Milwaukee, Wisconsin | Standard
Time: Friday November 16th - Sunday 18th 2018
Players: 1300 Winner: Adrian Sullivan

Friday – Last Chance Trials


Proud Mentor
I had the pleasure of being on LCTs again however, Milwaukee was a rather slow event, and thus the LCTs were a little more anemic than usual. I decided recently that something I don't do enough of is shadow other judges, or participate in a lot of mentorship, so I decided that I'd use this time to practice those skills, since myself and the event clearly had the resources to do so.

In particular there was an L1 on LCTs that I recalled working with at Montreal, he seemed quite competent, and well on his way to L2, I figured it would be a good opportunity for me to practice my mentorship, and hopefully I could provide a good learning opportunity for him. Also this L1 is just generally enjoyable to be around, so shadowing him basically had no downsides. During that period I got teach him about the Undderrealm Lich fix I had learned about at GP Montreal, as well as go over MTR section 4.2 that I had learned about at GP Atlanta [A player who does not scry/surveil (or look at the top card of the library after taking a mulligan) when instructed to is assumed to have not looked and chosen to leave the cards in the same order.]

It was kind of exciting to share some of the things I've learned with a less experienced judge!

What Does Policy Think of Unstable
While I was mentoring Felix he noticed a player playing with transparent sleeves, and asked me if policy allowed them. I let him know that it was generally fine as long as all the card backs were the same. He still seemed a little worried, so I let him know that if he wanted we could just check out the players deck mid-match. He nodded, and walked over to the match, I decided to largely let him take care of this call, after examining the deck, Felix, with a fair amount of consistency, was able to find the player's full art unstable basics just looking at the sides of the library, largely due to the fact that the edges of them were more worn than the other cards in the sleeves. (it was a sealed LCT, so the other cards were all NM) He felt like the player could gain advantage. He didn't seem to think it was cheating, and I encouraged him to ask the player some questions to try and figure out whether it felt malicious or not.

A few questions later, we both had a pretty strong feeling the player wasn't cheating and hadn't noticed. Felix asked me if we could instruct the player to re-sleeve right now, I agreed and said it was reasonable. I failed to inform the player they had 10 minutes, but they were back in 3 with new sleeves, so it wasn't an issue. We then helped the player re-sleeve, since we had the time, and I wanted to mitigate the time extension as much as possible.

I then went over the call with Felix, and asked him if he felt the player was cheating, he said that he did not, and that it seemed like an honest mistake. I went over the marked cards warning with him and we discussed the technicality of the IPG ruling. And let him know that I had decided to not go for the upgrade to GL, because it was pretty subtle and a judge swooping on your deck and giving you a GL for something you didn't notice and ordering you to buy new sleeves is pretty aggressive. He seemed to agree that the GL would've felt harsh, all things considered.

We also discussed the merits and issues associated with re-sleeving mid-game. I'm not a big fan of it, and if you aren't giving a GL I feel like the re-sleeve should be done after the game, however I didn't want to interrupt or take over his call, and I felt like this would be a good learning experience for him with almost no damage to the players so long as we were careful. In our post investigation discussion we also discussed scenarios where the player takes longer than 10 minutes to resleeve and how to address it.

Overall It wasn't an MC I would've given, since the lands were very subtly distinguishable (I personally couldn't pick them out at all). Felix gave me the background knowledge that his local meta had a lot of problems with cheaters and marked cards, and that he wanted to be especially diligent on that front.

