MagicFest Strasbourg 2019

| Io Hughto

This weekend in Strasbourg, we have 6 new judges to Welcome to the fold!

Florent Bellier

  • Name: Florent Bellier
  • Pronouns He/him/his
  • Level: Level 1
  • Location: Rennes, France
  • Region: France
  • Approximate date/month/year you started playing Magic: July 2003
  • L1 Certification Date: November 4, 2017
  • Favorite thing (e.g., card, deck, group of people) about Magic: the new azorius slogan “Order, Authority, Control”
  • Occupation: IT developer
  • Who are your mentors?: Maxime Chausson, Mikaël Rabie
  • What challenges have you faced or are you facing to become a better judge?: the fear of making a bad ruling and to speaking in front of a lot of people
  • How have you worked to overcome those challenges?: Practice and mentoring.
  • What is the best part about your local Magic community?: the mutual help and the help/tutoring given by the olds players to the newbies.

Christian Gienger

  • Name: Christian Gienger
  • Pronouns He/him/his
  • Level: Level 1
  • Location: Hechingen, Germany
  • Region: German-speaking countries
  • Approximate date/month/year you started playing Magic: May 1995
  • L1 Certification Date: May 23, 2018
  • Favorite thing (e.g., card, deck, group of people) about Magic: Grizzly Bears
  • Occupation: Chemist
  • Random fact about yourself: I help with a summer program for kids since 1999
  • Why did you become a judge?: I love rules (not only in Magic) and organizing events as well as being helpful to other players. I actually judged (uncertified) and organized my first Magic tournament in 1996, so I guess it was only a matter of time when I returned to the game with SOI.
  • What excites you most about this event?: To see how all the gears interlock behind the scenes.
  • What worries you most about this event?: Even though I have worked a larger (non-Magic)-events, I feel completely unprepared
  • What are you hoping to learn at this event?: I don’t have goals except to do my best.
  • Who are your mentors?: Nicole Weber and Martin Hergeth (for L2), Felix Gauder and Philip Wieland (to become L1)
  • What is the best part about your local Magic community?: That people lend cards (or sometimes decks) to other players for events without wanting something in return.
  • What is your favorite Magic memory?: Playing with my best friend all those years ago by drawing and playing from the same deck.

Matthieu Prudhomme

  • Name: Matthieu Prudhomme
  • Pronouns He/him/his
  • Level: Level 1
  • Location: Paris, France
  • Region: France
  • Approximate date/month/year you started playing Magic: 2002
  • L1 Certification Date: September 4, 2016
  • Favorite thing (e.g., card, deck, group of people) about Magic: The card Last Stand
  • Occupation: IT and Network Engineer
  • Random fact about yourself: I still believe that white is the best colour !
  • Why did you become a judge?: I became a judge to help people better understanding the game
  • What excites you most about this event?: I will be judging a multi-player tournament and more Headjudging !
  • What worries you most about this event?: To not repair any mistakes I could make
  • What are you hoping to learn at this event?: I want to learn every tricks that makes organizing a tournament faster.
  • Who are your mentors?: Raphaël Delbarre and Yoann Lasithiotakis
  • What challenges have you faced or are you facing to become a better judge?: I were once headjudge on a local EDH tournament and I had to disqualify someone for cheating
  • How have you worked to overcome those challenges?: I maybe spent too much time explaining to the player what will happen to him, insisting the best I could on him filling the DQ paper what he didn’t do anyway.
  • What is the best part about your local Magic community?: I play in an EDH multiplayer community and we all just want to make the best and coolest play in our games.
  • What is your favorite Magic memory?: Once in an EDH 4-player game ( Yeah I love this format), a blue player had Hivemind on his board. He then played Talent of the Telepath, which allows players to cast spells from each other’s libraries. We started to resolve the first copies – Try to imagine the stack there – Then Mind’s Desire was revealed and cast by a player. Now the stack starts to look funny. After some resolution from the Desire, the blue player casted Twincast on a random spell. The stack then was too horrible to finish. As a result the game was pronounced a draw since the stack was too complicated to resolve (we all agreed on that).

