Dominaria prerelease report - April 22 2018
Stronghold Games | sealed & 2HG sealed | Time: 11:30-9:00
Players: 62
HJ: Tobias Vyseri | FJ: Cory McCrae

My First Prerelease: A Tobi Story
Believe it or not, I've never actually run a prerelease before. I've played in a prerelease and taken calls, but I've never actually been in charge of taking care of the entirety of a prerelease. And it was so different from a PPTQ or Grand Prix I felt like I learned a lot! I even had a player mention that I was being a bit 'strict', which while bad (because a player was sad) is also kind of funny, because I feel like in the PPTQ circles I'm known as the chill judge.

Tobi in the Mysterious Case of the Missing Kits
So it's no mistake that Dominaria is the most popular set we've had in ages, people are genuinely excited about this set in a way that they haven't really been since Return to Ravnica, and that is really cool! Unfortunately, this burst of renewed interest is taking many stores by storm. From maxed out box preorders, capped prereleases to massive shortages of product. So it was no surprise that when I arrived in the morning, I was told that we would be capping registration on the event due to a lack of product.
I communicated with the store, and asked them how product was being handled, they let me know that they would be doing distribution. For some reason, in the shuffle of it all, I assumed that they would be handing out product after I had seated the players. What great news! Now I've done a few events at Stronghold, and the last time I ran a PPTQ at this store, there were some round one issues because I failed to make an announcement before printing pairings, to ensure all the players had turned in their registration slips, which left me with 8 players that weren't in my event. I solved the problem by pairing them against each other, but there were a few complaints because friends now had a higher probability of playing against each other. (In the end it worked out, no one was playing people they came with) But it still slowed down my event and looked kind of unprofessional. To avoid this happening again, I decided to do an announcement to get all the players to bring me their registration slips.
Which resulted in a lot of slips coming to me, which was good, but it also resulted in the TO coming up to me, which was bad.
“The procedure was supposed to be that they have their slip and they take it up to the front to exchange it for product, then while they're seated and building, we'll give you all the slips and you can enter everyone in the event.”
Oops. The TO had never intended to have assigned seating, he wanted the players to grab their stuff and fly off somewhere and build. At PPTQs we have assigned seating to ensure that you don't sit with your friends and collude during build, however in a prerelease environment, colluding with your friends is kind of the appeal of the event. Also with larger events like this, the luxury of not having to enter all the players in WER before build allows the TO to keep selling right up to start time.
In short, the TO's proposed method of running the event was way better than what I ended up doing. Because now I was stuck entering like 60 players into WER at the scheduled start time. The TO suggested having any remaining players complete the product-slip exchange properly, but I let him know that now that I'd already taken a bulk of slips that would be a mess and could result in players getting two kits by accident.
About 10 minutes after start time everyone was seated and we began handing out kits. As we did this, I had a few players look at me with a puzzled visage, and mention that they already had kits. I banked the information, thanked them for their honesty and finished handing out kits, resolving to investigate that further when I actually had time. My current priority was getting the players started. Which I did. Then I touched base with the TO again, who continued to look stressed. He mentioned that some players had also told him that there was a potential for double kits. I let him know that I had given out zero kits before seating, and asked if he had given out any kits. He shook his head, then we both looked at the other employee who had wandered into the conversation. After a brief pause he said, “Oh yeah, I gave out like 4 kits,” He couldn't really remember who he had given them to, but I distinctly recalled at least 3 players telling me they already had product. Which left one kit unaccounted for, I reasoned that it was entirely possible that while we were telling players to 'pass kits down' he had continued passing. Or one person had gotten a double kit, which in the grand scheme of the disaster was not a huge issue.

I'm Here to Train Judges and Crack Packs, and I'm all Out of Packs
I guess at this point I should mention why I was HJing a prerelease for once ever. Recently I'd been contacted by another judge in my area, and asked if I had the bandwidth to mentor an uncertified judge in a very remote location. The other judges let me know that the interview had been largely conducted already, but noone had actually met with him physically yet. I offered to see what I could do about completing his certification training. In an effort to raise the bar on L1s and give them an identity as a prerelease and FNM judge I figured it would be a good idea to ensure that any L1s I decided to certify would not only be able to handle the odd rules call, but also be able to functionally run an event if their TO suddenly dropped dead. I kindly asked Stronghold if he'd be willing to take me and my mentee on for the same event, and they agreed :)
I went through a few WER things with my FJ since he didn't really have any experience with the software, and got him to do a few announcements. He had read a lot online to prepare for the event, but unfortunately he had fallen into the IPG at some point. I went over a few simple fixes for common mistakes at Regular REL to prepare him for the field. As usual, during the day he let me know that one of those exact situations had come up and he had been prepared because of the pre-event crash course :)

Pairing Panic
In round 2 a player came up to me and told me that his record was incorrect. I felt like this was a good opportunity to reinforce some of my own knowledge and to teach my L1 something. I first checked and verified that yes, his slip had been filled out correctly but entered incorrectly. In the past I recalled having repaired a round for this kind of error. But that is disruptive and stupid, so instead I did the less disruptive option, I found his last round opponent, and switched their spots. So that they were both playing opponents with similar records. This didn't matter too much in this particular event since payout was based on record. But I felt that it was a good thing to show my mentee. I also fixed the previous round's record. After all the players were seated and happily playing, I brought my L1 over to show him how to re-pair people in WER. However instead of hitting the “unmatch” button I hit the “re-do pairings button” which caused WER to wipe all the pairings for the entire round. I sighed and grabbed my posted pairings, and decided that instead I was now going to teach Cory how to rebuild a round instead.
I got this hashed out before the round and the players were none the wiser ;)

And Prizes for All
We also had to deal with prizes, because of the delays our event looked like it might run into the next event, 2HG which was scheduled to start at 5 (the 4-round sealed started at 12). I wanted to do prizes similar to how they're done at a GP where both players bring up the match slip and get their prizes, to offset 100 people all coming up at once while we were trying to launch the next event. BUT this time I confirmed with the TO in detail to ensure there wasn't another system that was going to be implemented. Luckily, this was the system they wanted to use as well so we were on all on the same page this time. One of the unusual things I noticed was that my L1 didn't realize that 3 points represented a match win. So I'm glad we got to do this, because I never would've mentioned something like that.

A Giant of Many Heads
I asked my judgeling how he was feeling, and if he felt confident enough to be in charge of the 2 HG event. He agreed, so I was pretty pleased! For this event we let the store handle product distribution, and seating for build, which was a little unsettling, since the store basically said “go sit wherever and build” after giving each team their product. I had to remind myself again, that this was prerelease and strict timed build was not a priority. For the most part I let Cory take care of this one, and he did very well. There were very few calls, but like most L1s his rules knowledge was fine, it was more the TO end of things he needed experience on anyways, which he ended up getting a lot of. The last half of the day was a nice unwinding period.
The day ended pleasantly and I enjoyed both my first formal L1 mentoring session as well as my first HJ-ing of a prerelease.