Kim Warren is the Judge of the Week. Kim is a level 2 from Newport, Isle of Wight, in the United Kingdom. Kim started playing casually in 2004 and moved up to tournament play in 2006 during university. She started judging in 2009 as she was more interested in learning about how the game worked. The move towards judging came from her being completely disenfranchised with playing Constructed at the time, Limited season was over. She also adds judges seemed to have a lots of fun! Her most memorable judging experience was the judge dinner at the end of PT Amsterdam 2010, which was possibly the first time she met lots of non-UK judges who weren’t actively working / judging at the time.

Favourite Magic format?
Draft.

Favourite Magic storyline character?
Kiora Atua. I don’t know what she’s going to do yet, but that makes her pretty interesting, right?

Favourite Magic Card?
Sharuum the Hegemon.

What do you do outside of judging?
I work in QA for Stainless Games, who most notably are responsible for the Duels of the Planeswalkers video games.

Favourite board / video game?
The Silent Hill video game series (by which I mean games 1-4 on various incarnations of the Playstation; the others don’t count). I always found them incredibly absorbing and atmospheric – after pulling an all-nighter playing them, hearing radio static in the real world made me jump!

Favourite/Worst Magic set?
Bear in mind that I play a lot of Limited, and so this massively biases my evaluation of sets.

Favourite: Shards of Alara. This was fun, offering a lot of variety and options, and the possibility of building some truly ridiculous decks.

Worst: Zendikar. You might as well drop from a sealed PTQ if your pool didn’t support RB aggro.

Name one Planeswalker that you would want to have while stranded on a desert island.
Garruk Wildspeaker. The ability to summon beasts from the aether guarantees that you won’t run out of food!

What’s your favourite rule or section of a policy document?
Comp rules 705: Flipping a coin.

Reader Challenge – Two Truths and a Lie
Two of the following are true and one is false! Work it out!

1) I’ve been the focus of an international search and rescue mission.
2) I’ve played women’s rugby for England.
3) I have a dog called cat.

(Highlight the blank space between the brackets to see the answer.)
The false statement is [#2! #1 might be an interesting story to tell some time…]