Atlanta, Georgia | Pioneer
Time: Friday November 18th - Sunday November 20th 2022
Main Event Players: 928 | Winner: Matthew Saypoff


Friday - ODEs


What is Dreamhack?
So, I don’t work a lot of conventions as a judge, but have attended conventions as both an attendee and an art vendor, and I have to say that Dreamhack felt a lot more like PAX than a MagicFest. The focus seemed to be primarily on computer gaming, and walking through the hall was kind of bizarre, there were large sponsor booths like Monster, Circle K and Nesquik. There was a gigantic LAN area right next to the ODE section (which actually caused some issues because the LAN area wanted the lights off and players, uh, well wanted the lights on). In the back there were some singers doing concerts and some stages with interviews with content creators going on. Overall it was kind of a neat event to be at and I wish I’d had a little more time to check things out.

Enter the Dungeon
Having just come off MTG Summit I saw signs that this event might have similar logistical issues. On Thursday evening at the conference I asked when the call time for Friday was, since it wasn’t yet on the schedule. The Saturday and Sunday schedules were also not yet posted. I sighed and resigned to coming in early the next day to see what needed to be done. My room anticipated getting to the venue about an hour early, however two things prevented this from being reality. First, while Google claimed the venue was a clean 15 minute walk away, in reality it was a 15 minute walk to the venue and then an additional 15 minute walk to the part of the venue the event was actually taking place in. Second, there was a gigantic line of about 500 people trying to get into the venue. Luckily my group had picked up their event badges the night previous so we didn’t have to wait in the also incredibly long badge pickup line. The line was confusing and initially we were told that yes, even staff needed to wait in line. We shrugged and began waiting. After a few moments of boredom we decided to verify this, since it seemed rather odd. Apparently misinformation was already worming its way into Dreamhack Atlanta, because we actually didn’t need to wait in the line. We arrived at the hall and were told that the staff room was about a 5 minute walk away tucked into a corner of the venue. We grabbed out uniforms and trekked over to the staff room to drop our stuff off. By the time we found the staff room and made our way back to the hall we were right on time, and not at all an hour early.

Last Chance to Pay a Developer
the plan for LCQs was a little strange, the TO wanted to run all LCQs as a single event in MTGMelee. I’m not really sure how the logistics of this were supposed to work, but I do know that it didn’t work. The LCQs were supposed to be 32 person single elimination trials. What ended up happening was players were quickly prevented from signing up online, as the MTGMelee system quickly broke down, and so players were forced to sign up manually in person. After doing so the scorekeeper would print out a bracket of 8 names, and a judge would call out those 8 names, seat the players and have them play. After each match they would report to a judge who had the job of handing out prize tix, promos and organizing the fourth and fifth rounds of the LCQs. The way this worked was after players had played three rounds there would be a single winner, and that player would be paired against another single winner from another 8 person LCQ. Then once those two had played it would happen again for a final round, with the invite on the line. This was incredibly strange and frustrating to run. Because of the lack of staff rounds weren’t timed and deck checks weren’t done. I remember starting a few Sealed LCQs and these were even more of a mess. After a few hours of this I think the TO got MTGMelee working again because it looked like they were able to switch back to 32 player events.

Professional Gopher
I’m not going to lie, on Friday I launched approximately zero ODEs. It was where I was assigned but I felt like my job would’ve been more accurately described as “snack muncher” and “fire blanket” because that’s kind of what I was doing all day. I covered a few breaks, took some calls on LCQs and ran back and forth across the hall gophering for people. Near the end of the day I noticed some people fiddling around with nametags on the main stage and made the mistake of asking what was going on. I was told that for every player that had qualified for the RCQ before Friday, would be recieving a personalized nametag with their name, and the store they qualified at. This is, unbelievably cool, and as a player it’s an amazing value add to the event! So big props to Carter and Dreamhack for making this happen! The downside is that they wanted to judges to hand out the nametags to each player the next day. I asked why we couldn’t just have a judge at the front and allow players to collect the nametags themselves throughout the course of the day. I was told that handing them out was the TO’s way of intentionally lagging the event so that players that were potentially stuck in the security line up could avoid getting a round one game loss. I shrugged and relegated myself to organizing nametags alphabetically by last name.

