Is It Missed? #4 - Whisperwood Elemental

This ruling came up at Pro Tour Dragons of Tarkir, and I've seen it play out at a few SCG Opens as well.

AP controls Whisperwood Elemental and says "Go." Is the trigger missed?

Many judges say yes. "Go" passes the turn to your opponent, so clearly you are moving past the point where you should have resolved the trigger without having acknowledged it or taken the physical action. However, this position is contradicted by the official tournament shortcut from the MTR:

"The statement "Go" (and equivalents such as "Your turn" and "Done") offers to keep passing priority until an opponent has priority in the end step. Opponents are assumed to be acting then unless they specify otherwise."

Note that the shortcut ends in your End Step, not your opponent's turn. You're giving your opponent one last chance to do something on your turn. If they don't have anything to do, they can begin their turn. Where this gets weird with Whisperwood Elemental is that this triggered ability can be on the stack when you pass priority in your End Step.

Normally, a player will pass the turn in some fashion like "Go, make a manifest" or "Ready to go to my End Step." These are pretty clear situations where the player remembers the manifest trigger and is getting ready to take the appropriate action.

It is likely that a player who says "Go" with a Whisperwood Elemental in play has forgotten their trigger. However, policy now allows for players to have forgotten a trigger as long as they acknowledge it before it becomes relevant to the game. Prowess is the classic example right now. You can cast a spell, forget about prowess, but you're okay as long as you remember before the creature deals damage.

What this means here is that the Whisperwood's controller has until he or she takes an action or he or she allows the opponent to take an action that could not have been possible. Cracking a fetch in the end step? That's fine. Trigger could still be on the stack. In fact, just about anything could happen in the End Step with that trigger on the stack. There are a few minor things possible for the controller to do that make it clear that the trigger is missed. Discarding for the turn or ending some turn-based duration effect. But for the most part, it is allowing the opponent to take an action that signals the death of this trigger.

The most typical action here is untapping permanents, with drawing a card being a close second. The tricky part about this is the part about "allowing it to happen." If Whisperwood player says "Go" and the opponent untaps, is the trigger missed? Yes, unless he or she immediately points it out. "Whoa. You can't untap yet. My manifest trigger still has to resolve." If that isn't your reaction to the untap, then you've missed your trigger.

Good Practices #2 - Calling Out Table Numbers

During the classic "End of Round" (EoR) procedure judges report to a central hub of information, the Scorekeeper, or more likely a proxy for the SK who has a printout of Delinquent Matches which are still playing when time is called in the round. I'll have more to say on another occasion about various ways to improve this task, but today's tip is about as simple as it gets.

When the EoR judge assigns you a table number to go scout out and you pass other judges coming back to the hub with match result slips, call out the table number you've been assigned.

"Hey, do you have table number 56?"

If they answer no, you keep on moving towards table 56. However, if they answer in the affirmative, stop, turn around, (do not pass Go), and return to the EoR judge for another assignment. Congratulations! You've just saved yourself a meaningless and time-wasting trip to table 56, which in case I forgot to mention, happens to be at the opposite end of the GP hall.

Today's good practice helps save your judge legs, optimizes your time, and preserves judge resources throughout the day for the tasks that we actually care about, watching games of Magic, not walking to tables where the players stopped playing Magic one minute ago.

If you're coming back from a table with a result slip, you should also get into the habit of calling out what table(s) you're coming back with to judges that you cross paths with, spreading this good practice from both sides of the traffic.

Good Practices #1 - Tracking Infraction Counts

Good practices is my name for a new feature where I blog about a judging practice that I use, or have seen others use, which could be useful to you. I don't like the name "best practices" because that seems a little presumptuous.

Today's good practice comes from Level 3 Judge John Alderfer. I don't actually remember where I picked this up from him; he and I tend to meet once or twice a month at a GP near you. At this GP Unknown, I discovered John doing something unusual on the back of a match result slip. What I saw was something like this:

John Alderfer, Player name, GRV W(1) Cast Wrath for wrong mana.

The unusual part was the number in parenthesis after the penalty ("W" for Warning). When I approached John about this, he told me that he had been doing this for some time as a means of tracking the number of infractions the player had in that particular type.

At Competitive REL, there are upgrade paths for players who repeatedly commit the same type of infraction. For Game Play Errors (GPEs), which encompass GRVs, Looking at Extra Cards, and Missed Trigger as the most common infraction types, a third infraction in each type can be upgraded to a Game Loss at the discretion of the Head Judge. For Tournament Errors (TEs) like Slow Play, the upgrade clause happens with the second infraction. This is why judges are instructed to ask players if they've received prior Warnings.

