Comprehensive(ish) Guide to Writing Penalty Descriptions

It's Monday. This time yesterday, the Classics at SCG's Baltimore Tour stop were starting to transition from the Swiss rounds into the Top 8. I was on the shared deck checks team, which means that I was frantically (not really) courtesy checking the decks of people who believed that they would make the cut.

Right before that, though, I was walking around on the floor (of all three events — both Classics and the Open) and talking to judges about this slip:

That word you can't read is mana. But does knowing that really help?

To someone who knows what happened in this situation (a mystery I'll solve for you in a second), this penalty description probably makes perfect sense. But, to someone who wasn't there, this is confusing. What do you mean he spent mana from a revealed card? How in the ...? (Spoiler alert: the casting of the spell referenced in the penalty isn't really the error the player made.)

I've scorekept a lot of events, which means that I've had to decipher a great many penalty descriptions. Some of them are great. Many of them are like this one, or they're four lines long when a phrase or two would be sufficient.


Why Do Penalty Descriptions Matter?

I'm going to start here because without these, it's hard to see how unclear descriptions are problematic:

• The scorekeeper has to be able to make sense of them.
• The details might be important later in the event.
• The details might be important well after the event, when someone's being investigated.

The first reason is near and dear to my heart (which might be why I put it first). When I'm on stage at an event, I'm not just mindlessly typing in whatever's written on the back of a slip. I'm parsing the description both to figure out what happened and to make sure that the infraction as described matches the penalty that was issued.

That last part is very important to me. If something looks weird on a slip (like a Missed Trigger warning for a generally beneficial trigger), I want to make sure that the penalty is appropriate. Upgrades are a thing, and I'm one of their gatekeepers. Perhaps even more than that, if it turns out that the penalty wasn't appropriate, it's a learning opportunity, and I hate squandering those.

If I can't make sense of a penalty description or something seems off about one, resolving it takes time. I have to find the judge who wrote the penalty and find out the specific details of what happened. At smaller events, this isn't a huge burden. At larger events when time is at a premium, the time it takes to do this can cause Problems, especially if the problem with the description isn't apparent until someone else needs the details for something.

For example ... the second bullet point. For whatever reason (and potential DQ situations are on the list), another judge in the event might need the details of what happened when that old penalty was issued. If you've been on the floor all day and issued dozens of penalties for simple GRVs, you might not remember the details. You might have gone home for the day. You might be on break, and the situation might be time sensitive.

If you've left a concise explanation of what happened on the back of the slip, none of these possibilities turn into hurdles. And keep in mind that these details matter even after the event is over. In the not-so-distant past, penalty history has been used as evidence in suspensions. Accumulated warnings pointed to a pattern of deliberate behavior. Without details about those incidents, it would have been more difficult to come to a conclusion.

Writing Penalties for Game Rule Violations

This is almost the most frequently issued penalty at large events (Looking at Extra Cards usually wins out), and it's the one that judges seem to have the most trouble with describing. Let's look back at the example from earlier:

Illegally cast spell with mana from revealed card.

This description has one thing going for it: it's short. Short descriptions are easier to parse. GRVs don't happen in a vacuum: the game state around them can be complex, and there can be factors at play that make them more or less concerning. Even so, most of them can be boiled down into a few words. That gives us:

Rule #1: Be succinct.

Use as many words in your description as you have to, but no more than you need to.

When it comes to conveying what actually happened that was Bad, this one misses the mark. As I was sharing this penalty with judges on the floor, the unanimous reaction I got to this was "Uhhh ... what?!?!?!"

OK, maybe with fewer exclamation points.

The Mystery Unraveled

It's spoiler time. Here's what really happened when this penalty was issued:

AP's first turn: Land, Oath of Nissa, pick a mana dork. AP put the creature on the table to reveal it while he put the other two cards on the bottom of his library.

NAP's first turn: Some stuff happened.

AP's second turn: Land, tap both lands and the mana dork to cast a spell that cost three mana.

So *this* is how you use a revealed card to generate mana!

But was that really the error? At that point, the creature was physically on the battlefield (even though it should have been in AP's hand), and AP thought he could tap it for mana, so he did. The actual error happened the turn before, when he left it on the battlefield instead of putting it in his hand while he finished resolving Oath of Nissa's trigger.

