Oakland, California | Modern
Time: Friday January 4th – Sunday January 6th
Players: 1520 Winner: Eli Kassis

Friday – Last Chance Trials [Lead]


To Lead or Not To Lead
I've worked LCTs a few times now, but have never paid a ton of attention to the scheduling. Which is unfortunate, since now I needed to figure out exactly how these LCTs were going to be running. I recall at a recent GP the team lead assigned judges to specific trials. I thought this was a pretty cool idea and decided to try it. However on LCTs it's pretty hard to get breaks in as well as having one judge per event. We also had a “finals area” designated, this type of team really saves on judges and space, but for the FJs it feels like they never really finish any events, and it can get kind of hectic for the judges in that area around midday. I contemplated collapsing the team but realized that if I wanted one judge/event I just wouldn't have the staff to facilitate it, and I also wasn't sure if I really had the authority to collapse an entire team, so I decided against it.

Judge Shrinkage & Loss Report
The first thing that happened as team lead for me was that one of my two finals area judges called to let me know he was going to be late. Then before he arrived, the sides lead let me know that he wanted an extra person, and since my designated top 8 area didn't have any set tasks, other than running the area, I spoke to my remaining finals judge and asked him if he'd be okay running the area and taking floor judges as needed for support, he agreed, so I sent the other judge to sides. This generated a problem later because I had planned for that team to internally organize it's breaks between the two members, however in the tumult of everything, I forgot to try to organize my remaining member a break, which led to him having to ask me about it, and me assigning another team member to it which in the end, cost him his half round break. Which is pretty terrible. The entire team got to leave about a half hour early, but the fact that every other member of the team got a half and got to leave early, while this member didn't is pretty awful. I ended up apologizing to him later, but I think of that as a pretty catastrophic mistake, and especially one that could've been easily avoided if I'd just had some judges run two events at the same time.

The Event is All About the Follow-Through
I also made the decision in the morning to have both the Mega Trial, and the Early Bird Trial, two of the largest events, to be maintained by their HJ until their completion instead of passing them off to the designated finals area, I believe later this was a mistake because not only did it tie up two of my morning judges for an extra two hours in the morning, it also caused the judge in charge of my designated finals area to be pretty bored for most of the morning. Around round 2 of the early bird trial, I made the decision to change my earlier idea of not sending it to the finals area in order to unlock an extra judge due to some slight delays resulting from abnormally high player counts in the first three events.

The Best-Laid Plans of Magic Players Often go Awry
Another thing I did when designing the schedule was have all the judges do an event, and then take their full round break after the completion of the first two rounds. Then upon their return, do another event and take their half round break after that event. This generated some problems because due to the compact nature of the events, I had two judges who were scheduled to come directly off break and immediately launch an event, and twice, I noticed that my HJ for an event was not present at the correct time, and I was in a position where I needed to personally launch the event. Not because of a failing of the judge but because since there was basically no buffer time included in the schedule if their first event or lunch was delayed event a little it would throw off the entire thing. Again this is a problem I could've avoided entirely if I just had people launch an event, and then after the successful start, launch another event in the middle. Once the events are running they don't require too much monitoring, which is something I just didn't consider that much.

Sometimes It's Better Not to Plan for Failure
Previously when working on LCTs, it was fairly common that 1-3 LCTs just wouldn't launch, and therefore would free up those judges for support or other tasks. I thought this may happen and planned to use my free judges to fix the awkward breaks and event launches, unfortunately MF Oakland was fairly busy and we only had a single LCT collapse all day, while the remaining events were either large or medium sized. So I didn't get the additional resources I'd planned for. To compound this, due to various complications some of the events ran later than expected, which resulted in the aforementioned tight breaks running over the launch of events.

