It seems that WotC Europe decided that this year that aren’t any grinders at all for European National Championships. German Nationals used to have meat grinders (Standard, Booster Draft, and Sealed Deck IIRC) and these in part made Nationals a great event. Many people would come from all over Germany, just to have a shot in the Grinders. If they didn’t make it, they would play other side events.
This year there are no grinders. This means that the “Nationals event” will last one day less. I fear that much of the appeal of Nationals will be gone. I personally know many non-qualified people that would have gone to Nationals if there had been grinders. Now? Why bother? Grinders are gone and with it the many people that would come just to play in them. This in turn will probably mean that the side events will also become smaller, because most people are playing in the main event.
This is a sad situation and I hope WotC Europe will reconsider for the next year.
Here are some more bits from the PTQ that I forgot to mention in my last entry:
During the last Swiss round I was watching a match whose winner would make top 8. Player A had Heartbeat of Spring in play so that each land produced double that mana. A was at 1 life and did some splice action involving Soulless Revival, Hana Kami, and Ethereal Haze every turn. This left him with 1 mana left in his mana pool, which he sunk into a Sensei’s Divining Top. After he had done this several times he didn’t announce the sinking part in one turn. So I said: “So, you burn for one.” The player explained that he of course sunk his remaining mana into Top as he had done before. I accepted his explanation since he had demonstrated his actions before and from the way he reacted I had no reason to assume that he had really forgotten about this mana. It seemed to me as if he had just taken a shortcut for actions he had previously explicitly announced.
There was actually a tense situation after the Swiss rounds were over and prices were given out to people not in the top 8. A player from my hometown Berlin (let’s be creative and call him M) had played against another player (O) during the last round. The winner of this match had a shot at top 8. (But it later turned out that whoever had won this match would only end up at 9th place.) The events played out as follows according to an investigation conducted by Tim and Philip: M had won the match but got distracted and forgot to fill out the result slip. O then filled out the result slip incorrectly, noting that he had won. He signed his own name, but didn’t hand in the result slip. (The signature of M was missing at this point.) When the result slip finally arrived at the scorekeeper’s result entry box it had two signatures. It couldn’t be determined who had signed for M or how the result slip ended up in the result entry box.
So Philip and Tim discussed what to do. O confirmed that he had lost the match, so the result of the match was uncontested. Also it was obvious that M’s signature was not M’s signature. It couldn’t be determined who had forged his signature though. Since we were waiting for the top 8 to start, I went over to them and heard of this story. After pondering it for a while, I told them: “I’m sure you will find a solution.” and went away again. This is the moment when you are glad you are not the head judge’s shoes. After a while I went over again, having pondered the issue myself. Just when I was about to suggest to change the result slip according to the actual result of the match, Philip and Tim both came the to the conclusion that the result would stand. Since a decision was finally made, I didn’t comment on this any further as not to further delay the tournament. I feel that both decisions (letting the result slip as handed in stand or changing to the actual result) have their merits and this was really a decision that could go either way.
From the PlanetMTG forums I later learned that there had been a similar case in the tournament before and that it had been ruled the same way.
Finally at the start of one of the Swiss rounds I overheard a player saying somethink like: “Then call a judge.” When I went there, both players assured me that a judge wasn’t required, but then one of the players (X is a nice letter I haven’t used today) added: “I just doesn’t like to be called [some names I don’t remember].” His opponent claimed that he didn’t said any of these words and also the players at the neighboring table who were watching obviously amused claimed not to have heard anything. From the way they were telling me I had the feeling that they were lying. So I took them both away from the table and called over head judge Tim. Well, it couldn’t be determined that X’s opponent had used any insults. In the end Tim gave a stern lecture to all players involved.
Both players were clearly pissed off during the rest of the round. When X was in a situation that didn’t look good for him (but was still not hopeless), he conceded. He was clearly very pissed off and said something something like: “I have enough. I don’t want to play against assholes like this. I’ll just concede.” He grabbed the result slip, marked a win for his opponent and a drop for himself on it. At this point I decided to let the insult against his opponent slip, since moods were not good at this point and I didn’t want this situation to spin out of control. Also X had already dropped from the tournament. I did inform Tim afterwards though. In retrospect letting this slip was most likely an error, though.
Well, that’s it for now. If I remember anymore interesting situations, I will surely blog about them.
