Face to Face | Toronto
Time: Friday June 29th – Sunday July 1st
Limited & Standard | Players: 360
Winner: Kale Thompson

Friday – Product Preparation


Makin' Bags & Takin' Names
I've never really been on set up or prep before, so this was a new experience, and I was happy to have it! The greater part of the morning was occupied with the intellectually taxing task of moving boxes from one end of the room to the other end of the room. Afterwards we needed to set up an area conducive to packing goodie bags for the players for both Nationals and the Modern Open on Sunday. Afterwards we needed to sit in that area and prepare goodie bags for a few hours. While it was monotonous the two other judges I worked with throughout the day were pretty fun to be around, so it went by pretty quickly. Also at some point Face to Face bought us pizza. That was cool. I liked that part.

Saturday – Team Lead – Pairings


Mourning Meeting
the day started out pretty mellow, with a large judge staff meeting. Personally I'm not a big fan of meetings, and prefer getting right into the tasks of the day, I felt like the larger team meeting went on for quite a while, so when we broke into smaller groups for smaller meetings, I forewent any weird ice breakers and ensured that my team knew the tasks that were expected of us. I checked to see if anyone had any immediate questions or concerns, but I think we all felt our assigned task was fairly simple.

Proud Mentor
The turnout to Nationals was smaller than expected, some of us hypothesized that since Toronto had already had 2 Grand Prixs that year, yet another large Magic event probably wasn't that appealing to the player base. A 360 player event with like 20 judges on it is not a difficult to manage event. Realistically we might've been able to function with half that many people. At events that are slower than expected as judges, we can utilize that time by mentoring and communicating with our fellow judges. On my team I had two pretty seasoned judges and one relatively new judge. I let the other members of the team know that there were some mentoring opportunities here.

Play to Their Strengths
Another member of my team seemed very independent. I was a little anxious about how to keep him engaged without upsetting or infringing on his sense of pride. I felt like by appealing to his confidence and giving him tasks that were fairly autonomous (such as the slip organization task when we had to cover for slips) would be a good way to satisfy this team member.

Paper Perfect
For those unaware, Nationals is a mixed format event, consisting of Standard and Draft portions. Now, usually at large competitive level drafts, players are given stamped product, to ensure that adding cards to the pool is very difficult to do without detection. However, because we didn't have stamped product there was concern that it would be fairly easy for players to cheat. Kentaro, our fantastic Day 1 Product lead, devised an excellent way to disincentivize cheating. He proposed the idea of having envelopes with the pod and seat number on them (mostly to help players find their pod and seat) placed on the tables. After the players were done drafting their cards, they'd place them in the envelope, seal it, and have the person across from them initial the seal. Then the players would be unable to add cards to their pool during the re-seating shuffle for registration and build. When they sat down, players would pass the pool to the player across from them, who would verify that the seal was unbroken, and subsequently register the pool. Except this didn't happen on Day 1, there was some kind of miscommunication, and instead of passing the pools to be registered, players ended up registering their own pools, which generated an enormous amount of complaints.
I brought the concerns to HJ, mentioning that at this point it was increadibly easy for players to simply register the pool they *wanted* to play and put the cards in during the re-seating for round 1.
This error was so unanimously reviled that when it was announced on Day 2 that the pool swap would be happening the room erupted in applause.

It's the Little Things...
Something I noticed was that the decklists had a watermark on them on day 1 and a different watermark on day 2, to ensure that players couldn't pre-prepare a false registration sheet. Also, in a similar vein we had different envelopes for both days.

Sunday – Team Lead – EOR & Product Distribution


Passably Passing Product
For Day 2, or as it is colloquially known, Sunday, I was in charge of End of Round and Product Distribution, both of which I was very anxious about. Planning is not a strong suit of mine, and I regretfully admit that in the pre-planning email Kentaro basically took hold of organization for product distribution and logistics. I have very little experience in coordinating product distribution, so it was very beneficial to see Kentaro's plan in action. For distribution on Day 2, I didn't really feel I needed a super-tight distribution plan since I had been told that my team would have an hour before the event to place the envelopes, lists, pod numbers and packs on the table before the players started drafting. With only 100 players, this was something one person could do alone, and probably still have time left over.
However when I got in I was told that things were changing and there would be a player meeting beforehand to identify players that had failed to drop. The purpose of which was to mitigate re-pairing pods. This meant we couldn't just leave envelopes and packs on the tables, since players would inevitably touch or ruin them in some way. Instead, I proposed that we still put out pod numbers, (we had pod numbers on a different kind of stand than regular table numbers, which meant we didn't need to renumber the room in between events) and underneath them we could place the envelopes and decklists. This way it would cut down on the stuff we were doing in between the player meeting and the draft. We would only have to place packs and place envelopes in the specified seat.

Pairing Misdemeanor
While I'm happy to say that product distribution went off basically without a hitch, pairings did not. After the player meeting , the HJ filibustered while judges ran down each aisle and took note of the absent players. They then reported this to the scorekeeper who dropped those players. Then we posted round 1 pairings. Unfortunately this is where there were problems. Some people had been dropped when they shouldn't have been, and a bunch of people that were missing were still on the list. The scorekeeper had to do a repair. This all took about 45 minutes. So we were a little late starting. We're not sure what happened to cause the issues but my best conjecture is either a software error, or players were simply not in their seats for the player meeting.

All Good Things Must Come to An End
I was also a little nervous about EOR without purple fox. Being a relatively new judge to the GP scene I've never actually seen End of Round done without the software.
I did however speak to Megan Linscott, the EOR person and day 1 and got a good idea of what we'd be doing. My team for this day were two GP all-stars, that would basically be able to do anything I put in front of them. Seth offered to take point on End of Round, and I wasn't at all opposed to that. He did an excellent job, and we managed to close our rounds quickly and cleanly.

...In Conclusion
It was a relatively chill event, and I had a lot of good opportunities to communicate with other judges, however I feel like I didn't utilize them great. A piece of feedback ringing in my mind was something the appeals judge mentioned about making your team feel like a team. He said that as team leader your job isn't to take calls or necessarily do the thing you're assigned to do, it's to ensure it gets done and make sure your team feels like a single unit and is happy. I'm not sure if I did a great job of that. I was immensely nervous, especially on Sunday when my team was people I felt were much more qualified for leadership than myself, and I feel this nervousness negatively impacted my performance. Overall I think there were a lot of new experiences, and a lot of things I can work on in the future.