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 met him on the train ride to GP Hasselt. Travelling with and meeting Martin by chance has tradition by now. Arriving in Aschaffenburg we went to the hotel where we picked up coverage guy Hanno Terbuyken, before leaving to the site. (I can only recommend you check out the coverage. Hanno is easily my favorite coverage writer.)
The site was near the Main river and Schloss Johannisburg. When we arrived the meat grinders were starting slowly. (Meat grinders are 64 person single elimination events, where the winner qualifies for German Nationals.) I helped with the meat grinders, but all in all it was a slow day. We had only six grinders in total, probably mainly because this time the meat grinders were outside of holidays. So I had enough time to meet people I hadn’t met for a long time and to watch the matches that were going on. Special congrats go to GerMagic’s webmaster EvilBernd, who won the last grinder of the day. He was complaining that the slowly increasing crowd of judges that were watching his matches were irritating him. All I can say is: Tough luck, win early grinders, where you still have less judges than players.
Lutz Hofmann’s (L3 from Berlin) meat grinder had a DQ situation. During a deck check I noticed something suspicious: The sleeves were cut badly. (This seems to be an increasingly common problem.) But there were two clearly distinguishable types of cuts. All lands plus four Chars were in one type of sleeves, while the other cards were in the other type. According to the player the sleeves had been bought on-site and were unplayed. It was a 100 sleeve pack of black Dragon Shields. While these are sold in quantities of 100 sleeves per pack, each pack consists of two separately produced part of 50 sleeves each. This explained the two sleeve types. In the end we were not convinced that the player had known about the production differences. Therefore Lutz did not disqualify the player, but issued a Marked Cards – Major penalty, resulting in a Match Loss. We advised the player to always shuffle the sleeves before sleeving the deck and wished him good luck in the next meat grinder (since meat grinders are single elimination events).
There was an interesting discussion among judges about issuing Match Losses in single elimination events. In the only draft grinder a player played a Devouring Light in a deck without sleeves, which was supposedly clearly marked due to wear. Some judges were reluctant to issue a Marked Cards – Major penalty, since this would mean a Match Loss at Rules Enforcement Level 3. In single elimination events this equals a disqualification from the event (sans consequences like DQ investigations and possible bannings). I firmly believe that a single elimination event is no reason to downgrade penalties, and using this as a reason to change penalties is wrong.
We only finished the meat grinders around 10:30 in the evening. I went on a food hunt. Not easy in a small town in Bavaria during the week. But eventually we found a döner booth that was still open.
The next day I was assigned to side events. Since I had not too much to do, I peeked a bit into judge certification and helped with deck list counting in the main event. The most exciting event of the day was the project Save the Judge Test. Level 3 judge Ingo Kemper was doing judge certification. Unfortunately at the start of this day our internet connection was down. When this problem was fixed, the Judge Center refused to generate new judge exams. Finally I went onto #mtgjudge on IRC, where Lee Sharpe could help us out and send a test he had still saved to Ingo. Unfortunately only one of the candidates on this day passed.
In the evening most of the event staff went into a local Irish Pub where we drafted Coldsnap.
Saturday was the second day of the main event. I worked in Tobias Licht’s deck check team. The day started with a Coldsnap draft. Unfortunately during the draft one of my local players was disqualified for peeking.
Later in the day during the constructed rounds, I had an interesting situation: While I walked the floor I picked up a card from the floor. It turned out to be a Rumbling Slum. After looking around at the matches still playing I saw a player playing a Zoo deck using the same sleeves. A quick check confirmed that the card was missing from his deck. But since the player and opponent didn’t count the deck, we couldn’t be sure whether the player presented an illegal deck or whether the card was dropped from the library during game play. The player claimed that he didn’t draw that card during the current game. After a consultation with head-judge Philip Schulz (L3) and backup Justus Rönnau (L3) we decided to issue a Warning for Procedural Error – Major and shuffle the card back into the library.
To be continued …