Salt Lake City, Utah | Sealed
Time: Friday November 11th - Sunday November 13th 2022
Main Event Players: 900(ish) | Winner: Greg Michel
Thursday – The Calm Before the Storm
On Thursday, whispers in the air belied the concern that the general staff had about the event. The information from the TO was spotty at best, the staff schedule was confusing and incomplete. And then there was the software.... Ah yes the software. We were all in the dark about what software the event would be run on. Certainly it was unlikely to run through Companion, as all the large, high profile events recently had been run through MTG Melee. I’d also heard that we were potentially using Purple Fox, which as far as I knew, didn’t have integration capabilities with any current MTG software. Then the week before the event, the TO did a Twitch stream where they talked about their new software that had been developed just for this event. The staff were not made aware of the new software before the stream, and we got the same information at the same time as everyone else about it, exclusively through the stream. For as long as Organized play has existed, so too, has bad software design. It’s been an eternal struggle to have software that can actually run an event without crashing, eating a couple rounds, or blocking event staff from performing critical functions. Rumour has it that the HJs of the event called upon an old ally that had been planning on playing, and requested that if by chance, the software were to ‘unexpectedly’ fail, that this ally would perhaps be ready to take up the mantle of scorekeeper and dust off WLTR.
Conference Debrief
I attended the Thursday evening judge conference, there were two presentations then the Tournament Organizer, at the bequest of the judges, offered to give us an overview of how the software would work so that we could, you know, do our jobs the next day, and give us a chance to ask questions.
The players would sign up for events through the software and it would also pair them. It also allowed them to report their match results, in a similar manner to companion. Our first red flag was the fact that both players were required to report to allow us to flip the round. A few worried questions about what we would do about all the players that didn’t report were asked, but no answers were given. We asked if it would make a noise or send a push notification to player’s phones when the round turned over. Again this was not functionality the developer thought was necessary. We asked if we’d be able to print a player list for decklist sorting purposes or if it could display standings. Again the TO said that this wasn’t within the app’s functionality, and seemed confused as to why we would want these things. To help players judges were given a special role in the app which would allow us to take over players accounts so we could report for them or check on their match if there were complications. They also showed us a handy feature that would allow us to “switch player’s opponents after the round had started in case they accidentally sat down and played the wrong opponent.” I quickly interjected by saying that if you wanted to do this you should consult with your team lead or HJ first, since standard procedure is to... not do this at Comp REL. A hushed silence fell over the crowd as we realized that no judges, nor anyone who had run a large scale tournament had actually been consulted before or during the development of this app. I tried to remain positive however, and after all, the app could manually pair players. That, at least, was a bonus.
Demanding Inquiries
I then asked how ODEs would work, they said that people would sign up, as usual, through the app, then for drafts the app would randomly select a player and that player would go and fetch product for the table, thus making players completely autonomous when it came to drafts, which would explain why so few judges had been assigned to ODEs. We looked nervously at each other since this meant that there would be no one to onboard the players on how to draft, nor any monitoring of product. The questioning continued, but the more answers we got, the more worried we became. Eventually the interrogation was over, and the developer, nervously tried to step away as a flock of judges followed him, peppering him with more concerns and questions.
An Ominous Horizon
The app wasn’t the only cause for concern on Thursday, however. We noticed that there wasn’t really a main event stage, there were no printers, no paper, no paper cutter, no pens and, most importantly, no table numbers. Well okay, that last one wasn’t quite true, there were nametag stickers on the tables with numbers on them. It was, well, better than nothing. I asked the judge manager and he assured me we’d have table tents the next day. I was a little dubious about On Demand Events being run by two judges who had never worked ODEs on a large event. I mentioned this to the main event HJs and they decided to shift a slightly more experienced judge onto ODEs just in case.
I, along with many others, went to sleep that night with worry in my heart. I decided to go in two hours early the next day to investigate this table number problem, as well as other issues that might come up.
Friday – End of Round Lead
Numeric Quandary
I arrived early and saw two L1s removing some of the table number nametags from the tables. I asked what they were doing and they said the TO had told them to do this, but seemed a little lost. I decided to investigate, and if necessary take charge. Based on the demonstration of the app I was a little concerned that the TO might not have the best idea of how to number a room. I consulted with the TO and got him to send me the floor plan, which I’ve attached below.
You may notice a few issues with this. The first is that a group of table numbers in the far left column simply doesn’t exist. That’s because there’s a large concrete pillar there. I asked the TO and they said that these non-existent tables, he said that the software knew they didn’t exist and that was fine. O-kay, not how I’d solve it but ok. The next thing you might notice is that in the far right column there is a typo that causes some tables to be duplicated. I confirmed that in real life there weren’t supposed to be duplicated tables. Finally you may notice that the columns don’t snake normally, so it’s rather difficult to find where you’re sitting. I asked if I could fix this and was told that in the app they’d accounted for tables not existing and that I shouldn’t change it otherwise things would need to be changed in the app. Ok. Fine. Instead I asked a few of the others judges that had come in early if they’d like to help. I made it evident to them that they weren’t obligated to do so, but could if they were bored. A large percentage of the nametags that were on the tables were still blank, and some of them were actively wrong. I was told that we wouldn’t need most of the room and to only focus on the last two rows for table numbers. I didn’t listen and numbered the entire room, a lot of it was already done, and I felt like having to number during a meltdown would be a mess and it was just a good idea to head off potential delays. (I was later vindicated when we used the other part of the room)
Finally we finished, and I prodded the judge manager about table tents, since I mentioned that the nametags were really hard to see and would cause issues for both players and judges when we were trying to find specific tables. The judge manager told me that the table tents were coming.
End of Round in the New Era
I still wasn’t sure whether we were using purple fox or what so I’d drafted up a team email assuming we’d be using the emoji system that we’d been using at the recent SCG events. It would be easy enough to swerve into purple fox since that system is simpler. So after the all hands event meeting I briefed my team again on the emoji system, at which point the HJ came over and asked me what I’d be using, I said “well the emoji system, unless we have access to purple fox?” the HJ said “here I can set up an event for you in purple fox” I shrugged, and decided this was fine, and then taught my team how to use purple fox.
