…so, where did I leave off in July’s summary?  Oh, yeah – we were talking about the change in philosophy re: deck list counting and judge priorities (customer service #1)… that was still a hot topic, as we moved into…

August – despite the laziness and vacations associated with summer (apologies to our Southern Hemisphere readers) – was a fairly active month, with over 250 messages, 40 different threads.  We talked about GPs in Rimini, Calgary, Warsaw, Kitakyushu, and the WMC in Amsterdam; we continued our discussions towards improving judge and player experience at GPs (staffing, shifts, start times, etc); we discussed a few L3 candidates, their panels, lessons learned, and their progress on supplemental activities (those who aren’t promoted during their panel are given specific, measurable activities to address our concerns).  So, no “dog days of summer” for the L4+ … we were busy, even during our vacations!

From Rimini, Kevin Desprez explained his approach for running Day 2’s drafts without stamped product (shipment failure):

Once the draft was finished, we gave each of them a decklist on which they wrote their DCI number; they gave pool and decklist to the player sitting behind them. When there was no player, there was a judge taking care of it. This didn’t take more than a minute; They wrote their names and registered in 5 minutes. Meanwhile, we distributed the construction table assignments;  They gave the list and deck back to their owners, or a judge took care of it. This didn’t take more than a minute;  Players went to their construction seats.

Kevin noted that it was nice to hear players “cracking packs”, and it didn’t cost more than 5 minutes each draft; overall, it seemed to work well and was well-received by players.

Another lesson learned, from Rimini (which apparently originated in Australia?): for mid-round deck checks, the normal procedure is to collect the decks, go to the DC area, and – assuming no issues – return in about 4-6 minutes, leading to a 7-9 minute extension (3 extra minutes for shuffling the now-ordered deck).  The “Australian” method is to take the deck lists with you to the table, grab the presented decks, verify them against the list (some may be sideboard cards), and return them the players without changing the order; they can now proceed without an extra 3 minute delay, and you save at least one minute travel time.  Once you return the main decks, you can even inspect their sideboards while they proceed with the pre-game procedures.

An interesting “lesson learned” from Calgary – and something we should pass on to players, since double-faced cards are with us for a long, long time.  MTR 3.5 has an interesting phrase:

If a player uses a checklist card to represent a double-faced card in his or her deck, then all of the double-faced cards in the deck must be represented by checklist cards, and double-faced cards in a hidden zone are considered to not exist for purposes of determining deck legality.

A player had 4 Huntmaster of the Fells represented by checklist cards; he also had Mayor of Avabruck, but the actual cards, not the checklist.  Whoops.  This may become more of an issue, as checklist cards are, essentially, out of print; be sure to educate players about this so they can avoid the mistake.

Technically, that is a Deck/Decklist Problem; at the time, I applied a deviation, as I felt it was simply an error of understanding (ask your local players, how many of them know about that phrase in the MTR?).  A discussion with other L4s concludes that I should not have deviated, and should have applied the Game Loss.

At the World Magic Cup, during the Standard portion, one player had a couple Snow- Covered Swamps mixed in with his other Swamps – whoops.  The L4+ agreed that it was appropriate to downgrade that D/DL Problem to a Warning and replace the S-C lands with regular lands.

Finally, some personal notes:

Jared Sylva announced that he and Heather are expecting their second child in January; he didn’t announce if it’s a boy or girl yet, but he did insist that they will not name him or her “Jace”.

Carlos Ho provided a classic good news/bad news, or “our loss your gain” announcement: he just moved to Panama; Europe’s loss, Latin America’s gain!