I head judged Wisconsin States — the 2009s — last weekend. It was a blast. A big blast. We had a lot of players — and I have decklists. It’s States from a judge perspective — with decklists.
It all started around the time of GP: Minnesota.
Me: hey, Steve, got judges for States yet?
Steve: Nope, want it?
Me: Sure. How many are you expecting?
Steve: 100-150. Need help getting a crew? Ben will be scorekeeper.
Me: I’ve got some trainees, and Ingrid will help out. I’m good.
Steve: Okay.
I had originally planned on just using myself, Nico and two trainees, plus Ingrid for the start and finish.
Ingrid was a given, since we only have one car. If she wanted to do anything on Saturday, she had to drive me down to the event, and pick me up afterwards. I knew she would stay around for the first few rounds — to help count decklists and get the event started, and then reappear for the top eight, so I could let everyone else head home. Then we go out for dinner — she gets choice of restaurants.
Nico is a solid, experienced judge, but a bit rusty. He got stuck in the World of Warcraft for six months, and has only recently emerged. The other two — Erik and Tabo — were new trainees. Tabo was a bit nervous at the beginning, but did fine. Erik was, frankly, exceptional. Five judges for 100 players is a bit on the heavy side, but I figured that everyone would be busy round 1 counting decks, then Ingrid could head out and I’d spend all the free time mentoring and training — and doing deck checks.
Preparation for States started a couple weeks ahead of time. It involves lots of boring stuff, so let’s skip it.
Registration opened, according to the website, at 9am. Registration closed at 10am, with round one to start at 10:15. Ingrid and I arrived a bit after 8:30, and we found Nico and Tabo already there, numbering tables. We were putting three matches on each eight foot table. You can squeeze four matches on an eight footer, but it is tight, and we really didn’t want to do that if we could possibly avoid it. With three matches per, we had seating for 160 players.
The other stuff — getting the scorekeeper set up, etc. — was all pretty straightforward. Pretty soon, we were ready, and the judges’ only responsibilities were answering occasional questions and keeping the registration line moving. That meant standing near the front and occasionally telling people “the line will move faster if you have your DCI number and money ready.”
By 9:20, we had 70 players registered, and roughly fifty more in line. I asked the store staff what we could do — could we rent more chairs and tables, or get into the empty restaurant nearby? No to both — we could use all the chairs in the store, but we had been turned down on the restaurant, and we really could not add more tables. We were already over fire code levels as it was. We did what we could — we stole all the chairs from the card dealers, the judge table, etc, and renumbered several tables to have four matches per table, to the extent that we had tables.
We had to cap the event at 179 players — the last player would have a bye, and the second to last would be sitting on a stool. It was the least bad solution we could find, short of the TO performing a miracle. Eventually, we hit the cap, and I had to explain that we were capped. A lot of players were unhappy. I asked everyone to stay in line — that we would do something to compensate the players for being disappointed. Then I walked out to get abused. Everyone wanted to explain how terrible it was, how far they had driven and so forth. Yes, it was a totally crappy situation, and had we known how many players, we would have moved the venue, etc.
It was basic customer service — let them rant, and apologize a lot.
Fortunately, Steve Port did manage to perform a miracle. We recruited a friend with a truck to pick up a dozen tables and 6 dozen chairs from the local rental place, and we got into a wide hallway just a little ways down the mall. I was able to announce that everyone could play by about 10:10. After ten minute of listening to complaints, it was a whole lot better to hear cheers.
I asked that anyone who knew anyone that had left to call them and get them back. Most people were still waiting, so I don’t think we lost more than a couple.
Registration started back up, and we were in business. We hit 223, and the line was done. One local asked about numbers and rounds. The cut for 9 rounds was 226 — we were two short. He offered to find three more, and I told him to try if he wanted, but I’d DQ him is he succeeded. We were both joking: I’m pretty certain no one really wanted an extra round. (On the other hand, we still had over a hundred people playing at the end of Swiss, so maybe some would have continued.)
By 11:00, we had the tables set up, numbered, and were posting pairings. We got everyone seated, and I made my announcements. It was all the regular stuff, plus several apologies for the problems and late start. I was also able to announce that we were giving everyone a pack, as a more tangible sorry / thanks for playing.
The players were happy about that.
