Treasure Chest | Standard | Time: 12pm – 5:30pm
HJ: Tobias Vyseri
Players: 9 | Winner: Liam Malcolm

Diminishing Events
Another small event! I suppose with the PPTQ system dieing the player attendance has also started to diminish. For a while before the event officially started, we only had 8 people, I was discussing the structure to the players. 9 players was 5 rounds cut to top 4 and 8 players is a rather miserable 3 rounds of single elimination. The general consensus of the room was that while 5 rounds was far too many, 3 rounds of single elimination was horrible. In my more fresh days as an L1 I recall running a GPT with 3 rounds of single elimination, and the players on average were pretty dissatisfied with the entire event. When you pay $20 or $30 you don't want there to be a possibility you only get 2 games of magic out of it.

In the past, my approach would've been to do what I felt was best for the event and for the players and deal with repercussions later, however, after having been on the GP circuit I have gained some new resources I can access, in the form of other judges that I both trust to answer correctly and quickly. And after utilizing these resources, the answer I got was a pretty resounding “No, don't do that,” but without any sort of indication as to what the backlash for running an 8 person event as a 3 round swiss cut to top 4 would be. (if anyone knows that would be greatly appreciated) Also as a side note apparently contacting the store's WPN representative about a change to the event structure was also an option. Luckily, a ninth person walked in and I didn't have to worry about violating the MTR at all!

How to Half-Check a Deck
Deck checks at a single judge event are always a little weird, sure you can grab both decks and only check one, but in this scenario the players might catch on that's what's happening, and if they realize you are trying to trick them in some way, they will feel a little upset, and it doesn't help player-judge relations. Also if I end up deck checking the same guy twice just because I didn't check his deck earlier when I took it, it feels kinda lame, especially in such a small event.

So I decided to try something different this time, instead of fully checking one deck and not looking over the other one at all, I sorted both decks and checked everything except the mana base, if there were lands that did things I'd give them a glance over, but for the most part cheating intentionally with the manabase seems fairly irrelevant, and while there is advantage to be gained, I feel it is aggressively minimal, utilizing this method, I managed to get both decks mostly checked in about 8 minutes. Which is high but I feel a fair tradeoff, because I had to do less checks throughout the course of the event.

My Deck is In My Other Pants
At the beginning of the event, after all the players were seated, one of the players went in his bag to grab his deck and realized that his friend had it, and that his friend was at the RPTQ which was in another country. Ergo he had a pretty big deck or decklist problem he did, however, in his bag, have a different random standard deck he'd been using to help his friends test the day prior, and asked if he could use that instead. So this is a decklist problem, and technically a GL. I thought about it, and made it very clear to the player that I was entitled to give him a GL, but was electing not to, I felt like it was the beginning of the event, and pretty strongly believed his story, not only was he already being penalized by having to play a deck that he had very little experience on, but the deck in question was T2 at best in the current meta, which is also a bit of a punishment. I looked through it, and had a decent idea of what he was playing, to ensure that when he submitted his list at the end of the round it wasn't dramatically different than what he played in the first round. I was a little worried about the opponent's perception of things and checked in to see how he felt about the entire situation afterwards, the opponent seemed pretty understanding, and kind of thought the entire situation was a little amusing at worst.

...In Conclusion
The event was small and magic players in Vancouver are hyper experienced so the event required very little monitoring. I kind of wish I'd had more people, but to be honest, spending time with players is one of my favorite parts about an event, and I got to do a whole lot of that here. Ultimately, the goal of Magic is to have fun, and in these smaller cozy events, I feel like the atmosphere is much more casual, and there are a lot more jokes and laughter, and on average, players just seem to have a better time. Perhaps there is an argument for smaller events being a better overall player experience?