The infraction count on the back of the slip is a good way to reinforce that practice of asking the players. At a recent tournament, I actually caught myself as I was filling out the back of the slip. As I went to write the infraction count, I realized that I hadn't asked, and proceeded to do so.

There's also a good secondary reason to record this information. When a Scorekeeper (SK) enters penalties into the Reporter program, they will often flag players who have received multiple infractions of the same type and inform the Head Judge (HJ). There's a few reasons why a HJ might want to know this:
* If the infractions are suspiciously advantageous for the player, he or she may want to investigate for Cheating.
* To inform the Floor Judges, so that they are aware of the situation and make sure to ask players if they have received prior Warnings.
* To talk to the player and make sure that they are aware of the potential ramifications of additional infractions.

As the size of Magic events approaches bonkers status, there are also plenty of events now where the SK isn't able to keep up with the flow of result slips and penalty entry doesn't happen until a later time, either that day or the next. In such circumstances, judges recording the infraction count can serve as the check for the SK to talk with the HJ. The infraction count on the slip can also lead to situations where the SK notes a discrepancy. This could be because of incorrect information from the player, or from a judge recording the wrong infraction. Either way, it's a good opportunity to consult with judges and double check all of the information.

This is a real low cost way to do a lot of things that are useful for tournament operations, and something that I'd like to see become a world-wide practice. Thanks, John for showing this to me.

Super Sunday Series at Grand Prix Denver

Sunday for me was arguably the most important day of the GP Denver weekend as I was the Head Judge of the Super Sunday Series (SSS) Sealed event. Unlike some other GPs, this one only had the SSS Sealed with no companion Standard event. It was somewhat serendipitous that I had been chosen to HJ this event. Just a few weeks prior I had started an L3 discussion about whether it was appropriate for L2s to HJ SSS events. My goal wasn't necessarily to set a hard line that L2s could not HJ SSS events, but more to spur discussion on the topic and make sure that we as a Program were taking these tournaments seriously and staffing them appropriately.

I've had similar talks with regards to everything from StarCityGames Opens to PPTQs. When discussion turns to giving people opportunities to learn, I become the voice of caution and conservatism. Opportunity needs to be balanced with the proper support and feedback. Arguably, a SSS at GP should afford those things because there is usually an L3 support judge assigned to such an event being head judged by an L2.

I don't think that I was intentionally placed on this event as a statement ("If you think L3s should be doing this, then you go and do it!") because Side Events staffing was decided by Kyle Knudson, who wasn't privy to the L3 discussion directly.

Part of taking an event like this seriously is preparation. As soon as I knew what judges were on my event, I sent messages to the L2s about what roles I wanted them to fill, not traditional "Team Leads" (since we didn't have enough judges on staff to form full teams) but more like "Task Leads." I also try to send out a message to team members if I am a Team Lead on Day 1 of a Grand Prix. (I just sent one out to my GP Vancouver team for this weekend.) "Pre-gaming like this establishes a good mindset for judges going into the weekend. It can get a few administrative things out of the way. Basically, it's a low overhead way to put set up good expectations.

Setting good expectations applies to players as well. That starts with announcements during the player meeting. Since this was a Sealed event, there were a few more administrative details to talk about versus a Constructed event. For the latter, I'm a big fan of Jeph Foster's methodology: "I know that you guys came here to play Magic, so I'm going to keep this short." I know that I spearheaded the "food and drink pun" movement, but there's a limit to how much players are willing to tolerate with announcements.

Do we really need to announce the Rules Enforcement Level (REL) at the beginning of every tournament? Does the average player care? Does the average player even know how this is relevant? If the answer is "no," that's ten seconds we should be shaving from the announcements. The same applies to announcing the Tardiness policy ("Zero and ten"). If you don't announce it, does it give grounds for a player to complain? "If you had announced the Tardiness policy, I would have gotten here sooner." We don't tell players that the policy for tapping a Mana Confluence for mana without taking a pain is going to be a Warning. Seems like players should just... not be tardy to their match. There's also the matter that the tardiness announcement could be made at any time, like say after Round 1 pairings are posted. Not every announcement needs to happen during the player meeting.

Back to Denver, we had a slightly slow start to the day because we had to distribute sealed product and GP Denver playmats... and coupons for GP Denver playmats. Registration for Saturday's main event went above and beyond expectations. This left the supply short for Sunday, and we had to hand out coupons for players to write down their shipping address. The growth of Magic continues to amaze me. Denver has traditionally been a 700-900 player GP city, and suddenly we get over 1500. That's crazy.