With 223 players, counting the decklists was a major concern. For round 1, I was on the floor, and everyone else was counting. I even grabbed a handful every so often, and counted as I watched. I had told players during registration to check their decklists, and had given players an additional minute to do a final count as part of my opening announcements. That may have helped — we had just eight game losses for decklist errors.
The tournament was split between the two rooms, but that was no problem. Ingrid basically ran the other half. She had no problem running, solo, what started as, basically, a seventy-player event. I just handed her the match results slips for her half of the event, and she came back at the end of the round with the completed slips in numeric order, and all her decklists checked and alphabetized.
Being married to a Level 4 judge has a lot of advantages.
Most of the judge calls were pretty straightforward. Several people accidentally flipped cards while shuffling. (That gets a warning for looking at extra cards.) One player had failed to desideboard, and called the penalty on himself when he drew the card. (Failure to desideboard is usually a game loss, but it can be downgraded to a warning if the player calls it on himself. I did downgrade.)
The most common questions, at least initially, all involved landfall triggers. Playing a land does not use the stack, and you cannot respond to that, but landfall is a triggered ability, and players can respond to the trigger. In other words, you can use Burst Lightning to kill a Geopede in response to the trigger. And, no, you cannot play another land real quick to save the Geopede. Lands can only be played when the stack is empty.
One question I could have answered a lot better: does Safe Passage prevent damage to planeswalkers? The short answer is no — Safe Passage prevents damage to players and creatures. The more complete answer is that Safe Passage replaces the damage that would be dealt to a player with no damage. The planeswalker ability also replaces damage that would be dealt to a player with damage to the planeswalker. That means that two replacement effects are both trying to modify the damage event. The player that would take the damage decides which applies first, and the second effect does nothing. A better answer would have been “Safe Passage cannot prevent damage to a planeswalker, but it can prevent the damage before it would be redirected to the planeswalker.”
Hindsight is 20/20. Still, as a judge, you have to answer the question asked — you cannot give advice. If someone asks “Can I cast Giant Growth targeting my Illusionary Servant?” you cannot answer “yes, but it is a bad idea.”
I only had one player argue a call. He wanted to appeal, but I’m head judge — there is no one to appeal to. He also wanted my name and DCI number, so I’m sure that I will get to read a bad review and have to explain the ruling to someone from Wizards. It’s not going to be hard. His opponent had cast Quenchable Fire. The player had not paid the U prior to that step. Both players agreed on this. Here’s the text on Quenchable Fire.
Oracle text: Quenchable Fire deals 3 damage to target player. It deals an additional 3 damage to that player at the beginning of your next upkeep step unless he or she pays U before that step.
I’m not completely sure what the player was upset about, other than that the card did not work the way he thought. He was arguing that the card triggered — which it did. The problem was that it triggers during the opponent’s upkeep step — at which time it asks if the opponent has paid U previously. He hadn’t. He could pay all the U he wanted during upkeep, but that would not prevent the card from doing the three extra damage. The Blue had to have been paid in a previous step, and it had not been. Both players were agreed about that.
We had a mix of other judge calls. A number of players left without dropping, so their opponents got free wins. I had some standard questions: how do protection and trample interact, if I bounce the blocker is my guy still blocked, if a cantrip is countered on resolution, do I still draw my card, etc. Nothing too hard.
One recurring problem, however, was spills. We have a Dairy Queen a few doors away, and a lot of players (and judges) had ice cream treats and drinks. A few got spilled. A couple cards were ruined: fortunately they were commons and we had replacements in the draft leftovers box. One ice cream shake got spilled on a match result slip, but we just made a replacement.
On the plus side, the folks at Dairy Queen were quite happy with all the extra business, and they made us a special ice cream cake for the Top 8 players. It said “Wisconsin State Champs, Top 8 Competitors,” and looked really good. We cut it into 8 parts, and each competitor got one. I didn’t, and I was very proud of my restraint. I know how to cut a pie into nine pieces, and not let anyone know I did, but I was good this time.
Ben was scorekeeper for the event. He did a very good job. He handled the line at the beginning without problems, and we had no problems, missed drops or mishandled results for the first seven rounds. I thanked him for that, and complemented him on a great tournament — during round seven.
That’s just begging for a jinx, right?
