Calgary, Canada
Time: Sunday February 19th 2023
Modern: 18


Role - Conference Organizer


For the Sake of Role Playing
This is the first mock tournament I’ve organized, and the second I’ve participated in. My major goal for this event was “realism”. I wanted it to feel as much like a real tournament as possible. The major issue with mock tournaments are that everyone breaks character and there aren’t any consequences. Which are, interestingly enough, the same issues that you tend to encounter a lot in D&D. Many may not know this but I was a hardcore DM before I was a hardcore judge, I only ever DM’d two games. But both those games lasted for multiple years, and if you want to know what kind of DM I was, I’d say my crowning success was making a player cry by having the knight that he had acquired 6 months earlier from a Deck of Many Things say that he was going to leave the player’s service, after that player traded away the knight’s “loyalty” to a god on the divine market.
....God D&D is freaking weird. Anyways, back to mock tournaments. I felt like if I could wrangle my group of WoW playing, Youtube watching memelords into actually developing feelings for NPCs, I could wrangle a bunch of judges into pretending they were players.

The way I attacked this was to establish a physical signal for being out of character, I actually just hijacked what they did in the LARP I used to be a part of. It’s hard to describe but it’s like, make a pointing hand, but then also raise your second finger. It’s a weird gesture and not something people do naturally, so it’s very evident when someone goes out of character.

The next thing I did was have costumes. Costumes make everything better. We had a red HJ shirt for the HJ each round and the FJ would bring their own FJ shirt (Face to Face has given out a lot of judge shirts, so everyone that needed one, had one) for the TO I used an old ChannelFireball Ops shirt as well as an orange Face to Face hat. You are probably about to ask what the TO role is and why it’s necessary. The TO’s job was twofold, the first fold (is that a valid expression? IDK) was to be a TO, the persona given was “a comic-book shop owner that is running their first RCQ and knows absolutely nothing about magic judging”. Their role was to answer any random logistics questions that would be reasonable for a TO to know, such as “where are the table numbers” or “where can I find pens” or anything logistically weird about the mock tournament itself. However they also had another job - to watch judge calls as the TO (so if the judge asked them any questions they wouldn’t be able to answer them) BUT after the calls were over the TO was to remove their hat and would become imbued with the spirit of Kevin Desprez, and would give excellent feedback on the calls. This is obviously a little immersion breaking, but taking judge calls isn’t very useful without immediate feedback, I also designated these people as my “presenters” so that also solved the problem of “what am I going to do with these presenter foils”.

You Never Catch the Good Cheaters
The next thing I needed to address was the common issue of everyone going crazy with over-the-top cheats, USC or anything else that’s really unrealistic and unlikely to come up at an actual event. This is actually a problem in a lot of workshops as well, people just do insane things and the judge on the call is just like “what do I even do here” and I’m usually in the back watching the judge’s soul erode and thinking “yeah I have no idea what to do when a child starts screaming and throwing their deck around. In the 100+ large events that I have worked this has literally never happened.”
I hate it when people do this because it emabrasses the judge on the call and wastes everyone’s time. I’d much rather see a simulation of an HCE or an LEC since those things come up at least 4 times per event.
Anyways, the first thing I did to head off crazy random cheats was implement something I’m calling the “Emiya” rule. If you get DQ'd in the tournament you get DQ'd in real life.... kinda. If you’re DQ’d, you have to sit and write a statement and the judge for that round has to write a statement and then they have to input a DQ in EventLink. And you are not playing for the rest of the event. And you don’t get prizes. This may seem harsh but I think this really encourages people to cheat like a player would cheat, meaning – only cheat when it matters, and try not to get caught.

The second thing I did to was introduce stakes, but there were prizes! There are REASONS to cheat. One of the big parts of cheating investigations is looking for motive, but what motive is there if you get nothing for winning? I figured the only way to simulate this was to actually put in some prize support.

The prizes ended up being a full blown prize wall because my house at this point is just a place to hold all my magic-branded swag. I brought packs as the default thing to buy for 10tix but also playmats, judge swag, secret lairs etc. This part is unnecessary for most mock tournaments but I do think some kind of prizing helps up the stakes.