Here's a better way to describe that point of error:

Left Hedron Crawler on battlefield after revealing from Oath of Nissa.

I'm not actually sure whether the mana dork was a Hedron Crawler, but I'm going to pretend that it was, because it illustrates:

Rule #2: Use card names.

I talked about this recently in a tournament report, but I want to bring it up again:

Use card names in penalty descriptions.

Card names convey an insanely large amount of information in very little space. They represent everything that the card can do and they're easy to parse. I know what Oath of Nissa does (mostly). I know that Hedron Crawler taps for colorless mana. By using card names, you're cutting down on the amount of space that you have to use to convey the same information (see: Rule #1).

When I talk to people about using card names, I often hear that they were told never to use them. I've come to the conclusion that this has morphed (teeheehee) out of a very solid piece of direction, which is: don't write names of cards that aren't known to both players.

The classic example of this is Deck/Decklist Problem penalties. If a player left a card of his deck list, don't write the name of the card on the match result slip. It doesn't really matter because in that instance the card name doesn't convey nearly as much information, and you never, ever, ever want to give players access to information they wouldn't otherwise have. Especially about their opponent's decks. Especially at the beginning of a round.

However, if both players have seen the card — which is likely, since Something Bad happened — it's OK to write the card name down. They both know it's there.

Card names are particularly effective for GRV descriptions because it's easy to pair them with what happened that was wrong. Let's look at one of the most common not-quite descriptive-enough penalty descriptions:

Cast spell incorrectly.

OK. This is a start, but it doesn't mean much. Did the player not have enough mana? Did she not have the right colors? Was the target illegal? Did she forget to choose modes? Casting a spell is complicated, and lots can go wrong.

I'm going to pretend I'm casting Wrath of God. I'm also going to pretend that I don't have any white mana, that my opponent notices, and that you come over to help us figure out what needs to happen. You put the Wrath of God back in my hand, untap my lands, grab my match result slip (which I haven't crumpled up or written life totals on the back of), and head an aisle over to write down what happened.

You start to write "Cast spell incorrectly," but then you imagine your scorekeeper frowning, so you decide to write something else instead. How about this:

Cast Wrath with no white.

This follows the first two rules — it's short and it uses card names. (On that note, abbreviated card names are totally fine. If you write Bob or Mom, I'll know what you mean.) It also tells the scorekeeper how the casting of Wrath of God differed from how Wrath of God is supposed to be cast, which illustrates:

Rule #3: Explain how what happened was different from what was supposed to happen.

More like Wrath of Scorekeeper.

The advice I like to give in person (when I'm trying to be succinct), goes like this:

"Tell me the name of the card and what happened in the game that was different from what's printed on that card.*"

(*Replace "printed on that card" with "in that card's Oracle text" as necessary.)

Most GRVs can be simplified this way. Yes, other things might be going on in the game (like the three-mana spell being cast in the first example), but you can often identify a single root cause of the "corrupted" game state and name the "responsible" card. It's an easy recipe to remember, and it's very effective at communicating what happened.

Here are the three rules, all together:

1. Be succinct. Use as many words as you need to, but no more than you have to.
2. Use card names, but not if the card isn't known to both players.
3. Explain what happened that was different from what's on the named cards.

If the Game Rule Violation is paired with a Failure to Maintain Game State warning, you don't have to rewrite the description. Arrows or quote marks are perfect.

Looking at Extra Cards

Remember how I mentioned that this is probably the penalty that's issued most often at large events? It turns out that cards are finicky things, and getting them to go where you want them to go is way harder than it sounds. (Especially for me. You can ask EDB all about it.)

Writing penalty descriptions for these infractions is pretty straightforward. You'll want to include three specific things:

• How
• Where
• When

How. How did the player come to look at this extra card? Did it fall on the table while he was shuffling? Flip from the top of his library?

Where. Where did the card come from? The player's library? Her opponent's hand? Someone's sideboard?

When? When was the card revealed? Were the players shuffling up for game one? Was someone drawing for their turn or putting their deck back after a search effect?

As with GRVs, it's pretty easy to condense this information into a few words. Here are some examples:

• Flipped top card while drawing
• Dropped opponent's card while shuffling for game one
• Milled one too many cards

There's a trend to describe Looking at Extra Cards infractions with just "dexterity error." That's not really enough — there's a huge difference between flipping the top card of your own library and catching a glimpse of your opponent's deck while shuffling, and even if the root cause of those two infractions might be the same — slippery Magic cards — the results are vastly different.