The next thing I noticed was that we didn’t have any time extension slips. I noticed that the judge manager had carted in a printer and a paper cutter, as well as some laptops, I sat down and began trying to hook up the printer to the computer, but was fairly frazzled and had a lot on my plate already, I asked one of the members of my team if I could just assign them the task of hooking up the printer to the laptops that had just been purchased and if he could also make some time extension slips for us. He nodded and said he’d be happy to. Excellent. Task delegated.
Doom Peeks Over the Horizon
The beginning of round one was peppered with issues, players couldn’t sign up, players were having the app freeze, players couldn’t see who they were playing, players didn’t understand the room numbering. Us judges, armed with a half hour Q&A the night before answered the questions as best we could, but for the most part ended up sending the bulk of the players to the developer’s area near the stage.
I however didn’t really see much of this at all, I decided to check in on ODEs and the Commander area, since I’d had plenty of concerns the previous night. To my chagrin it seemed like no one had actually been assigned to run the creator clash/commander area, and one of the content creators, MTGNerdGirl, had just sort of... taken point on running the area. I asked her “well how much are you getting paid for this judge task” she shrugged and said “well I got this Special Guest pass since I was supposed to be playing today...” I frowned and went to investigate the other parts of the area, I asked the two people that were checking players into the command zone if they were judges, since they weren’t really wearing judge shirts, they mentioned they were volunteers, and my countenance darkened. There were at least three people here doing effectively the work of judges and not getting paid for it. I poked a few people on main to send a few judges over to help out ODEs and ensure that MTGNerdGirl got breaks and support. I also approached the judge manager about paying these people, I was ready to fight, but was actually met with understanding, and little resistance, which was really great.
Let Me App You a Question...
On the way back to the event I was waylaid by the deck check lead who asked me to ask the stage if he could get a player list, otherwise there would be no way for him to verify which lists were missing. I groaned and stalked back over to the stage.
The developer was swamped and told me that he was too busy dealing with other issues to address the player list thing, and that it simply wasn’t a functionality that the app had been designed to support. I sighed and let the deck check lead know that this simply wasn’t happening. After all this it was time to get started on end of round. I began having my judges go through the event and mark off tables that were still playing. However while I could send judges to the tables we knew were still playing I had no way of figuring out which tables hadn’t reported yet, since we couldn’t view outstanding tables in the app. This meant there wasn’t a way of addressing ghost tables. The HJs were all swamped, and dealing with tons of other issues, and were basically glued to the developer at the main stage, I let them know about the issue and they let me know it was in their queue.
The judge I had left on the “deal with the printers” quest let me know that all the printers were set up. I asked him to stay with the technology since I felt like we needed a body to attack any printer/laptop issues. I also asked him to start working on a template for table numbers since at some point the judge manager had dropped off some cardstock. I had lost hope that there would be table tents provided. I made sure my judge was okay with the task before relegating it to him, but he happily said he really enjoyed “IT adjacent” jobs.
Total Meltdown
And then it happened. I remember being called to the main stage, I had been working for about 4 or 5 hours at this point and had missed breakfast. I was hungry and tired and frustrated. The HJs told us all to go on break for an hour. The software had completely died. I had some vague flashbacks to Grand Prix Vegas. There was still more work to do in the hall, but I knew I was collapsing, and needed to eat something. The VIP room across from the hall was supposed to have food. It did not have food. Myself and a posse of judges went on a quest to find the mythical break room that was rumoured to actually have food. It took us about 20 minutes to navigate our way there, since the break room wasn’t actually in the convention center, but was in fact, in the attached hotel on the 24th floor. Oh and there was also some conspiracy theory expo and a bunch of Mormon gatherings that we had to awkwardly avoid en route.
But there were indeed snacks in the break room, glorious snacks. Granola bars, and chocolate and gummy bears. I sat down and ate for 20 minutes before returning to the hall.
An Ode to ODEs
ODEs were also being run through the app and totally melted down. The judges on ODEs began taking payment, and would also take player’s phone numbers and used a program to text the players to let them know when their ODE was ready to launch. There were many problems with this program since it uh, well sometimes just didn’t text people, eventually they just abandoned the program and started tweeting at players to come back to the hall when their events were ready to launch. Eventually instead of putting players into specific brackets, they just sat the players down in chairs, and when there were enough players in chairs, a judge simply sat the event and put the player’s names into a paper bracket for the TO to deal with later.
To be perfectly honest, when ODEs are busy, putting players into specific pods, or drafts or whatever is actually just really dumb and inefficient. If I have four commander players who have paid and are waiting I should be able to seat them, take their names and tell an SK to create an event later. Having to sit around and call for “John Smith and Jane Doe” who have left the hall to buy sandwiches while 6 players stand around waiting to play commander is stupid.
Party Like it’s 2016
Upon returning we were told that the event had been ported to Wizards Large Tournament Reporter, (the old software that had been used to run Grand Prixs) the CFBE scorekeeper that had been contacted under the table was now stationed on the stage, and I noticed that at some point the judge manager had bought some blue tape. I was told to steal the paper cutter from ODEs. I donated one of my judges to the judge manager to work out buying lunch for people and didn’t see him for the rest of the day. So I lost two people from my team, one to technology and one to food. This would be a common theme throughout the weekend.
And after this, well, it was basically a blast from the past, paper pairings, paper slips, and purple fox. I checked in on the judge who was working on table numbers frequently, he presented a few prototypes and printed out the table ends to help judges navigate the event. The tables that had been eaten by the pillar needed to be reassigned each round and this caused problems basically all day. Renumbering the room would’ve been great, and my judge had created the numbers on the laptop, however there was never a good time to send all those numbers to the printer. I resolved to come in early the next day to work on them. I think I shadowed some judge calls but honestly don’t remember much from the rest of the day. At some point sandwiches appeared on the stage and I remember chain eating them. I also remember trading one to a player for a bag of dried mangos. My team got half round breaks and by the end of the day I was dead.
