Seattle, Washington
Time: Friday April 26th – Sunday April 28th 2024
Players: 209


Friday - Pro Tour Floor Judge - Coverage Team

It's My First Day
This was my first time on the Pro Tour and, well it's a little hard to describe, but for judges getting on the Pro Tour is very similar to players getting on the Pro Tour, you work hard, you study, you do events and eventually you might get good enough to even be considered. There are still a lot of external elements at play, though, and even if you're the best judge in the world there are reasons you might not get staffed. Often when I speak to judges about their goals, one of the often mentioned long-term goals mentioned is "work the pro tour". And I have to admit, this was a goal of mine for a long time as well. I think I had this idea that only the best judges in the world get accepted to the Pro Tour, and so if I got accepted then that meant I was finally a "good judge". Maybe the goal for me then, wasn't so much "get accepted to the pro tour" but rather "be a good judge". The awkward truth is, that's not actually true, Pro Tour staffing, has a bunch of its own weird requirements and restrictions.

Enigmatic Staffing
After counting the schedule there were 26(ish) judges staffed for Friday and less every other day. That is not a lot of judges when you consider the pool being drawn from is literally the entire judge program. The next thing you need to consider is languages, because it's an international event you're going to have a cavalcade of players whose first language isn't English. Doing a cursory look at this most recent PT there appear to be 11-13 of us that only speak English (based on what I know without asking people), so if you only speak one language, your chances of being staffed just got cut in half.

Out of the, let's say 12 people that only speak one language, I'd say 5-6 of them are in contention for the greatest judge of all time (these are people that have head judges multiple Grand Prixs or been Head Judges for previous Pro Tours). This means that realistically, there are only 5-6 slots for "pretty good" floor judges that only speak one language. All this being said, a serviceable L2 that speaks Japanese or Korean is going to have a better shot of getting on the PT than a very good L3+. Then there's still all the regular staffing considerations, such as giving newer people opportunities and taking some amount of locals. Anyways, what I'm getting at here is that Pro Tour staffing is complex, and if you didn't get staffed for a Pro Tour it's not necessarily because you're not good enough. I'm also saying that I was incredibly honoured to be on staff for a Pro Tour.

BYO...Schedule
When the staff schedule came out it was weirdly "choose your own adventure", while some of the schedule was filled out in advance to account for language needs, we were told to self-assign. By the time I got to it there wasn't much left, checks and coverage were the options. I wasn't terribly excited about doing deck checks on limited, so I chose "coverage" thinking it meant floor coverage (because features are usually called "features"). As it turns out, coverage meant features. I was a little taken aback by this, as my main goal for this Pro Tour was "don't screw anything up so I can be hired again". Pragmatically speaking, screwing up on the floor and screwing up on features should have the same impact on a judge's future prospects, however I have a sneaking suspicion that's not true.

Called draft
Shortly before the event, a friend reached out to me and let me know that I might want to prepare to be the draft caller for the streamed feature match just in case, since for them it was somewhat sprung on them the morning of their first Pro Tour. While I was terrified of being the draft caller after the somewhat disastrous occurrences at GP Madison. I also knew that letting past experiences prevent me from doing stuff wasn't really a good plan for progression and improvement. My friend let me know that if I wasn't comfortable, I could just say no, to which I replied "if I never did anything that made me uncomfortable, I would never do anything new!" and I committed to doing the best job I could. I practised a bunch the night before and prepared my draft script as well as downloading a draft timer since MTG Familiar apperantly doesn't have on? Good thing I checked. The moment of truth came up the next morning and the TL offered the job to us two team members. I had prepared for this and wasn't really about to back down out of fear and said "well I'm nervous, but I did practice last night", and the TL had me call the draft. The whole thing was very surreal and kind of felt like being in a movie. I got strung up with a mic and was told when to walk out on stage, and even where to stand. Luckily for me, while I felt like I was going to both throw up and melt into a puddle the entire time I managed to do neither of those things and did a pretty decent job.

The Only Official Coverage
The coverage area was split into three main tasks, the judge on the feature match, the judge on the other other three backup camera matches and finally the judge watching one of the four camera matches on the computer in the back area. The judge watching camera matches on the computer also had the job of preparing labels for things like Cavern of Souls with the labelmaker and pulling out tokens for feature matches, since players on camera were required to use official WotC tokens, and preferably the most recent ones. In conjunction with this, the judge in this area would be able to lookup player's decklists on a specialized piece of software, which would show all the tokens that particular deck used, so that the judge could pull out those tokens. Something that also looked like it was happening during the downtime was that judge preparing token packs for various common archetypes, so that if, for instance, someone played Red Deck Wins, instead of diving into each set box each time, they could just grab the "Red Deck Wins" token pile and give that to the spotter for the match instead. Finally the job of the camera match-watcher was to be an extra pair of eyes on one of the feature matches, but not be an extra body for coverage staff to trip over in the area. I personally found it very difficult to follow matches on camera, though I'm not sure why. It might've been a combination of the cards were too small and I wasn't as familiar with the format as I would've liked.