To, uh, not hemorrhage money for the event I asked that judges pay $5 for the event, and for players it was free. This actually caused a ton of confusion since most judges were also playing they weren’t sure whether they needed to buy in or not. I clarified by saying “if I’m giving you a foil packet, you’re paying $5. I figured this was reasonable, since most people don’t balk at $5 since it’s the price of a weekly, and honestly, the foil packet is worth a lot more than $5.

Attached below is the pre-event letter I sent out (with judges names removed for privacy reasons)

Mock Tournament Pre-Event Information



Logistical Nightmare
The format was as follows, we had a pre-event meeting at noon, where I told everyone about the prizes and DQs and that it’s not going to work if everyone is just insane all the time. I also tried to stress the fact that if the HJ and FJ were both involved in a call to not generate any new problems until the judges had time for you. Then the actual event started at 1pm. For each round there was one head judge and one floor judge, as well as a Tournament Organizer. The HJ and FJ roles should be fairly straight forward, they do HJ and FJ things.

The next logistical hurdle to overcome was how to swap judges out each round. What I ended up settling on was after each round we’d have a short 10-15 minute debrief to see how things went, share some short stories, and course correct if anything was going off the rails. People seemed to really like this, but I think in the future, I’d like to have people share how they cheated each round, so further cement the fact that it’s very hard to catch cheaters, and help people know what to look for in future rounds.

Because we were running the event in EventLink we couldn’t add or subtract players willy nilly, so what we ended up doing for the people that were judging for a round was have them “play in place” of whoever had the role in the previous round. Meaning that 3 fewer people would register for the event than were actually at the conference. This was by far the most complex part of the event, but it went alright. Let me provide an example.

In round 1 Tobi is the TO, Megan is the HJ and Eric is the FJ.
Eric, Megan and Tobi don’t register in EventLink.
In round 2 Brian is the TO, John is the HJ and Matt is the FJ.
Tobi will play Brian’s opponent.
Megan will play John’s opponent.
Eric will play Matt’s opponent.

Tobi, Megan and Eric will keep and internal record of match wins for prizing purposes.

It’s not an amazing system but it was the best I could come up with and still use EventLink for the tournament. I know there are other options (BestCoastPairings comes to mind since I think it’s free, unlike MTGMelee) however there aren’t many chances for judges to practice using EventLink, so I wanted to make sure the tournament included that as well. For the record we didn’t submit the event to WotC since there was a) tournament fraud b) rampant cheating c) players impersonating other players.

How it Went Down
Even with all my guidance, round one was still a bit chaotic, I think leading up to the event people were buzzing with excitement about all the cool things they were going to do and just kind of... exploded in round 1. We ended up with an odd number of players which resulted in a bye. About 20 minutes into the round I noticed that the FJ and HJ were constantly bogged down and I (the TO and shadow for the round) could barely get any mentoring in since the judges were going from call to call. In addition to this approximately zero deck checks were getting done. As the “TO” I decided to “hire” another judge for the event. I grabbed the judge with the bye, put them in a judge shirt and threw them into the mix.

Round one ended up going severely overtime, and in the post round meetup I stressed to people that we needed to tone it down a bit for future rounds so that the judges could breathe. Things improved in round 2 and for round 3 they were actually kinda dead. At the beginning of round 4 a major snowstorm was rolling in and a bunch of judges needed to leave, which caused a big of a logistical mess for the final round. We managed to get it sorted but it was a bit chaotic. In addition to this the store was also closing in roughly an hour. The HJ made the (correct) call of only giving us 30 minutes for the round.

Cheater’s Paradise
After the event one of my opponent’s let me know that for every round they pre-boarded their deck. I was like “Oh yeah! You cast Mystical Dispute against me in G1 and I didn’t think anything of it!”. Another player mulliganed to four but insisted that they had mulliganed to five. It was a long investigation, but the judges eventually ruled in their favor. At this event we very likely had 18 Alex Bertoncinis.