Saturday – Main Event - Papers


Your First 8 Minutes Are Free, After That it's One GL/Minute
I walked over to a call, it was 8 minutes into the round, no Magic was currently being played, and it was pretty evident by the way one player was rustling through his bag that no Magic had been played. My immediate thought was that I was giving a GL for tardiness. I asked the players what was going on, and the player that was rummaging through his bag said “I don't know, I think I'm missing a card,” At this point I very desperately wanted to ask what had been happening for the last 8 minutes and why I hadn't been called by either player sooner but instead decided to focus on addressing the problem at hand.
I asked him if it looked like he was going to be able to fix the problem in the next two or three minutes, he said he wasn't sure, got up, wandered over to a single vendor, asked for the card, and returned saying that he wasn't going to be able to fix the problem. I instructed him to replace the card with a basic land and to begin playing. He asked if he could instead put in a sideboard card, I thought for a moment, and didn't check policy before agreeing that yes, this was probably supported by policy and was probably in the IPG somewhere. Pro tip, it's not.
I figured this out when a nagging thought forced me to check the IPG about 10 minutes later. I also forgot to issue a warning for deck problem. Also, at the 10 minutes later mark, I also realized that I hadn't instructed him to go report to the deck check team to rectify his decklist. Overall, this call was a pretty big mess, and I'm not super sure why. I feel like the 8 minutes of his opponent vapidly allowing him to look for cards and not calling any judges was throwing me off of the whole thing. I swung back around and let the player know to change the decklist up front, however this was before I had figured out that my IPG application was incorrect. At this point he already had a pretty hefty time extension and I didn't want to interrupt his game a third time. So instead I spoke with the deck check team, and let them know the situation, and that if the player said something strange about putting in a sideboard card, that I had instructed him to do that and that I was wrong.

62 Card Special
I took a call where a player let me know that game one was over, but he had forgotten to register a card in his deck, I let him know that he had two options, he could register the card on his deck list and get a game loss, or he could instead play the rest of the event without the card and not get a game loss. He opted to play the event without the card, but I forgot to issue him a warning, this was a bit of a mistake. I spoke with several other judges about the call, a few newer ones, as a bit of a discussion topic, and we discussed what kind of advantage could be gained from something like this if it was intentional. I brought up the fact that giving the Deck Problem - Warning for this kind of thing was kind of abuseable, if you are uncertain about a card, you can play with it in the first few rounds and if you don't like it you can call this and not receive a penalty, really. Because Deck Problem – Warning is a pretty difficult infraction to get a second time. Unlike GRVs where everything is pretty public, if you forget to de-sideboard, the most common generator of this error, you can kind of just hide that pretty easily. And while we want to encourage players to call errors on themselves, giving out warnings for registration errors doesn't feel fantastic.

Seth “2-Lands” field
I was on break when one of my local L1s sent me a text asking if I was on GP Milwaukee and if I was on features, I replied by saying, “No I'm on papers team and break, but what's up?”
He responded by saying that Seth Manfield had played 2 lands in one turn on the stream, and that no one was doing anything and that the stream chat was exploding. I asked him, “how sure are you?” he responded by saying “110% sure”, I looked forlornly back at my tea and my snack and sighed. I first spoke with the judge on features, who informed me that the match in question was already over, and since we couldn't issue a post-match infraction, there was nothing we could do. I felt like this was incorrect, and that we should at least say something to stream chat. The feature judge uncertain how to proceed and redirected me to another judge. The judge I had been redirected to looked like he was in some kind of intense rules call, so I found another judge and let them know instead. They then told me that this was, in fact, important and should be escalated to the HJ. I was pretty nervous because I hadn't witnessed the problem first hand, but I trusted my local L1, and got the stream timestamps from him to bring to the HJ, [turn starts at 07:28:59, first land is at 7:29:26, second land is at 7:29:55] the HJ checked the video and let me know that indeed this had occurred, and was grateful that I had brought it to his attention. He also let me know that if anything like this happened in the future that it should be escalated to the HJ.
The features judge was correct in saying that we can't really issue post game infractions, however the HJ did speak with the player and conduct a small investigation to ensure that no cheating had occurred. Realistically, I found out later, the extra land was quite superfluous in the context of the match.

