February 18, 2018 | Sealed | Time: 11am – 8:30pm
HJ: Tobias Vyseri | FJ: Justin Schofield
Players: 23 | Winner: Dylan Gidlof


This was just a little sealed. It was a nice tournament to get back into the PPTQ groove of things. I communicated with the person taking registration funds this time to ensure we didn't have any registration disasters. I got to go over a few easy things with my FJ before we began. The player cap for the event was 32 people, and we had more than that preregistered, but I guess with the snowfall and the distance, not so many people decided they wanted to make the journey out, and our final total was 23 players.

My FJ's wife was playing the event, so beforehand we discussed that he would not be allowed to take any calls on her game, for professionalism's sake. I got product marked up and didn't actually miss anything in the opening procedure this time, there were a few players who needed help organizing and registering their pools, I got my FJ to help them out. We also had a triad of... chatty players. I had to talk to them a couple times about being quiet..er. And not sharing strategic advice during build, nothing was explicitly advice but some of it was a little borderline. During build I had to inspect a bunch of foil lands to ensure they didn't count as marked. There was one that was a little iffy, so I consulted with my FJ and he seemed to think it was fine. I felt like I was able to pick lands out more than 50% of the time, but was uncertain if I was just getting lucky (a blind pick out of a limited deck will get you a land about 40% of the time). In addition I've never had problems with this players foil lands in the past (he frequents a lot of events locally) but will be bringing it up with my other local judges in the future to see if they have ever disallowed this players lands. Round 1 I had my FJ on the floor while I did clerical boringness in sorting decklists.

Overall the tournament was pretty quiet. There were a few minor infractions but nothing terribly major. In round 3 or 4 a player spoke to me away from the table and mentioned that their opponents lands were visibly marked, he said he didn't want to make a big deal of it, knowing the player was a local casual, and that's why he spoke to me away from the table.

I also didn't want to make a big deal of it, but felt like the integrity of my event did need to be protected, I thought about waiting until the end of the game to deal with it, but decided that now was probably the best option. I spoke with the player and he didn't seem too bothered, I felt kind of bad because I had inspected this players lands beforehand, but the problem was I was testing the deck by seeing if I could cut to them, which I couldn't but when on top of the library, their bend was very apparent. This was something I didn't consider when doing my check, so I didn't issue an infraction because it was kind of my fault the issue occurred at all. Instead I helped him change out the lands with store basics and gave them both a 5 minute time extension before allowing their game to continue.

I feel like by the book the infraction would've been a marked cards GL, but I specifically told him those cards were okay and they were both in the 0-3 bracket, I felt like the GL would be insanely harsh considering it was largely my own mistake. Reflecting on it now, I don't think it was really my call to make since policy is pretty clear, and I know I will definitely be more careful in my land inspections in the future.

The next interesting thing that happened was the, ahem, Carl's Jr. event.

Halfway through round 3 two of my players left to get Carl's Jr., the round itself finished early, so I jumped ahead and got people seated and playing for the next round, making sure to continue timing the previous round to ensure that players had the full time to return. I kind of got to watch the situation unfold, tables 2 and 3 were missing players, who were at Carl's Jr. texting their friends asking how long they had to get back. Their time went from 5 minutes, to 3 minutes to 1 minute to -4 minutes when they finally came through the door complaining about the service. Being in the top tables they were relatively experienced players and took the game losses pretty well all things considered. I was very nervous, but the players seemed okay with it in the end. And during top 8 they were already making jokes about how Carl's Jr. was the biggest misplay of the event. Notably I didn't forget to post standings before round 5 and I also didn't screw up the top 8 bracket. However, when I quickly went over draft, I neglected to mention that first place wouldn't be playing 8th place (that they would be playing according to the random seating), I ended up going over this before they split up for construction, at which point one player noted “I wouldn't have hate-drafted so hard if I had known he wasn't my opponent!” (luckily that player won so he won't be salting the earth any time soon).

I got the players to register entire pools this time, just in case. It feels weird to get them to only register relevant SB cards and decks, though I have heard of this variant.

Top 8 was a rowdy affair, as the two Carl's Jr. victims were in a car with a contender that made it to finals, and were cracking jokes the entire time. In semis I decided to do a deck check because someone once told me to do a deck check in top 8 and I figured it was a good way to keep people honest. Unfortunately I had to GL a player for forgetting to register an evolving wilds. GL's in top 8 are no fun :( In the other semifinals game one of the players (and a fellow judge actually) came up to me and said “I think I mushed my SB into my box with the rest of my sealed cards” I glared at him, and said “well, we have your decklist so let's just reconstruct your SB.” I did consider that he could've fabricated a SB as it was self registration, but it didn't seem likely, also all the cards in the SB were in a chunk near the front of the box. We were making good time on the event so I took the extra time to go through it with him so he wasn't randomly picking cards out of his box in between games. The finals match was pretty enjoyable, the players seemed to really be enjoying themselves, which is always a good sign. There were a few feel-bads but overall I felt like the day went well.