Hello everyone! This is my report from the PPTQ in Level Up, Sofia, which took place on March 13th 🙂

I’ll start the description a few days prior to the event. I had talked to the TO to let me bring someone to help me in this tournament despite the low expected turnout (~24 people). In this case, I asked in our local Facebook group for a volunteer, and Theo (Todor) Vladimirov was ready to take on the challenge.

For me, this was the first tournament where I actually had an actual written-out plan about how it was supposed to go (thanks to DLI for suggesting a couple very relevant edits to my original version). Up until now, I always thought “I got this” and went ahead with nothing more than a (pretty good) idea of the things required. I have to say that even though I had managed to not screw up significantly in any of my previous attempts at this head-judging thing, this time things were really like a walk in the park: I felt like the plan gave me an additional layer of security and I always felt certain that I am not missing things. This in turn allowed me more time to observe both my floor judge and the magic games taking place.

On the day of the tournament (before we started), we ran a few “tests” with deck checks and decided to go with the AU method, even though the tournament had cards from 2 different sets. The way to go about this was simply to make another pass through the cards, looking for just the cards from one set, then the cards from the other set. This does make the deck check take longer than usual for this technique, but still less than a “normal”, spread-out-all-cards deck check. We then discussed the rest of the procedures for the day, the goals for the tournament and we were ready to go. At about this time, we got news that the car with our friends from Macedonia we were expecting is not going to come, due to a road accident an hour or so before they reached us. 🙁 Thankfully, nobody was seriously hurt.

Of course, the plan was not without issues. At the very start, it was obvious that not everything will happen according to it… Several players wrote their names in the wrong field (“player registering”) even before I asked them to put it anywhere. Then when I asked them to open and look at the boosters, some people went ahead and started sorting the cards booster by booster, taking forever for a task that should have taken under 5 minutes. All of that is probably a remnant of the “old” or “classic” way to do deck swaps that we used to practice until recently.

Once the actual tournament started, it went very smoothly, with no delays and we actually went quite a bit faster than my plan. Round 1 started a few minutes later, but by round 5 we were already 30 minutes ahead of schedule. After the swiss rounds were done, I took a few minutes to debrief with Theo (as was the plan!), and I have to repeat this: I feel that having the written out sheet of paper to lean on contributed greatly to me making better notes throughout the tournament and writing a more focused review later.

A few rules questions that came up during the tournament:

• “I am at 2 life, my opponent is at 8 with no blockers, and I have two 4/4s, one of which is enchanted with my opponent’s Visions of Brutality. If I attack, what happens? Do both of us die?”
• “My opponent blocks my 5/4 trampling attacker with his 2/2 double strike creature. Please explain to me how this is going to work, which creatures are going to stay alive?” (Note: that question took some time to answer not because it is hard, but because I had to find out that the guy just did not know how double strike works.)
• “What color is the land on which I just used my Awaken mechanic from Sheer Drop?”

There were  no issues during the draft portion that I noticed, but I would like to get your input on a question: the draft table for this event had 4 seats to a side. Where do you sit/stand while timing the draft in order to observe best? Do you stay at the head of the table, where you can see a small bit of everyone, or behind one half of the players, getting a great view of the other half, or do you move around, or anything else? 🙂

After playing the 1/4-finals, the remaining players agreed to an equal prize split for everyone (people outside of the top4 would only get consolation prizes) and played out the rest of the matches to determine the winner who would get the invite to a RPTQ of their choice. I am very happy to say that a little after 8pm, we were already completely done with the tournament!