The Sealed of Variable Size
The Mega Sealed in the morning had been quite large, at around 120 players. So I decided to check in on the 1:30 event well in advance just in case. I had been given a player count of 5 at 1pm, this was pretty relieving, we probably wouldn't need to prep a bunch of product and wouldn't need to pull in any extra judges either, cool. At around 10 minutes to I got a player count of 55, which was a lot more, I began to panic a bit and started to pull people from the floor to prep product. Then I got an update that in fact, after factoring in online registration we had 100 players in the event, which meant I would need to dedicate some floor judges to the event. I also knew we needed decklists, I scrambled over to the other scorekeeper, and asked her to print me 100 decklists. She did, and I grabbed them and ran onto the floor, and began putting them on tables, to take a step out of the launching process. After about a row had been distributed, a player looked down, and asked, “Wait, is this event using UMA product?” I thought for a moment, checked the schedule and shook my head, and on the way back to the scorekeeper I frantically scooped up the decklists I'd just set out. I asked the scorekeeper for Guilds of Ravnica decklists instead. The scorekeeper began printing, at which point the other scorekeeper let me know that, due to a series of strange errors, the even was in fact, only 30 people. At which point I just kind of melted, sent all the people prepping product back to what they had previously been doing and handed 30 decklists to the HJ and said “you got this, right?”.

Conclusions Drawn & Lessons Learned
In the future, I think I'd organize the schedule to have more judges running two events, (except for the HJs of the Early Bird and Mega Trial) this would not only make breaks easier, but would keep my judges a little more steadily busy and wouldn't cause too many weird activity crunches. I think another thing I really missed was because I viewed my FJs and kind of locked to tasks I ended up taking on a lot of the tertiary responsibilities myself, like helping kickstart events or personally prepping product, this really took away from my ability to communicate with my FJs, Friday was busy but wasn't so busy I couldn't have checked in on my people more. I felt like I made a lot of mistakes on Friday, and while it felt pretty frustrating and crummy, I do think the hardest lessons are the ones best learned. If I'm given the opportunity again I will have a lot of new tools at my disposal and will hopefully be able to run LCTs a lot more smoothly and with a lot less issues.

Saturday – Scheduled Sides [Lead]


If At First You Don't Succeed, Try, Try Again
This was my first real time having to organize a team meeting, on LCTs I did one, but was quite nervous, as the experience level of my team was quite high, so it was more of a “This is the stuff we need to do, but you already know all this,” Whereas on Saturday, I had some more relatively inexperienced judges working under me, which made me feel a little more at ease in some ways, but quite nervous in other ways. The schedule was also quite tight, all of my judges were running two events with the exception of a single late shift judge. My first 6 or 7 events were 50+ players, and we really only had the resources to dedicate one judge to each area, which meant that judge to player ratio was high. I had two GP first-timers on my team, I made sure to spend a little extra time preparing them for their designations, and they both seemed pretty satisfied with how the day went. The schedule for this day was a little more well prepared, and had less logistical problems than Friday, therefore things ran smoother just in general. I knew I had a deficiency in people, so I made sure to ask one of the judges on main to see if they had additional people to spare for side events, and managed to scrounge up a few extra judges for additional floor coverage.

What Is a Lead?
I found that leading felt very much like encountering an infinite stream of tiny problems, very much akin to how FJing is just an infinite stream of judge calls punctuated by random tasks every now and again. MF Oakland was busy, so there was constantly something strange going on that needed another pair of hands. The first thing that happened was one of my FJs noticed, that, while waiting for his event to start, there were no basic lands in any of the three land stations I assigned a few judges to sort lands before their events. I had to revisit this a few times throughout the day as our sealed events were just so large that land loss was an eminent concern. Another problem was that the vendors were in the center of the room, and the booths were divided into four quadrants with a tall black pipe and drape, however the pipe and drape was so high it completely obfuscated the gathering point if it was on the other side of the room. Therefore frequently players would have difficulty locating it. The rest of the day was me just running around moderating whether there were enough judges in each area. I also spent a fair amount of time helping kickstart, as with the large player counts and chaos of the room seemed to be very draining on them. I also ensured that each FJ had checked in at the appropriate time before their event began.

