Toronto, Ontario
Friday August 21st, 2026 – Sunday August 23rd, 2026
Role: ODE Lead



A Leader of Many
One of the aspects of ODE lead I like is the fact that it's a role that doesn't garner a lot of prep work, and requires more adaptability and creativity on the floor, which I think are stronger than my pre-event planning skills. One of the facets I'm not as fond of is the fact that the role is effectively a logistics role with very little player interaction and it requires almost no rules or policy knowledge. Currently the process for launching an on-demand commander pod is as follows: players come up, pay for a commander pod, write their name on a sheet for their desired bracket (we will talk about brackets more later), get a buzzer and return to the registration desk when the buzzer goes off. At that point a judge will gather the pod, seat them and hand them any participation promos and tickets as well as the tickets for the winner. The problem here is that we don't have a good way of tracking when those commander pods are done, and there's no incentive for the players to leave the table if they simply want to play more casual games with the same group. I think if we instead left the pod sign up sheet at the table and had players come up and trade it for their victory tix, perhaps at prize wall, then we'd be able to have their pods vacate the area and clear up space for new pods. This also has the benefit of being the same as the current process for prizing out drafts.

More Content
I had two content creators on my team, and their job was to prowl the commander area and prompt people who were starting casual games to pay and make their game a ticketed game instead. This was great except for the fact that I didn't find out about this until Friday morning and had to organize breaks for them in addition to my other folks. Another spanner in the works is because they were effectively starting commander pods and processing payment, they needed to be briefed on the systems we were using and taught basically everything an ODE judge needs to know. The fact that they came in half an hour after the rest of the team did not help with this. Luckily, Friday morning was slow enough that I just briefed them when they came in and worked out a break schedule for them. I then revised the email I'd sent my team with the new breaks and forwarded it to the creators as well. Also of note, included in the email was this image which succinctly outlines when everything closes.

The Storm
Saturday felt a bit like a commander game, in that there were far too many players and we constantly needed more table space. At about 13:00 we had to freeze commander pods. I also stopped my content creators from re-launching pods in the area since we had so many people waiting to play commander, instead they ended up being effectively assimilated into my ODE team and helped with registration, payment processing and line management. I had one to two judges constantly patrolling the area for open space so that as soon as we found a spot we would launch a commander pod. Throughout the day the TO had the venue put some tables in the hall and allowed me to use some of the activity rooms for pods. I also had a constant revolving door of people being sent over from other areas to cover breaks and simply help with the constant tumult of ODEs. We also stopped using the buzzer system for a while and instead we simply had players wait to the side for the 30 seconds or so until their pod launched.

Diminishing Supplies
Friday was busier than expected and by the end of the day we knew we were going to run out of participation promos. In the past we've been allowed to give out the current destination event promo as a participation prize for commander pods, however we are no longer allowed to do that. In light of this, Face to Face opted to give out old destination event promos to commander pods instead of the current one. Which in this case was Arcane Signet, however we ran through about half of our entire stock by Friday evening, and by Saturday night they were completely gone, thus we shifted over to giving out old Command Tower promos, however those dried up even quicker. The signage for the Commander pods did clearly state that promos would only be available while supplies lasted, though we still had to explain this to a lot of players since this was the first time we had run out of promos for commander pods. Another rapidly diminishing resource was prize tickets, we were constantly taking any that came in through the prize wall, but again, by Friday evening it was pretty clear this was not going to be a workable solution for the weekend. Luckily Face to Face placed a rush order for some last minute prize tickets from a local print shop to basically band-aid our issue.

A Bracket Racket
At normal tour stops we only offer regular and high power commander pods, but at the Commandfests we offer bracket 1-2, bracket 3-4 and bracket 5. We group 1-2 and 3-4 together since the more different things you offer, the more likely people are to be waiting a long time. Consider if you have five event types and eight people looking to play commander, it's pretty likely each event will end up with 1-2 players in it, but if you only have two event types it's much more likely both events will launch. Several players did complain that they explicitly wanted bracket 3 but not bracket 4. I'm not sure if having more granularity in commander pods is the answer here, however if other Commandfests see similar turnout to Toronto, perhaps we could piece out the commander pods more. A correlated issue with running a greater variety of pods is the fact that currently we only have enough buzzers to support two commander pods and a draft. Notably we had four different types of ODEs, so we opted to name the slowest commander pod (bracket 5) after notable Magic characters, letting players know they were in commander pod "Jace" or "Chandra", and then when they filled we'd simply page the pod over the mic.

Magic: the Puzzling
One of the cool things I did for this event was design some of the side activities for this event. I created the activity booklet for participants and organized a bunch of puzzles! You can read more about those puzzles here. Honestly that part of the event is what I had the most fun with. A long, long time ago I was a dungeon master for a few campaigns and one of the things I liked most (aside from playing the NPCs) was creating interesting, tactile puzzles for players to solve. Making small, themed crafts is absolutely my jam and I hope I get to do it for future events.

...In Conclusion
Saturday was tiring, the ambience in the room was so loud that I could barely hear myself over the ever-present din, by the end of it I felt more drained than I normally do at an event. That being said I still had a great time and was so appreciative of everyone on my team that really stepped up to pitch in to make ODEs a success!