The SSS had 238 players, a little over the 9 round threshold. That's a good day's work for sure. Part of the challenge for an event like this is the ever-changing cast of judges that you get. For a GP Side Event, you usually start with an AM shift of judges, get a relief/PM shift at some point in the late morning or early afternoon. There's also a rotation of judges who come over from other side events. Since the SSS is the premiere Side Event on Sunday, the Side Events Lead makes sure to keep the event well-staffed and supported. That's all well and good, but there does reach a point when more isn't always better. I think this event had a healthy balance for most of the day.

In terms of rulings, it seems like Missed Triggers are still a thing that players are getting used to, especially with things like Prowess. It's the same old thing as Exalted years ago (or every year if you play Modern). You don't have to explicitly announce the trigger when it happens. You just have to make sure to acknowledge its existence before it would matter in the game. For the vast majority of cases with these two triggers, that means when the creature deals damage. Keep in mind that there are a few "Prowess-ish" triggers that work differently. Mistfire Adept, for example, has the second "flying prowess" trigger. This trigger targets and you have to announce your target when the ability goes on the stack.

Grand Prix Denver Tournament Report: Saturday

Have you ever noticed how tournament reports inevitably mention what the person had to eat that day? This seems like a holdover from player reports, although it's something I always found unexciting when reading those. And now you've gotten the meta-section that uselessly complains about this useless aspect of many tournament reports. Enjoy!

Saturday of a Grand Prix used to be a hectic scramble as hundreds of people needed to register for the event at the last minute. With online preregistration and no Saturday morning registration, we've traded that scramble for a new one: the player meeting. Now every player with a problem will try to fix their problem after the player meeting seating is posted because they just walked into the hall five minutes ago. These problems might include:
* A player who is unable to find their name on the seating. This is actually several potential problems:
@ The player is not registered in the event. Usually the solution is to direct the player to a TO representative to confirm payment and entry into the event.
@ The player's name is spelled wrong on the seating. Again, several possible reasons for this depending on how pre-registration was done.
@ The player didn't look down both columns on the seating. Ugh. This is an unfortunately common problem. Players are used to finding their names down the left-hand side of the sheet for pairings (since the opponent's name appears down the right-hand side). However, for the player meeting, and only the player meeting, DCI-R saves space and paper by putting names down both columns. I would say that probably confused 1-2% of the players at every GP. That doesn't sound like a lot until you have a dozen extra people coming to the scorekeeper who don't really need to be there.
* Bye issues. This is another one where the range of issues can range from "legitimate problem that we fix" to "players don't pay attention." However, all of the blame for this can't be put at players' feet. Yes, a large number of bye issues stem from players who completely misunderstand the Planeswalker Points system when it comes to earning byes. Then again, where the heck is this information? Why does it keep changing so much? And why, oh why isn't there a graphic on a player's PWP site that just explicitly says "You have X byes from this date to that date"?
* Players whose names are misspelled on the seating in a way that still allows them to find themselves. This is an issue--I hate it when people spell my name wrong--but it isn't a pressing issue. You've found where you need to be seated. Just go there and we'll deal with the fact that your name is spelled "Jon" instead of "John" later. Your first match result slip is a good place to do this. Just cross out your name, and neatly print the correct spelling. If there is some ambiguity as to whether it is actually you or not, you can certainly come up and check, which sometimes leads to...
* There are two or more players with the same first and last name. Yuck. This actually happened with 3 players at GP Denver. Unlikely as this is, 2 of them being a father-son duo made it slightly more likely. However, when the third person with the same name showed up, some kinds of hell broke loose. Okay. Not really. Situations like this usually require middle initials to be used. If that fails (because of same middle initials), we end up adding the 4 digits of their DCI number, or making one of them middle initial "X." Some day, I aspire to be Riki X Hayashi.

All of these issues often add up to 50+ players lining up in front of the Scorekeeper right after seating for the player meeting go up. For Denver, we tried to triage this with a team of judges in front of the Scorekeeper. Some of them had a second copy of the seating to weed out the easy problems like not looking down the right side to find their name. This cleared out about a dozen or so, and the rest had to the figure out the various problems listed above. I didn't write down how long this all took, but it was a significant amount of time, and it is an ongoing problem at GPs now.

