Providence, Rhode Island | Team Sealed
Time: Friday May 17th – Sunday May 19th
Players: 360 teams (1080 players) Winners: Vince Ferraiuolo, Joel Sadowsky, and Andrew Vorel

Friday – Side Event Scorekeeping


Learning From Our Mistakes
The day started off a little hectic, getting set up to scorekeep is always a little weird, ensuring I have all the stuff to do my job is a bit of a fetch quest, and then there's usually at least one thing that doesn't work for no reason. In fact there was so much running around in the morning that my first three events were almost late in launching. For the the third event (the Sealed Double-Up), I almost had a rerun of the tragedy in MF Los Angeles, registrations were piling up and at 10 minutes before the event I hadn't input any of them. I didn't ask for help before the 10 minute mark because I figured it would only take a few minutes to scan them all in with the scanner. Unfortunately when I finally began trying to use the scanner it decided to stop working! Instead of actually just reliving MF Los Angeles though, I asked my lead for help and let him work on my technical issue while I took care of online registrations and entered fanatic DCIs manually. I managed to get the event launched right on time, even though we never did get the scanner working. There are multiple reasons this didn't explode like LA, first off there were less entrants into this event, and I was also not being interrupted nearly as often by players, nor was I flipping another large event simultaneously. The abolition of handwritten entries also allowed me to skip the “discern the players terrible handwriting” step of player entry which contributed to the expediency in launching the event. However an important growth point is that I asked for help, I feel like before LA I might've just tried to continue fiddling with the scanner myself and wasted many more minutes rather than passing off the job to someone else, which allowed me to optimize my time and ensure that everything launched on time!

Saturday – Main Event – Floor Features


A Ruling for All
Team events are an interesting thing, I got called over to a table and the player let me know that they had just drawn their second copy of Enforcer Griffin, normally this wouldn't be a problem, except it was G1 and Enforcer Griffin #2 was a SB card while #1 was not. Ergo, this was a pretty stock deck problem upgrade to a GL. As was policy, I doubled checked with an L3, they came back to the table with me, stood with me while I explained the problem and then after the player acquiesced they encouraged me to offer an appeal. I was kinda confused, the player had even mentioned the GL when I had initially taken the call, so they clearly understood policy. I shrugged, offered the appeal, the player shrugged and was like “sure I'll appeal”. I got upheld, and after the call I asked the other judge why he suggested the appeal. The judge mentioned that while the player in the call seemed okay with the proceedings, one of his teammates did not. I hadn't noticed the teammates reaction at all, and was grateful for the other judges intervention.

I've Seen This Pool Before...
In team trios you see a lot of the same powerful rares. In a single sealed pool, an off color bomb might not be enough to pull you into it's colors, but in trios someone is probably playing those colors so that card's getting played. In WAR sealed, that card is Bolas' Citadel. At least one of the team members will be player black and that player is probably playing Bolas' Citadel. Consequently, it's a card that also generates a lot of calls since it operates a little outside the bounds of normal magic. I took the “How does Spark Harvest + Bolas' Citadel work?” multiple times. (You still have to pay the additional cost, either with mana or by sacrificing a creature)

Everyone's a Lead in Their Own Way
On Saturday I was on floor/features, and our team lead gave us all little jobs to do. One of us was features, one of us was the “L3” wrangler, someone who would ensure that the L3s were properly distributed around the event, one of us was upcoming break manager, namely someone who was making sure judges would be well distributed the following round with respect to upcoming breaks, and the last one was the team lead liaison, someone who would make sure that information was being transmitted between all the TLs. These responsibilities moved around during the day. It made us all feel a little like mini team leads, however I did feel like the TL liaison was a bit ofa pointless designation, since the FJ doing that doesn't have the authority to move judges around, therefore they are effectively a middleman between team leads, and with an event of this size, it seems far more efficient if the TL of floor/features simply communicates with the other TLs.

Sunday – RC Support
RC Support is a relatively new role, and it's only been implemented twice. The job basically boils down to a cross between breaks and RC secretary. My main responsibility was to fetch people the RC wanted to meet with and cover those people while they were meeting with their RC. I think this is actually a valid role, since I've been in the awkward position of telling my RC that the only time I really feel comfortable having a meeting is on my break, and if multiple people want to meet with them at that same time it becomes problematic. Also it means the person in the meeting doesn't really get a break. With the RC support it means that overall more people get to utilize RC hours. On Providence in particular the role felt a little superfluous since it was a slow enough event that one person leaving for a meeting didn't automatically necessitate the need for a replacement judge, so I felt more like sides float. But I feel like on a busier event the value of this position goes up exponentially.

...In Conclusion
Overall MF Providence felt more like a “maintain and reinforce” event than a “learn new things” event. Which is a little disappointing, however maintaining old skillsets is still valuable. I feel like lately I've been bouncing around so much on different things that my Comp REL FJ skill tree has kind of gotten neglected, so I was grateful I got to be on the main and MCQ over the course of the weekend. As always I'm looking forward to my next event!