Over the last several years, I’ve come to know Jacob as a great judge and a great friend.He has scorekept events with hundreds of players, head judged an RPTQ, team lead at Grand Prix, and head judged SCG Classics in three formats. His tournament operations skills are good, but his mentorship, project work, and diplomacy are better.Jacob asks and answers questions to local judges constantly, and is a huge resource on our Slack, at conferences, and at all sorts of events. He has deep patience, and will work with candidates to build their understanding for a long time.He also has a good eye for skills and talent. He has worked with a ton of Madison area judges to build them out – if you have liked any judges from Madison in the last three years, he has had a strong hand in their mentorship. (Frankly this is true for most of the growing judges in the North, but in Madison it is especially true.)He runs one of the projects with the most consistent deliverables in the program – Judge of the Week has been his for nearly two years, and he has spent that time revising the kinds of features they do, managing a staff of judge interviewers, and keeping that ship on strong track. They even interview the Vanguards for Exemplar because they have that skill and experience and we decided to lean on them rather than build that skill in the Exemplar team.Jacob is also just very active in the local Magic community. He plays in a lot of events, and he and I have been doing a ton of team Grand Prix in the last two years. We have yet to day 2 (mostly because I’m not amazing at competitive Magic), but he is everything I want in a teammate as both a judge and a player – pleasant to spend time with, focused on goals, and constantly improving.Rob McKenzie
You can congratulate Jacob on his promotion post on the Magic Judges Facebook page.