Emerald City Comic Con
Seattle, Washington
Time: Thursday March 2nd– Sunday March 5th 2023


There’s a First Time for Everyone
This was the tournament organizer’s first time running Magic events at Emerald City Comic Con. From what I understood the store running Magic got the gig a little under a month before the event, which is a really short timeline when you consider staffing, marketing, and organization. So understandably there were some uh... anomalies. Events started every hour which is a bit of a pain, since it means that rounds are turning at the same time new events are starting. The structure was advertised as “double elimination” which isn’t even a setting in EventLink, and while it’s not super hard to implement (just drop players after their second loss), I didn’t see any reason to actually run events as double elimination since swiss is not only easier, but also lets people play more Magic, which is kind of what convention players want. On the flip side of things, the prize wall was stacked, WotC officially sponsored the event, which meant we had a cornucopia of awesome oversized cards and uncut sheets!

Casually Speaking...
I’ve never worked a convention before, and the needs of convention players are dramatically different than the needs of competitive players. Firstly, I think I somewhat take it for granted how inedependant competative players are. It’s been a while since I’ve had to explain that matches are best of three and that you’re playing three rounds of Magic. Or how deckbuilding in draft works,the fact that for limited basic lands are provided. The next thing that kind of hit me was how relevant it was to avoid having byes. Convention players want to play magic more than anything else, and a bye is incredibly boring for them. We addressed this by having me sit in on draft pods and play the bye player on Thursday and Friday while it was slow. The next thing that needed fixing was the prizing, the next worst thing after not playing Magic for 50 minutes, is getting pub-stomped by some spike trying to grind tix. Initially prizes were set up so that only 2-0-1 and better got something, but we changed it so that 1-2 or better got something.

Limited Problems
Every event on the schedule was limited, either draft or sealed. The thing about scheduled drafts is that they just kind of suck. We ran into a situation multiple times where we had an odd number of players in each draft and EventLink wouldn’t pair the two byes together. This isn’t EL’s fault, it’s not pairing cross-pod because we didn’t tell it to do that at the beginning of the event (and you can’t change it mid-event), however at an event like this I would probably manually pair (if I could) the two bye players. As it was, I just asked each player if they’d like to play, and only once during the weekend did the players decline. The other annoying thing about running scheduled drafts is that oftentimes one pod would finish draft and build before the other and just have to sit around and... wait. Oftentimes I just let them start playing early, but this is annoying for timer-reasons, and also dumb because if EventLink does something unexpected with pairings I can’t fix it. I think a better method would’ve been to run a few sealed and constructed events and then run drafts as ODEs.

Speaking of ODEs that was another issue that the judge staff tackled this weekend. We proposed to the TO $5 on-demand commander pods, and they were a hit! We had registration take people’s phone numbers and text them when the pod was ready to go. This is an OK system, and worked fine for the volume we had (I think over the course of the convention we launched maybe 20 commander pods), but for the future I suggested handing out buzzers like we had at GPs.

Fraudulent Matters
I like tournament integrity, I really do. But I also like happy players. One of our drafts was a Kamigawa draft which has a lot of double-faced cards. Recall that a lot of these players are so new that they don’t even realize that there’s a problem with playing a double-faced card unsleeved. We didn’t have enough checklist cards to give each player, so instead we wrote on basic lands. Technically, this is illegal as per the MTR, since it very specifically outlines when we’re allowed to give out proxies, and this case isn’t one of them, but the alternatives are telling the player that they now have to buy sleeves, or telling them they can’t play with their DFC. I think at anything more competitive than this I’d probably disallow it, since I think there’s some small amount of advantage to be gained by the player pretending their proxy is a basic land or something, but here I think cheating is less our focus and that player experience is paramount.

2-Headed Disaster
We had a Two-Headed Giant Commander sealed event scheduled. This is problematic for many reasons. First 2HG commander doesn’t actually have defined rules. We went with 60 life, 90 minute rounds and a shared commander damage pool for the team (similar to how poison works in 2HG). These were the fiat rules we used at CommandFest Orlando and they seemed to work well enough, so we ran them back. The other issue with this event is that EventLink doesn’t do 2HG so well. Initially we had an issue moving teams from the lobby into the event, we figured later that this was because one member of the team had the Companion app and the other didn’t and so when the one person registered the team it was causing issues. So then we manually entered a bunch of players in, because registration was doing this quickly they just put in the last initial instead of writing in the players entire last names, like they’d been doing all weekend. The unfortunate issue here is that 2HG names the teams after the combined last names of the individual members. This meant we had a bunch of two-letter team names that were completely indecipherable. So registration had to take them all out and put them back in again with correct names. This all took quite a bit of time and delayed the event by about 20 minutes. In retrospect, since it was a prerelease-style casual event, we could’ve just given the players the product as they paid and had them sit wherever and build. We weren’t crunched for space and this would’ve prevented like 30 people just standing around waiting.

Learn to Teach
For Friday and Saturday a Wotc employee wandered into our area and ran a very popular “learn to play Magic” area. However, he wasn’t available for Sunday. It was pretty slow on Sunday and so I decided to build some decks out of draft chaff and run my own learn to play area! I ended up teaching three different players before handing it off to the other judge and it was a really interesting experience, I had forgotten just how complex Magic really is, and that what you really need to teach people is an extremely bare-bones deck. The draft chaff, unfortunately didn’t contain a lot of vanilla creatures that I could fill the decks with. I suggested to the TO that in the future this should definitely be a feature of the Magic area, and if I end up working ECCC in the future I’m going to plan ahead and build some new-player friendly decks.

...In Conclusion
Overall EMCC was alright, it was definitely very different than the events I normally work. Thursday and Friday were really slow and in some ways slow events are more stressful than busy ones. I did however get to really examine some of the aspects of event running that I don’t often look at, such as event start times and scheduling. I also got to spend a while thinking about how to best serve more casual players. It’s been a long time since I’ve engaged with a crowd this un-enfranchised. It was a really unique experience and I’d be happy to try more events like this in the future!