Great White Comics & Toys | Standard | Time: 10:30am – 4:30pm HJ: Tobias Vyseri
FJ: Jason Lawyer, Dakota
Players: 9 | Winner: Maxime Odegaard

The PPTQ That Almost Wasn't
So this PPTQ was the strangest event I've probably ever worked, the store was in upper BC, so it was a bit of a jaunt for me. My goals were to run the event and train an L1 on their path to L2 as well as test an L1 candidate. The event ended up being really small for a bunch of reasons, so I decided to focus heavily on the mentoring and training aspect of my job, I went over a lot of TO related stuff with the L1 candidate, and went over a lot of IPG with the L2 candidate, I communed with him on the Friday before the event and was a little disappointed that it seemed like he hadn't read the IPG at all, so I went over a few interactions with him and advised him to look it over before the event on Saturday. When I came back in I was pleasantly surprised to find that he had in fact looked over the IPG and was much more prepared for my questions.

Izoni, Thousand-Insected
A spectator pulled me away from the table, and pointed out that the Izoni, Thousand-Eyed that was played the turn prior had generated an extra insect token due to AP accidentally counting a card in exile. I went over to investigate, I pointed to the offending Izoni, Thousand-Eyed and started by saying “So this Izoni you cast last turn, can you kind of tell me about what you did when this trigger resolved,” At which point both players were like “Oh crap there are two Izoni's in play right now!”
I looked over the 40 other permanents that were in play in this GB mirror, and sure enough, on the other side of AP's board there was a second Izoni, I sighed, and put that to side for the time being and continued investigating the insect thing, eventually the players agreed that a card in exile had been counted, after which I issued the appropriate infractions and also put the additional offending Izoni in the GY as an SBA, since rewinding through the dozens of actions since the previous Izoni was played was going to result in a mess anyways.

Less than a minute later the players called me over again, to let me know that what they had previously thought was the exile zone, was actually just a second graveyard pile (why did this player have two graveyard piles? I don't know. I really don't know), So the insect count had actually been correct the first time, I groaned, not much had happened since the last ruling, and nobody had really been contemplating attacking into this mess of a board stall, so I just ticked the die up one, and told the players that if I had to come over a third time for any reason I was exiling all the insects in play because I was very much done with mistakes in this game, to which the NAP responded by saying “Wait, doesn't that incentivize me to call you over,” In response to which I bonked the player on the head and told him to stop slowing the event down.

2MC + DLP = GL + W
In R2 during a deck check, I ran into a failure to de-sideboard, as well as marked cards for a couple reasons, a few sleeves were significantly more worn than others, and some cards were double sleeved but others not, the cards that were double sleeved were all high value cards (or alpha basics) and didn't really have a pattern, and the worn sleeves were much in the same boat. I called the player over, informed them of the GL and warnings and instructed them to either grab some more inner sleeves or desleeve everything, he elected to grab new inner sleeves. He seemed pretty dejected by the whole thing and was pretty unfamiliar with the entire idea of Comp REL in general (which I kind of got from most of the players.) So, due to the excess staff I had for the event, I sat and helped him desleeve as well as tried to make him feel a little better about the entire crummy situation. He seemed a little happier after chatting with me for a bit, and I think, thankfully, his entire event was not ruined by getting slammed with a pile of infractions early on.

Judge Issued Deviations
Before the event the L1 had mentioned that the store didn't really have extra checklist cards lying around, and he asked about issuing proxies. I let him know that proxies were generally not a great thing to be issuing for random reasons, and told him the story about the incorrect Nexus of Fate proxies at GP Orlando (with CMC 4UU), and how regarding checklists, we could just tell the players to resleeve in better sleeves. Somewhat as a slap in the face, the fourth round of deck checks we did, had both players playing with some amount of DFCs in pretty ambiguous sleeves, it was visible, but very, very difficult to tell, I was pretty on the fence about the GL but definitely felt I wanted them to either change sleeves or get checklists, seeing as checklists were not available, and with only one round of the swiss remaining I felt it would be a little uneconomical to have the players go and re-sleeve since it was pretty likely neither of them were making top 4 anyways. Instead I grabbed some basics and begrudgingly issued some proxies, much to my own chagrin.

This Section Has More to Do With Yugioh than Magic
While my PPTQ was going on, there was also a Yugioh event running, which was largley being handled by my L1 candidate. However near round 4 of the PPTQ my L1 had run off to figure out how prize support was being handled and my L1 candidate was pretty intently taking his exam. So you can imagine how surprised I was when some players not in my event came up to me to report! I didn't want to completely disrupt the L0's exam for some silly yugioh players, so I asked him roughly how to report matches in Konami's tournament software, apparently in Yugioh 2-0 or 2-1 isn't recorded, only who lost or won (or drew). The layout of the program is somehow worse than WER and their rounds are 40 minutes instead of 50, there wasn't a round timer function that I could find, so I just set up a 40 minute timer in WER and called it “Yugioh Timer”. It was overall, a very exciting experience, I do regret to inform you all, however, that I failed to take any Yugioh judge calls.

...In Conclusion
Overall, I would've liked a larger event to train the L1 on, but I still believe the high amount of autonomy I gave him helped him really see where his deficiencies were and what he would need to do to improve them, I think both him and the L0 got a lot out of the experience, in spite of attendance. The players themselves were pretty inexperienced with the format of a Comp REL event, and after having worked so many Grand Prixs it was kind of jarring to interact with players at that level, and I had to remember to scale back my level of formality to match the tone of the event. Overall it was a pretty good time and I feel like there were some pretty positive outcomes for everyone.