Sebastian Rittau

Category: Magic the Gathering

  • PTQ Berlin in Berlin I (FUNtainment)

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    Last Saturday (August 2nd) was the first of two locale PTQs for the Pro Tour in this very city. It was held at the FUNtainment Game Store. Going into the event I expected 70 X players. 70 is about the normal number for Block Constructed PTQs (which are never very strong), and X was going to be…

  • Missed Triggers Article Up

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    My article on Missed Trigger Remedies is now up at Wizards of the Coast’s judge page. A larger and a PostScript version of the chart is available here.

  • PTQs for Valencia

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    It was a hard weekend. I was head-judging two Pro Tour Qualifiers for Valencia. The first on Saturday in the Der Andere Spieleladen here in Berlin, the second on Sunday in the Heldenwelt in Magdeburg. Saturday we had 66 players. I had two floor judges (Robert Zemke and Christopher Eucken, both level 1) as well as two staff employees helping…

  • German Card Translations

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    German card translations are a sad affair. They are riddled with clumsy translations, especially in the card names. It’s not such a great idea to translate english card names 1:1. The rules texts are translated sanely, i.e. using special German templates, although some of the template choices are a bit strange and more verbose than…

  • Planar Chaos Prerelease

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    Today I head-judged the prerelease of Planar Chaos, the latest Magic: The Gathering expansion. The prerelease at the FUNtainment Game Center here in Berlin was attended by 71 players, a fairly disappointing number after the strong Time Spiral prerelease. Some people blame The Burning Crusade, the latest World of Warcraft expansion, out this week. Personally I also think the traditionally weak month of January plays…

  • Disqualifications & Coverage

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    I am glad to see that there is an extensive article about the double disqualification of Amiel Tenenbaum and his opponent in Wizards’s coverage of Worlds 2006. I just had the discussion with another judge on #mtgjudge, whether this should be covered and how extensive. I think covering DQs has several advantages: It generates interest in the game. People…

  • PTQ Geneva in Berlin

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    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…

  • German Nationals 2006

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    Last weekend I was judging at the German Magic: The Gathering Nationals 2006 in Aschaffenburg. I took the train on Thursday morning, leaving from the new main station in Berlin. The ride was fairly uneventful, but when I exchanged trains in Hanau, I met Martin Golm, a L2 judge from Dresden. I had travelled with Martin to Grand Prix Nottingham and also…

  • Team PTQ Charleston in Berlin

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    Yesterday we had a team PTQ for Pro Tour Charleston in Berlin. The turnout was pretty with 23 teams for a total of 69 players, although we had a few players from Hamburg and eventual winners, Team Hans (Hans-Joachim Höh, Pro Tour Honolulu quarterfinalist Maximilian Bracht, and Stefan Urban), came from further away even. At first I was a bit worried,…

  • Deck Viewer for Pro Tour coverage

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    The Pro Tour video coverage is nice, although there is one thing that has been nagging at me for a while: The cards are hard to recognize. While this was ok, when I still recognized the cards by image, it was rather difficult with the Pro Tour Prague coverage, since I didn’t know most Dissension cards…