was correct and the other ruling was overturned. In the same breath I got called over for a ruling about semi-transparent sleeves, I picked up the deck and looked through it, thinking that perhaps the call was about Search for Azcanta, so I was super surprised to see that I was looking at Jund. I didn't see any DFCs, so then I looked at the top card of the library at the time of the call. The card in question had a strange white square visible through the sleeve. I pulled the card out, a foil Tarmogoyf, with a price sticker of $110 on the back. I mentally went through the IPG and was uncertain if this situation was eligible for the upgrade. Tarmogoyf is a pretty relevant card, but can you really consider a single card part of a pattern? I wanted to make sure before I ruined someone's day and gave them a Game Loss. Luckily the appeals judge was still kicking around from the previous ruling and I quickly confirmed with him before issuing the infraction. The player was upset, but didn't want to argue or anything, so that was okay.
At the time this seemed like a pretty honest mistake, I could see myself going “I just bought a goyf and sleeved it up not realizing my sleeves were semi-transparent”. But while discussing this later with another judge, he brought up the fact that a price sticker on the back of a card is really weird. It's unusual that a vendor would have the price there and not on the front, suggesting a player cognizance of the sticker. In retrospect I probably should have asked more questions.

In the end I still learned a lot and don't regret going at all! With every mistake I learn a little more and cement my knowledge. I'm excited to keep working GP's and am looking forward to Seattle already!