Saturday – Main Event – Slips/Floor/Features Team Lead
The Early Bird Gets the Table Tents
I knew Saturday’s event was going to be big, and wanted to get table numbers done before it started, and ideally, I wanted to renumber the room if possible so that things didn’t suck so much. I walked up to the stage and one of the scorekeepers told me that we didn’t have enough printer ink to justify printing out 500 table numbers. I was very crestfallen. However, when I turned around, the TO approached me with 4 employees who they had brought along to manage product in their booth. The TO said “you have these guys for whatever you need them for this morning”. I paused, and thought for a moment, then grabbed a sharpie, the prototype table number and a few reams of cardstock. I had a plan.
I told them that we would be manually making table numbers. I sat them down and together, with some great insight from the team, we worked out at assembly line. As my main event team trickled in I asked if they’d like to help with table numbers. If I wanted to come in early and work that was one thing, but I needed to make sure others didn’t feel pressured into it. A few people volunteered to put out table numbers. However we ran into an issue, there were an odd number of chairs in each row. We didn’t have time to reorganize the room so I told people to just put out the numbers we had, and get rid of any that would confuse things. This would result in some tables only having the “nametag” number. Halfway through the activity I needed to return to the all hands team meeting. It was kind of frustrating since the table number thing was important, but it was also important to know what was going on during the event since I was a team lead.
Sealed Fates
I was given a zone to distribute product but it ended up being empty, so I assisted other zones. It was a mess, the PA system was unintelligible unless you were right in front of it, and using it to dictate a sealed registration procedure that no one’s done in years was chaos to say the least. I spent the majority of this time sprinting around the hall helping players figure out what to do. This is a good time to mention how the VIP system worked and why it was an issue. So VIPs got entry into any number of events for free over the weekend. This meant that you wanted to enter every sealed event. And probably drop most of them to grind on demand drafts (I think there was a 2 hour cooldown for entering on demand drafts but I’m not sure). This resulted in the main event starting out with 900 players but actually only launching with 600. this meant there were a lot of “registration triangles” which again, is not something people have had to deal with for years. This also meant a lot of players moved around to align with their registration buddies. This meant that when my team went through the hall to take down the names of the players who wanted to drop, we were going to have a lot of issues. Needless to say, all this resulted in a lot of drag on the event.
My Alignment is Chaotic Blue
At some point I had to sit down and help a player finish registering their decklist. The first thing I noticed was that wotc had “helpfully” organized the artifacts on the deck registration sheet by “color alignment”. Which makes sense in theory but in practice is incredibly annoying. So first the cards with prototype were aligned to whatever color their prototype cost was. Okay makes sense. Then if an artifact had unearth or another activated ability that was colored, they’d also be aligned to that color once again, slightly annoying but not a big deal. However the biggest kicker is that if artifacts mentioned “island” or “plains” or any other land, they were also considered to be aligned to that color. This was super annoying because I’d be trying to register an artifact in the generic artifact section only to realize that it said “island” on it somewhere and so I was looking in totally the wrong section.
What is Mentoring, Again?
This is probably a good time to mention that a LOT of the judges on the event had very little comp REL experience and almost none of them, save for the team leads and L3s had large event experience. Because of how hectic things were, I found myself often being come to for rulings and asking my judge “would you like me to just take this ruling” rather than doing something like walking them through it. I had a very small amount of time to go over rulings and philosophy with my charges as well. It was kind of frustrating. Since this would usually be a great time to do some training and mentoring, but when you see five other judge calls start to go stale while you’re trying to explain HCE to a junior judge, something needs to get dropped, and unfortunately, I think the players come first.
Featuring: Lack of Communication
Before the event, I was told that my team was floor, and slips if we ended up going full paper. We did end up going full paper, so I then became the slips and floor lead. Then in round 1 I was told that I was also in charge of features, the HJ wasn’t sure whether I needed to send a judge over to features. I shrugged and said I’d send someone over and if they didn’t come back I assumed they were needed over there. In round two I asked the HJ which match they wanted on features and they seemed a little taken aback, either they’d forgotten or they thought I was supposed to pick a table to send over, they gave me a name and told me that I was now also in charge of picking a feature match, and if I wasn’t told anything to just get the world champion. I shrugged and sent the same judge to take care of it. Then the next round I was told that they didn’t want the world champion, instead I should just take an undefeated table. For my features judge I’d picked a decent RCQ trained L2 on my team, initially I wanted to rotate other judges into the task but decided that there was enough tumult on the event and couldn’t really afford to train anyone else to do the job, front that point on they were completely autonomously in charge of picking and monitoring the feature table.
Later on in the event my mentor asked why I’d picked the RCQ L2 to be the feature judge. I said that I certainly didn’t want the newer L1 as my feature judge, and that I wanted to keep my event grinder L2 on the floor to handle calls. My mentor mentioned that being a feature match judge was actually a bit of a big responsibility, since you both needed a judge that was very good at rules and policy but also could handle being “Twitter hero of the day” if something went wrong, or they had to make a controversial call. While I was lucky and my RCQ L2 didn’t end up being a Twitter hero, I did agree that it was a mistake to put a newer judge that I didn’t know that well onto such a high visibility task. The next day when I needed to once again assign a judge to features I made sure to pick a more appropriate candidate.
Giving People the Slips
I haven’t cut slips in a while and with just a guillotine cutter, it’s not easy. Or rather, it’s very easy to become overly ambitious and try to cut too many slips at once, which results in all the slips looking like a dog cut them with its teeth. This coupled with the slow printer put a significant lag on slip distribution. The first two rounds weren’t too bad, but when the 5ks began their first rounds as the main was trying to turn its rounds things began to get really laggy. This frequently caused my slips to be delayed by 10 minutes, which resulted in anyone who had an opponent that didn’t show up, waiting more than 10 minutes to get their match win. At the end of the day when I did my debrief with my mentor, he mentioned that perhaps I should’ve brought up the issue to the HJ who could potentially strongarm the scorekeeper into prioritizing things differently. I agreed that I probably should’ve mentioned the logistical issues to someone else, I just assumed that the SK was working at peak efficiency and didn’t want to add another complaint to the issue pile. Another thing that fell through the cracks a bit was slip sorting. A relic of ages past, judges haven’t had to sort match slips for a long time now, and I totally forgot about doing it. Because of this, there was a fair amount of lag at the end of round 2 because my team only started sorting slips after time in the round was called.
