Washington | Team Sealed
Time: Friday May 25th – Sunday May 27th
Players: 539 Teams (1617 Players)
Winners: Team Tenjum, Sochůrek, and Ingram

Friday – Scheduled Sides


All Quiet on the Eastern Front
Friday was a fairly quiet day, there were a lot of opportunities to speak with other judges on sides. One thing I did notice was that events were large, larger than they normally are on Friday sides, this made me kind of excited, because that meant it was going to be a busy weekend! Another thing that happened was there was the typical confusion around how to run the brawl side event from one of my team members. As someone who has had the opportunity to work a lot of Grand Prixs as of late, I got to share my knowledge with him about the logistics of this type of event, which felt good.

Saturday – Scheduled Sides


Pick a Pack of Paired Players
I was the HJ of the 7pm Standard event, and as my pairings were printing the scorekeeper let me know that there had been some kind of registration error, and that a bunch of the people in the 7:30 Legacy event had been accidentally added to my event. At first, the scorekeeper told me to wait the regular 10 minutes for tardiness and collect information about the no shows. I nodded, this seemed like the logical response. I started my event handed out slips and let the players with no opponents know about the ten minute rule. As I was doing this the scorekeeper returned and mentioned that he would like the information about no shows immediately. Alright, I didn't really ask for more details, since this seemed time sensitive, I went around and grabbed all the no show slips and marked who was missing before passing them onto the scorekeeper. He left with the slips in hand, and I felt like all was well. Until I saw him about 2 minutes later walking towards my event. He promptly gave me my slips back and told me to pair all the unpaired players against each other. Okay. Sure. It was only six minutes into the round so this wasn't going to break anything. I moved some players around and manually changed the slips so that no-shows were paired against each other and actual players were paired against each other. Hoping this would make it easier to determine what was going on for scorekeeping at the end. Then at about the 9.5 minute mark one of the unpaired no-shows turns up and says that someone is in his seat, playing his round and the slip has been altered. I sighed internally, and asked scorekeeping if this guy could be the bye, since we now had an odd number of players. They agreed and I finally felt like the storm was over.

Until the end of the round, when one of players mentioned that he went to fill out his match slip and realized he was sitting in the wrong seat, and since the seat of the player he was sitting in never showed up, it had never gotten resolved. So I went to scorekeeping and asked if they could just pair this guy with the guy he actually played. They agreed and had to make another amendment to the dropped players list. Overall, though I was quite pleased with how everything went, while a few players were very minimally inconvenienced, and we didn't really lose that much time in the round overall.

Musical Seatings
During the 11am Sealed event, a player came up to me and mentioned that someone was in his seat. I went over to the board, double checked and then asked the incorrect player at the seat to go check the board for his correct seat assignment, he returned and let me know that there was someone in his seat. I was beginning to think all this seat confusion was very strange indeed and began thinking that perhaps something else was going on when a nearby player mentioned that the table numbers were messed up. I looked down and sure enough, seat 2039 was labeled as the same as seat 2040. I took one of the currently standing players and directed him to the end of the event, where we had been seating late adds. I was lucky this happened during build because it would've been a little more of an issue if it had been during round 1. I then proceeded to fix the table numbers while the players were busily opening packs.

Don't Drop Me Now
In the 2pm Modern event, I was tasked by the HJ to resolve an issue where we had accidentally dropped a player. I noticed there was a bye on the event, and reflecting on previous events mentioned that we could pair the two players together. Unfortunately we hadn't managed to catch the bye player quick enough, so I instructed the player to wait 10 minutes, and if the bye player showed up they'd play, and if not, she would also get a bye because it was our fault she was dropped. Which was how we'd handled the situation the last time it had come up.
Unsurprisingly, we didn't recover the bye player and ended up having two byes that round, but 0 unhappy players!

