Orlando, Florida
Time: Friday April 14th – Sunday April 16th 2023

Friday – Scheduled Sides Lead

Sides Tasks
My first order of business was to get pairings boards in the right places, this was a little tricky since the venue was kinda small. I’ve also determined that there’s no universal feeling towards pairing board placement from vendors. Some vendors love pairings boards near them, because it means the players cluster near their booth, other vendors hate it because it blocks their merchandise, and while players are clustering they’re not necessarily buying anything. In the end, it’s always better to ask each vendor how they feel about it.

A Companionable Ability
Over the weekend I got to take very few rules questions, and most of the questions I did get were “how do battles work in 2HG?” (both players can block for the battle). But one of the other interesting questions I got was whether paying {3} to put a companion in your hand was an activated ability. Well, you know what they say, if it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, that must mean it’s a special action that doesn’t use the stack and isn’t an activated ability.

Break Me off a Piece of that Schedule
I seem to be finding myself in charge of break schedules more and more these days, and I’ve yet to find one that works smoothly with side events. For newer judges, they often like to be in charge of individual events, and taking your break in the middle of it kind of sucks, so for this event, I had people take their breaks either 1.5 hours before their event, or after their event ended. Unfortunately there were still two people that ended up needing to take their break in the middle of their event, just because of the timing of it. Finally this ended up making half round breaks awkward as well, which resulted in breaks feeling incredibly messy and floor coverage getting weirdly thin at points. Because Friday was a bit of a mess this way, I ended up just going for a more traditional break schedule on Saturday.

Saturday – Scheduled Sides Lead

TO Woes
I like TOs who are willing to iterate and change things, being too rigid is a curse, if you ask me. It doesn’t totally change the fact that I was knocked off guard when I was asked on Friday night if it would be okay to uncap the Saturday prereleases. We hadn’t filled the room the previous day, and based on the number of badges sold, we felt that uncapping the events wouldn’t cause any huge issues, like running out of product or anything. The first prerelease ended up being 160 players, which was pretty significant, but not too much to handle! The biggest issue with all the prereleases was the fact that each kit contained one of three random commander cards that the players weren’t allowed to play in their pools. While I never ran into anyone playing the darn thing, I was also super vigilant about making infinite announcements informing players of this fact.

No Plan Survives First Contact
An event isn’t really a good event unless something catastrophic happens on Saturday. At this event, it was our printer going down right before round two of the monster prerelease. Luckily, in the Companion era, this isn’t such a big deal, though there were still a handful of players who were “allergic” to Companion. We had those players line up in front of the scorekeeper, who would read their pairings off the computer. It worked well enough and didn’t end up costing us too much time in the grand scheme of things.

Regular Suspicion
In larger, regular REL sealed events, there’s always going to be that one guy with a really good sealed pool that people are concerned is... less than legitimate. One player in particular opened two Vorinclexs’. I had a judge watch the player during their next prerelease, but they opened a different kind of nuts pool for that one, that had no need for Vorinclex.

Sunday – Scheduled Sides Lead

Regular REL 1.5
So, CoolStuff really wanted to do this prerelease with crazy top-heavy prizes. As in first place gets four complete sets of March of the Machine. But they wanted to run it on Sunday, which means we can’t do a top 8. Okay fine, we’ll pay out based on swiss standings, which means it’s 7 rounds. Also, it’s a prerelease, which means it can’t be comp REL for some reason. So instead we did “pool registration”. We followed the regular pool swap and registration, but didn’t bother getting the players to register their decklists. One of my FJs mentioned that this felt weird to anyone familiar with Comp REL and maybe it would’ve been better to do the entire sealed registration. I felt like most of the players weren’t going to be that familiar with comp REL pool registration, and that I didn’t want to sacrifice 20 minutes for that. I also felt like it might give players the impression that continuous construction was not being instituted in this event. Throughout the event we did a few random pool checks, just to keep things feeling on the up and up. It was also kinda weird, but a few players thanked us for instituting the decklists, since they were worried about people doing weird things with their pools.

