Grand Prix Birmingham 2017

| Io Hughto

This weekend sees the following judges on their first Grand Prix for the first GP Birmingham in over nine years!

Alfred Bellinger

  • Name: Alfred Bellinger
  • Level: Level 2
  • Location: Leicester, United Kingdom
  • Region: United Kingdom, Ireland, and South Africa

Francesco Cinelli

  • Name: Francesco Cinelli
  • Level: Level 2
  • Location: Bologna, Italy
  • Region: Italy and Malta

Morgane Costaire

  • Name: Morgane Costaire
  • Level: Level 2
  • Location: Bourbriac, France
  • Region: France
  • Approximate date/month/year you started playing Magic: July 2015
  • L1 Certification Date: 4/30/2016
  • Why did you become a judge?: For the shirt.
  • What excites you most about this event?: I will be working on the floor, yay!
  • What worries you most about this event?: Oh my, I will be working on the floor.
  • What are you hoping to learn at this event?: How to let go of some of my mistakes.
  • Who is your mentor?: Everyone I meet.
  • What is your favorite Magic memory?: April, 24th, 2017

Alistair Crook

  • Name: Alistair Crook
  • Level: Level 1
  • Location: Coventry, United Kingdom
  • Region: United Kingdom, Ireland, and South Africa

Floris De Baerdemaeker

  • Name: Floris De Baerdemaeker
  • Level: Level 2
  • Location: Ghent, Belgium
  • Region: BeNeLux
  • Approximate date/month/year you started playing Magic: September 2012
  • L1 Certification Date: 10/14/2016
  • Favorite thing (e.g., card, deck, group of people) about Magic: I suppose my favourite thing about Magic would be the immense number of possibilities, the ways in which to play and enjoy the game, the amount of personalization you can bring to it and the sense of wonder all that entails when you see someone play a deck you had never even thought of.
  • Occupation: Training to become a driving instructor.
  • Random fact about yourself: Apart from Magic, I also enjoy sitting down for a few hours of DnD.
  • Why did you become a judge?: I felt that I had something to offer to my local community and that I could be an asset to the judge program. Furthermore, the judging itself really intrigued me, and still does. I feel that it has made me learn a lot about Magic and people, but also about myself, my own strengths and shortcomings and has made me be a better, more independent, more caring person.
  • What excites you most about this event?: Working with so many other judges and trying to grasp the enormous complexity of the logistics of it all.
  • What worries you most about this event?: I suppose the same thing that worries me at most competitive events: encountering a situation that I am unequipped to handle, because I don’t have the experience, the tools or the knowledge. That worry is rather small, though, because I can always check with other judges or staff members about what to do.
  • What are you hoping to learn at this event?: I am hoping to learn a lot about how these events are run, who does what and how that all fits together. On a more personal note, I am eager to find out how well I will be able to fit in all this.
  • Who is your mentor?: Niels Viaene
  • What challenges have you faced or are you facing to become a better judge?: When I first started judging competitive events, I now realize, would often give rulings too abruptly, too harshly or too strict. I knew the rules and the IPG and I would give my rulings accordingly. I was missing the point that I was there to help people, to provide customer service and not simply to be a walking/talking rules document.
  • How have you worked to overcome those challenges?: I talked to a lot of different judges and got a lot of great feedback on how they handled things and then I tried to apply those tips to my own events. This was difficult at first, not because it went against my character, but because I felt like I was leaving myself and my rulings vulnerable to criticism. However, with more experience and more confidence in my own abilities, this grew to become more natural and I developed some own ways of approaching players. For instance, I will now try to sit down, bend over or just kneel down, so I can speak to players face to face. I am not lurking over them, but rather we’re just having a conversation face to face. And I try to figure out exactly what went wrong and how I can help them. I now strongly believe that everything to do with logistics should be done as quickly as possible and everything to do with players is something you should take your time for, because that is your customer service. And it is striking difference for me to see how those things influence the atmosphere of a tournament.
  • What is the best part about your local Magic community?: I would have to say the atmosphere and the openness and welcoming mentality most players have.
  • What is your favorite Magic memory?: I remember when I just started playing and I had made a commander deck, which was basically a slightly pimped version of an off-the-shelf preconstructed commander, and I was playing someone, who had a mono-red goblin commander with practically all the coin-flip effects in the game. I was completely obliterated, but I was just awestruck by the deck. I had no idea you could play like that, or do all those things. For me that was the moment when I really became fascinated with the game.

