Memphis, Tennessee | Standard
Time: Friday February 15th – Sunday February 17th
Players: 988 Winner: Jody Keith

Friday – Last Chance Trails


The Difference Between the “Finals” and the Final Round
I was lead in the “finals” area, which I've never been before, this was interesting. I've done a fair number of PPTQs so I'm used to the finals match being untimed. Similarly, I've always told players in the last round of their LCT that it's untimed as well, because we treat R4 of an LCT as a “finals” for the purposes of prize splitting already. However my lead talked to me and the last round of an LCT doesn't strictly follow the MTR definition of “finals”. I heard this was because the events are sanctioned as swiss events where we drop the losing players and cut at four rounds. I imagine they are run like this so we don't have to have exactly 32 players to launch an LCT. But this was very interesting for me to learn. We ended up not changing anything since a precedent for untimed round 4's had been set for the day. However I feel that in the future this is something I need to consult my team lead about instead of simply assuming the policy.

Shepherd of the Players
Another problem I quickly encountered was that I wasn't really sure how to handle round 4. Round 3 was easy, the pairings for R3 would be posted at the players normal pairings board and the table numbers would just be different, but for R3 players were often confused as to what pairings board they were supposed to go to, and in addition to this, rounds often flipped fairly quickly because of the low player numbers, so often players would be waiting for a long time if they finished early but their opponent wanted the full 50 minute round to eat lunch. I eventually started telling players to “stay in the area”, I had a dedicated pairings board, but it kept getting moved so as the day wore on I just told players their pairings manually. This was kind of fun because if someone got a bye in R4 I got to be all dramatic about it. The other problem is that even though I felt that R3 was fairly intuitive oftentimes players wouldn't be able to find the new table numbers and got lost. By tournament procedure I could've easily started and timed most of the players out, but when half your event is missing that's a little heartless, so instead I did a lot of player hunting, and communicated with the HJs of the trials to locate truant players.

Saturday – Mythic Championship Qualifier – Team Lead (Not Checks)


Perfect Leadership
(it's the McQualifier again! YES!) I was excited to TL under John Carter, and get another shot at Tling an MQ! And I have to say, Team Leading went very smoothly. I coordinated my entire team and got pairings and slips out in record time. My team worked together great and seemed really in sync.

…. This may be because I was the only person on my team, so you see, the McQ ended up being a mere 70 players. So everyone but me and the other lead were dismissed. It was sealed so the event was fairly quiet. My biggest task of the day was adjusting the table numbers, we started by having 3.5 matches to a table but we wanted to have 3 matches to a table to give the tables a little more room. I kind of did this weirdly aligning numbers to the middle and not the end and ended up killing table numbers at both ends of the event instead of just one due to poor planning.

The cramped space was a problem in R1 when a player complained that he didn't have enough play space. Normally this is something we kind of can't accommodate, but our event was pretty orphaned and I knew we wouldn't have another event placed in the space behind us, so I relocated the player to a spare seat at the tail end of the event.

Sunday – Side Events


Commander the Commanders
I haven't been on regular old side events in a while. I got to work the multiplayer commander event, which is always a little strange, but I'm pretty decent at running it since I learned how it worked last year at it's inception at GP Columbus. I launched my event and after about 10 minutes of waiting, I was sill missing two players, as well as having two players that didn't appear on the pairings and a player with a bye that wasn't assigned to a pod. I replaced the missing players with the people who had shown up but weren't on the pairings. And the bye I just added to the pod at the end, making a pod of four. The commander event isn't really set up into pods in WER, it's inputted as a regular event with regular matches with two players and as a judge you kind of have to walk through and declare what the pods are. My SK offered to make winner pods, he achieved this by declaring a winner for some matches and drawing all the other matches. This seemed like an efficient way to automate this, I'll have to remember that if I ever SK a commander event! The other thing was that the SK had no record of the missing players, he mentioned that he wished I had brought up the players before R2. I had been pretty focused on starting the event, and hadn't caught the players after they were done. So I was given R2 pairings without the extra players. I wasn't a big fan of this because I was fairly certain they would be in the event and it had been some kind of clerical error, but I wasn't going to press the scorekeeper about this too much, and figured I could simply work it out when it happened. After they showed up for the round I sent them both to the scorekeeper and had them entered into the event. I ended up taking a pod of four, and splitting it into two pods of three. I also had to move a player from the winner table to another pod because one of the unentered players was also the winner of his pod. Luckily none of the players were too dissatisfied with all the kerfuffle! Another problem was that because the pods were created by clustering players around table numbers the players would move the table number for the duration of their game, and sometimes not put it back in the right place afterwards. This resulted in some funny table numbering in R2, which soaked up a few extra chairs. Compounding this,I had two extra players that weren't accounted for on the kickstarter spreadsheet. So the Sealed event had players trying to sit down where my commander pods were. I had the sealed players in the occupied seats simply move to the end of their event to build instead, and since there wasn't another event tailing after sealed we didn't run into any more problems.

Proxies at Casual REL
I had a call me about his opponent using proxies in a commander pod. The player had taken his first turn, played Mana Vault, Candelabra of Tawnos, Island and was in the middle of casting Serum Visions, when an opponent called him on his Mana Vault and Candelabra of Tawnos proxies. The player claimed to have the real versions in his car, but said that his car was parked pretty far away and it would take more than 10 minutes to retrieve them. And mentioned that his motivation for using proxies was that so the real version of his expensive cards didn't get stolen. I decided to tell him to exchange the cards with basic lands, and to rewind to the first proxy played. He also fixed the other proxies in his deck. The player asked me if he could make mulligan decisions again, but seeing as the other three players had already taken their first turns, I decided against it.

Heed the Call
I had an interaction with another judge where they were dithering on a call, AP was casting Summoner's Pact, and wanted to be casting it in response to Mausoleum Wanderer's trigger, but NAP was arguing that Mausoleum Wanderer's trigger had already resolved (a Spell Queller had been cast on the previous spell) I was watching the call and the other judge pulled me aside to confer. I gave my opinion, the judge returned to the table and still seemed to be floundering, so after a few moments I asked the other judge if they'd like me to just take the call. They agreed, and I wrapped it up, giving the pact player the choice of what he wanted to cast his spell in response to, but it didn't feel great. On one hand, the call was taking quite a while, and the players were starting to get anxious, but on the other hand effectively taking over the call from another judge really undermines their authority. I think at some point you need to ensure that players don't start getting frustrated but it's difficult to know when and how to step in tactfully.

...In Conclusion
This is the first slow MagicFest I've attended this year, and while it was kind of nice because I was a little ill, it was also kind of boring, I really enjoy hectic events, but on this one I felt like I didn't do enough work! The MagicFest moving between Friday and Saturday due to excessive Jackhammering in the main room was pretty exciting, but I didn't really have a huge part in that as I was busy babysitting LCTs at the time the room teardown and rebuild was happening. It was pretty interesting to see the GP and vendors crammed in one room, and scheduled sides crammed in another, with scorekeepers and registration hanging out in the hallway. Overall it was fun, as all events are fun, but more players certainly would've made the experience better!