Roll the Dice
I had two flipped Delver of Secrets, and my opponent played Engineered Explosives on one. I groaned internally, but then realized that I could just attempt to get a bad ruling. I called a judge and confidently asserted that I thought that the mana value of my flipped Delvers was 0 (which like, used to be true) unfortunately for me, the judge on the call got this one right and my Delvers were destroyed. As a judge something I’ve never considered is players who know the right ruling attempting to get a judge to rule incorrectly. Honestly, it’s kind of a great angle shot, it’s not technically cheating because if the judge rules weirdly, that’s not technically my fault. Though I would have to say that I’m not a fan of any player that does this.

Administrative Obfuscation
My opponent accidentally put down 8 cards in front of them at the start of the game and called a judge on themselves. While the judge was handling the call, I drew my opening hand, it was terrible, so I put it back and quickly drew a second one and didn’t put any cards on the bottom. My opponent was distracted enough by the judge call that he didn’t notice. I was kind of shocked at how easy it was to pull this one off.

Dress Up
Later on I also did something similar, I drew for turn and then noticed that NAP’s sleeves looked weird. I asked the judge to speak away from the table and took my hand so it wouldn’t be obvious I was asking for an investigation on my opponent’s sleeves. I asked the judge on the call to obfuscate the fact that I'd asked for this, because I didn’t want to cause a bunch of tension in my game. Then to enhance the appearance that I’d actually asked a rules question I took a brief look at my hand and noticed a Dress Down, I asked how it worked with Murktide Regent and was told that my Murktide would enter with +1/+1 counters. I paused for a moment, this is not the correct ruling. I quizzically looked at the judge and asked if he was certain, he paused fumbled around and then said yes. I asked for an appeal and the FJ was upheld. I was frustrated because I’d boarded in the Dress Down’s for my opponents Murktide Regents. I went back to my seat. And the judge immediately asked to see my opponent’s deck. I internally facepalmed at the lack of subtlety. Because I was so frustrated I drew a second card for turn to counterbalance the disadvantage I’d received for the poor ruling. Also because enough time had elapsed that it would be easy to play off as a mistake.

This situation was interesting for two reasons. One: getting a second card was incredibly easy since I just inserted a judge call in between the two draws, and two: it feels freaking horrible to get an incorrect judge ruling. As a player it was probably right up there with drawing no lands for 6 turns in a row. There was a point in the game where I had a Dress Down ready for my opponent’s Murktide, but didn’t bother casting it to blank the delve counters because I knew that the judges would rule that it didn’t do anything.

Later on in that game my opponent and I got into a counterwar, they cast Expressive iteration, I cast counterspell they responded with spell pierce, I responded by casting snapcaster, they cast counterspell, I cast a second snapcaster, which they also counterspelled. I was out of mana at that point and sighed. We resolved the stack, and then my opponent said “okay and you paid two for this spell pierce” I was about to say “no that was two for the snapcaster mage” but I stopped myself and just nodded, “yeah I paid two for that”.



...In Conclusion
So... I savagely cheated like, four times and never even got a warning for any of it. I also felt incredibly scummy at the end. A savvy cheater can get away with tons of stuff, which is not something that a lot of us like to think about. I’m not naturally inclined to cheating, so being given a bit of a playground to experiment and get into the head of malicious players was a very new experience for me. I’m definitely going to be running more mock tournaments with a bigger emphasis on cheating in the future, since sadly no one actually got DQ’d in this one. I’ve got some ideas for the upcoming Ottawa conference (It’s only an hour and half slot, so it’s just going to be one round, and I’m running it like a social deduction game, where everyone has a “role” assigned to them)

The other thing I learned was that overall I think the logistics were fine, in the future that I’ll have people unveil their dastardly cheats in between rounds, but I also think the event only needs to be three rounds, four rounds was way too many and people seemed a bit exhausted at the end. In total the event ran from noon to about 6pm which is pretty long for a conference. That being said, a lot of that time for most people was just playing modern, which is a fairly enjoyable experience.