This is Why EventLink Doesn’t Get Nice Things
The scorekeeper encouraged me to post standings each round for the semi comp REL sealed event. While this would mitigate some amount of the issues regarding mis-entered match results and erroneously dropped players, I decided against it, mostly because we were already strapped for time, and I didn’t think the additional ~20 minutes throughout the day would be worth it. As it turns out, we high-rolled on players not randomly dropping or entering incorrect results, but we did encounter an entirely different issue that EventLink prevented us from fixing.

AP asked a judge when round 3 for their event started, the HJ thought they were talking about their own prerelease and not the semi comp REL event. The HJ said “we just started round 2”. AP happily left and durdled around for what must’ve been more than an hour before wandering back to try and find their match. Unfortunately this caused them to entirely miss round 3 of their event and wander up to the SK stage at about 20 minutes into round 4 asking what was going on. At this point the SK had dropped them during round 3 and couldn’t re-add them in because of Eventlink. It was too far into the round to delete the round and do a re-pair either. Which left this player with the option of starting 0-4. Which obviously completely disqualified them from getting anywhere near top 8. After much frustration, the TO ended up giving the player the prize tix they would’ve gotten if they’d made 9th-16th and also refunded their entry fee.

A Prized Idea
At the end of the big event players all needed to go to the prize wall to get their prize tix. This resulted in a huge lineup. The hall was literally closed at this point and prizing out the players and having them spend their tix was literally the last thing that needed to happen. Another judge suggested that instead of having a big dumb lineup, we should’ve had players sit in the seat that corresponded to their placement in the event, after we posted standings. Then we could’ve easily given out the prize tix super quickly, and let prize wall simply deal with selling prize wall stuff. This is a super cool idea, and I’m definitely going to keep it in the back of my head if I end up in a similar situation in the future.

Advantage Gained, Advantage Lost
Another interesting theoretical call that came up was what if NAP arrives to the match five minutes late, but AP doesn’t say anything about it until the third game, where they call a judge and ask whether or not NAP should get a game loss. I think this somewhat falls under the USC definition of “A player notices an offence committed in their own match and doesn’t call attention to it” or the line under FTMGS that says “if a judge believes that a player is intentionally not pointing out other players’ illegal actions in the hope of bringing it up at a more strategically advantageous time”. Though I’m not sure if I would actually jettison this player for this. I think I’m more of the school of thought that you and the other player had a gentleman’s agreement to not call a judge and to play a match without a time extension. Too bad so sad, stop being an angle shooter and play your games.

Lord of the Sponge
Over on ODEs weird things were happening. Halfway through Saturday one of the judges came over to me and proudly showed me a sponge with some blue tape on it that they affectionately called “Rombo”. I asked the ODE lead how many drugs he had given his team, and he said that he had not distributed any, contrary to popular belief. The origin of “Rombo” was as follows: one judge was required to launch each commander pod, but because there were no buzzers, the strategy implemented was have the players pay into the pod, make sure they remember their pod number, and when it filled up, the sides lead would announce that the pod was starting over the mic and hopefully the players would come and gather at the appropriate gathering point. Unfortunately this meant that all the judges would also gather when a commander pod was called, this caused issues in that, well there was no floor coverage and not enough commander pod to go around. So the ODE lead created this odd sponge totem and said that “whoever holds the sponge is authorized to launch the next commander pod” and after they launched the pod they were to bestow the sponge upon another judge, and that it couldn’t be the judge that had given them the sponge previously. While I agreed that this did solve some logistical issues, it also felt too similar to Lord of the Flies and Castaway for me to be entirely comfortable with it.

...In Conclusion
I like going to Florida. I don’t care what anyone else says. I saw like two herons and a bunch of other birbs and like four lizards while I was there. Anyways the event itself was really great, I had a lot of fun, though I also felt like it wasn’t my strongest event. Regular REL events always leave me feeling a bit weird, there’s so much less to do, and watching magic always makes me anxious because I feel like I’m not very good at catching mistakes players make while I’m just watching them, so I feel like I’m doing a bad job. I did enjoy the constantly changing expectations and requests from the TO though, organized chaos is where I thrive and the organized play of today is just that! I’m really sad I can’t attend the next CommandFest in June since it overlaps with the event in Canada as well as all the other CommandFests.