It is useful to note that you think slippery Magic cards are to blame, but you can do that with the other language that you choose. "Flipping" is pretty accidental, and so is "dropping." "Milled" is purposeful (as "picked up" would be), on the other hand, and it points to an error of game rule execution rather than dexterity.

Deck/Decklist Problems

These are the best.

And by the best, I mean that they're the best penalties to write descriptions for because they lend themselves well to short descriptions, like these:

• 58/15
• 38
• Failed to de-side
• Unregistered sideboard cards*
• Mismatch**

Remember: don't use card names here. Don't write down the name of the card the player forgot to put back in his sideboard or the ambiguous card name. Don't even write down what the player wrote instead of a card name.

For these example penalty descriptions, the rules of the game or format are sufficient to fill in all the blanks — players need to have 60 cards or 40 cards, depending on the format. If they have fewer than that number on their list, the Problem is perfectly clear.

*While you're not going to issue this penalty to a player who has 13 cards both on her decklist and in her deck box (because that's not a Problem), I probably won't assume that's the case if you use something like "60/13" instead. I'll follow up to make sure you didn't issue the penalty to someone who intended to use a 13-card sideboard.

**Don't use card names. If there's a reason you want the specific details recorded, bring it up with your Head Judge or write the scorekeeper a note about the penalty on something other than the player's match result slip.

Other Infractions

While the three infractions above are the most common, they're not the only infractions that players commit. Here are some quick notes on some of the others.

Missed Trigger

Just the card name is usually fine, unless the card has multiple triggered abilities. For symmetrical triggered abilities, it's useful to be extra clear that the detrimental side was the one that got missed.

Hidden Card Error/Mulligan Procedure Error

You can use the recipe for writing GRV descriptions for many of these infractions, regardless of whether they're tied to specific cards or game rules:

• Resolved Ponder as Brainstorm
• Put both cards in hand from Sleight
• Didn't reveal for Domri
• Mulliganed to 7
• Mulliganed after scrying

In all of these instances, the card text or mulligan procedure tells us why what happened was a problem. These descriptions are clear and concise because they can take advantage of that framework.

Tardiness

You don't need to write a penalty description on the back of the slip for Tardiness. The markings you make on the front are sufficient. Here's an example:

Red pen helps. You can also write "NO SHOW" in the drop column.

Here's a pro tip when you're filling out Tardiness slips: have the player at the table fill out the game score. They're much less likely than you are to get it backward, and re-adding a player to an event is one of the more time-consuming scorekeeping fixes.

Communication Policy Violation

It's not CPV.

When Weird Things Happen

Sometimes infractions don't lend themselves to neat and tidy descriptions. Using card names isn't enough to explain it, or the context of the error is important to understanding what happened. When you run into these kinds of situations, you have two options: write a longer description (generally preferred) or talk to your scorekeeper (before someone has to hunt you down) and explain what you wrote.

Here are some situations where you probably want to add extra details to your penalty descriptions:

• Something raised a red flag, but the Head Judge decided against the DQ
• The short version of the description sounds like an infraction other than the one that you issued
• Upgrades, downgrades and deviations

I'm going to leave you with one to think about. This happened this past weekend in Baltimore:

During AP's upkeep, he reveals Mana Leak for his Delver of Secrets trigger. He puts the Mana Leak in his hand and starts to flip the Delver. NAP activates Codex Shredder targeting AP (intending to mill the Mana Leak before AP drew it for turn and not realizing that AP had already put it into his hand). AP mills the top card of his library, which is now a Steam Vents. At this point, NAP realizes that Something Bad has happened.

After sorting everything out, you pick up the slip to record the infraction. What do you write?

Walter, Our New Overlord (SCG Philly Saturday, Open SK)

The SCG Tour stopped in Philadelphia on February 27th and 29th last month, and I was on staff. On Saturday, I was scorekeeping the 755-player Open (details to follow), and on Sunday I was in charge of Swiss side events (which will be its own, separate post).

Scorekeeping the Open was the second chance I've had to work in WLTR, the first being GP Atlanta last November. There's a new build from the one I used in Atlanta, and it made some significant improvements, like being able to print pairings and slips together rather than separately.

