Sealed | Time: Sunday June 3rd 2018 11:30am-9pm
Head Judge: Tobias Vyseri Floor Judge: Justin Schofield
Players: 27
Winner: Adam Kiyonaga

Home Again
It was weird coming back and doing a small PPTQ after so many Grand Prixs. I once saw a poll online asking whether it was more difficult to work Day 1 of a Grand Prix or to judge a small 20 person pptq alone, and I have to admit, I kind of think the pptq is harder. Luckily, I wasn't alone, I had Justin Schofield to help out. But even so, the amount of little things you need to be cognizant of is pretty significant. I carefully went over everything in my mind before the day began to ensure I wouldn't forget anything. The first thing that I remembered to do was to portion out packs for distribution. Also to mark the packs, I decided that instead of the regular single or double black line I'd put smiley faces on the bundles because it was cuter.

WoTC Creates Very Reliable Software
The next thing that happened was that a player called and said he'd be late. This was fine, and because we had time we pre-registered a pool for him to avoid delaying the event. Unfortunately, or fortunately, we didn't end up using it because WER decided it didn't really want to print seatings properly and while we were troubleshooting the player ended up arriving. At about 8 or 9 minutes past official start time I decided to manually write out pairings and deal with the computer during registration & construction. I went through the registration and construction speech and got the players going. One thing I can say is that my ability to project my voice and deliver announcements has greatly improved due to my involvement in the GP circuit.

Put Me in Coach!
While players were shuffling around, one player mentioned to me that he wasn't in the event. He was an Adam. This was relevant because my event already had two other Adams. We asked all Adams in the room to raise their hands to ensure that the event was supposed to in fact, have three Adams, and that we hadn't accidentally added some random other Adam in this one's place. We hadn't so I sat this Adam down at the end and let him know that he would be in for round 1. Unfortunately, I spent so long troubleshooting the printer issues I didn't actually put him in for round 1. Reflecting on how this kind of issue had been handled at GPs, I decided to simply give him the bye, we had an odd number of players, so this was the most logical solution, rather than repairing the round or something silly.

Checking Decks & Taking Names
Near the end of registration I reminded players to write their names on the sheets and register basic lands, which got me some weird looks since we hadn't entered construction yet. I laughed it off and we moved on. It was kind of nice seeing some of the local players again, and chatting with them was a little distracting at times. So distracting that I forgot to hit a mid-round check during the first round and also completely forgot to organize decklists. Silly me. In round two we grabbed some decks and did a check, I got Justin to grab the deck so I could riffle through my unorganized pile of lists and have them ready for us. I spent a lot of round 2 organizing lists. In round three I grabbed decks but couldn't for the life of me recall where I had placed the pile of decklists, time was ticking and Justin was caught up in a large store-related trade in. I decided to excersize my bluffing abilities and give each deck a quick look through instead of doing an actual check, and just pretended like a check had happened. The players didn't seem to catch on. It felt a little kind of... like cheating. But delaying the entire event because I had misplaced decklists seemed like a bad idea, and there would always be more chances for deck checks in future rounds.

You Have How Many Forests?
There was a weird call about whether a player had played a very game relevant additional land, I asked both players a few questions but couldn't really get a concrete answer out of either of them. Lands are pretty innocuous and hard to track, so I figured we would assume innocence since there wasn't great evidence either way. I kept a close eye on the player for the rest of this and the next round to see if he did anything else weird but everything seemed pretty legal.

...In Conclusion
Overall the day was super quiet and pretty pleasant. I did kind of miss the local PPTQ. Hanging out with the local players is always fun, and they're a very experienced player base, so the events tend to run pretty smoothly and nothing weird really happens.