GP Arts & Crafts
Recently I have noticed a policy about pairings boards, the policy is that they are not high enough and that it is better when the letter ranges float precariously above them. Usually accomplishing this includes some kind of semi-challenging arts and crafts activity associated with looting stir sticks. You can view the results of this here
Front of Pairings Board | Back of Pairings Board
I'm not really sure how I feel about this, I think it looks a little unprofessional, and to be honest, while having more of the pairings at eye level is great, I think the players will be fine if they have to look down a little bit. In other news, over the last 3 GPs I've noticed a bunch of new tech get introduced, We now have Round time TVs, these were implemented at Atlanta where the walls were so bright the clock we usually project on them was basically invisible, so half way through the main event they brought these TVs in and set them up. I guess they're a permanent fixture of the circuit now? Also there's these awesome scorekeeper result slip playmats, these things are great, the boxes are cute and all, but they are getting broken, take up awkward space in the kit, and the scorekeeper often needs to print out a label for them, which is probably a bit of a pain.

When the Mentor Becomes the Mented
I spent a lot longer shadowing other judges, since we had the staff to support it. Which is kind of a weird experience for me, usually I'm aggressively running to calls, and just taking everything I can to gain experience. And if another judge took a call, I'd usually just walk away in search of the next thing to do. But I think there is a lot of merit in seeing how other judges handle calls, something interesting that I noticed is that most other judges spend on average, a little longer on each call than I do, I've always worried about my accuracy and while speed is important when taking a call, accuracy should be the more prominent goal.

I Opt to Deviate
I walked over to a table and the player gestured to the board, “Judge on my turn, I declared attacks with this Crackling Drake, then after no blockers were declared, I cast Opt looked at the top card of my library, and put it in my graveyard, then I drew Opt, cast it, and then as I was scrying, I realized I surveiled with my last Opt,”
After recently having discussions with some other judges about how I should stop acting like I'm HJ of a PPTQ and deviating, I decided that this seemed like a call where some nice, good old fashioned IPG needed to happen. I ruled GRV, and contemplated a backup, and by contemplated a backup, I mean I went and talked to an L3 about a backup. The L3 mentioned that a world where we just put the surveiled card on the bottom is not a terrible world, but the world where we GRV warning do nothing is a little more in line with policy. I ruled this and the players, as players usually do, looked very upset at the prospect of “do nothing”. And I got appealed, so I grabbed the HJ and went through it with him. He thought about it, and again brought up the idea of just putting the offending card on the bottom. I agreed that at this point it kinda felt more elegant than anything else that was happening at this table currently. He dithered for a bit and then went through it with the players, ensuring that they fully understood that a deviation was happening and that it was not standard procedure. Overall, the players seemed pretty satisfied with the outcome of it all.

Sunday – PTQ – Slips


PPTQ Panic
I'm more comfortable on slips, the PTQ was around 250 players and we had a pretty significant team of 8 people to handle it, so the event overall was pretty easy. Frighteningly easy. Most of the calls required the simple application of rules or policy, and were done in less than 30 seconds. The more exciting thing that happened that day was that I got a text from a local store asking if I could judge a PPTQ that day, I regretfully let them know that I could not, but perhaps I could work something out. I already knew all the local L2s were busy (save for the one I thought was running the event) and began trying to organize an L1 FJ with a remote L2 HJ. There are a few strong L1s I trust to run an event locally that need minimal support and supervision. Also once when a local weather anomaly prevented an L2 from getting to a PPTQ our RC allowed the L2 to HJ remotely. Unfortunately I wasn't able to get the go ahead from my RC in a reasonable time, and the event ended up not running.

...In Conclusion
I felt like Milwukee was a pretty easy event for me, the players were pretty kind, the event was well staffed, and I got to try out some of the things that I don't usually get to work on, like mentoring and shadowing, I even managed to write a judge review! I'm glad I practiced some of the skills I seldom exercise here, otherwise I feel like I might not have gotten very much out of the GP. Overall I had a good time interacting with players, and each team I was on was extremely jovial and enjoyable. I'm once again looking forward to Portland, Vancouver, and everything in the new year.