Hi Everybody!

If you haven’t already read the announcements from Wizards of the Coast, Judge Academy, or the PCs,  go ahead and do that now. You are going to need that context for this blog post to make sense.  The announcement of the new Judge Academy is going to bring a lot of changes, and some of those changes directly impact the Exemplar Program.  

The first change is that the current open wave, Wave 18, will be the last Exemplar Wave used to distribute Judge Promos. Promos are not going away, but Judge Academy will manage the distribution of all new promos. I was part of some of the early planning discussions, and I’m encouraged by WotC’s renewed interest in making Promos that judges want to have. However, this also means that Wave 18 will not contain any new promos.

The second change to Exemplar, however, it is still to be determined. No longer being tied to a quarterly distribution schedule opens up possible changes that were previously logistically impractical or detrimental.  We want to explore other possible avenues of collecting and publishing peer-to-peer nominations in a more flexible and immediate manner. We’ve collected a lot of feedback over the last several years, and the team will have lots of ideas for improvement and we’ll be exploring them further in the weeks to come. After Wave 18 is complete, we will delay the start of Wave 19 until we can explore and implement these updates. 

We still are looking towards the future.  Over the last 4 years, the Exemplar program has published nearly forty-five thousand examples of positive contributions to and by the members of the Judge Program. Exemplar nominations have impacted so many positively that we will continue to collect and publish them as long as you continue to recognize the accomplishments of your fellow judges.  In the meanwhile, keep recognizing and encouraging the positive behaviors that make Magic Judges the envy of other OP organizations.

As a reminder, Exemplar Wave 18 closes on Tuesday Aug. 13th at 23:59 PST