Chilliwack, BC, Canada
Saturday June 14, 2025


Mixed Responsibilities
This show was, from what I heard, notoriously difficult to staff, I ended up spending the first half of the day supporting the retail booth as a result of this. Notably this isn't the first time I've worked retail with Face to Face, I also took on this role in Saskatoon, but unfortunately as I was on it all day, I didn't feel like there was enough material to really fill out a full tournament report. Which is why you didn't see a report that for that event. The Face to Face system is interesting because to sell a card, you have to first search the card on the point of sale system, and then add it to the order. The system then adds tax and you need to then enter the payment method, notably inputting "cash" transactions or "store credit" as your payment method will cause the POS to take the tax back off. If the player is using a credit voucher, you need to select "coupons" in the system and apply the total voucher amount. Then the next screen will show you how much it actually used (since the first amount included tax, but using a voucher means the customer doesn't need to pay tax) and you need to use a calculator external to the POS to subtract the total amount used from the total amount on the voucher. Once you have the remaining voucher amount, you write it on the back of the voucher, cross out the total on the front and return the slip and cards to the player. If players don't want to deal with this, they can just convert their vouchers to store credit. If this sounds like a giant pain, it is! Each transaction takes 25% longer than it should take due to all the tomfoolery. Everything needs to be run through the system because the inventory used for the one-day shows is the same as the inventory on the website, and so to avoid a horrible and error-prone counting activity after the show, they do this.

The other thing about the retail booth at one-day shows is that it's connected to the prize wall, and so it's also where people pick up commander packages, which I helped with.This was a fairly easy process of searching their order number in the system and marking it off "received" when I gave them the package.

A Demand for On-Demands
The next thing I did was ODEs. The ODE system is also a little awkward. We have players sign up for events and tell them to wait in a designated location until their event fills up. We don't use buzzers at the smaller shows because often the room simply isn't large enough to merit it, one good yell will locate any players you're missing. Buzzers are also irrelevant when commander pods are constantly launching. When the pod fills up, we find an empty spot in the ODE area, and put the pod there. We give everyone 50 tickets and put 50 in the middle for the winner (for regular commander pods, for the cEDH pods it's 400 in the middle). Then we have all the players enter the companion code into their apps for WotC tracking purposes. It was a bit of a pain because many players didn't have the companion app, because realistically, most commander players will never need to interface with it. Because this was quite time consuming, oftentimes I just left the sheet on the table for the players to enter it while I launched more pods, then collected it later, we didn't need the sheets for anything at the end of the show, so if it went missing it wasn't a big deal. In the future I think we'll have QR codes for the companion app right on the sign up sheets. I'm not entirely sure what a good system for room management is. Kefka was great, but the scale of these events is so much smaller that something similar would feel a little unnecessary. For drafts the process was similar except the bracket stays with the players, at the end the two finalists take the bracket up to the prize wall to get their prizes.

Vincent's Rules Break
Vincent's Limit Break is a very difficult card to read. First, does the power and toughness modification wear off at the end of the turn? Yes. When the creature returns to the battlefield will it have the power and toughness modification? No. This card reminds me a lot of Hold for Ransom. It just has a lot of words and is syntactically very difficult to parse.

...In Conclusion
Overall I basically did logistics all day and answered very few rules questions. I don't mind logistics when it's busy but I am finding it's a bit of a burnout skill for me. I think I have about one day in me of "all logistics no thinking" per event, otherwise I start to go crazy. Still I'm glad to do different stuff every once in a while, having the odd event that has almost no pressure or difficult decisions can be kind of a palate cleanser.