Vancouver, Canada | Modern
Time: Saturday, December 7, 2019 | 8:30 – 21:00
Main Event Players: 145 players
Role: Deck Check Team & Sides

Checking Decks?
I was on deck checks, mentoring a newer L1. I asked him what his plan for collection was and it seemed good. I also worked with him to ensure that the index was created and went through how to check if each decklist was present, I also helped him with a few infractions in the first few rounds, including a check where a single sideboard Wrenn and Six was in a sleeve that was more worn than the rest of the deck. I let him know that it did qualify for the Marked Cards - GL upgrade, but I personally felt like while the wear was enough of an issue to tell the player to change it and issue the warning, but would feel kind of ridiculous as a Game Loss. Unfortunately after that side events ended up kind of exploding, I was thrown into ODE land and didn't really touch another deck or do any more mentoring that day.

Off-Brand On Demands
Drafts were being run kind of differently than you'd expect at an SCG event or MagicFest. There was a sheet on the table near the basic land station where players could put down their name for draft. It was completely unmonitored and when the eighth person arrived they'd bring it over to the scorekeeper, who also doubled as a registration and ops person. The scorekeeper would page the draft number and proceed to take payment from the players. This is a fine system when you launch a very small number of drafts because it prevents you from having to process a bunch of refunds if one doesn't fill up. Unfortunately when ODEs are functioning, well, as intended, you have to make all the players wait while you process 8 payment transactions. This was compounded by the fact that we couldn't take cash payments, so we'd call them up to the scorekeeping station and then send them back across the room if they were trying to pay cash. The other issue is that the drafts were marked by number, and when we paged them we just paged the draft number. Players have a hard time remembering arbitrary numbers so often when I paged a draft, I just got a bunch of players who had signed up recently (maybe for a draft that hadn't filled yet), also a bunch of the players I was supposed to have failed to show up, so after I paged them a few times, I'd have to bump them into the next draft, which was kind of a logistical mess. Finally after all the payment had been taken and I had 8 players I needed to find them a spot in the room to sit. Almost immediately we ran out of space, so finding 8 seats together was a bit of a challenge. Then, I'd have to seat them randomly and fill out a paper bracket and leave it with the players, they were to fill it out autonomously and bring it up to the Face to Face booth to get their prizes. There were only prizes for first, so this system actually worked out ok. I also got to make the joke about how if they lost the bracket they weren't getting prizes.

Pioneering Scheduled Side Events
In addition to some rather chaotic on demand events, Face to Face was also running two scheduled side events, a free Pioneer event at noon and a free Modern event at 2pm. They both capped at 32 players. Because of the fact that both events were free there were quite a few players who came to the venue simply to play these two events. There were a few problems with these, first off the same scorekeeper that was taking ODE payments and doing the Open was also expected to scorekeep these events. We lacked an event cover sheet, which meant that the only judge in the room that knew what time the round ended was the one that had started the round. If I'd been a little more on top of things I think I'd have liked to make an event cover sheet. Also weirdly enough, once the event was over, the TO wouldn't prize everyone out until he had a copy of final standings, meaning before any one got prizes they had to wait for everyone else to finish playing. I initially thought this was because we were paying out based on standing, but in fact, we were paying out based on record. I let the TO know how it's done at MagicFests (both players bring the result slip up to prize tix and get paid out when they're done, instead of waiting for the entire event to finish). And he seemed receptive.

Overwhelming Layers
A player was playing an Enduring Ideal deck had Overwhelming Splendor enchanting his opponent, who controlled a Mycosynth Lattice and Karn, the Great Creator, the opponent wanted to know what would happen if he animated the Mycosynth Lattice with Karn's ability. The result would be a 6/6 lattice that doesn't allow you to spend mana as though it was any color, but that does still make everything an artifact and make all spells and cards colorless.

...In Conclusion
It was interesting working a smaller event for a budding organizer. I got to really see how much CFB and SCG have refined the side event process. It was a lot of fun to work in the chaos that was side events! I'm a little dissapointed that I won't be able to work sides at their next event, due to it being the same weekend as a MagicFest, but I hope I get to work for Face to Face again before the end of 2020!