Calgary, Alberta
Time: Friday September 29th – Sunday October 1st 2023


Friday - Unified Deck Checks – Team Lead

Deck Checks are Covered
Upon suggestion from a colleague I printed off a deck check cover sheet for every event we were checking (except the Regional Championship, which I had a google doc for) with a number of pieces of information on it. They were as follows:

-Start time of the event
-HJ of the event
-Round end time
-Name of checked players
-Total time of deck check (after the 3 mins were added)
-Whether a warning was issued
-Whether the check was midround or not

A big goal for this event was to keep deck check times around the 10 minute mark after the 3 minutes. I feel like a reasonable deck check time is about 7 minutes (which turns into a 10 minute extension after you give them the +3 for shuffling).

However I spoke with a few other judges after the event and while some are on my page of 7 minutes is reasonable, there are a few that would like to see checks that clock in around 4 minutes.

I decided that it might be interesting to see where the current program is at deck check time wise, so I’m going to save my data from this event (you can view it here) but I also intend to add to it in the future to get more accurate averages. I’m also going to try to get others to submit their data so it’s not just my teams that I have data from. If you want to be part of Tobi’s giant deck check data aggregate just fill out a copy of this spreadsheet for your event and send it back to me with a few details about the event.

Transparent Intentions
I checked a mono-green deck and made note that the deck was using helper cards for the DFCs and didn’t bother checking whether the sleeves were semi-transparent. Then a few rounds later a FJ asked me if we’d deck checked a guy in apple green sleeves and if their sleeves were semi-transparent. I mentioned that we had checked him, but we hadn’t bothered checking the sleeves because he was using helper cards.
Turns out it was not the same guy, and when we checked him for a second time it was pretty apparent that the sleeves were in fact semi-transparent and I’d actually just missed it on my first pass through because... I guess I really just hadn’t been paying that much attention. There were a few things that went wrong here, first, I had assumed the player I’d checked with the helper cards, had been the same player the FJ was talking about and didn’t verify the name or archetype or... anything really to ensure that the two were actually the same player. The second thing that went wrong was, well I straight up punted a deck check by not checking sleeves sufficiently.

Team Matters
One member of my team was not doing too great on Friday due to some unfortunate circumstances with their airbnb. I know first hand that the most detrimental thing to a FJs performance is attitude, and if you can’t somehow pick yourself up after something crummy happens in the morning, you’re gonna suck all day. I did my best to cheer up my FJ and ensure that when mistakes did happen I wasn’t too harsh on them. In the grand scheme of things there are very few mistakes that are so bad that they’re worth getting upset over anyways. I sent them on an early break to try to collect themselves, but I failed to notice that they were still a little flustered. I was lucky because I didn’t notice that they had been too flustered to get themselves lunch, but another member of my team had picked up on it and shared half their sandwich with them. While this kind of care is somewhat outside the purview of a team lead, I think it is within the purview of just being a good person in general. I felt a little embarrassed that I hadn’t come back with some extra food or something in anticipation of this, so the next morning I stopped by the store and picked up some fruits for the deck check area just in case!

Casual Checks
One of the members of my team grabbed what we thought was a fairly standard targeted check, however half way through the check another member of the team came back, and asked why we were checking that particular table. The first judge mentioned that it was one of the tables we needed to check for top 8, and the second judge responded by mentioning that the table had already drawn and had been playing the game for fun. The first judge felt a little silly, but I shrugged and said it wasn’t a big deal since this way we could verify the list and check for marked cards anyways. I thought it was kind of funny that the players hadn’t mentioned anything when the judge had taken their decks, and I do think there’s a nonzero chance that while they were waiting they had negotiated the draw.

Saturday & Sunday - Unified Deck Checks – Team Lead

Tablet Adventure
On Saturday morning I discovered that the tablets I’d chosen to charge the previous day had a pattern password, and spent a fair amount of time trying to figure out the password. We spoke to the judge manager, who spoke to their boss, who contacted both the retail booth as well as some of the internal company tech people, but no one knew the password. As soon as I got in in the morning I started charging the two tablets that we did have access to, and luckily that hour of charge gave them enough juice to last the whole day. In retrospect I really should’ve done more on Friday than just verified that we had tablets and that they were charged, but I also should’ve gotten them on wifi and figured out the unlock code. The funny thing is, we spent the whole weekend baffled about the origin of these tablets. On Sunday afternoon the HJ asked me if their tablets had come in handy and I facepalmed super hard since I’d never thought to ask the HJ! He’d brought them down just in case we needed them and I’d mistaken them for tablets that belonged to the TO.

Unified Effort
Something else I tried to do was have members of my team responsible for keeping an eye on specific round turnovers. This didn’t work as well as I would’ve liked since each team member was often involved in constant checks and didn’t often have time to think about the round end time of any specific event, so I ended up just periodically sending whoever was available to check in on it, which worked out fine. I also ended up being both a deck checker but also a deck-traffic controller, while I often like delegating as much as possible I couldn’t find a great way to delegate the “which checks need to happen where” job, since you kind of need a single person to be doing that. In retrospect I think giving that task to someone on Sunday would’ve been a good training opportunity since I had the same people on my team all weekend.

To Be Marked, or Not To Be Marked
AP presents a deck with their companion in it in a different coloured sleeve. When considering whether a card is part of a deck, we take sleeve colour into consideration, and if it’s not the same as the rest of the sleeves, it’s not considered part of their deck. So this isn’t even a warning, just take it out and set it to the side. The more interesting question is, can they then use it as their companion? The CR says that you determine the starting player, then do a bunch of random pregame stuff, including presenting your companion. The MTR says that starting player is determined after decks have been presented for shuffling etc. Regardless of whether the players had determined starting player yet, they were at the presentation period, which is before determining starting player which is before presenting your companion. So it was ruled that AP could use the card as their companion.

Who’s At Fault?
AP casts Grapeshot, and announces the storm trigger, then Remands their own Grapeshot. NAP casts Veil of Summer and draws a card. AP says he wants to resolve the storm trigger targeting NAP and NAP says they have hexproof. AP shrugs and no life totals change. Then AP plays a land and a spectator calls judge, what do you do? While it’s not illegal to say that Veil of Summer grants hexproof, it is impartial information, and I feel like this poor information caused AP to illegally resolve their Storm Triggers. I’m leaning towards GRV for AP and FTMGS for NAP. There is an argument for CPV, however NAP didn’t actually misrepresent what Veil of Summer does.

Will The Real Pat Please Stand Up
In the current world, there’s no requirement that a player uses their real name to enter a Magic: the Gathering event. Also EventLink makes it ridiculously easy for players to change their names. While this is great for some reasons, this also allows players to change their names to silly jokes with relative frequency. Someone for this particular event accidentally forgot to change their name back after having meme’d on a local FNM and also forgot to report their match result, which ended up with a one Pat Magroin being paged over the PA system. We all thought it was pretty hilarious but also kinda didn’t want the player do that again, they were issued a good-natured USC – minor and asked to change their name.

...In Conclusion
I haven’t lead unified checks in a while, and it’s one of those teams that is rapidly being abolished from large event operations. I think with the current Face to Face model, it still does a fairly good job of doing a sufficient number of deck checks on a large number of events and utilizes the staff well. I think it needs to remain a fixture so long as the current player counts and number of Comp REL events remains consistent. I enjoyed the logistical challenge of balancing when to do checks on which events, and was really grateful I reached out to the previous unified checks lead beforehand, their advice and shared documents were super helpful!