As you may now have realised through the miracle of social media, the mailings associated with the first Exemplar wave have started to be received by recognised judges in the US. All of the mailings were sent at the same time and as such they will take a little longer to get to other parts of the world, but you can rest assured that the system is in motion. We’ve said it before, but cannot reinforce this point enough: Wizards of the Coast have offered to support this program by providing judge foils to accompany the recognition messages, and all decisions about the type and distribution of these cards is with them. In particular, there is no guarantee that judge foils will accompany every recognition, or that every recognised judge will receive the same judge foils.

I’ve mentioned in this blog that Exemplar Wave 1 was effectively a closed beta, and that Exemplar Wave 2 is an open beta. As such, it may not surprise you to find out that there was an Alpha Exemplar exercise, testing whether this kind of recognition paradigm could work at all. In this Alpha Exemplar wave, Regional Coordinators, Level 4 and Level 5 Judges were all invited to submit exactly four recognitions. Specifically, we were invited to recognise exactly one level 1, one level 2, one level 3 and one senior judge (a Regional coordinator or L4+). This exercise enabled us to explore the possiblities and difficulties of the concept, and led to us having a much better idea of what we were dealing with as we developed Exemplar further before its public launch. The current mail out includes both judge foils associated with recognitions from Exemplar Wave 1 and with recognitions from this Exemplar Alpha test. I’m delighted to now be able to reveal the recognitions that were made within that Alpha wave.

As a reminder, the recognition messages from Exemplar Wave 1 can be found here.

And a quick look to the future:
-We’re planning to do an Exemplar grabbag/FAQ article in the near future; if there are any questions that you have about the Exemplar program that you would like to see answered in this blog, please send them into Exemplarprogram@gmail.com.
-Remember that the window for Exemplar Wave 2 recognitions is open until February 28th. Don’t forget to submit your recognitions through JudgeApps. Full information for Wave 2 has been published previously on this blog.

Edit: With thanks to Tasha Jamison, we now have a non-Google Docs link to the Exemplar Alpha recongitions.