An Appealing Orb
NAP illegally activated Meticulous Excavation, returning their Mesmeric Orb to their hand at the end of AP’s turn. Then cast Union of the Third Path afterwards, drawing a card and gaining two life. I looked into the situation and noticed that they had an Evolving Wilds in play. I didn’t want to put a random card back and give them the option of shuffling it away and allowing them to draw a new one, so I ruled GRV no backup, I got appealed and upheld.
*Slaps Hand* “You can fit so many cards in this bad boy”
AP was supposed to be mulliganing to 6 but ended up drawing 8. NAP noticed this after AP played his land for T1. My FJ brought this to me, since it seemed like it might be an HCE. I thought it was a bit weird for someone to draw up to 8 and just, not notice. I grabbed the HJ for an investigation, there wasn’t too much to ask here, and eventually the HJ ruled no cheating, based on the fact that it seemed relatively low value and pretty noticeable. I didn’t totally agree with this assessment, just because a cheat was obvious, it didn’t necessarily disqualify it from being cheating. The HJ ruled HCE and as the opponent was selecting two cards to shuffle back in AP said he’d just concede and drop since he didn’t think he’d win the second game with a neutered hand, and with one loss he was out of contention for the Black Lotus.
Sticky Situation
I was supposed to go on my half round break, but decided to check on ODEs and the creator clash (some kind of ODE area where you play with famous people) first to make sure things were okay. On my way over I noticed that the feature match wasn’t playing, I looked around to ask someone, but the commentators weren’t at the booth. I asked the judge on features and he told me that the players had been told to wait. I shrugged and continued to walk to ODEs when the TO stopped me and asked if I could run some “drafting with pros” event. I was like “uhhh okay, I guess” I asked what had been done the previous day and the TO explained it to me. Then the judge that was actually supposed to be running the draft arrived and I helped her start it. My first task after helping seat players was to get her product, on my way to get product I got asked about whether a player’s sticker board was revealed in legacy. I wasn’t totally sure so I asked a few other judges and we can to the consensus that we thought it was (pro tip: we were right). I then took product from ODEs and they told me they were running out of product. Wtf. I dropped the product off with the pro draft and then went to the product area and let them know that ODEs was running out of product. I then returned to the main event stage to realize that I’d wasted my whole break doing random stuff and now it was time for me to start EOR. The feature match went extremely late, and the HJ approached me about it, I told them I’d seen the match being held and the HJ said that it’d been held for 15 minutes. I said that was dumb and confirmed that we wanted matches held for 5 minutes max, ideally no more than 3 minutes. I went over to talk to coverage to find out what happened. Apparently coverage had went on lunch break and then missed the round turnover. Someone else in the coverage area had told the matches to wait until the coverage team returned from lunch, which they did 15 minutes later.
A Prized Structure
There were multiple events advertised as “5ks”. However, we quickly discovered that these events weren’t going to cut to top 8 and that the prize structure hadn’t been announced anywhere. In addition to this some of the events were starting at really awkward times, such as noon or 4pm which meant that we couldn’t realistically run all 7 or 8 rounds in one day unless we wanted to keep players in the venue until midnight. This meant that two strange things were going to happen:
1) The 5ks were going to be split across 2 days. So some were 4 rounds on Saturday and 3 rounds on Sunday etc. We also weren’t cutting to top 8. I was told this was because the event on Friday decided not to cut to allow judges to go home at a reasonable hour. The rest of the 5ks followed suit.
2) The prizes would be given out based on swiss standings which are listed below for the Modern 5k.
21 points $300
19-20 points $225
18 points $150
16-17 points $100
15 points $50
14 points $25
Players kind of freaked out about this, since they were worried that less than 5k would be given out in prizes. I think the goal was to actually give out as close to, or a little more than 5k in prizes, but obviously since payout is happening based on record this is going to be very dependant on the number of players. Because of this weird structure the payouts for each 5k was different. This is, of course, a terrible system and a great lesson in why we run top 8s for these events.
The main event also suffered from a similar lack of planning, it was 8 rounds on day 1 and then 6 rounds with a cut to top 16 on day two. Now this isn’t too weird until I tell you that for Day 2 we weren’t running drafts like a normal GP, instead we’d just be having the players use the same sealed decks as the day before. Prize structure was also not solidified before the event, because in about round 5 while I was working on some slip activity by the stage I overheard one of the HJs ask another judge to work out the prize structure.
Sunday – Unified Deck Checks.....?
Team Building
I was given a very large team on Sunday to do deck checks, me and five other judges. Initially the main event HJ said that he wanted me to do 6 deck checks a round, which is, sort of doable. However things began to fall apart quickly. The legacy 5k HJ had no one to do deck checks and requested I do checks for him. The sealed 5k was slated to be huge and that HJ also wanted me to to checks for him as well, and then the Pioneer HJ revealed to me that I had also been slated to do checks for that event as well. So I shrugged and assumed I was on unified checks. On Saturday ODEs told me they’d be taking one of my judges. Ok. Fine. That’s five judges, that’s still enough for checks on four events. I checked in with MTGNerdGirl in the morning to see if she was getting any support. She said that they’d told her she was going to be getting two judges but at this point we were both dubious as to whether that would actually happen. I said I’d send a judge over just in case, and if they didn’t return I’d assume her two judges hadn’t materialized. Then main event stole one of my judges for features since apparently more feature match areas spawned overnight. Then they told me that two of my judges were leaving at 2pm. This was... a lot to juggle, between my rapidly decreasing team size and ensuring everyone got breaks I felt like a headless chicken for most of the morning. Then on top of all this, I was told that main event didn’t want me doing checks for any other event. I definitely felt like mom and dad were fighting at this point. I didn’t want to pingpong between warring events, and Pioneer wanted literally a single check done so I just did it without wasting more time talking to the main even HJ. The main event HJ was annoyed and in retrospect I should’ve just told him to argue with the Pioneer HJ instead of effectively “going rogue”. The Sealed event, luckily ended up being much smaller than expected and so the large team assigned to it got rearranged to do their own checks. I think the Legacy HJ also managed to scrounge around and found some judges behind the stage or something to do checks because I was told that they didn’t need me for that either by the time noon rolled around and that event started.