Wizards Large Tournament Reporter (WLTR, or Walter)

Since late last year, large events have been using WLTR exclusively for scorekeeping. It replaced the very old and well-loved (but also problematic) DCI Reporter.

There were a two glaring issues with using DCI-R for events like GPs:

1. Events can't be directly uploaded.
2. It's impossible to enroll more than 2,000 players into a single event.

Once upon a time, no one imagined that the second thing would be a problem. A 2,000+ player event? Really?

That's not only a possibility, it's become pretty common. In the past few years, events have grown massively. My first GP ever, Charlotte in 2012, set the record with almost 2700 players, and that was a Big Deal. This past weekend, Detroit capped out at around 2500, and that now seems pretty normal. GP DC is coming up this weekend, and attendance expectations are higher than both of those events.

The Past: Split Grands Prix

The "solution" to the maximum player cap was to split the GPs that had more than 2,000 players. Day 1 ran as two or three (or, in the case of GP Vegas last year, 8) different events, and then the events were combined for Day 2. That's all fine and dandy as a workaround, but it creates some awful tiebreaker situations.

Because Day 1 and Day 2 aren't actually linked, tiebreakers didn't carry over. Day 2 was treated as a completely separate, seven-round* event, which means that only your opponents from Day 2 and their records on Day 2 mattered.

For example, a player who went 9-0 on Day 1 and then from 0-2 to 4-0 on Day 2, for a total record of 13-2 could miss Top 8 while the player who went 7-2 on Day 1 and 6-0 on Day 2 could make it instead.

This isn't how tiebreakers are supposed to work. They're supposed to reward losing to better opponents, which translates to later in the event. But, because of the way Day 2 had to be implemented for these events, it instead rewarded losing later on Day 2 or not at all on Day 2, and when you lost on Day 1 didn't matter.

*Yep, seven. In DCI-R, you could assign any number of match points to a bye. To combine the events for Day 2, every player started with a bye that was assigned the number of match points they earned on Day 1, then "round 2" was paired, which would actually be round 10 of the event, and round 1 of the day.

The Present: Walter

Now, in the Age of WLTR, that won't happen anymore. Since there's no player cap and there's support for multiple scorekeepers at multiple computers to actively work on the same event, GPs no longer have to split.

While WLTR does a lot of cool things and has some nifty interface updates, it's still new. As Patrick Vorbroker and the SCG team described it, "It's a great program with some landmines."

He wasn't wrong.

I ran into three WLTR-related issues over the course of the day:

1. Some Bye Issues

These always come up, but the ones from Philadelphia were of a slightly different flavor than normal. At GPs, some players inevitably think they should have byes but aren't listed with them. This can be the result of a number of things:

• A GPT wasn't uploaded by an LGS
• A Last Chance Trial winner wasn't communicated from the side events area
• Planeswalker Points weren't updated
• There was a typo somewhere
• The player registered with no DCI number or an incorrect DCI number (usually online)

That last thing was the source of the bye issues in Philly. SCG Tour events have a preregistration site that players can use if they want to sign up in the weeks leading up to the event. This form asks for DCI number, but it can be left blank.

*Unlike in WER, you can enter a player with a "Joe" DCI number in WLTR. It serves as a placeholder, and you can change it later on in the event to the correct number. This means that we can fix missing or invalid numbers after the event has started, and we don't have to track players down before we can pair round 1.

For Philly, a few players who should have had awarded byes registered online without entering their DCI number. When that list was imported into the platform SCG uses to manage event registration, it didn't flag those sign-ups with byes because it checks DCI numbers to do so.

Fast forward to the beginning of the tournament. The player list was imported from that platform, and those players weren't assigned the correct number of byes before round 1 was paired. We didn't realize this was the case until partway through round 1, when the judges started issuing No Show penalties.

Fixing It

The fix here was straightforward: since their opponents had already been told they'd won their match and we were already 10 minutes into the round, the best thing to do was to split those matches and award the opponents byes manually in the pairings screen (this works basically the same way that it does in WER, but things look a little different). Then, we'd make sure those players who should have had byes to begin with had them now.

Everything worked beautifully.

At least, I thought it did. I started entering results, and Everything Was Wonderful.

Fast forward to the end of round 1. According to WLTR, there are about six matches outstanding. The EoR lead only knows of three that are still playing. The other three tables are clear.

Well, that's a problem.