Yesterday was a PTQ for PT Los Angeles in Hamburg. I planned to go there with a few friends anyway and since the TO Philip Schulz had asked for judges on the German judge list, I applied. We targeted our arrival at about 10, but between weekend traffic on the Autobahn, a broken route by Map24 and several closed streets on that route, we managed to arrive exactly at 11.
We were four judges total: Besides me there were Tim Richter (HJ, he passed his L2 test yesterday as well, yay!), Stefan Kurhofer und Johannes Schnoor. Philip was scorekeeping. We had 86 players, although it was a bit sad to see two thirds of Phoenix Foundation playing in a PTQ (Marco Blume and Dirk Baberowski). All in all the event ran smoothly, although there were of course a few interesting situations:
One situation involved Ghostly Prison and Godo, Bandit Warlord. The question was if a player had to pay for the Prison twice for the same creature if there were two attack phases (due to Godo). After consulting with other judges I ruled that you had to pay twice , although I wasn’t sure. The ruling was on the grounds that the way Ghostly Prison is worded, it will apply to every time attackers are declared. This ruling was later confirmed by judges on #mtgjudge.
I was called over to another situation that involved a player looking at another player’s hand cards without any effect allowing him to. The situation was not easy to resolve, especially since there were two issues mixed up. Player A had played Enduring Ideal before and was just in his upkeep resolving the Ideal as well as a Honden of Night’s Reach and a Honden of Infinite Rage. The players were not quite clear, whether the Honden A had just searched with the Ideal would also trigger (it won’t) and how cards B had to discard and how much damage the red Honden would do. Since A could explain to me the correct stacking order of the Honden and Ideal triggers (stack Honden’s first then Ideal), I rules that B would discard three cards and the red Honden would deal 3 damage.
Nevertheless the complicated issue was that A had placed his one remaining hand card face-down in the middle of the table while searching through his library. B had picked it up and looked at it. A claimed that B had asked “What’s this?” and A had answered “My hand card.” before B picked it up. B couldn’t remember whether there had been such a conversation. Also, B maintained that it didn’t matter, since A couldn’t play any spells anyways, due to the Ideal. I went to Tim and Philip and discussed that situation. I thought that a Game Loss was appropriate here. I think that B was confused when he looked at the card and did not think much about it before he did. Otherwise we would probably talking about a disqualification in this situation. Nevertheless I think that this is a very abusable situation. Looking at an opponent’s hand card can give you crucial information if not caught (Ideal or no Ideal). Tim went over himself and ended up giving B a warning. Also while we were still discussing the situation, B went over to us and told us that he would concede anyway, which he did.
Another situation that caused a bit of discussion was when Stefan went over to Tim and myself. A player had played a Cranial Extraction and accidently looked at his own library and shuffled it. Since he had reordered his top cards due to Sensei’s Divining Top before, Tim and I felt that a Game Loss was the only appropriate penalty here, since the game state was damaged beyond repair. I have to admit that I failed to ask Stefan some necessary question in this situation. (“Why didn’t the player’s opponent stop him when he looked at his own library?”, “Why did the player shuffle it when he noticed that it was the wrong library?”, “What targets did the player announce for the Extraction?”) Anyways, when we later discussed the ruling with Philip, he told us that he had just given a Warning for announcing the wrong target (his opponent instead of himself). While this is a sneaky way to prevent a player from getting a Game Loss, I don’t agree with that. I feel uneasy, since this seems to be easily abusable. Maybe the player noticed too late that he grabbed the wrong library and then used this opportunity to get a free shuffle? As I noted before, I am missing some information about this situation.
Finally there was the obligatory “DQ situation”. During one of the last Swiss rounds, Stefan asked me to help him. (I was not sure what the exact question was, though.) At a table two players were playing for a possible top 8 spot. The extra turns were practically over, but both players were tied, which would mean elimination for both of them. So they were discussing if one of them would scoop to the other. Always a slippery slope. Player C asked us judges whether they could role a die to determine the result. We denied this of course. They discussed a bit more and D asked C whether he would like to concede. C replied with: “Was würde mir das bringen?” (“What use would that be to me.”) Now this term can mean two things: “What are giving me for it?”, which would be a request to be bribed, but also a rhetorical “No, why should I?” In this situation it sounded to me to be the latter. Nevertheless I stepped in and told them that I would not tolerate the discussion going into this direction. In the end the players called it a draw.