Bag Cards, Bag Cards, Whatchu Gonna Do When They Game Loss You?
We had a mid round deck check where AP’s two sideboard cards were bent in a different way from the rest of their deck. After investigating we determined that since AP had put both their deck and SB into their bag overnight some condensation had warped all the unsleeved cards (their SB) causing the uneven warping. Thus I had to issue about 20 proxies for potential SB cards that had been warped throughout the course of the event. I also issued a Game Loss for marked cards, which was appealed and upheld.
Value Huntin’ VIPs
Like I said earlier, VIPs got free entry into every event, so it was simply value to enter every sealed event. Therefore the Sealed 5k had about 400 players registered but only 100 players who actually wanted to stick around and play! Usually during deck registration and build, judges go around and collect the names of the players that aren’t in their seats, for this event the HJ determined that it would be much more efficient to take down the names of the players that had shown up since there were so many drops!
...In Conclusion
This event was a lot of work, and was definitely in the top 10 most disorganized events I’ve ever worked (though it’s very possible that I’ve worked other events and haven’t seen the amount of band-aids that were implemented due to not being in leadership for those events) However the TO was really accommodating and when they realized they were out of their depth they were very happy to turn the event over to the people that could fix it. They were also quick to get us the supplies we needed, like paper, printers etc. I really wish they’d communicated better beforehand, but I think based on how receptive they were to feedback at the event I’m hopeful for the future, and think this TO shows a lot of growth potential. I’m glad I got to work Summit and would gladly do another event with Kingdoms!
You may notice a few issues with this. The first is that a group of table numbers in the far left column simply doesn’t exist. That’s because there’s a large concrete pillar there. I asked the TO and they said that these non-existent tables, he said that the software knew they didn’t exist and that was fine. O-kay, not how I’d solve it but ok. The next thing you might notice is that in the far right column there is a typo that causes some tables to be duplicated. I confirmed that in real life there weren’t supposed to be duplicated tables. Finally you may notice that the columns don’t snake normally, so it’s rather difficult to find where you’re sitting. I asked if I could fix this and was told that in the app they’d accounted for tables not existing and that I shouldn’t change it otherwise things would need to be changed in the app. Ok. Fine. Instead I asked a few of the others judges that had come in early if they’d like to help. I made it evident to them that they weren’t obligated to do so, but could if they were bored. A large percentage of the nametags that were on the tables were still blank, and some of them were actively wrong. I was told that we wouldn’t need most of the room and to only focus on the last two rows for table numbers. I didn’t listen and numbered the entire room, a lot of it was already done, and I felt like having to number during a meltdown would be a mess and it was just a good idea to head off potential delays. (I was later vindicated when we used the other part of the room)
Finally we finished, and I prodded the judge manager about table tents, since I mentioned that the nametags were really hard to see and would cause issues for both players and judges when we were trying to find specific tables. The judge manager told me that the table tents were coming.
End of Round in the New Era
I still wasn’t sure whether we were using purple fox or what so I’d drafted up a team email assuming we’d be using the emoji system that we’d been using at the recent SCG events. It would be easy enough to swerve into purple fox since that system is simpler. So after the all hands event meeting I briefed my team again on the emoji system, at which point the HJ came over and asked me what I’d be using, I said “well the emoji system, unless we have access to purple fox?” the HJ said “here I can set up an event for you in purple fox” I shrugged, and decided this was fine, and then taught my team how to use purple fox.
The next thing I noticed was that we didn’t have any time extension slips. I noticed that the judge manager had carted in a printer and a paper cutter, as well as some laptops, I sat down and began trying to hook up the printer to the computer, but was fairly frazzled and had a lot on my plate already, I asked one of the members of my team if I could just assign them the task of hooking up the printer to the laptops that had just been purchased and if he could also make some time extension slips for us. He nodded and said he’d be happy to. Excellent. Task delegated.
Doom Peeks Over the Horizon
The beginning of round one was peppered with issues, players couldn’t sign up, players were having the app freeze, players couldn’t see who they were playing, players didn’t understand the room numbering. Us judges, armed with a half hour Q&A the night before answered the questions as best we could, but for the most part ended up sending the bulk of the players to the developer’s area near the stage.
I however didn’t really see much of this at all, I decided to check in on ODEs and the Commander area, since I’d had plenty of concerns the previous night. To my chagrin it seemed like no one had actually been assigned to run the creator clash/commander area, and one of the content creators, MTGNerdGirl, had just sort of... taken point on running the area. I asked her “well how much are you getting paid for this judge task” she shrugged and said “well I got this Special Guest pass since I was supposed to be playing today...” I frowned and went to investigate the other parts of the area, I asked the two people that were checking players into the command zone if they were judges, since they weren’t really wearing judge shirts, they mentioned they were volunteers, and my countenance darkened. There were at least three people here doing effectively the work of judges and not getting paid for it. I poked a few people on main to send a few judges over to help out ODEs and ensure that MTGNerdGirl got breaks and support. I also approached the judge manager about paying these people, I was ready to fight, but was actually met with understanding, and little resistance, which was really great.
Let Me App You a Question...
On the way back to the event I was waylaid by the deck check lead who asked me to ask the stage if he could get a player list, otherwise there would be no way for him to verify which lists were missing. I groaned and stalked back over to the stage.
