M13 Prerelease, or "How I Became A Level 1 Judge"

Last weekend, like the vast majority of you, I attended the M13 prerelease. My shop of choice this go-around was All-Stars Collectables, which always manages to put on a good show.

This weekend was a little different from previous ones however, since I’d be donning the mantle of judge for Sunday’s tournament. I’ve been working with our local Level 2 judge – Mike Noss – to get me up to snuff, and while he is a cruel, evil man who deliberately tries to slip you up at every opportunity, he’s also one of the most knowledgeable judges that I have met in my life, and prepared me well. I asked him about working towards becoming a Judge during the Dark Ascension prerelease, and since then, we've been working on and off with practice exams and other quizzes. Playing in high-level events has also helped a bit. Finally, I felt like I was ready (and Mike agreed, thankfully.)

We arranged for me to play in the Saturday Sealed event, and judge on Sunday under a Level 1 named Dave. I’d planned on giving a tournament report here, but frankly, limited match reports are boring as all hell, and my pool was terrible in both of the events that I played. I was only half joking when I told people that Sunpetal Grove was the best of the 12 rares. I battled to a 2-3 record in the first event, and a 2-2 in the second, which was an extremely disappointing finish, but was about where I’d expect given the shallow nature of my sealed pool. Heebs managed to win a side event, which was good for a stack of packs.

It may have been that I should have been more ambitious with my mana, and gone into a third color for better card quality, but two just seems so much more stable. I suppose that’s an argument for another day though.

I woke up bright and early Sunday morning, making it to the venue by 8am since the event was scheduled to start at 10. George, our TO, wanted help setting up the community room that we were playing in. Dealer Booths needed to be set up, as well as the store’s own table. Table numbers needed to be placed, and ice fetched from the local store. Many players don’t realize how much organization goes into having a well run tournament, but George made the whole thing seem like old hat. The one hiccup being that the Mall didn’t open until 10am – and neither would the air conditioning, leaving the tournament venue sweltering.

One of the dealers joked that we should buy a crate of deodorant and give it out as Door Prizes. I thought that was pretty amusing.

The event started a couple of minutes after ten. There was some question about starting a few minutes late, since some players who had pre-paid weren’t there yet, but they all got phone calls or showed up. With all our ducks in a row, we started things off for the 31 player, 5 round event.

Mike was playing in the event, and ended up winning the whole thing with the most insane BW Sealed pool that I’ve seen in a long time. He spent his free time between matches drilling me with rules questions.

Dave gave me a few decks to practice deck-check, and while my speed is a little slow, Mike assures me that will come with more practice. The deck in question being Vintage Oath of Druids probably didn’t help at all. It has even more 1-off copies than most vintage decks. Still, it is something to work on in the future.

Since it was a prerelease, the majority of the judge calls were simple, ordinary things. “Is Prey Upon combat damage?”, “Does Fight take Deathtouch and Lifelink into account?”, “Does Exalted stack if a creature has it more than once?”, “If I kill the source of an ability after it’s already triggered, does it still happen?”, “What if I kill one of the creatures being exchanged with a Switcheroo?”

Pretty benign stuff for the most part. The most complex call of the day involved a misplaced card. A player raised his hand and called for a judge. I meandered over and asked what was wrong – since neither player appeared to have drawn any cards or anything yet.

“So, there’s a pacifism here, and I’m pretty sure it belongs to my friend over there. We played here last round, and it’s in one of his sleeves.”

He gestured to a player a few tables away, so I walked over and asked him to count out his deck. When he came up with 39 cards, I told him to be more careful in the future, asked if any cards in the deck were known, and when they told me no, I shuffled the card in.

His opponent asked me if it should be a Game Loss for improper deck, and I informed him that it would be at Competitive REL, but Prereleases are run at Regular, where there is no Game Loss penalty.

And that’s all for the interesting judge calls. I tested during the first round of Top 8, after Mike and George wrestled with the printer for a while. I managed to get every question but one of them (which I waffled on for ages before ultimately picking the not-correct one.) The test wasn’t especially difficult – certainly about on par with the easy practice exams. I'd discuss some of the more interesting questions on there, but we're not allowed to talk about the content of the tests. I'd encourage anyone to go and practice some of them on the DCI Judge Center.

And just like that, I’m a Level 1 judge – or more accurately, a Level 0 who has passed his evaluation and is currently waiting to be accepted in the system. Still, in the last 48 hours, I feel like a giant vault of information has come flooding out of the woodwork. I’ve been added to facebook groups and mailing lists. I have phone numbers for local shops and arrangements to judge an event already. I’m reading the MTGJudge twitter account, and I find it very interesting to read the articles that they’re posting. I find myself flipping through the Comprehensive Rules on my iPhone (There’s an app called MTGJudge that ALL Magic players should download immediately. It’s incredible, and also includes Oracle Text for every card, plus all the rules documentation.)

For those of you who are just starting out in Magic, or perhaps think that you need a more firm grasp of the rules, I’d encourage you to run over to the DCI Judge Center – http://judge.wizards.com – and take a few of the practice exams. They’ll expose you to rules and interactions that you hadn’t thought about before, and it will improve both your mechanical play and ability to leverage the rules to your advantage in-game. If you legitimately think that you have a great grasp of the rules, check out the hard practice exam.

This weekend, it felt like I took a big step towards the future. I don’t know where I’ll be in five years, but I can certainly tell you that I’ll still be playing Magic and judging tournaments on a regular basis.

On Thursday, we’re going to brew something using M13 cards, and update a few decks that I have built at the moment, to account for the new additions to Standard. This coming weekend, I will be at Connecticon, and will happily be playing Magic a healthy (unhealthy?) amount of the time there. If you’d like to meet up, grab a bite to eat, or even just sling a few spells, let me know.

Always topdeck like a champion.

-Andrew