Remember that match slip we had to recreate, after the shake spilled on it? We simply wrote out a new one — and we reversed the order of the players. Ben didn’t know that we had them reversed, so when he entered the results as 2-1 for player 1, he had it backwards. That’s not really Ben’s fault, but it did create a problem. Two players both had the wrong record, and were paired against players with the wrong record.
That’s not a big problem: you just break those two pairings and reverse them. That, along with fixing the previous round’s results, solves the problem. In this case, though, we couldn’t — one of the new pairs had already played each other. Now you can break another set of pairings and do a three way swap to fix that — sometimes. And sometimes Reporter just won’t let you get away with it. This was one of those times, and we had to repair round eight.
Bummer.
I had one almost-DQ. A player noticed that a judge was standing behind him, so he offered — obviously jokingly — his opponent $20 to concede. Then he offered the judge $40 to pay no attention. A while back, a professional football player offered a ref a buck to decide a penalty in his favor — on national TV. Like my player’s joke, that was a really stupid and unfunny. We had a long discussion about appropriate behavior and not jerking my judges’ chains, and I let him play out the event. On the condition that he tell no more jokes.
Joking about bribery is just dumb. It’s like joking about hijacking planes while in the security line at the airport — just don’t do it.
Back to the good stuff. Despite starting about 11am, and playing a full eight rounds with plenty of Turbo-Fog decks in the mix. The mix was actually pretty broad. We had a lot of everything. Jund was common, but we had — well, with 223 decklists, we had it all. Even Lich’s Mirror.
Let’s finish with the Top 8 decklists. I watched only one match carefully — the finals. It was short. Bant was on the play, and opened with a turn 1 Noble Hierarch, turn 2 Rhox War Monk and a turn 3 Rafiq the Many. At that point, Jund had an untapped Mountain, a tapped Savage Lands and a real problem. It went downhill from there.
Game 2 was equally short. Bant kept a one-land hand, but played Hierarchs and Birds of Paradise on turns 1 and 2, and a Emeria Angel and land on turn 3. On turn 4 Tommy played a land, and then played and equipped a Behemoth Sledge.
The match was over quickly, and Ingrid and I were eating dinner at a Mexican restaurant by 11:00pm. Not bad for starting at 11:00am, playing a full 8 rounds and the top 8, cleaning up the store, packing up and travelling to the restaurant. Better yet, we ate near the bar, so I could see the Badgers pound Hawaii in the final regular season game. Late games FTW.
Enough babbling — here are the decklists.
Tommy Kolowith — Bant — Winner
1 Behemoth Sledge
1 Finest Hour
2 Rafiq the Many
2 Birds of Paradise
4 Baneslayer Angel
4 Rhox War Monk
4 Emeria Angel
4 Knight of the Reliquary
4 Noble Hierarch
4 Path to Exile
4 Lotus Cobra
3 Elspeth Knight-Errant
3 Seaside Citadel
1 Island
2 Plains
5 Forest
4 Misty Rainforest
1 Verdant Catacombs
3 Marsh Flats
4 Sunpetal Grove
Sideboard
2 Great Sable Stag
3 Relic of Progenitus
3 Mind Control
4 Celestial Purge
3 Quest for Ancient Secrets
Andy Shebuski — Jund — 2nd
4 Savage Lands
3 Rootbound Crag
4 Verdant Catacombs
4 Dragonskull Summit
3 Swamp
3 Mountain
2 Forest
2 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
3 Broodmate Dragon
4 Sprouting Thrinax
2 Borderland Ranger