I looked at the names of the players at those tables, preparing to have announcements made for them to come to the stage. Except I recognized them: each of those three matches was one of the ones where a player should have gotten byes.

So, the changes just didn't take, right? Not quite :(

Those three matches were still waiting for results, but the three opponents (so not the players who should have received byes at the beginning of the event) are listed with their assigned byes in the reported matches column. Yep. They were in the round twice.

Well, that's a much more interesting problem.

Ward and Patrick remembered something about a similar issue that had happened at the last event with re-paired matches not saving, and they had to manually edit the tournament file to fix it. Patrick got on the phone with Jason Flatford, master wizard, to talk him through the changes that needed to be made, but it was taking some time and it sounded like they were having issues with that approach.

So I started fiddling with things. I found a solution (which involved deleting the table they were paired at and not just the pairing), but it added a few minutes to the round turnaround time.

2. The Unsticky Re-Pair

At the beginning of round 2, I had to switch two players, a la Editing Matches. But, no matter how hard I clicked the button to assign them to their new seats, it didn't save. It looked like the swap was complete, but if I tried to move to a different process, like entering results, those players magically unseated themselves.

Thinking the problem was something like the one I ran into while fixing the byes, I went through a few iterations of deleting the pairings and tables and recreating them, but nothing stuck.

In WLTR, you can't start entering results until all the players are paired, so this meant that I couldn't, well, start entering results. With about 20 minutes left in the round, I had to find an interim solution, and that turned out to be assigning byes and losses to those players. This cleared them from the list of unseated players, and I could go back to it when their slip came in and adjust which player won and which lost so they'd have the correct match points.

It's not an ideal solution; it means that they won't show up on each other's tiebreakers.

3. The Floating Player

After the first two rounds, everything on the software side was pretty smooth. There was one more wonky WLTR thing, but I couldn't figure out how to fix it and it didn't seem to be impacting the tournament. It was, however, pretty amusing:

A player was dropped in round five. Except...he didn't appear to actually be dropped, according to WLTR.

His name showed up every round after that, in the list of unseated players for the round. Normally, an unseated player means that you can't move to the results entry screen, but this one didn't cause that problem. He just hung out, spying on the pairings, for the remaining four rounds of Day 1. He didn't even show up anywhere on the results entry screen.

During rounds six and seven, I kept trying to drop him. Nothing worked, and he didn't seem to be causing any problems for the rest of the event. He dropped with three match points, so he wasn't going to make the cut to Day 2, and I decided that doing too many weird things to try to fix it might cause more substantial problems.

It also seemed likely, based on the fact that he wasn't paired and wasn't preventing the tournament from moving forward, that, as much as WLTR wanted me to think he was still enrolled, he wasn't really. I shrugged it off.

At the end of the day, there was a clean cut to Day 2 at 64th place. I performed the cut in WLTR with the place rather than the match points because it was so neat and tidy: 64 players into the next set of rounds.

Guess how many players were active in the event after that?

65. Obviously. And one of them had three match points.

I laughed, and then I went back to my hotel to sleep.

WLTR and Penalties

WLTR's penalty entry interface is very different than the ones from WER and DCI-R. In fact, WLTR has two different penalty entry interfaces.

This means that the preferred format for writing penalties on the back of the slips has changed. This is what's been used at GPs and SCG Tour events recently, and it seems likely to stick:

[Table Number] - [P1/P2] - [Judge] - [Infraction] - [Penalty] - [Description]

Of note here, you don't need to write the player's name anymore. Instead, use P1 for the first player listed in the slip and P2 for the second. Beyond that, the rest is pretty much the same.

Being An Effective Line Captain

Judges interact with scorekeepers and stage staff at many different crunch times throughout a tournament. For some of these interactions, the urgency is readily apparent: pairings or result slips are printing and need to be posted or someone has a problem that only someone on stage can help them with. In these cases, the impact of not approaching these tasks with purpose is evident. Pairings don't get posted. Players are left waiting and wondering who's going to help them.

There are some interactions that don't have such an obvious impact on the event, though, and these are equally important. Line captaining seems simple enough, but the difference between a good line captain and a bad one can be the difference between the event starting on time and starting late.

What Do Line Captains Do?

As a line captain, you're an ambassador to the players who are registering (or collecting prizes or filling in tax forms). You're their gateway to signing up (or picking up prizes or whatever) in as little time and with as little fuss as possible.