The developer was swamped and told me that he was too busy dealing with other issues to address the player list thing, and that it simply wasn’t a functionality that the app had been designed to support. I sighed and let the deck check lead know that this simply wasn’t happening. After all this it was time to get started on end of round. I began having my judges go through the event and mark off tables that were still playing. However while I could send judges to the tables we knew were still playing I had no way of figuring out which tables hadn’t reported yet, since we couldn’t view outstanding tables in the app. This meant there wasn’t a way of addressing ghost tables. The HJs were all swamped, and dealing with tons of other issues, and were basically glued to the developer at the main stage, I let them know about the issue and they let me know it was in their queue.
The judge I had left on the “deal with the printers” quest let me know that all the printers were set up. I asked him to stay with the technology since I felt like we needed a body to attack any printer/laptop issues. I also asked him to start working on a template for table numbers since at some point the judge manager had dropped off some cardstock. I had lost hope that there would be table tents provided. I made sure my judge was okay with the task before relegating it to him, but he happily said he really enjoyed “IT adjacent” jobs.
Total Meltdown
And then it happened. I remember being called to the main stage, I had been working for about 4 or 5 hours at this point and had missed breakfast. I was hungry and tired and frustrated. The HJs told us all to go on break for an hour. The software had completely died. I had some vague flashbacks to Grand Prix Vegas. There was still more work to do in the hall, but I knew I was collapsing, and needed to eat something. The VIP room across from the hall was supposed to have food. It did not have food. Myself and a posse of judges went on a quest to find the mythical break room that was rumoured to actually have food. It took us about 20 minutes to navigate our way there, since the break room wasn’t actually in the convention center, but was in fact, in the attached hotel on the 24th floor. Oh and there was also some conspiracy theory expo and a bunch of Mormon gatherings that we had to awkwardly avoid en route.
But there were indeed snacks in the break room, glorious snacks. Granola bars, and chocolate and gummy bears. I sat down and ate for 20 minutes before returning to the hall.
An Ode to ODEs
ODEs were also being run through the app and totally melted down. The judges on ODEs began taking payment, and would also take player’s phone numbers and used a program to text the players to let them know when their ODE was ready to launch. There were many problems with this program since it uh, well sometimes just didn’t text people, eventually they just abandoned the program and started tweeting at players to come back to the hall when their events were ready to launch. Eventually instead of putting players into specific brackets, they just sat the players down in chairs, and when there were enough players in chairs, a judge simply sat the event and put the player’s names into a paper bracket for the TO to deal with later.
To be perfectly honest, when ODEs are busy, putting players into specific pods, or drafts or whatever is actually just really dumb and inefficient. If I have four commander players who have paid and are waiting I should be able to seat them, take their names and tell an SK to create an event later. Having to sit around and call for “John Smith and Jane Doe” who have left the hall to buy sandwiches while 6 players stand around waiting to play commander is stupid.
Party Like it’s 2016
Upon returning we were told that the event had been ported to Wizards Large Tournament Reporter, (the old software that had been used to run Grand Prixs) the CFBE scorekeeper that had been contacted under the table was now stationed on the stage, and I noticed that at some point the judge manager had bought some blue tape. I was told to steal the paper cutter from ODEs. I donated one of my judges to the judge manager to work out buying lunch for people and didn’t see him for the rest of the day. So I lost two people from my team, one to technology and one to food. This would be a common theme throughout the weekend.
And after this, well, it was basically a blast from the past, paper pairings, paper slips, and purple fox. I checked in on the judge who was working on table numbers frequently, he presented a few prototypes and printed out the table ends to help judges navigate the event. The tables that had been eaten by the pillar needed to be reassigned each round and this caused problems basically all day. Renumbering the room would’ve been great, and my judge had created the numbers on the laptop, however there was never a good time to send all those numbers to the printer. I resolved to come in early the next day to work on them. I think I shadowed some judge calls but honestly don’t remember much from the rest of the day. At some point sandwiches appeared on the stage and I remember chain eating them. I also remember trading one to a player for a bag of dried mangos. My team got half round breaks and by the end of the day I was dead.
Saturday – Main Event – Slips/Floor/Features Team Lead
The Early Bird Gets the Table Tents
I knew Saturday’s event was going to be big, and wanted to get table numbers done before it started, and ideally, I wanted to renumber the room if possible so that things didn’t suck so much. I walked up to the stage and one of the scorekeepers told me that we didn’t have enough printer ink to justify printing out 500 table numbers. I was very crestfallen. However, when I turned around, the TO approached me with 4 employees who they had brought along to manage product in their booth. The TO said “you have these guys for whatever you need them for this morning”. I paused, and thought for a moment, then grabbed a sharpie, the prototype table number and a few reams of cardstock. I had a plan.
I told them that we would be manually making table numbers. I sat them down and together, with some great insight from the team, we worked out at assembly line. As my main event team trickled in I asked if they’d like to help with table numbers. If I wanted to come in early and work that was one thing, but I needed to make sure others didn’t feel pressured into it. A few people volunteered to put out table numbers. However we ran into an issue, there were an odd number of chairs in each row. We didn’t have time to reorganize the room so I told people to just put out the numbers we had, and get rid of any that would confuse things. This would result in some tables only having the “nametag” number. Halfway through the activity I needed to return to the all hands team meeting. It was kind of frustrating since the table number thing was important, but it was also important to know what was going on during the event since I was a team lead.
Sealed Fates
I was given a zone to distribute product but it ended up being empty, so I assisted other zones. It was a mess, the PA system was unintelligible unless you were right in front of it, and using it to dictate a sealed registration procedure that no one’s done in years was chaos to say the least. I spent the majority of this time sprinting around the hall helping players figure out what to do. This is a good time to mention how the VIP system worked and why it was an issue. So VIPs got entry into any number of events for free over the weekend. This meant that you wanted to enter every sealed event. And probably drop most of them to grind on demand drafts (I think there was a 2 hour cooldown for entering on demand drafts but I’m not sure). This resulted in the main event starting out with 900 players but actually only launching with 600. this meant there were a lot of “registration triangles” which again, is not something people have had to deal with for years. This also meant a lot of players moved around to align with their registration buddies. This meant that when my team went through the hall to take down the names of the players who wanted to drop, we were going to have a lot of issues. Needless to say, all this resulted in a lot of drag on the event.
