Niagara Falls, New York | Legacy
Time: Friday April 19th – Sunday April 21st
Players: 964 Winner: Goetschel Unbeaten

Friday – ODE Scorekeeping


Technical Revolution
MF Niagara was the debut of the entirely online based registration model for events, instead of having a table with slips with event names for people to fill out and check off, we had a bunch of kiosks at the front where people came up and effectively registered themselves through the online system. To accommodate the new model, online reg now closes 10 minutes before an event instead of the previous 15 minutes. The entire online-only system really improved the way we handle events, it effectively eliminated the issues associated with not being able to read people's names and DCI numbers, but it also increased the amount of registration points we could have, usually there are only four or five stations max, but here there were 6 or 7. Cash transactions were interesting, for debit and credit transactions players were totally autonomous, but for cash after they filled out the online registration form they'd need to flag down a customer service rep and have that person process the money, and verify that they'd paid through the digital system.

Relics of the Past
For all the new advancements associated with registration, CFBE hasn't yet devised a strategy for removing people from the ODE process. So ODEs are largely run as they always have been, with paper and buzzers and a scorekeeper.

Kefka doing WER things
There was one particularly strange thing that happened in an ODE draft, I accidentally input a chaos draft as an RNA draft, so the ODE judge came up to me and let me know that he was seating them as the RNA draft dictated so they could get started, and asked me to make the event properly, and just ensure the chaos bracket was the same as the RNA one. This seemed easy enough, I canceled the old event, remade it as the proper format in WER and rearranged the players. Unfortunately when I uploaded the event, it eliminated one of the players and duplicated another one of them, which resulted in me having and event with a player registered twice. this was no good, I tried to change one instance of the player in Kefka to the missing player, but when I changed it, both instances of the player changed! I deleted this event, and remade the event again in WER and uploaded it again, and to my chagrin I now had 2 duplicated players! I wasn’t really sure what to do at this point, so instead of fighting with it more, I simply had the judges run the event with a manual bracket and I finished and reported the event in WER when it was complete.

Saturday – Scheduled Sides Scorekeeping


New Equipment
With almost all player entries being either online or fanatic vouchers inputting players was very different than previous events. I had the pleasure of borrowing another scorekeeper’s scanner at Los Angeles and it made the process of entering fanatics a breeze, I decided that to expedite my workflow I’d pick one up for myself. Using the scanner at this event made stacks of fanatic vouchers no longer daunting. I think the addition of a scanner to the CFBE tech kit might be really valuable to newer scorekeepers, it eliminated a lot of the drudgery of scorekeeping and allowed me to focus on issues that came up and player questions.

Cluster of Rooms
The other thing that was interesting was the entire event was being run across multiple rooms, similar to Memphis, We had a Main Room and a Sides Room, we ran out of space in two of the rooms so we opened up another room, it was down the hall and there were signs posted to help lead the players to the extra conference room, in that special room we hosted the Sealed Double Up, we didn’t want players getting lost on the way to and from the other event, we had the HJ also scorekeep the event. it was pretty interesting.

Player Minds are Creative
I had a sign that said "round 3 & 2-0 drop go to the prize tix station". I was on orange paper, but the SK adjacent to me was on green paper, we had two players come up and ask how they could change their green slip into an orange slip to prize out

A Loopy Policy
AP was executing the Worldgorger Dragon - Animate Dead loop with a Sun-scorched Desert flickering. He had used it to kill two of his opponents, however his third opponent had cast Angel’s Grace. NAP insisted that the rules for loops stated that if AP couldn’t terminate the loop on his own he was ruled to “lose the game”. The judge on call informed them that this wasn’t the case, the judge then explained that because of a policy update we now consider hidden information when determining whether players could potentially stop a loop. In this scenario the player was pretty oblivious and didn't really understand what he needed to do to stop the loop. The judge let him know there was a way and eventually he puzzled it out, stopped looping and the game progressed. However this raises an interesting question, in a situation where a player cannot figure out the line to stop the loop, what kind of information should the judge give them? Should the judge point out every way to terminate the loop, or only a single way? Should it be the worst way or chosen at random? Should interactions visible on the battlefield take precedence over those in hand? We also run into a problem where we are now testing a judges skill at reading a board state, which is usually prohibited when making rulings, I think while this doesn't come up often it’s an interesting deviation from regular policy philosophy.

The Not-So-Convincing Fakes and the More Convincing Fakes
The player that was looping in the previous paragraph was also playing with obvious proxies (like foil dual lands) The other players didn't call attention to this and the judge was only alerted when he went to take the looping call. The judge spoke to the player and asked them not to play with proxies in the next round of the event, as it looked like the game was effectively over. The player informed the judge that he had real copies of the cards and briefly flashed the binder to the judge. Upon sight the judge suspected that the cards in the binder may also be fake. The next round the judge walked over to see if the player had switched out the obvious fakes for the more convincing fakes, and was surprised to see that he had. Upon interrogation the player claimed he had traded for the cards over the years from various places, however they were all the same brand and texture of counterfeit. They were fairly obvious counterfeits, glossy and with slightly blurry text. It was fairly obvious to the judge on the call that the player was not being honest.

Sideboard Alterations
A player mentioned during G1 that he really wished he had a certain card in his SB. Then at the end of G1 his opp saw him take an object from his bag and put it into his deckbox, potentially a sleeve or a card. The judge confronted the player after this occurred and asked what card the player wanted in the matchup, the player answered with Sandwurm Convergence, which didn't actually do anything in the matchup he was in, and also wasn't in the SB at this point. Then the judge noticed that the SB was 16 cards with a Mountain in it, the deck was playing mountains, and the judge asked if the mountain was in the player’s SB, the player said yes, but then when the 16 card problem was mentioned, the player said, “Oh, no it's not in my SB”. At the end of the match the opponent mentioned that he thought that an Ensnaring Bridge had been snuck into the SB, however the SB contained 3 Ensnaring Bridges, the judge figured sneaking the third one in was not something the player would do. He also noted that the player had mentioned that he was grabbing a sleeve from his box to sleeve some unsleeved SB cards, of which he had a few. Overall, while the player's actions seemed suspicious, the judge on the call decided that the player was not lying.

Sunday – Scheduled Sides Scorekeeping


Technical Revolution
Sunday was a quieter day, there were very few complications with the exception of the Legacy 2 event, there were a lot of weird omissions from registration that never got explained, as well as a number of odd scorekeeping errors, I feel like every error over the entire weekend was condensed into this one, single event. In particular something that happened in R1 was a missing match slip, the HJs solution to this was to randomly enter the result and swap the players’ opponents in the next round if that came up. this is an interesting solution because it shaves a lot of time off the end of the round, but generates some delays at the beginning of the round.

Some Byes are More Equal than Others
I also ran into another odd problem during the UMA draft, in R2 there were two players with byes (as players were not being paired cross-pod) however in WER it showed one player as having 3 points and the other as having 0. I agreed that this was not correct, and the solution, for me at least, was to “edit matches” un match the two bye players and then grant them byes again, this then caused both players to have 3 points.

...In Conclusion
This event went a lot more smoothly than LA, the workload was a lot lighter, and I didn’t make any catastrophic mistakes, so those were both really nice, having the scanner really helped me speed up my workflow and eliminated a lot of registration fumbles. I got to reinforce my knowledge and experience the new registration booth, so overall I had a great time at MF Niagara and am excited to do more scorekeeping in the future.