Yesterday the Pro Tour Qualifier Geneva in Berlin was held at FUNtainment. We had 110 players, a rather high turnout, among them many players from Poland. It’s always nice to have these guys around. One thing I noted, though, was that I stepped in multiple times when a player and a spectator were speaking in Polish. When players and spectators do that in German I often don’t step in, since I hear what they say and most of the time it’s not about the game. So I subconsciously filter that talk out. I can’t do that for a language that I don’t understand, though.
Helping me were acting TO Peter, Christoph (L1), and Kersten, my promising judgeling. While we were understaffed by one person for this event (but aren’t we always?) the event went rather smooth. The main problem was that we couldn’t do as much deck checks as I would have liked to and that sometimes we couldn’t cover all the matches in overtime. One more judge would have been quite beneficial in these cases, but as I have explained before, we don’t have that many active judges anymore and a few possible candidates chose to play instead of judging.
Also of note was the high number of appeals I got. During the first two rounds I had three appeals, while I usually get about one per tournament. But this became less during later rounds.
About a quarter of an hour before the tournament began we had a call in the store. A rather young boy asked whether it was possible to participate in the event where “you can qualify for the Pro Tour”. I told him to hurry up, since we wanted to start soon. He showed up a bit too late with his mother, but I still let him participate. This was obviously his first sealed deck tournament, and I absolutely forgot to mention that the cards were in English. I would have liked to have more time to talk to him before the event to explain everything, but unfortunately didn’t have the time in the stress at tournament start. Well, he build an 80 card deck, playing all the basic lands from the tournament pack, although I had explained to him that he can get more lands if he wanted to. Not very surprisingly he went 0-4 drop. I am kind of sorry for him, and wish I could have found more time for him.
In the last round I handed back the decks from a deck check seven minutes into the round. The players from a neighbouring table asked me: “Can we get extra time? We didn’t start playing yet, since we couldn’t decide whether to take an intentional draw.” I explained to them the errors of their ways.
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