Quick introduction from Jack: The UKISA leadership team has made an effort to communicate more regularly and do its best to share conversation topics and decisions with the wider region. We’ve been pretty bad at it in the past (sorry!) but I hope that some of the efforts we’re making are well-received, and tick the box of trying to involve more of the region in the discussion. One of the things that was raised at our leadership conference in March was the insular nature of Discord, so we implemented some functionality to try and share the “Best Of” Discord with judge who don’t want to or are unable to use Discord. Norman Ralph has kindly put together this small digest (a more specified version of MJM) from Discord, JudgeApps, the program, and the region to give an idea of stuff that we’re talking about. Thanks, Norm!

Our next leadership meeting is today, June 11, so we’ll hopefully have more to chat about soon.

Jack x

Welcome to the inaugural issue of UKISA’s new monthly digest covering what’s been happening on the various regional communication hubs as well as any news or announcements that need to be shared. This opening edition will cover April and May.

The first order of business is to find a snazzy and snappy name so we can put the thesaurus down. If you have any thoughts then let us know on the regional Discord, Facebook page or forum. We will select from all entries for the June edition (due the beginning of July).

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From Discord:
Applications and discussions around the first wave of Mythic Championship Qualifiers were major topics in April and into May. The judge staff for Liverpool, Sheffield and Stansted shared their thoughts on the new competitive Standard format with War of the Spark cards causing a lot of consternation especially regarding the static abilities on Planeswalkers – we’re looking at you, Narset!

Scottish judge and blogger, Kirsty McIntyre shared her thoughts about the #IllGoWithYou campaign and we saw her featured on the Channel Fireball Twitter feed. Kirsty also provided great summaries of MagicFest London, whilst another Scottish judge, Ruth Woodrow, reminded us that body language is a key element of communicating with each other.

From JudgeApps:
After years of service as Area Captain for the West of England Guy Baldwin decided to focus more on his international event commitments and handed over the reins to Erin Murphy. The UKISA leadership team shared its views on staffing competitive events. Exemplar Wave 16 was published and MagicFest Birmingham was staffed with a hearty number of UKISA judges. There were a lot of L1 applications from the region, so please don’t be disheartened if you were one of those declined. Feel free to get in touch with Jack for a chat about your application.

Program Updates
The new Outreach Sphere was launched helping the program to help tournament organisers work with judges to provide better events for players whilst ensuring that we continue to invest in training and development opportunities.

Program Coordinator, Johanna Virtanen, shared the latest news from the PC group as rules guru, Toby Elliott, provided us with the updates to the documents from War of the Spark.

Channel Fireball gave us the list of their Core selections for the third quarter of 2019 and we were brought up to date on the latest changes to the Judge Apps platform.

Regional Updates
The UKISA leadership group met at the end of March and the minutes from the weekend are now available. The main topics included how we continue to develop the region to manage Wizard’s new Organised Play program and also prioritise the continued health and growth of the judge community. The team also looked how to reinvent itself to meet those new challenges and better respond to future changes as and when they come up. One of the big takeaways was to start holding more regular leadership group sessions and the first of these took place during May.

June will see the group develop the new-look leadership team roles and responsibilities and they need your input to help shape that. Please speak to your Area Captain, local L3 or Jack with any thoughts, concerns, ideas or anything else you think should be taken into account.