You find out you are the head judge of the Dragon’s Maze prerelease at your local store, problem is, you’ve never given head judge announcements before!
What are some of the things we want to include or avoid when doing HJ announcements at Regular REL?
Judges, feel free to discuss this scenario here!
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You may want to state what the rel of the tournament is, how many people you have attending,how many rounds you’ll be doing, a brief overview of any recent rules changes, thanking the TO for the tournament, introduce yourself to the players, explain to the players how to make a judge call, where to turn in the match slips (if any), and then give them permission to start opening their guild packs. You can give a reminder that the DGM prerelease promo is NOT playable in the prerelease.
A great idea here, something that adds fun to the deckbuilding process:
At a prerelease, you can encourage your players to ask their neighbours for help – especially if they’re playing the same guild.
This highlights one of the MOST IMPORTANT aspects of head judge announcements at regular REL, especially a prerelease. Keep them FUN! The whole point of a prerelease is that it should be the most laid back and fun event for players both new and old and this idea hits that on the head, bravo!
Another great idea is cutting the announcements into 2 sections. Players are eager to bust packs and get to griping about bad rares or high fiving about mythics, so keep your initial announcements short and let them get to it! Talk about the more mundane stuff after they’ve built their decks and are ready to play. This keeps the players engaged and lets them do what they came to do, bust packs and have fun!
Especially if you have a lot of new players, it’s easy to see that with encouraging players to help each other build their decks that they might think they can trade cards. Make it pretty clear that this is not cool and do so before deck construction.