Once we got the event started, I was responsible for the Pairings, Result Slips, and End of Round Procedure. A few anecdotes about these various procedures:

Pairings
With close to 1600 players, we had to put up two physical copies of the pairings, or risk terrible traffic jams. Even with two copies, we had terrible traffic jams because the room was narrow and many of the players going to different pairings boards had to utilize the same traffic lanes. One board, the second set of S-Z pairings went almost completely unused because of its location... by table #1. Go figure. Even as the tournament shrunk towards this pairings board, players insisted on walking to the farther board because papers were posted on it first. Not everything can work perfectly.

An important note about posting pairings on the Grand Prix zip banners. Do not cover up the "Magic: the Gathering Grand Prix" logo with any tape or paper. This is a branding thing. Also, do not cover up the Planeswalker's face with any tape or paper. This is also a branding thing, but as someone recently pointed out, it is also a practical thing. We often tell players to go to their pairings at "The Ajani banner." Covering up the face reduces the effectiveness of the announcement and makes it harder for players to find the right banner.

Result Slips
The GP kit now comes with a super-industrial strength paper cutter. Unfortunately this thing is so heavy-duty, or just plain heavy, that you cannot use it unless you put on a very secure surface, otherwise you risk breaking the table, the paper cutter, or your ego, as things go flying in a horrible mess. It also happens that the strength and pressure needed to use the super cutter might result in said cutter breaking under the pressure. Yeah. Be careful.

End of Round Procedure
As I mentioned, the hall for the GP was very long and narrow. This lends itself to a lot of walking for judges. "Go to table 1..." all the way across the freaking hall. Oh, the match finished and the slip slipped by you in the crowd? Go all the way back and report. "Yeah, we got the slip right after you left. Go to table 3." Sigh. To cut down on this, I assigned some judges to do some "Zone End of Round" which is something that I plan on writing more about in the future. The short version is that a judge scouts out a zone at the extremes of the hall and begins sitting judges on matches manually without having to wait for the "Delinquent Matches" printout. (Never call them "Outstanding" because there is nothing outstanding about Slow Play.) Ideally, this cuts down on a lot of the walking back and forth. When your match finishes, you just need to walk the slip to the judge who is responsible for the zone to get a new assignment, not all the way back to the stage. There's also the added benefit to this procedure that sometimes the Scorekeeper isn't in a position to printout a Delinquent Matches sheet because he or she is too far behind on results entry. Even with super-SK Nick Fang at Denver, he couldn't keep up to have this ready to go when the clock struck 00:00.

That about covers my day on Saturday of the main event. I do want to call out a standout performance by Elliot Raff, who handled Zone EoR for the front 90 tables. Not only did he get the zone scouted out, judges sitting on matches, but he also reported in when all of his matches were covered by judges, a useful piece of information for the home base team. Thanks for the work, Elliot.

Grand Prix Denver Tournament Report: Friday

Recently it was noted that L3s aren't required to write tournament reports, something that all L2s were recently required to do as part of a mass re-certification/ renewal effort for the level. The implication being that it is shitty that L2s have to do this thing that L3s don't have to do. I dunno. L3s have to do a lot of things that are far more diverse and difficult in order to attain and maintain their level. But there's nothing that says that we can't write tournament reports, and with my extensive background as a writer, I thought I would go ahead and do so to entertain and hopefully educate some folks.

GP Denver started with a Mid-day Grinder shift for me. When I arrived on site at 1pm and checked in with the AM Lead Casey Brefka I was surprised to learn that he hadn't yet launched any Grinders even though they were scheduled to start an hour ago. There was also a significant line over at the Sides registration area--probably 30-40 people--which was in a separate part of the hall. Apparently the TO staff was trying out a new form on registration and seating for Grinders that would change everything (TM). The new method involves giving each player who pays for registration a slip of paper with a table number. They are instructed to go sit at that table and wait for their Grinder to launch. When the Grinder fills up, the judges in the Grinder area begin the event, first by collecting all of the slips and taking them to the Grinder Scorekeeper, who enters the information into a bracket. the bracket is printed out and given to the judges to run the event. In theory, the judge can now run the entire Grinder from this bracket, and the next interaction they have with the SK is to hand them back the completed bracket.

I'm all for innovation and trying new things, but it's always a bit frustrating when these happen at events for the first time and they seemingly haven't been tested until then. See: GP Richmond Mini-Masters or GP San Antonio new tournament software. Yes, these things need to be tried out live at some point, but it seems like when they are, there are a bunch of problems that could have been solved by a group of judges sitting down for lunch. Look, my intention is definitely not to throw the good folks at Cascade Games under a bus here. All I'm saying is... I'm available for lunch.