Aukusti Koivu

  • Name: Aukusti “Aga” Koivu
  • Level: Level 2
  • Location: Vantaa, Finland
  • Region: Europe – North
  • Approximate date/month/year you started playing Magic: Fall of 2014
  • L1 Certification Date: 5/14/2016
  • Favorite thing (e.g., card, deck, group of people) about Magic: My best friends, who I’ve met through playing magic. Or more accurately, teaching them to play :). Also, TARPAN!
  • Occupation: Student
  • Random fact about yourself: I talk and share wayyyy too much 😀
  • Why did you become a judge?: I have an unquenchable thirst for knowledge. This led me to studying the rules for nothing more than my own entertainment at first. When I started to know a bit about the rules, I started to teach people about them and telling how some interactions worked. I got my L1 mainly, because I wanted to continue doing these things and having a chance of people actually believing me without first checking from seven different people.
    ‌
    And while this may sound bad to some, I want to assure you I didn’t do it out of malice. I wanted to give back to my community, and it seemed like the only way for the community to allow this was for me to become a judge.
  • What excites you most about this event?: This is my first GP either as a player or as a judge. I have heard many a great things about GPs from judges and players alike. I am really excited that I actually get to see a little peek of the GP world.
  • What worries you most about this event?: About the only thing that worries and also saddens me a bit is that I am not actually on the main event. I will be working on demands for both saturday and sunday. The independence is both exciting and a little worrisome, as I like working at my own pace, but if (and when) something goes wrong, I might not know what to do. Also I would have really liked to see what it’s like to work on the main event, but oh well, there’s always the next GP
  • What challenges have you faced or are you facing to become a better judge?: Can you give a judge a match loss for outside assistance?
    ‌
    I mean, I really need to learn how to shut my damned mouth. I’ve gotten much better at this, but I still occasionally catch myself just before I’m about to point out a static ability that a player missed when doing the math to figure out blocks etc.
  • What is the best part about your local Magic community?: My community is really inclusive. It welcomes the competetive players with the exact same kindess and warmth as the casuals. It is not uncommon to see a nationals finalist or a format champion teaching some new kid the basics of magic, and that is just mindboggling to me.

Hannah Lissaman

  • Name: Hannah Lissaman
  • Level: Level 2
  • Location: London, United Kingdom
  • Region: United Kingdom, Ireland, and South Africa
  • Approximate date/month/year you started playing Magic: July 2013
  • L1 Certification Date: 9/6/2016
  • Favorite thing (e.g., card, deck, group of people) about Magic: Getting to meet so many people from different backgrounds and countries and knowing we all have something in common
  • Occupation: Management Consultant
  • Random fact about yourself: My favourite pokemon is Cubone
  • Why did you become a judge?: I had met lots of judges and seen lots of judges at competitive events and I wanted to be a part of that community
  • What excites you most about this event?: Getting to learn about the logistics of running a GP, what is going on behind the scenes
  • What worries you most about this event?: Not being loud enough! I’m a very small and quiet person and I’m starting my weekend as a HJ on a scheduled event – I’m not sure anyone will hear me
  • Who is your mentor?: I’ve never really had just one mentor. I live with Niklas Ek, one of our UK L2s, but I’ve always felt more like there was a whole community of people who have supported me. Guy Baldwin, who I only see occasionally in person, is one of the most supportive people I know, and i always have access to the UK Discord chat for access to more judges than I could possibly need.
  • What challenges have you faced or are you facing to become a better judge?: I’m small, I’m a girl, and a lot of competitive players know me from when I was pretty new to magic and was just coming along as a ‘girlfriend’ of a more experienced player. It makes it hard to know sometimes whether people are reacting differently to me than they would another judge, and I sometimes feel that I am not coming across as authoritative enough.
  • How have you worked to overcome those challenges?: Getting out and judging around the country is great for not feeling like I’m being watched the whole time! Plus meeting other judges who face similar issues and taking with them is enormously helpful. Most important though has been other judges who have been able to give me some perspective – and in some cases to tell me that people genuinely aren’t being respectful.
  • What is your favorite Magic memory?: I went to my first regional conference really soon after passing my L1, before I had officially judged any events. One of the presenters invited us all to consider something about judging in the last year we were proud of, saying that nobody should have nothing. When I said that I didn’t have anything because I was so new, he very sincerely told me that the fact I was at the regional conference as a brand new L1, wanting to get involved and learn more and be a part of the community was already something to be proud of. Realising that I had finally found a community which values just how incredibly keen I am about everything in life was a fantastic feeling, and made me realise how much I felt at home with this new community.

Daniel Maier

  • Name: Daniel Maier
  • Level: Level 2
  • Location: Bamberg, Germany
  • Region: German-speaking Countries