Hello everyone! My name is Uri Hershkovitz, and I’m a level 1 judge from Israel.

First, I owe you all an apology – I’m really late in writing this. I’m so late, in fact, that if this were school, I’d probably be standing in the corner with a “dunce” hat right now. Please forgive me.

Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, let’s dive right in, shall we?

So, Kaladesh has been released in all its artificer glory, and we were there to witness it happening live. By “we” I mean Raz Kiani and myself, the two floor judges, and Yuval Tzur, the head judge, his honor. We were joined by the staff of “Freak” Saturday morning, September 24th, to make sure everyone has a great time with their new artificial minions friends.

Things were hectic right from the start – we had 36 players signed up in advance, and were expecting around 70, so we set up shop for around 80 players, which was fine right until the very last minute of registration, when the player count jumped all the way to 94. Needless to say, we were scrambling for tables, chairs, stools, benches, counters, beds, refrigerators or anything else we could pilfer use to play cards on or seat player with. We somehow managed this in a timely fashion, holding the tournament up only a few minutes (and replacing temporary seating arrangements with something more…solid as the tournament played out) and got to the deckbuilding process!

We decided we’re going to try using seating for the deckbuilding process. This is a very uncommon practice in Israel for Regular REL, and we received many complaints for this afterwards. The goal here was to make sure that newer, less experiences players have enough support of adjacent, more experienced players to help them build their decks, and also so that they won’t waste our time forget to notice the clock while exploring the new set. This actually worked out really well in regards to our old friend the clock, and we started the tournament on time, but the response was amazingly negative from players who came to enjoy the set with their buddies, and we’ve decided to discontinue this since and look for a different solution.

We played 7 rounds of Swiss, with prizes being handed out to players based on score. The TO, with the head judge’s advice, decided to spread the love and even 50th place got something for their time – that’s over 53% of the players! We obviously always run into the more competitive players who are unhappy with such a wide spread, but wholeheartedly believe that that is the way to go with prereleases, and we made a lot of players happy that day.

But let’s get to the important part: How many masterpieces were opened? How did the event go? Well, I have quite a bit to say about that. First off, I’ll note that this isn’t my first time judging, and I have quite a bit of experience with Regular REL events, and that Raz is newer to the field, with Yuval, obviously, being that old guy who complains on how things were done in his day. This was felt throughout the day as Raz was still a little uncertain with his rulings and requested confirmation for them afterwards. This is VERY good (as a method to learn) to a degree, but needs a little tuning down for his own sake. Also, with an event so large, the floor judges need to be hustling (while remaining respectable) to cover the whole floor. In this regard I feel that there is room to improve – Yuval made sure to let us take the calls so that players can appeal if necessary (and there were several! More details soon), but It felt to me that I needed to take more of the workload as Raz wasn’t used to this. To his credit, I must say that I was very impressed with his rules knowledge and desire to learn and improve, and I believe he’s going to make an amazing judge with a tad more experience under his belt.

So, you all probably stopped reading to ponder my statement when I said appeals, didn’t you? Who appeals in prereleases, anyways? So what happened is that the high-end tables (obviously, who else?) could sense Raz’s lack of certainty and sadly, tried to use it to their advantage. He was correct on every. Single. One. Of them, of course (kudos, man!), but that whole “dogs can smell your fear” thing is wondrously true for Magic players as well. They also say that “All dogs go to heaven” so I guess there’s still some hope for me. 🙂

What else was noteworthy during the prerelease? Well, I had to give out two warnings and a game loss, which I do my very best to avoid during these kind of events. The warnings came from sluggish play that was holding up the tournament and from repeated mistakes from the same table, which were getting a little out of hand. The game loss was earned by a player who was late for the second time for his game, after warning him about tardiness and him missing the clock by almost 10 minutes. Giving out these always makes me sad. Note to self: I need to sympathize less with the players, so that I don’t feel bad when giving penalties.

And if we’re on the subject of self-reflection, I’ll also say that I may be a BIT bossy at times. My best excuse is that I’m used to running these kind of events and want to make sure everything is ticking, but I accidently stepped on Yuval’s shoes and he just polished them yesterday. Luckily for me, I give a wicked shoe-shine he understood that it was in good intentions and helped me gently off my high horse.

Yuval was amazing during the event. He made sure everything was going as planned, helped solve and answer anything we threw at him and even found some time to mentor us, all while keeping a smile and a great attitude for our enjoyment. The only thing I think Yuval could have improved upon is the issue of judge compensation. The TO hired Yuval as a head judge and gave him free reign to recruit two judges to work with him, also declaring that he will pass the judge compensation for the three of us to him for distribution. Sadly, the exact compensation wasn’t discussed prior to the event, and we didn’t know how we were going to be payed (and how much) until a few days after the event. Luckily, they are both great guys and it turned out fine, but it’s something that I think needs to be known in advance, just for our peace of mind.

All-in-all, I have to say the event ran smoother than peanut-butter on bread, with the small smudges adding extra flavor. The handling of seating equipment could have been better (and the store really needs to keep a larger stock of tables and chairs – we had to get some from the food court and they are SOLID METAL. I don’t even lift, bro), and we all have room to improve as judges on our quest for WORLD DOMINATION improving ourselves and the community. As a last note, I’d like to thank Yuval and Raz for their hard work during the event. It was a pleasure working with you both, and I’d love to do so again!

See you all next time, in the Aether Revolt episode of “Uri’s Judge Notes” (patent pending)

P.S. – there were 6 masterpieces opened. I know you were curious 🙂