Williams Lake, BC Canada
Time: Sunday November 5th 2023
Role: Head Judge | Sealed | Players: 17


"R" is for RCQ
This store has such a big heart and not quite enough players. I attended their previous modern RCQ as a player, there were around 20 of us, but was an event that awarded RC invites to the top four finishers! In Canada stores can simply purchase a four invite kit for $350 (the single invite RCQ kit is $100). I think for this kind of event, it’s a little unnecessary to have that many invites. The next thing I noticed as a player was the fact that I made top 8 but there weren’t any prizes in top 8! It was super heavy in top 4. It didn’t feel amazing. I gave the TO the feedback and she was very receptive, ensuring that all of top 8 got prizes this time.

Initially her prize structure was:
1: 200
2: 100
3-4: 150
5-8: 25

I felt like it was still a little top-heavy for what is overall a more casual crowd, so I suggested it be changed to the following:
1: 160
2: 100
3-4: 75
5-8: 60

How to Train Your TO
It reminded me a lot of my PPTQ days, since that’s effectively what RCQs are. Except this TO is very inexperienced with magic so a lot of things that generally make sense to a judge were novel. Such as table numbers. Last time the TO made table numbers that had the same number of both sides. This time she labelled every table twice, and had numbers between each table. I didn’t bother to change it since there was no real reason to. She also ran her poster for the event by me a few weeks before and I made some recommendations which were reflected in the new poster. Notably having modern on-demand, and finalizing the prize structure the day of rather than advertising it in advance. Last time her start time was a little wishy-washy, but this time it was a solid 10:30. I prompted her to have decklist registration sheets ready and to be prepared to run top 8 as a draft.

The Day Of...
It ran super smoothly, the store also gave us breakfast, sandwiches AND pizza. It was great. Any TO that feeds me gets like, +20 rep with the Tobi faction. I did a few deck checks. One of the big mistakes I made was forgetting that this wasn’t an SCG or a Laughing Dragon or some other destination event. This was a random RCQ in the middle of nowhere, BC. Most of the players had never registered a sealed pool before and some were unfamiliar with sealed in general. I should’ve reiterated that the minimum deck size was 40 cards, not 60 (one player bore the brunt of this mistake) and I think it took a few other players a few rounds to totally internalize that any screw-ups they made in registration would haunt them every game one, as with one player who carelessly registered an off-color card and then had to play with it all day.

The Split Dance
The entire top 8 prize split the store credit, and afterwards only four people wanted invites. So most of them got scooped in. The playmat and promos were obviously unsplittable, so the players battled for those. Something really irritating about running a sealed RCQ in EventLink is that the top 8 draft is supposed to be seated randomly, but EL doesn’t allow manual pairings, so it’s just gonna pair the top 8 like a regular top 8. Which means you have to seat them for the draft based on record if you don’t want a gimpy draft.

Adventurous Rulings
AP controls Johann, Apprentice Sorcerer and has Frolicking Familiar on top of their library, can they cast Blow Off Steam? Yes. Similar to Kess, Dissident Mage, the game checks to see what the characteristics of the spell would be if you cast it and determines that it’s an instant or sorcery.

...In Conclusion
Overall this felt a lot like an old-school PPTQ. It was a really interesting experience, I’m a totally different judge than I was when I used to run PPTQs. I remember when 60 players felt like the biggest event ever, and when making announcements for 30 players was intimidating. I remember getting nervous about missing something in the sealed procedure or forgetting to post standings. While I still make some of those mistakes, I’m not as afraid because I know how to handle it if I screw up. It was a really interesting experience to go back and work an event like this, and I hope that this little store will continue to run events, there really is a certain charm to small, store-level RCQs that is fundamentally different than large events.