Your job is to help keep the line at registration (or maybe prize payout or some other function that requires a bunch of players to talk to a few people on stage) moving quickly. You'll wrangle players into a single-file line or guide them to the appropriate line if different stage stations are managing different processes. Essentially, you're directing traffic.

You're also often the first point of contact a player has when he or she walks into an event, which means that you'll have to field common questions like "where do I sign up?" and "where can I get a deck list sheet?" It's important that line captains are equipped with the information they need to answer these questions or point players to the person who can.

As with many kinds of choke points, having ineffective direction can be worse than having none at all.

So, what makes a good line captain?

Find Out What You Need to Know

I asked Eric Dustin Brown, whose line captaining abilities I respect immensely, what he would tell a judge line captaining for the first time if he could only tell him or her three things. His answer was pretty telling:

1. Learn who is signing people up for what.
2. Learn which way the line forms.
3. Learn what information the players need.

The most effective line captains are equipped with information. It's hard to direct players to the right place if you don't know where the right place is. The first thing you should do when you're asked to line captain is find out what the players need to know so that you can tell them.

Learn who is signing people up for what.

If multiple events are open for registration, such as On-Demand side events and the main event, different people may be taking registration. There might be a dedicated registration person for side events, but he or she might also be taking main event registration while there's no one in the side events line.

The more you know about the registration process from the stage side, the easier it will be to direct players to the correct spot. No one likes being bounced around from station to station to do what they're trying to do.

It also may be important to find out which stations can take credit card registration, if that's an option. Many organizers only have one or two credit card machines, which means that not everyone can handle those registrations. The same is true for DCI number look-ups or special kinds of registration, like vouchers or players with byes.

Learn which way the line forms.

In some venues, there will be rope lines and stanchions to make a neat and tidy line, but that's not always going to be the case. If you're tasked with line captaining when a line has already formed, it's better to work with what the players have set up (unless it's getting in the way of something else, like the door to the room or bathroom). Otherwise, you'll have to devise a plan for the players who are waiting.

When you're trying to figure out where to have players wait, keep the layout of the room in mind. Where are they least likely to get in the way of other traffic? How long do you expect the line to get, and will the space you have accommodate that line easily? Will stage signs still be visible to other players in the room?

Learn what information the players need.

When they get to the stage, what should they have ready? This list almost always includes their DCI number and their event entry fee. Some organizers use registration slips, in which case players will need to have those filled out before they get to the stage. Other organizers just have players type their DCI numbers into a keypad.

Beyond just knowing what players need, it's important to make sure that they have those things ready before they get to the stage. If someone has to dig out their DCI number, it's better to send the person behind them to the stage while they find it. A player digging through their wallet or bag in front of a registration computer delays the entire line; a player digging through their stuff off to the side delays only themselves.

If a player doesn't have something that the need, be prepared to help them get it so they can get through the registration process. For example, know who can help them find their DCI number and where the closest ATM is.

The Two-Player Rule

This is one of my pet peeves, so it gets an entire section all to itself.

When the front of the line is a few steps from the registration stations, keep two players in front of each station. Yep. Two.

Why?

It takes time for a player to walk from the front of the line to the next available admin, and that's time that could be used to register someone. Two-person lines aren't going to make things significantly messier in front of the stage, but they can drastically speed up the registration process by maximizing how much time each of the stations can use to actually get people signed up (or prized out, etc.).

Responding to the Needs of the Stage Staff

Sometimes things happen on stage. Someone has to deal with a laptop that isn't working or step away talk to the venue representative. When something like this happens, I try to let my line captain know as soon as possible, but sometimes noise, distance, or the urgency of the issue get in the way.

As with most other judging tasks, awareness is key. When you're line captaining, this is awareness of players, the stage staff, the clock, and any other judging obligations you have, like team meetings. If you think something weird is going on that might affect who can take registration, just ask. If you think there's a better way to be doing something, suggest it. If it's simple, you can probably just do it.

Awareness is more useful when it's paired with communication, and that goes both ways. If you need something, like to step away from the line for a minute, or notice Something Bad happening, say something.