There were several delays related to both the new registration and seating schema, and some of it stemmed from the distance between the registration area and the play area, as judges would have to walk back and forth to get some basic information like whether a Grinder was full or not. After 3 or 4 Grinders launched, the experiment was abandoned. Scorekepers moved from the registration stage to the Grinder stage where the judges were stationed, and we transitioned to the traditional Wizards Event Reporter (WER) method of running the events.

The transition went very poorly, unfortunately to the detriment of the players. What happened was that between switching over registration styles, an attempt to renumber the tables in the Grinder area, and a shift change for the judges, one Grinder just got lost in the shuffle for close to an hour with neither the players nor judges realizing what had happened. Also, as we transitioned the existing Grinders from form of the bracket to WER input, the SKs fell behind in building their tournaments as they had to manually enter all of the old pairings and results.

Part of the lost Grinder was definitely my fault. I had a lot of balls in the air with the various transitions and I simply forgot that we had a Grinder that was close to launching. If I had it all to do over again... I would remember the Grinder. No, but seriously, even if the error is a lapse in memory, there are valuable lessons that you can glean from an incident like this. I think I was definitely trying to do too many things at once here, also known as the classic error of not delegating. If I had delegated a few of the tasks, I would have had more bandwidth available for the big picture. It's possible that I still might have forgotten about the Grinder, but less likely.

After a lunch/dinner break, I handed over the reigns of Grinders to Mike Combs, he of the late shift Grinders Lead, and headed over to assist with On Demand Events. Here I was under the leadership of Nathan Wang, where we had an unfortunate interaction. He asked to go out and cover the floor. I thought it was more important for me to stay close to the registration area and continue to assist with launching the events, which were going along at a very fast clip due to the TO's decision to allow the "Infinite Constructed Bracelet" to be used on On-Demand Constructed queues. Most of the Standard and Modern queues we launched had 6-8 Bracelet owners, while 4-player Commander queues averaged 3. However, my response to his request was a short "The floor looks fine."

From my perspective, this was a dialogue. He could have very well just responded to this with "Well, it's not fine. Several players have had to wait a long time for judges to respond. Please go cover the floor," and I would have had no problems following his instructions. Unfortunately, Nathan thought that I was defying him, and that my "The floor looks fine" was me flat out rejecting his instructions with a slammed door. It's possible that something in my tone of voice conveyed this, or it could be a general "L3" aura thing, but I can assure you (and I assured Nathan afterwards) that neither myself or any other L3 judge is going to shy away from a task given to us by a lower-level judge (Nathan is an L2) because we feel that we are above the task or resistant to being given instructions by someone who isn't wearing burgundy (the traditional color shirt for a GP HJ who is usually an L4 or 5).

This interaction with Nathan was brought to my attention later by John Carter. He's an L3 from Seattle, which is where Nathan is from, give or take, and he was working for the TO as a stage admin. Carter and I go way back, and he is someone who I have always looked up to in the Judge Program. Carter explained what he had been told by Nathan and several other people, and while it was a surprise to me that my words and actions had been interpreted that way, I was able to see my culpability in this situation. Despite my internal feelings, the words I said didn't leave room for the "dialogue" that I thought we were having, especially when wrapped up with this being Nathan's first time leading such a shift at a GP and not being sure how to interact with higher level judges assigned to his team.

Later on in the weekend, I got a chance to sit down with Nathan, and I apologized to him for my actions. I also explained my perspective on what had happened. In situations like this, I find that it is so easy to fall into excuse mode, and I try very hard to not to do that. Admit fault. Apologize. Explain but don't excuse. I thought our talk went well, and I encouraged Nathan to enter a Judge Center review of me because it's important to record interactions like this, and it would be a good growth opportunity for him to be able to write a review like that of a higher level judge. Never shy away from critical feedback.

This tournament report has gotten surprisingly long, so I'll sign off here and return later to write about Saturday and Sunday.

1000 Miles - Week 47-49 Update (1000 Miles completed!)

Week 47
Thursday: 8.8 miles
Saturday: 5.0 miles
Tuesday: 6.5 miles
Week Total: 20.3 miles
Year Total: 980.7 miles

Week 48
Friday: 9.5 miles
Sunday: 10.0 miles
Week Total: 19.5 miles
Year Total: 1000.2 miles

Week 49
Friday: 7.0 miles
Sunday: 6.5 miles
Week Total: 13.5 miles
Year Total: 1013.7 miles