Later Tim approached me. It seems that he interviewed C about this and he wanted to know my opinion. Actually I was a bit confused at first and was not sure what situation he was referring to, since I hadn’t viewed it as “serious”. I told him about my interpretation and in the end Tim decided just to give a Stern Lecture.
At the end of the day, I table judged the quarter finals between the two Berlin top 8 players, Gabriel Huber and Rosario Maij, which Rosario won 2–1. Since the people I drove with were eager to leave, I didn’t have the chance to judge or watch the half finals, but I later learned that Rosario went on to win his and so won one of the two flights to LA. Congrats to him as well as the other finalist, Fabio Reinhardt!
Finally I found time to blog a bit about GTA: San Andreas. Let me begin with a brief summary: San Andreas is a great game in the tradition of the GTA series. The level and mission design is certainly better than that of GTA: Vice City, and there have been lots of other improvements.
Cruising through the state of San Andreas
What is so great about the GTA series of games? Well, I think it is mainly the freedom you have in the game. You can do whatever you want at any time you want. You can go whereever you want to go in the game. Contrast this with my criticism of Brothers in Arms, where you have very static levels that force you into exactly one possible approach to each situation. Also, the games are very anarchistic. Here you can do whatever you want to do, and you don’t have to live with the consequences, especially when driving around in cars. The radio stations with their subversive moderators and highly satirical commercials and chats also help to make this game a lot of fun.
But let’s start with some of the negative criticism. The graphics sucks, of course. It is rather primitive compared to other current games, although there have been a few visual improvements and added effects compared to Vice City. Also, the viewing distance has increased, which is important in the vast level of San Andreas. The poor graphics are of course a legacy of the console heritage of this game. This also explains the rather crude controller options. You can notice how they just mapped the keypad keys to certain keyboard keys, so that you have rather different functions on the same key. On the other hand, shooting with weapons is very easy on the PC, since mouse aiming is so much easier than aiming with a keypad. But there is one crucial advantage over the steering of Vice City: You can now look around inside vehicles using the mouse. This is so much easier than looking around with keypad keys. In Vice City you easily bumped into other cars when driving backwards or turning corners, since the camera view needed a few seconds to adjust to the new direction. This won’t happen in San Andreas!
Flying around Los Santos
One of the most visible changes is of course the size of the level. GTA: San Andreas is supposed to simulate a whole US state. It includes three cities: Los Santos (resembling Los Angeles), San Fierro (resembling San Francisco, complete with steep streets and trolley cars), and Las Venturas (resembling Las Vegas). It also includes a lot of smaller villages and an airplane graveyard in the desert. The level is quite diverse. Also, for the first time, there is a whole system of highways between and inside the cities.
The size of the levels offers many opportunities to discover so-called sub-mission. These are missions that are not necessary to complete the main story arc, but are nevertheless challenging. These sub-missions are very different. For example there are the classic taxi missions, where you have to drop off passengers as quickly as possible, race missions with cars or planes, girlfriend missions where you have to please your girlfriends with restaurant visits etc., pimping missions, quarry missions, various driving schools etc. pp.
Denise likes to do drive-bys
But of course there is also a main storyline. This storyline is again quite expansive, similar to the Vice City storyline. Also, we get to meet old friends, like Rosenberg and Kent Paul from Vice City and even you character from GTA III and his treacherous girlfriend Catalina! Oh yes, and you take a short trip back to Liberty City.
As I mentioned before one of the strong points of the game is the satire and humor in the game. Unfortunately I personally think that the satiric part was more advanced in Vice City, with the radio moderators being a caricature of modern society or the film studio where they seemingly filmed the moon landing. San Andreas concentrates more on a “sex theme”, which might be shocking or provoking to a more prude audience, but which I personally find rather childish. (Although I have to admit that I laughed out loud when I first saw the new Cherry Popper ice cream wagon.)
Nevertheless the game is a whole load of fun and perfect stress relieve. It brought me many fun hours and I am sure it will bring me more.
I will be judging the PTQ for Los Angeles in Hamburg this weekend. I was planning to go there with friends, but since Philip Schulz was still looking for judges, I applied, and fortunately I was accepted. Nice.
As you will have heard, there was a series of bombing in London today. Of course, tomorrow Pro Tour London is supposed to start, so many Magic people are gathered in London at the moment. I haven’t heard about any harmed Magic players or judges so far, so let’s hope for the best.