Saturday – Regional Championship EOR Lead


Furry Critters
I was told that I would be the team lead for End of Round on the Regional Championship on Friday night. I got Purple Fox access and was told that there would be MTGMelee integration, which was kind of an exciting prospect. My team was myself, another experienced circuit judge who I was rooming with and two relatively newer judges. In my hotel room that night I went over the plan for the next day with the circuit judge. Purple Fox, while a great piece of software, isn’t something I’ve touched for 3 years and it’s changed since then. It now accepts penalty entry, which is a great boon since currently only Eventlink accepts penalty entry, and it’s really difficult to actually do that.

Class, Please Open Your Decklists to Page 1
Along with nametags and promos, paper decklists needed to be handed out at the beginning of the day. Why were we giving players paper decklists, you might ask? Well the Regional Championship is an open decklist event, meaning that at the beginning of each match players need to exchange decklists with their opponent. This is probably the second time ever I’ve worked an event like this, and there are a lot of small things that came up around this issue. The most prominent was note taking, when are players allowed to take notes? They can’t make notes while holding the decklist, but as soon as they put it away they can make notes, but if they spend too long writing stuff down we can start hitting them with slow play warnings. Another thing is looking at the decklist mid-game. This is not allowed and will result in an outside assistance penalty with a downgrade to a Game Loss (rather than a match loss) since the decklist is something the player can access between games. Finally, the weirdest thing I encountered was if a player gets a game loss at the start of their match, they’re allowed to sideboard before playing any games of magic! This is weird but makes sense philosophically. The reason they aren’t allowed to SB for game losses issued at the start of a match in a “closed decklist” event is because they shouldn’t really have any information with which to base the sideboarding off of.

Sunday - 10K Head Judge


A Flighty Investigation
AP only had one white source but cast bishop of binding as well as Righteous Valkyrie. It was a fairly simple GRV backup but as this was late in the day and at the top tables I wanted to investigate for cheating. My favorite question to ask is “who’s winning” but this early in the game both players were like “IDK it’s anyone’s game” which made the question pretty useless. I wasn’t really sure what else to do, and shrugged, determining that it was a low enough value cheat that it was probably not cheating. A judge shadowing me mentioned that because the fix would likely be a rewind which would lock the player into a bishop of wings as their only play for the turn instead of the Resplendent Angel, it was somewhat likely that it wasn’t cheating. UI’m not sure about guessing player’s knowledge of policy to determine if if they view the cheat as high or low risk, but I think a good question to ask would’ve been what the player thought the fix for the issue was.

Aaaaand the Game Loss Goes to: DragonShield
AP had a deck that was clearly in two different types of purple sleeves, or rather, perhaps two different runs of Dragonshields, all their sleeves were purple but about half of them had a slightly different reflectiveness to them. I issued the warning for marked cards, and instructed my FJs to help the player resleeve. Unfortunately, there weren’t any vendors in the hall that were actually selling card sleeves, so the player elected to drop from the event.

A Notion of a Day Beyond the Veil
AP controlled Narset, Parter of Veils and Notion Thief, and cast Day’s Undoing, how many cards do they draw? How many cards does their opponent draw? This was an appeal, the FJ said that AP would draw 8 cards, but after thinking it through, Narset doesn’t start blocking draws until NAP has actually drawn a card, and since all draws will be replaced by Notion Thief, AP would actually draw 14 cards.

Just Tell Me What You Actually Want
I shadowed a call where AP asked “is Anointed Peacekeeper’s ability a replacement effect?” the FJ said yes it was, but the player still looked a little confused and then managed to stumble through asking “can my opponent do anything after I put it into play with Collected Company but before I name something?” the FJ then said yes, seeing what the actual question was. I took the opportunity to talk to my FJ about the value of asking players what it is that they’re actually trying to do. Oftentimes players will ask me weirdly specific or technical questions, and sometimes they’re not even really asking the question they want an answer to. So it’s really good to ask players what they’re trying to accomplish.