Olivier Schoeffel

  • Name: Olivier Schoeffel
  • Pronouns He/him/his
  • Level: Level 1
  • Location: Marcq-en-Baroeul, France
  • Region: France
  • Approximate date/month/year you started playing Magic: 02/10/2015
  • L1 Certification Date: September 9, 2018
  • Favorite thing (e.g., card, deck, group of people) about Magic: Judges! (and cards infinite combo ^^)
  • Occupation: Student
  • Random fact about yourself: I’m two meters tall. Yes, size matters.
  • Why did you become a judge?: I wanted to understand the rules of the game and to help people to better understand them.
  • What excites you most about this event?: I love when someone call “judge” and look at me! I’m still a bit surprised ^^
  • What worries you most about this event?: I think I fear failure, that I may not be able to manage people or be “the best judge ever”. But it’s natural, I hope it will be better with some more experiences.
  • What are you hoping to learn at this event?: Discover a new kind of organization, meet incredible people… There are so many cool things in the judge community !
  • Who are your mentors?: Raphael Delbarre and Julie Bouchonville
  • What challenges have you faced or are you facing to become a better judge?: My behaviour, the way I understand players and how I adapt my own explanation to them. I heard that my main weakness was the lack of selfconfidence so I’m gonna be careful about that this time!
  • How have you worked to overcome those challenges?: It value a lot advices I received from other judges or players after an event. It seems that I improve with each experience but I think there’s still work to do.
  • What is the best part about your local Magic community?: A majority of players at my LGS are so cool! Always happy to share advices and to meet new players (and decks). I love this “social” part of the game.
  • What is your favorite Magic memory?: When i was in school, I had a friend who brought a deck one day. I didn’t know Magic cards yet and I was really impressed by the look and by the game itself. Then I moved to a different school where nobody knows Magic, but one day I ask my godfather to buy me deck too. It was the Monstruous Surprise Intro deck (Dark Ascension) and when I came back home, I just look at the cards again and again and I was so happy! I keep this deck on my night table and during a whole year, each time I was going to bed, I look at those cards. Later, I met magic players and bought a new deck, starting my collection, but this will stay in my mind as my really first step in the amazing world of Magic the Gathering.

Peter Vogl

  • Name: Peter Vogl
  • Pronouns He/him/his
  • Level: Level 2
  • Location: Munich, Germany
  • Region: German-speaking countries
  • Approximate date/month/year you started playing Magic: Something around 9th Edition
  • L1 Certification Date: June 5, 2016
  • Favorite thing (e.g., card, deck, group of people) about Magic: Judge Community and Control Type Decks
  • Occupation: Does work in IT count?
  • Random fact about yourself: A lot of people thought I was stoned most of the time in my youth (which I wasn’t)
  • Why did you become a judge?: Helping others understanding the rules of this amazing game was my intial goal
  • What excites you most about this event?: It will be my first time judging in such a large scale event
  • What worries you most about this event?: Not managing everything in time and thus delaying the tournament
  • What are you hoping to learn at this event?: Besides a lot of new awesome judges how to manage such large scale events
  • Who are your mentors?: My mentors were / are René Oberweger and Markus Dietrich (L2 Mentoring)
  • What challenges have you faced or are you facing to become a better judge?: Managing two tournaments at once with ~50+ people and taking part in some large scale events like the last years german nationals (just as floor judge)
  • How have you worked to overcome those challenges?: I grit my teeth and tried to do everything as good as possible while still helping players as fast and as good as possible
  • What is the best part about your local Magic community?: You can find a player for almost everything every day
  • What is your favorite Magic memory?: The good old starting phase of commander where we had this really amazing rounds of just playing magic

Ruth Woodrow

  • Name: Ruth Woodrow
  • Pronouns She/her/hers
  • Level: Level 1
  • Location: Edinburgh, United Kingdom
  • Region: United Kingdom, Ireland, and South Africa
  • Approximate date/month/year you started playing Magic: Autumn/winter 2007
  • L1 Certification Date: September 12, 2015
  • Favorite thing (e.g., card, deck, group of people) about Magic: The UKISA judge community!
  • Occupation: Translator
  • Random fact about yourself: I did gymnastics until the age of 18 and competed at a national level
  • Why did you become a judge?: To support my local Magic community
  • What excites you most about this event?: Finally getting to see what a GP is like from the staff side
  • What worries you most about this event?: How rusty my spoken French and German will be…
  • What are you hoping to learn at this event?: The best way to get people registered quickly while also providing excellent customer service
  • Who are your mentors?: The UKISA judge community (specifically Liz Mackie)
  • What challenges have you faced or are you facing to become a better judge?: The current situation with OP is making it virtually impossible to get experience judging at competitive REL because there aren’t really and competitive events outside GPs
  • How have you worked to overcome those challenges?: Applying to every GP I can feasibly get to
  • What is the best part about your local Magic community?: The friendly, welcoming, and supportive atmosphere
  • What is your favorite Magic memory?: Making day 2 at a GP for the first time by spending day 1 equipping a Sword of Feast and Famine to Smuggler’s Copter in Kaladesh sealed