Tournament Error: Insufficient Hall Space
One of the FJs mentioned that while he was working on registration the previous day, fanatic packages had sold out before noon. This lead me to believe it was going to be a busy day, which it was. So busy in fact, that we completely ran out of space in the hall, players who wanted to play casual games of magic were literally sitting on the floor. The lack of space resulted in two split events, meaning a few rows of their event were in one area of the room, and the other rows of their event were in a completely different area of the room. This seemed like a logistical challenge for the HJs who now had to deal with handing out match slips with the wrong numbers on them.

Administration Error: Insufficient Judges
Near the end of the day there was a pretty big miscommunication with a team member, his event had run long and he was scheduled to go on break after his event. He had a fairly tight margin between the end of that event and the beginning of his next event. I asked him when he checked in with me to go on break, what his next designation was, and he said “Well, to go on break!” I nodded, thinking, mistakenly that his final task of the day was to take a break, so I waved him off. This resulted in him not being available for the start of his event, and a PTQ judge being pulled to take care of it. I was on break at the time of the launch of the event, so no one really knew what was going on either. This was a pretty embarrassing blunder, as it could've easily been fixed by me simply checking the schedule.

Conclusions Drawn & Lessons Learned
Overall the day had a lot of challenges, but felt fairly okay, there was only one huge problem (in that HJ being on break when he was supposed to be launching an event), and it didn't impact players heavily. I still feel like there were some pretty big issues, I spent a lot of the day very busy and doing a lot of the extra grunt work, I heard later that I was pretty hard to locate because of it. I'm still not sure what the correct balance between maintaining stationary, and roaming is. If you stay stationary, people can find you easily, but you have no idea what's going on in the field and if any problems need addressing, but if you roam, no one can find you if they need you. It's something I'm still trying to figure out, and on my next few events as non-lead I'll try to observe how my leads function and see if I can't learn a thing or two.

Sunday – PTQ Deck Checks [Lead]


Reluctant Leader
I was asked which team I wanted to be on for the PTQ and gave the answer “not checks”. Unfortunately, the other team lead was an L3 and was needed on the floor. So I ended up with checks and product. The event was fairly small, and I'm used to being a little understaffed on smaller events, and thus I felt like a concrete product distribution plan was not entirely necessary. A few other members of my team seemed to dislike this more lax approach, and had a few suggestions, I ended up going with the plan of assigning a judge per row to collect decklists and having those judges then report to one of the members of my team for promos to distribute to the players. I feel like the HJ was pretty uneasy with my more lax approach to leading and organization, and a few times I felt like he took over a bit, which I understand, I think the in the future a more tentative plan would be beneficial, and, at the very least, delivering an improvised plan with a little more confidence may have been a way to fix the unease generated in the HJ. However because of the size of the event, I also had the feeling that at some point adding more judges to a task actually slows it down and adds in the possibility of additional errors.

...In Conclusion
Team Leading at Oakland was pretty difficult, in particular on Sunday, the event was busy and I think I know my pre-event planning skills are quite weak, and I tend to lean heavily on improvisation, unfortunately without a strong command of both these skillsets things can very easily fall apart. I feel like in more than a few places they did fall apart a little, and the job really highlighted the areas I need to work on. And I think one of the major takeaways is that I need to stop doing so much stuff, I think a large part of team leading is socializing with the members of your team and constantly checking in on them and being available if they need anything, which I get the impression is not how the members of my team felt. I think because of how busy it was I often got wrapped up in the never ending torrent of tasks and touching base with my team members kind of fell a bit by the wayside. I'm still not sure if I could've done that aspect of things much differently considering how busy the day felt, but it will be something I'll have to think about more in the future. I'm glad though, that I had the experience I did at Oakland, and the experience I gained as well as the feedback I've received, I feel like I'll be able to do a better job in the future.