Cards Lost
One of my FJs found a player’s deck and asked me what to do with it, I told him to go to the prize wall/ registration booth and turn it into lost and found. Apparently when he went over there, they sent him back to the main event stage and had him drop off the deck there, at which point on of hte RC HJs paged the player, since we had their name. They were also doing this for players who left their decklists lying around. I thought this was a little peculiar, since we don’t usually page players who’ve lost belongings. Personally I like to minimize mic chatter since at a certain point players will start auto-filtering out microphone announcements which becomes really problematic for when you actually have to get ahold of players.

Pragmatic Paperwork
Before my event started I was told that while the majority of the decklists would be in MTGMelee there would be some amount of paper decklists because MTGMelee had closed decklist submission 10 minutes before the event started. I told my judges that at the beginning of the round we had two tasks, to get decklists and to hand out promos. I did the promos first and then never announced for the judges to get decklists. This was an issue because players who had paper lists never knew when to hand them in, so they were trickling in over the next few rounds. It was so busy and hectic that I didn’t even really think about them until round 4 when things had mostly calmed down and my staff stopped changing (sides was constantly taking people and then giving me different people so it was hard to keep track of who was doing what). I assigned a judge to figure out which players were missing decklists. My strategy was as follows
1) If the player says they handed the decklist to a judge believe them and assume we lost it, then later deck check them, take a photo of their deck and write them up a list.
2) If the player hands you a list now, ask them why they didn’t hand it in beforehand, and unless they have a good reason give them a game loss.
3) If a player says that they attempted to submit it online and ran into issues, believe them, and have them create a paper decklist after their current match is done.

In retrospect I think this wasn’t a great approach, ideally in round 1 I should’ve made an announcement for lists, and failing that I should’ve done it at the beginning of a subsequent round. Even with my current strategy I think the game loss was too punitive since well meaning players could’ve just been waiting to hand it in or could’ve forgotten.

Seating Status? Fixed
The event initially started quite far away from the main stage, since Day 2 of the Regional Championship was being run at the tables closer to the stage. However in round 5 or 6 the RC ended and the scorekeeper proposed that we move my event up closer to the stage. I said this was alright, and approached the task of moving the fixed seats. When I went to one of the players in fixed seating they complained that we had been moving them all day and that they’d rather stay where they were if possible. I thought about it for a moment and said that we wouldn’t be seating any more events, so if they didn’t mind being far away from the rest of the event I didn’t have a problem with it.

A Hungry Trigger
AP escaped a Kroxa, Titan of Death’s Hunger, then looked at his hand and thought for a moment, and passed the turn. Before NAP untapped AP mentioned his trigger. NAP agreed with the story, and I was about to issue a very simple reversing decisions ruling in AP’s favor when a spectator tapped me on the shoulder and mentioned that they had some additional information about the call. I was curious since both players agreed on the story. The spectator said that NAP had put a card in the graveyard while AP was looking at his hand and then picked it back up when he realized AP had forgotten his trigger. The spectator mentioned that the card in NAP’s hand was a Stomping Ground from Return to Ravnica. I felt like this was really weird but had noted that NAP was being fairly aggressive about this trigger having been missed. It’s possible that NAP thought that if he had remembered it for AP than AP was entitled to it, and therefore wasn’t willing to disclose the information that he’d noticed AP forget the trigger. I felt like it was weird enough to loop one of the HJs into the call and did so. Unfortunately there were a few more calls I took while the investigation was going on so I never got any more information on it, other than the fact that in the end NAP got DQ’d for lying to a judge.

...In Conclusion
Personally I felt like Dreamhack Atlanta was less of a mess than MTG Summit but I think the main reason for this was that there weren’t a lot of messes that I personally involved myself in, unlike Summit where I definitely took on more small tasks. Even so, I had a great time working the event, as always I like feeling useful and when the event is on fire, I really feel like I’m useful at these kinds of events. I was also really excited to be put as the Pioneer 10k HJ on Sunday. We got a full 409 players and my team was only 6 judges, so it was a big challenge. Especially since the experience on my team was a little low. Personally I’m a trial by fire kind of person, and this was exactly that. Also I think to date it’s the largest Comp REL event I’ve head judged, so there’s also that! Overall I had a great time at the event, and will definitely apply to more Dreamhack events in the future.