My Alignment is Chaotic Blue
At some point I had to sit down and help a player finish registering their decklist. The first thing I noticed was that wotc had “helpfully” organized the artifacts on the deck registration sheet by “color alignment”. Which makes sense in theory but in practice is incredibly annoying. So first the cards with prototype were aligned to whatever color their prototype cost was. Okay makes sense. Then if an artifact had unearth or another activated ability that was colored, they’d also be aligned to that color once again, slightly annoying but not a big deal. However the biggest kicker is that if artifacts mentioned “island” or “plains” or any other land, they were also considered to be aligned to that color. This was super annoying because I’d be trying to register an artifact in the generic artifact section only to realize that it said “island” on it somewhere and so I was looking in totally the wrong section.
What is Mentoring, Again?
This is probably a good time to mention that a LOT of the judges on the event had very little comp REL experience and almost none of them, save for the team leads and L3s had large event experience. Because of how hectic things were, I found myself often being come to for rulings and asking my judge “would you like me to just take this ruling” rather than doing something like walking them through it. I had a very small amount of time to go over rulings and philosophy with my charges as well. It was kind of frustrating. Since this would usually be a great time to do some training and mentoring, but when you see five other judge calls start to go stale while you’re trying to explain HCE to a junior judge, something needs to get dropped, and unfortunately, I think the players come first.
Featuring: Lack of Communication
Before the event, I was told that my team was floor, and slips if we ended up going full paper. We did end up going full paper, so I then became the slips and floor lead. Then in round 1 I was told that I was also in charge of features, the HJ wasn’t sure whether I needed to send a judge over to features. I shrugged and said I’d send someone over and if they didn’t come back I assumed they were needed over there. In round two I asked the HJ which match they wanted on features and they seemed a little taken aback, either they’d forgotten or they thought I was supposed to pick a table to send over, they gave me a name and told me that I was now also in charge of picking a feature match, and if I wasn’t told anything to just get the world champion. I shrugged and sent the same judge to take care of it. Then the next round I was told that they didn’t want the world champion, instead I should just take an undefeated table. For my features judge I’d picked a decent RCQ trained L2 on my team, initially I wanted to rotate other judges into the task but decided that there was enough tumult on the event and couldn’t really afford to train anyone else to do the job, front that point on they were completely autonomously in charge of picking and monitoring the feature table.
Later on in the event my mentor asked why I’d picked the RCQ L2 to be the feature judge. I said that I certainly didn’t want the newer L1 as my feature judge, and that I wanted to keep my event grinder L2 on the floor to handle calls. My mentor mentioned that being a feature match judge was actually a bit of a big responsibility, since you both needed a judge that was very good at rules and policy but also could handle being “Twitter hero of the day” if something went wrong, or they had to make a controversial call. While I was lucky and my RCQ L2 didn’t end up being a Twitter hero, I did agree that it was a mistake to put a newer judge that I didn’t know that well onto such a high visibility task. The next day when I needed to once again assign a judge to features I made sure to pick a more appropriate candidate.
Giving People the Slips
I haven’t cut slips in a while and with just a guillotine cutter, it’s not easy. Or rather, it’s very easy to become overly ambitious and try to cut too many slips at once, which results in all the slips looking like a dog cut them with its teeth. This coupled with the slow printer put a significant lag on slip distribution. The first two rounds weren’t too bad, but when the 5ks began their first rounds as the main was trying to turn its rounds things began to get really laggy. This frequently caused my slips to be delayed by 10 minutes, which resulted in anyone who had an opponent that didn’t show up, waiting more than 10 minutes to get their match win. At the end of the day when I did my debrief with my mentor, he mentioned that perhaps I should’ve brought up the issue to the HJ who could potentially strongarm the scorekeeper into prioritizing things differently. I agreed that I probably should’ve mentioned the logistical issues to someone else, I just assumed that the SK was working at peak efficiency and didn’t want to add another complaint to the issue pile. Another thing that fell through the cracks a bit was slip sorting. A relic of ages past, judges haven’t had to sort match slips for a long time now, and I totally forgot about doing it. Because of this, there was a fair amount of lag at the end of round 2 because my team only started sorting slips after time in the round was called.
An Appealing Orb
NAP illegally activated Meticulous Excavation, returning their Mesmeric Orb to their hand at the end of AP’s turn. Then cast Union of the Third Path afterwards, drawing a card and gaining two life. I looked into the situation and noticed that they had an Evolving Wilds in play. I didn’t want to put a random card back and give them the option of shuffling it away and allowing them to draw a new one, so I ruled GRV no backup, I got appealed and upheld.
*Slaps Hand* “You can fit so many cards in this bad boy”
AP was supposed to be mulliganing to 6 but ended up drawing 8. NAP noticed this after AP played his land for T1. My FJ brought this to me, since it seemed like it might be an HCE. I thought it was a bit weird for someone to draw up to 8 and just, not notice. I grabbed the HJ for an investigation, there wasn’t too much to ask here, and eventually the HJ ruled no cheating, based on the fact that it seemed relatively low value and pretty noticeable. I didn’t totally agree with this assessment, just because a cheat was obvious, it didn’t necessarily disqualify it from being cheating. The HJ ruled HCE and as the opponent was selecting two cards to shuffle back in AP said he’d just concede and drop since he didn’t think he’d win the second game with a neutered hand, and with one loss he was out of contention for the Black Lotus.