Wizards plans to run the Pro Tour as planned. Personally I welcome this. We should try to continue living our lives as normal as possible and cancelling such an event sends the wrong signal. Also, many people have taken holidays or spent money travelling to London and they should not be disappointed. Life goes on.
On a more happy note, I’ve been invited to judge German Nationals this year. I’m really looking forward to judge a big event again and to meet nice people. Finally, I will travel to a PTQ in Hamburg the weekend after next. I will go with friends, and since Philip Schulz was still looking for judge, I applied. If I’m not accepted as judge, I will play in the event, which should be fun as well.
Last Saturday we held the Magic Regionals 2005 here in Berlin. I’ve already blogged about the problems I see in the way this year’s Regionals are run in Germany. So originally it was proposed to run inofficial top 8 as a separate event, but in the end we decided against it for various reasons.
The event ran smooth overall, although there were complaints about the lack of judges on the floor during the first round. At this point most judges were involved in various administrative tasks.
As always the event was held at the Magic Center. Since the store is now under new management, we two TOs: Theo Buskase is the old owner and still official TO, and Peter Who’slastnameIdon’tknow is the new manager for the store. Head judge was Cristian Hoof (L2), Sascha Wagner (L2) was our scorekeeper, Lutz Hofmann (L3) and I (L2) were floor judges.
Huy covering Gabriel Huber vs. Andreas Hennig
For this event we had a special treat: Huy Dinh covered the event online. He was later joined by Christoph Meise, so that we had up to two matches covered and featured per round. Of course the lack of top 8 play was hurting coverage as well.
We had a few interesting situations: While counting the deck lists we noticed a player who had noted four Beacon of Creation in his mono-red deck. While a legal deck list, we didn’t believe that this was right. When checked the player did indeed play four Beacon of Destruction. We argued about the solution to this problem. I was of the opinion that we should stick to the Penalty Guidelines and let the player replace his BoDs with BoCs. The head judge wanted to correct the deck list to match the deck played, since he saw no abuse potential. In the end he decided to let the player play with basic land of his choice instead of the BoCs, since getting the BoCs in time would be quite hard and be a de-facto disqualification. I liked this decision.
We had another situation where we checked player A who had noted only 56 cards on his deck list. And he had Beacon of Destructions in his deck, but he had noted … Beacons of Creation on his deck list. It turned out that the scorekeeper hadn’t accepted the player’s original deck list because of unreadable handwriting. So the player had to rewrite it. When we reviewed the original decklist we noticed that it was fine and matched the deck as played. Therefore the head judge decided to accept the original deck list as valid deck list. We issued a game loss, but let the deck unmodified.
During one of the following rounds I got a call: Player B had a Genju of the Spires enchanted on a Mountain. Player A wanted to know what happened if he played Mind Bend on the Genju, changing “Mountain” to “Plains”. Especially if it would also change the type line (“Enchant Mountain” to “Enchant Plains”) and if the changed return to hand ability (“When enchanted Plains is put into a graveyard, you may return Genju of the Spires from your graveyard to your hand.”) would cause the Genju to stay in the graveyard when the land dies. I ruled that it would indeed change the type line, but that the Genju would return nevertheless, since the trigger is basically a placeholder for “When enchanted permanent is put into a graveyard”.
Head Judge Cristian Hoof patrolling the feature match area
A appealed to the head judge about the last part of the ruling. (“Would you be very angry if I ask the head judge to make sure?” I considered this an appeal.) But when I came back to the table with Cristian A had already realized that this question was irrelevant. The Genju is put in the graveyard, not the land, so the ability of the Genju will never trigger.
We had problems throughout the day with player A. He accumulated a total of five penalties over the day. One game loss for deck problems was listed above. This was joined by warnings for Unsporting Conduct, Exceeding the Pregame Time Limit and others. In one case he called over a judge and when Cristian and I went there, he complained about a supposedly marked foil Chrome Mox of his opponent. We couldn’t determine any markings and alloted extra time. After Cristian went away, A complained that the game couldn’t continue, since we had modified his opponent’s library. Even when I explained to the player the we hadn’t reordered the library, he wanted a confirmation from the other judge. In retrospect I should have given him an Unsporting Conduct warning at this point. Instead I called over Cristian again and gave another two minutes extra time.
At the start of the next round A called over a judge again. Since Lutz and I were doing deck checks and Cristian was handling another call, our scorekeeper Sascha went. I told him to issue an Unsporting Conduct warning should it be something trivial again. Sascha gave that warning; A had sorted his opponent’s deck into what he believed marked and unmarked cards.
