Tournament Reports, What are they Good for?
To figure out “what makes a good report?” we need to identify our audience and their interest in reading a report. In other words, “why do people read tournament reports?” By polling literally no judges, I’ve come to the conclusion that judges read tournament reports primarily to harvest information that might help them level up their rulings and event administration skill trees. Therefore, the first element of a good report is relevant information.
Why yes, yes we could. You are 100% correct!
So what does a tournament report have that the IPG doesn’t have?
Well, interesting content hopefully! Interesting content is our second component of a good tournament report.
In this article, I will mostly be talking about providing interesting content in a tournament report, since your tournament report must contain Magic tournament information; if it somehow fails to do that, I do not know if I–or anyone else–can help you.
The Human Element
What makes a good report different, and more interesting than simply reading the MTR, is that everything written has been filtered through human perception, which is fun and wonderful and hilariously flawed sometimes. When writing a report, use your opinions to your advantage: adding how you felt about an interaction or ruling and providing your opinions on events that transpired really improves the quality of your report and the level of engagement with the reader. If, for example, you mention in your report that a certain investigation method was effective, but made you and the player extremely uncomfortable, that is very interesting! You’re providing a valuable insight for potential HJ’s who might want to implement such tactics, and will perhaps give others insights into potential flaws of the program!
Don’t be afraid to say what you mean and give your opinions, talk about what was difficult and what you enjoyed! This not only makes you a more endearing narrator, but also colours your report with a little bit of it’s own character and makes it a unique and enjoyable read!
Whatever Doesn’t Get You Decertified Only Makes You Stronger!
I wrote my first tournament report as a requirement for L2, as most of us usually do; however, I was too shy to ask any of the senior judges in my area whether it was a requirement for every event. Rather than bothering my seniors, I decided that I’d rather be safe than decertified, and just wrote a million reports. I was a relatively new L2 at the time and was just as shy online as I was in real life, so I tended to stay away from things like forums and bulletin boards, and anywhere else where I had to interact with others. Naturally, because of this aversion, I had never read a tournament report, and I erroneously assumed that no one else read them either. So my first few reports felt, to me, much more like a personal diary and catalog of mistakes than an actual report. Because I wasn’t really sure what goes into a report, I just decided to write down the stuff I felt was most interesting and memorable, which, to me, was every mistake I had ever made.You can imagine how terrified I was when people started commenting!
However, my misunderstanding of tournament reports showed me that mistakes are probably some of the most interesting and educational parts of any event. So don’t be afraid to share them. Besides, you will probably never interact with any of the people that read your report and most of them probably don’t care enough to remember your name anyways!
It’s the Little Things…
Good tournament reports are really just a bunch of little stories. Every time I run or work an event something happens that has not happened before. Something is challenging or different than last time, and I learn a new thing from those challenges. Most of us have had an absolutely ridiculous call that we can’t wait to share. That’s the kind of stuff that should be in your report!
You are Not as Good a Designer as You Think
As much as you might not want to think about this, a report is for other people, and so you want to make sure it’s as digestible as possible for those other people. Don’t go nuts with formatting, just keep it simple. And make sure everything is spelled right. For many folks, grammatical or syntax errors make writing impossible to read. With the technology we have access to, clean writing is actually fairly easy to achieve. If you make sure you’re writing clear and simple for your audience, your computer will handle most of the errors that arise. Just take the extra 10 minutes and make sure your report doesn’t look like a first draft. Another tactic that I didn’t have when I first started writing: headlines. We are a Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram generation, so writing longer than 280 characters feels like a novel, and items that are an entire page might as well be The Iliad.
Break up your stories with little headings to make them more digestible. This helps people pick and choose the parts they deem most relevant to them. It also makes them think that they don’t have to commit to an entire report, because for the Tinder generation, commitment is hard.
If You Aren’t Having Fun, No One Else Is
This article is part of a series of articles dedicated to completing your L2 checklist–and being an awesome L2 after that.