3 Master of the Wild Hunt
4 Bloodbraid Elf
3 Maelstrom Pulse
4 Blightning
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Terminate
3 Bituminous Blast
3 Garruk Wildspeaker
Sideboard
3 Great Sable Stag
2 Jund Charm
3 Goblin Ruinblaster
3 Duress
2 Thought Hemorrhage
2 Terminate
Bradley Stryczek — RWb Bushwhacker — 3rd / 4th
4 Plains
5 Mountain
1 Swamp
3 Terramorphic Expanse
2 Teetering Peaks
4 Arid Mesa
4 Marsh Flats
2 Scalding Tarn
4 Lightning Bolt
4 Blightning
4 Path to Exile
2 Kor Skyfisher
3 Elite Vanguard
4 Ranger of Eos
4 Goblin Guide
4 Steppe Lynx
4 Plated Geopede
2 Goblin Bushwhacker
Sideboard
2 Manabarbs
3 Celestial Purge
3 Baneslayer Angel
3 Harm’s Way
4 Goblin Ruinblaster
Todd Davis — Vampires — 3rd / 4th
18 Swamp
4 Vampire Nocturnus
3 Sign in Blood
4 Tendrils of Corruption
2 Mind Sludge
4 Vampire Nighthawk
4 Gatekeeper of Malakir
3 Vampire Hexmage
2 Malakir Bloodwitch
1 Liliana Vess
1 Sorin Markov
3 Quest for the Grave Lord
4 Bloodghast
3 Disfigure
2 Verdant Catacombs
2 Marsh Flats
Sideboard
3 Doom Blade
3 Grim Discovery
1 Eldrazi Monument
1 Mind Sludge
3 Duress
2 Marsh Casualties
2 Sadistic Sacrament
Mark Jaeger — Jund — 5th – 8th
4 Savage Lands
4 Rootbound Crag
4 Verdant Catacombs
3 Dragonskull Summit
3 Swamp
4 Mountain
2 Forest
1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
4 Putrid Leech
4 Sprouting Thrinax
2 Siege-Gang Commander
2 Master of the Wild Hunt
4 Bloodbraid Elf
3 Maelstrom Pulse
4 Blightning
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Terminate
3 Bituminous Blast
1 Sarkan Vol
1 Garruk Wildspeaker
Sideboard
2 Mind Rot
3 Jund Charm
4 Goblin Ruinblaster
3 Malakir Bloodwitch
3 Unstable Footing
Tim Saari — Grixis Control — 5th — 8th
4 Scalding Tarn
6 Swamp
4 Drowned Catacombs
3 Cruel Ultimatum
2 Essence Scatter
3 Flashfreeze
4 Divination
4 Crumbling Necropolis
4 Dragonskull Summit
2 Sorin Markov
4 Sign in Blood
2 Countersquall
3 Sphinx of Lost Truths
2 Island
4 Lightning Bolt
2 Mountain
4 Terminate
3 Earthquake
Sideboard
3 Deathmark
1Sphinx of Jwar Isle
1 Countersquall
1 Flashfreeze
1 Negate
1 Pithing Needle
1 Relic of Progenitus
1 Nicol Bolas, Planeswalker
2 Siege-Gang Commander
3 Malakir Bloodwitch
Kevin Ollila — Jund — 5th – 8th
4 Savage Lands
3 Rootbound Crag
4 Verdant Catacombs
3 Dragonskull Summit
4 Swamp
3 Mountain
3 Forest
1 Oran-Rief, the Vastwood
4 Putrid Leech
4 Sprouting Thrinax
3 Broodmate Dragon
3 Master of the Wild Hunt
4 Bloodbraid Elf
3 Maelstrom Pulse
4 Blightning
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Terminate
2 Bituminous Blast
Sideboard
3 Jund Charm
4 Goblin Ruinblaster
4 Pithing Needle
4 Great Sable Stag
Mathew Hines — Boros Bushwhacker — 5th — 8th
4 Plains
5 Mountain
3 Terramorphic Expanse
4 Arid Mesa
4 Marsh Flats
4 Scalding Tarn
4 Lightning Bolt
3 Path to Exile
3 Earthquake
2 Burst Lightning
4 Hellspark Elemental
1 Elite Vanguard
1 Soul Warden
4 Ranger of Eos
4 Goblin Guide
4 Steppe Lynx
4 Plated Geopede
2 Goblin Bushwhacker
Sideboard
1 Path to Exile
3 Celestial Purge
2 Soul Warden
2 Harm’s Way
1 Baneslayer Angel
3 Hell’s Thunder
2 Elspeth, Knight-Errant
1 Journey to Nowhere
Congrats to the Top 8, and thanks to everyone who played.
One final notes. In Wisconsin, our prizes were good — first place got a State Champion Plaque and free entry into events, plus lots of packs. The entire Top 8 got special playmats and more packs. However, in one other states, the posted prize list said that the winner got the plague — but that the rest of the top eight got playmates.
Cool.
PRJ
“one million words” on MTGO