In one situation that player missed what I dubbed an “on-table game loss”. I was watching his match against player C for time play. C announced a Reap and Sow with entwine, targeting A’s Blinkmoth Nexus. C immediatly grabbed his library to search for a land card. (He was obviously in a hurry.) At this point a reasonable play for A would have been to activate the Nexus in response and shoot it with his own Arc-Slogger to prevent C from searching and shuffling. (C knew the top three cards of his library due to activations of Sensei’s Divining Top.) In this case I would have no choice but to issue C a game loss, since the game state couldn’t be repaired. Fortunately A just sacced a Sakura-Tribe Elder in response, so that I only needed to give a caution to C.
The new Berlin champion, Lovis Anderson
I was called to the match between two other players (let’s call them D and E). D called me to watch the game for time play. He was clearly agitated and suspected his opponent of stalling. E was up one game and timeout was approaching. While watching the game I chatted with another spectator, so I missed what exactly happend. D was resolving a land search and currently shuffling his library. E claimed that D has said “Dann du” (common German Magic lingo, meaning: “your turn”) while shuffling. D stated that he still wanted to attack with his creatures, but couldn’t remember what he had said, or if he had anything at all. In the end I went with E’s version, since he was sure of what D had said, and D’s bad memory border shadyness in my opinion. So I didn’t allow D to attack.
At this event I also talked a lot to the other judges, the old TO, the new TO. The current judging situation in Berlin is not comfortable at all, since everything is unclear at this point. We hope to find a permanent solution soon, when the store’s new owner is in Berlin. Currently the main problem as I see it are unclear responsibilities. At this event we didn’t have a head judge until a few minutes before round 1. Also, people were invited to judge future events without the new TO knowing etc. pp. All this is of course completely unacceptable and I think all persons involved agreed.
Nevertheless it was a fun if tiring event, but aren’t they all?
This year the Regionals in Germany are in a format I am not comfortable with. They are played as swiss tournaments with one additional round of play, but no cut to top 8. Instead there is a number of invitations given out based on attendance and these are handed to the leading players after the swiss is over. Also, already qualified players can’t play in the Regionals.
I don’t like this format for various reasons. To me the main purpose of the Regionals is to crown a Regional Champion (similar to what the Champs do in the US). And of course the Regionals Champions and all other players that placed high enough should be invited to the Nationals. But the way the Regionals are currently played out, it is just one more (big) Nationals qualifier. And many players can’t reasonably attend.
There is no top 8. This means that the Regionals Champion is determined by swiss standing. But swiss standings have the disadvantage that many players just draw into the top ranks during the last round to ensure a Nationals invitation. Also, the thrill of watching elimination rounds is missing. There is no real champion, just the player that ended up first.
Invitations for the Nationals are also given out based on rating or Pro Points. Now the rating cut is after at least some of the Regionals. But this means that players with a high rating will not participate in the Regionals, because they might threaten their rating with a poor performance at this K-32 event.
And finally people who are already qualified can’t participate. This means that for example the reigning German Champion can not participate in the Regionals and can not also become his Regional Champion.
In my opinion it is a better idea to move the rating cut before the Regionals, allow all players from that region to participate, even if they are already qualified, hand down invitations if necessary, and play out the top 8. This would solve all the problems I mentioned.
This weekend was the prerelease for Saviors of Kamigawa. As always it took place at the Magic Center, now under new ownership. I judged Saturday. It was a fairly uneventful tournament with 125 players. We were three judges plus scorekeeper, which was just enough. Personally, I would have preferred one more judge on the team. The best part was that we now have a preliminary agreement with the representative of the new owner about judging. I hope this helps to ensure that we will keep the high standard of judges we have and will enable all judges to judge if they want to.
On Sunday I planned to play in the team events. Unfortunately I only had one team member and we weren’t able to find another one. Fortunately we found a team for Carsten who needs the experience, but I had to watch the others play. There was no single event on Sunday, since I was the only person interested in one and we didn’t even manage to get a booster draft together. But I had fun nevertheless, talking and joking with all the people I know there.
I will probably play the in-store prerelease next Saturday and was already asked whether I want to judge Sunday’s event, which I will do. I really hope to get a bit play experience with the new set. Getting into the Magic Online Beta for Saviors could help here as well.
