{"id":569,"date":"2017-02-09T02:30:14","date_gmt":"2017-02-09T02:30:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/?p=569"},"modified":"2017-02-09T02:30:14","modified_gmt":"2017-02-09T02:30:14","slug":"so-you-want-to-run-a-quiz","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/2017\/02\/09\/so-you-want-to-run-a-quiz\/","title":{"rendered":"So you want to run a quiz?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Written<\/a>

Written by Sean Knowelden, L1, Southampton, United Kingdom<\/p><\/div><\/em><\/p>\n

It is a well-established fact that quizzes are fun, especially Magic quizzes! If you\u2019re exceedingly lucky, you had the chance to experience the world-renowned Rich Hagon Game Show, and I\u2019m sure you\u2019d have had a good time there. But what if you want to develop and run your own Magic-based quiz, either for other judges or for other players? Fortunately, this guide will give you a rundown on some guidelines if you want to take on the daunting task of creating your own quiz event.<\/p>\n

The first, and perhaps the most important detail is to consider your audience when deciding the difficulty of the overall quiz. For example, is this quiz aimed at your local group of players, all of whom have been playing for the last twenty years and can name every card from the Mercadian Masques block? Or is it aimed at a Prerelease crowd, which might consist of players only barely familiar with the last year of cards? In either case, you want to try and tailor the difficulty of the quiz for the appropriate level.<\/p>\n

The ideal structure of a quiz should result in a spread of success among players. To achieve this, questions of varying levels of difficulty should be included. If you\u2019re not sure where to set the challenge, a good hedge is to assume most players who attend a quiz have been playing in the 1-2 year range. Design the quiz with this in mind, and include a few questions aimed at the more long-term players. The major implication of this is to base many of your specific questions on cards in Standard, especially if knowing the rules text of these cards is important!<\/p>\n

\"bingo\"<\/p>\n

Obviously, all these aspects are subject to change, but I\u2019m going to lay out the structure of the quizzes I have run in the past at judge conferences. Quizzes should run for about an hour, with five distinct rounds, finishing with a quick-fire round to determine an overall winner. Teams are divided into groups of roughly four contestants, and the preferred method I\u2019ve found is to use WER, enrolling each team into a casual event and pairing them automatically. At the end of the round, the pairings then compare their scores, with a win, loss or draw occurring.<\/p>\n

\u201cBut Sean!\u201d I hear you cry, \u201cI don\u2019t know what sort of stuff to write a quiz about!\u201d I hear you, convenient writing device- I\u2019ll offer some examples of rounds I\u2019ve written or co-written in the past, and I\u2019ll even include a few questions at the end to test your mettle.<\/p>\n

\"wheelI tend to start each quiz with a picture round, normally showing a small part of the art of some Standard-legal cards, and asking players to identify them. This is a great option, partly because it\u2019s quite easy to vary the difficulty (Kozilek\u2019s crown is easier to figure out than a small patch of Saddleback Lagac), but also because the paper with the questions can be passed out whilst your participants are getting settled. I\u2019d recommend trying to make most of these questions; focus on cards that are regularly played in Standard, but including a Hundred-Handed One here or there never hurt anyone.<\/p>\n

Next, I will up the difficulty with a flavour text round (some participants aren\u2019t a huge fan, but some absolutely love them). Questions from this round entail asking players to match flavour text with their respective cards. If you\u2019re feeling particularly mean, ask them to write the flavour text of given cards!<\/p>\n

Completing card cycles is also a fun activity. This involves providing participants a single card from a cycle and asking them to name the rest of \"ancestralthe cards in the cycle. If you can make so it that people have heard of the card named but didn\u2019t even know it was part of a cycle, all the better. (Karakas was part of a cycle? Oh god.)<\/p>\n

One other successful type of quiz has been a spelling round (David Lyford-Smith is a monster), naming the current top 25 players in order, and naming the players in a top eight of a particular event. If you\u2019re feeling particularly adventurous, a Magic general knowledge quiz is always fun, although a little arduous to put together!<\/p>\n

My final observation is that in keeping with tournament tradition, it\u2019s quite fun to have the top 4 contestants battle it out for first place. The current tried-and-tested method is a quick-fire round. A category is chosen and each team’s \u2018champion\u2019 must, in turn, name a card that belongs to said category. Those who hesitate, deviate or repeat are eliminated from the running. Examples of categories include: legendary three colour creatures, creature types, and dragons. It sounds easy, but with pressure it becomes a lot harder!<\/p>\n

As a final point, remember that the emphasis on these events is for it to be fun. If no-one has any idea of the power and toughness of a Guardian Beast, or what the third word of flavour text on Reparations is, don\u2019t make those questions part of your quiz!<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Thanks for reading!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

L1 Sean Knowelden goes over how to create and run a magic quiz!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":56,"featured_media":145,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[51,50],"language":[38],"class_list":["post-569","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-fun-formats","tag-community","tag-magic-quiz","language-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/56"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=569"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":631,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/569\/revisions\/631"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/145"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=569"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=569"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=569"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=569"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}