Something Old, Something New
Another weird thing about the PT is that both on day 1 and day 2, there was a half hour lunch break after the three rounds of draft. This was.. very odd, as at larger events that sometimes run longer than the PT, the players are never given a lunch break. I imagine the players appreciated having a chance to get food and relax before more rounds of Magic, and it definitely begs the question as to why we don't do this at other events. Often times when this is brought up the answer is "the day would be an hour longer and the day is already really long." Or "Players generally prefer to have the option to go to dinner instead of getting an hour lunch break." Though, if this was the case, then why do we do it at the Pro Tour? Is it because managing 200 players that probably won't leave the building is significantly easier than managing 1000 players that definitely will leave the venue? I'm not super sure. After writing the report I've been told that there are some unique circumstances that necessitate this lunch break that exist at the Pro Tour and no other event. So basically, "don't try this at home, kids!". Another odd thing was the fact that the stamped draft packs were different than they were in the old GP days. They used to have bands wrapped around them like this, but this time they were in sealed envelopes like this, I was told this was because borderless art cards are visible from the side and can cause issues. Being able to tell which borderless card I'm going to get in pack two can warp how I draft in pack one. Another interesting thing was the fact that the foils were removed from the packs and replaced with other cards of the same rarity, this is because even WotC understands that foils come off the printing press marked, and no one wants to watch a bunch of judge proxies on coverage.

Reversing It All
NAP was completely tapped out. AP controlled Bristly Bill, Spine Sower and played a land. Then afterwards they activated their Mercenary token to give Bill +1/+0 and at that point realized that they forgot to put a +1/+1 counter on something. The primary judge on the call bounced this ruling off me, and they settled on ooos, whereas I felt like it was much closer to reversing decisions. As described the AP paused after each action, which is mostly why I felt this fell more closely under reversing decisions. However, we both agreed that we weren't ruling missed trigger, regardless of how it was spun.

Rulings Gone Wrong
I was watching a match where AP attacked with three creatures including Raffine, Scheming Seer and targeted Raffine with the triggered Connive ability, NAP killed Raffine before the ability resolved, then both players wondered whether the connive would still resolve. I was quite nervous and both players seemed confident it would resolve so I nodded. Silly me. I knew this was incorrect, if AP were to play something like Echo Inspector and it was killed before Connive resolved, then yes, it would still resolve. However Raffine's trigger has a target which means that if the target disappears, so too, does the trigger. After the players began executing the action, I felt uneasy about the ruling and double checked myself, after realizing that I'd guided some players into an incorrect ruling. I ran and got a HJ... without stopping the game first. At this point, I thought it was HCE because, well it involved drawing cards. Upon further reflection, the opponent acknowledged the action, meaning this actually falls into GRV territory, which results in a backup or don't backup. By the time I had explained the entire thing to the HJ, it had been quite some time since the illegal action had taken place. We went back over to the game and explained the issue to the players, who honestly, were pretty amicable about the entire thing, but we weren't able to actually fix anything as too much had happened since the illegal action. I felt pretty silly about the whole thing after, why hadn't I'd keyed on the fact that the ruling was not only simple, but incorrect sooner? Why hadn't I stopped the game once I was reasonably sure the ruling had been incorrect? Why had I not even realized the correct category of infraction for this? I basically did everything wrong in this ruling, and probably quantify it as my biggest mistake of the weekend.

Invoking Adventures!
AP casts Invoke Calamity, can they select Bonecrusher Giant and cast Stomp from their graveyard? Yes! This is similar to the ruling regarding Kess, Dissident Mage and Adventures as well as Lier, Disciple of the Drowned and adventures. When evaluating whether a spell can be cast you consider the alternative set of charcacteristics you may be casting it with. (CR 601.3e)

Saturday – PTQ Floor Judge

Saddle Down
AP uses Storm Crow to saddle their Trained Aryx. Before the ability, resolves NAP casts Take the Fall, giving Storm Crow -4/-0, will the saddle ability still resolve? Yes the ability doesn't check upon resolution whether the creature's power is still enough, tapping a creature with one power is part of the cost to activate the ability and therefore there's no reason the game would check that again on resolution. (CR 702.171a)

Silent Ride
AP activates Vraska, the Silencer on NAP's Mobile Homestead, what does it look like? It's an Artifact – Treasure with Crew 1 and its other ability. AP can crew it and have it become a creature, even though it's no longer is a Vehicle. Vraska's ability that is making it lose all its types has an older timestamp than the resolution of the Crew ability which makes it gain a type. (CR 613.1d, CR 613.7, CR 702.122)

Warning Matters
I was watching AP a little in round 2 when they preemptively asked NAP what the target was for hypothesizzle, when AP hadn't yet drawn or discarded. NAP turned to me for clarification, to which I explained that NAP would choose a target after they discarded, because it was a reflexive trigger. This is a very understandable mistake, and I didn't think much of it. Later in round 3 I wandered by the same match and noticed AP fail to present their deck to their opponent to cut after casting Silver Deputy. The opponent caught it and the issue was resolved without incident. I watched the game a little more and noticed later on that AP cast Smuggler's Surprise, milling four cards but then attempting to return creatures that weren't in the milled set to their hand. AP was quite behind in the game, they only had three mercenary tokens, and Smuggler's Surprise was the last card in their hand. NAP had 3 cards in their hand and a Carcantula on board. I felt the culmination of all this was somewhat suspicious, but once again, NAP had pointed out the resolution error and the players had fixed it without my intervention, so I was disinclined to step in. Upon reflection I think I should've at least issued a GRV for the last one, especially considering all the other vaguely suspicious things AP had done.

...In Conclusion
I'm still not entirely sure how to feel about it all, it was an immense honor to be staffed on the Pro Tour, and while on one hand it was one of the most stressful events I've worked, the travel aspect of it was relatively stress-free. Flights and hotels were booked and paid for by WotC, and meals were brought in each day. It was nice to just, go and work the event and not worry about travel planning or whether I'd have enough time to walk somewhere for lunch. Overall it was an amazing experience and I hope I get another shot in the future, but won't be holding my breath.