Old Moon, New Moon, Red Moon, Blood Moon
I got called over to a table where both players mentioned to me that Damnation had been cast last turn but the caster, Ajani, didn't have double black, due to Blood Moon being in play. I asked what had happened and was told that Ajani had used Jace, the Mind Sculptor to fateseal Nissa, then had cast Damnation, Nissa had put her two creatures in the graveyard, took her turn, drew, played a land and passed. Then Ajani drew and was in the middle of fatesealing Nissa again, I asked if anything had been scryed (or fatesealed) to the bottom, and shuffled the library to back up JTMS, then put a random card from Ajani's hand back on top of the library. Then we went back to Nissa, put the land in play in her hand, and put a random card back on top. Then we went back to Ajani's turn, put the Damnation back in his hand, untapped his lands, and let them continue playing.
Both players seemed happy with this but in retrospect, I focused very hard on the backup and didn't really do much of an investigation, also I feel like instead of putting a random card back on top of Nissa's deck we could've confirmed the identity of that card with both players since it was fatesealed to the top and could've put the correct card on top.

To DQ or Not to DQ
I had some players in a Modern side event who had gone to time, and they were discussing who would've won the match, had the game been allowed to continue going, one player decided to reveal the Knight of the Reliquary on the top of her library, her opponent had already seen this card with Jace, the Mind Sculptor the previous turn, so the information was already known to him. I knew that revealing cards was a DQ type offense, but for some reason didn't feel like it was correct to DQ this player. Instead I interjected and asked if either player was willing to concede. The opponent, decided that as they were both 0-2 it would be better if at least one person got prizes, as opposed to none and conceded to the other player.

I collected the slip and passed it off to the HJ and spoke with the player who had revealed the card, letting him know that this was a DQ-able offense, but that I wasn't going to take action. I mentioned the situation to the HJ of the event as we were both waiting at the printer for the next event to start, and she seemed a little uncomfortable with the ruling, suggesting that I check with the sides lead, I mentioned it to him, and while he also seemed a little uncomfortable, agreed that no further action was to be taken.

Reflecting on it, perhaps I should've just DQ'd him. However, I guess the part I'm not certain about is why revealing cards from the top of the library is bad at all. I understand from a practical standpoint if we allow players to do this it will take time, and delay events, which is not correct, and certainly revealing cards from the top of the library isn't playing magic, which is what we should be doing, but I still feel like there is a gap in my knowledge as to why this particular action is so vehemently disallowed in the rules.

I'm interested if others would have done something differently, or for more of the philosophy behind this particular stipulation under IDW?

Sunday – Scheduled Sides


Multi-Queue
I was watching a 2HG event and a team asked me a few times if they could go somewhere else and build, I was a little confused as to why they wanted to build elsewhere, and they didn't seem to be able to clarify why. Eventually, I just said no, since they might be trying to do something strange (such as add cards to the pool) without supervision. While they certainly could do that anyways, their inexplicable desire to go elsewhere felt suspicious. They then left their pools at the station and went over to the main event area. As it turns out they were playing in both the main event as well as this 2HG side event. I spoke with the HJ of the event as well as with the show manager about the idea of double queuing, and he said that as long as the team was present to their matches within the 10 minutes, it was fine. However, if they missed a round of either event and were dropped (as is normal with tardiness after 10 minutes) and asked to be put back in, they wouldn't be allowed since it was ruled that this would be depriving other players of the opportunity to play.

In Conclusion...
Washington was definitely less stressful than team leading at Toronto, almost boring by comparison, personally, when I learn a new skill I like to use it a lot to ensure I understand the position fully, so there was a small amount of disappointment when I couldn't practice organizing breaks or team leading at Washington. However there was also a lot of relief in that I wasn't responsible for nearly as much and could relax a little more. Also I got to apply the things I learned in Toronto to being a better team member, and hopefully making life easier for my leads! In the end I had a lot of fun and was really glad I went. I'm grateful to Channelfireball for these opportunities, and and looking forward to applying my knowledge locally in the next few weeks at PPTQs.