Sticky Situation
I was supposed to go on my half round break, but decided to check on ODEs and the creator clash (some kind of ODE area where you play with famous people) first to make sure things were okay. On my way over I noticed that the feature match wasn’t playing, I looked around to ask someone, but the commentators weren’t at the booth. I asked the judge on features and he told me that the players had been told to wait. I shrugged and continued to walk to ODEs when the TO stopped me and asked if I could run some “drafting with pros” event. I was like “uhhh okay, I guess” I asked what had been done the previous day and the TO explained it to me. Then the judge that was actually supposed to be running the draft arrived and I helped her start it. My first task after helping seat players was to get her product, on my way to get product I got asked about whether a player’s sticker board was revealed in legacy. I wasn’t totally sure so I asked a few other judges and we can to the consensus that we thought it was (pro tip: we were right). I then took product from ODEs and they told me they were running out of product. Wtf. I dropped the product off with the pro draft and then went to the product area and let them know that ODEs was running out of product. I then returned to the main event stage to realize that I’d wasted my whole break doing random stuff and now it was time for me to start EOR. The feature match went extremely late, and the HJ approached me about it, I told them I’d seen the match being held and the HJ said that it’d been held for 15 minutes. I said that was dumb and confirmed that we wanted matches held for 5 minutes max, ideally no more than 3 minutes. I went over to talk to coverage to find out what happened. Apparently coverage had went on lunch break and then missed the round turnover. Someone else in the coverage area had told the matches to wait until the coverage team returned from lunch, which they did 15 minutes later.
A Prized Structure
There were multiple events advertised as “5ks”. However, we quickly discovered that these events weren’t going to cut to top 8 and that the prize structure hadn’t been announced anywhere. In addition to this some of the events were starting at really awkward times, such as noon or 4pm which meant that we couldn’t realistically run all 7 or 8 rounds in one day unless we wanted to keep players in the venue until midnight. This meant that two strange things were going to happen:
1) The 5ks were going to be split across 2 days. So some were 4 rounds on Saturday and 3 rounds on Sunday etc. We also weren’t cutting to top 8. I was told this was because the event on Friday decided not to cut to allow judges to go home at a reasonable hour. The rest of the 5ks followed suit.
2) The prizes would be given out based on swiss standings which are listed below for the Modern 5k.
21 points $300
19-20 points $225
18 points $150
16-17 points $100
15 points $50
14 points $25
Players kind of freaked out about this, since they were worried that less than 5k would be given out in prizes. I think the goal was to actually give out as close to, or a little more than 5k in prizes, but obviously since payout is happening based on record this is going to be very dependant on the number of players. Because of this weird structure the payouts for each 5k was different. This is, of course, a terrible system and a great lesson in why we run top 8s for these events.
The main event also suffered from a similar lack of planning, it was 8 rounds on day 1 and then 6 rounds with a cut to top 16 on day two. Now this isn’t too weird until I tell you that for Day 2 we weren’t running drafts like a normal GP, instead we’d just be having the players use the same sealed decks as the day before. Prize structure was also not solidified before the event, because in about round 5 while I was working on some slip activity by the stage I overheard one of the HJs ask another judge to work out the prize structure.
Sunday – Unified Deck Checks.....?
Team Building
I was given a very large team on Sunday to do deck checks, me and five other judges. Initially the main event HJ said that he wanted me to do 6 deck checks a round, which is, sort of doable. However things began to fall apart quickly. The legacy 5k HJ had no one to do deck checks and requested I do checks for him. The sealed 5k was slated to be huge and that HJ also wanted me to to checks for him as well, and then the Pioneer HJ revealed to me that I had also been slated to do checks for that event as well. So I shrugged and assumed I was on unified checks. On Saturday ODEs told me they’d be taking one of my judges. Ok. Fine. That’s five judges, that’s still enough for checks on four events. I checked in with MTGNerdGirl in the morning to see if she was getting any support. She said that they’d told her she was going to be getting two judges but at this point we were both dubious as to whether that would actually happen. I said I’d send a judge over just in case, and if they didn’t return I’d assume her two judges hadn’t materialized. Then main event stole one of my judges for features since apparently more feature match areas spawned overnight. Then they told me that two of my judges were leaving at 2pm. This was... a lot to juggle, between my rapidly decreasing team size and ensuring everyone got breaks I felt like a headless chicken for most of the morning. Then on top of all this, I was told that main event didn’t want me doing checks for any other event. I definitely felt like mom and dad were fighting at this point. I didn’t want to pingpong between warring events, and Pioneer wanted literally a single check done so I just did it without wasting more time talking to the main even HJ. The main event HJ was annoyed and in retrospect I should’ve just told him to argue with the Pioneer HJ instead of effectively “going rogue”. The Sealed event, luckily ended up being much smaller than expected and so the large team assigned to it got rearranged to do their own checks. I think the Legacy HJ also managed to scrounge around and found some judges behind the stage or something to do checks because I was told that they didn’t need me for that either by the time noon rolled around and that event started.
Bag Cards, Bag Cards, Whatchu Gonna Do When They Game Loss You?
We had a mid round deck check where AP’s two sideboard cards were bent in a different way from the rest of their deck. After investigating we determined that since AP had put both their deck and SB into their bag overnight some condensation had warped all the unsleeved cards (their SB) causing the uneven warping. Thus I had to issue about 20 proxies for potential SB cards that had been warped throughout the course of the event. I also issued a Game Loss for marked cards, which was appealed and upheld.
Value Huntin’ VIPs
Like I said earlier, VIPs got free entry into every event, so it was simply value to enter every sealed event. Therefore the Sealed 5k had about 400 players registered but only 100 players who actually wanted to stick around and play! Usually during deck registration and build, judges go around and collect the names of the players that aren’t in their seats, for this event the HJ determined that it would be much more efficient to take down the names of the players that had shown up since there were so many drops!
...In Conclusion
This event was a lot of work, and was definitely in the top 10 most disorganized events I’ve ever worked (though it’s very possible that I’ve worked other events and haven’t seen the amount of band-aids that were implemented due to not being in leadership for those events) However the TO was really accommodating and when they realized they were out of their depth they were very happy to turn the event over to the people that could fix it. They were also quick to get us the supplies we needed, like paper, printers etc. I really wish they’d communicated better beforehand, but I think based on how receptive they were to feedback at the event I’m hopeful for the future, and think this TO shows a lot of growth potential. I’m glad I got to work Summit and would gladly do another event with Kingdoms!