When I'm on stage during registration, I'm in a tiny little world that consists of my computer and the player in front of me. Sometimes that world includes the other people on stage or a player sneaking past the line to ask a question. Sometimes I have time to glance up at the line, but I'd prefer to spend that time with my head down, signing players up for their events. The more time I can spend doing that, the less time they have to stand around waiting.

And the less time you get to spend line captaining.

SCG Charlotte Open: On Questions (Sunday Edition)

A few months ago, I wrote a tournament report about my last judging experience in Richmond. One of the themes of that report was questions. I love questions. So, naturally, I'm going to continue that theme.

Here's some context:

• On Saturday, I was on the Open's paper team. Jonathan Aiken was my team lead. The format was Modern.
• On Sunday, I was on side events. Michael Grimsley was team lead.
• I worked the sales booth from 7:45-9:45 each morning before my shift started (which means that I got to miss most of my morning briefings, sadface).
• Most of the weekend's events were being scorekept in Walter. There were some software issues that caused delays, especially in the early rounds of the Open.

(This report is divided into two posts, because otherwise it's just a giant wall of text. You can read the Saturday Edition is here.)

Sunday

Sunday was sides day. Before I finished up on the sales booth, my team lead had divided the day's tasks among the three judges: Sean was in charge of on-demand events, while Michael and I split up the Swiss events. I had Sealed, Two-Headed Giant and Legacy.

My favorite thing about the day was working the other side of Swiss sides for the first time. I've been in the scorekeeping seat for this these events for dozens of Opens and GPs, but making things happen from the other side for the first time was super fun.

There were some challenges. Since we only had two judges to manage the six Swiss events, we had overlapping events. Since every event started on the hour, lots of rounds were flipping around the same time. I didn't have a problem with this until Legacy started because of the 20-minute build time for Sealed, but since 2HG build time is 60 minutes, those rounds lined up just about perfectly with Legacy.

I did a lot of walking with purpose from the side events area to the stage to make sure players weren't waiting. Since the Legacy event was small, I gave those players pairings directly instead of posting them. That saved them time walking to and from the pairings board. I also gave them their round end time (with a couple of extra minutes to get started), which gave me more time to start the 2HG event, which was large enough that it needed more formal start- and end-of-round procedures.

Everything worked out pretty well. Events started on time and stayed on pace all day. There were a couple of short delays flipping rounds when they stacked up on top of each other, but the cause for those delays were communicated to the players. Michael and I also made sure we were communicating with each other to minimize them as much as possible:

• "Nah, I have to wait for my pairings. Go post those and I'll grab your slips for you."
• "Hey, I need to flip this round. That event has six minutes left until time. Can you cover it?"
• "I need to run to the stage to get some information. Can you watch for calls?"

We also placed events in a less traditional way. Instead of jumping to the start of the next row for the next event, we left some space so that my second event could be placed next to my first event. This made it easier for us to manage our respective events without having to run all over the place. Leaving less space also meant that there weren't stretches of unused tables, and it kept players closer to their pairings board.

Michael Grimsley, L2

The Standard Challenge

The day was very smooth. There were some questions, especially about Kalastria Healer and Mind Raker in 2HG, but the most interesting things happened in the Standard Challenge.

There were eight players at the beginning of the event. In the first or second round, one of the players was disqualified for offering to roll a die. I don't want to go into details about what did or didn't happen, but this was the inciting incident for the events that followed, so I wanted to mention it.

I'm starting a round of the Legacy Challenge, which starts at table 437. The Standard challenge ends at table 436 — the events are right next to each other. I'm walking down the row, toward the aisle, when I overhear a particularly heated conversation between (most of) the players in the Standard Challenge. I start to eavesdrop a little bit to see if I need to get involved.

The conversation isn't the kind of heated conversation you expect at a Magic tournament. The players are talking about the disqualification, and they seem to have a different idea of what happened. They're upset about it. So, I grab the player who seems to be most vocal about it, take him a few steps away, and ask for his story.

And you thought the questions thing wasn't going to come up, didn't you?

As part of his explanation, he says that what he's saying is what he heard from another player in the event, the opponent of the player who was disqualified. I listen to the rest of what he's saying, thank him for talking to me, and then proceed to talk to the opponent. I ask him for his story.

Like I said, I'm not going to get into details of what did or didn't happen here. The important things for this story are that a) a player was disqualified and b) the other players in the event are upset about it.

As soon as I realized that the second thing was most definitely the case, my goal shifted from "find out why this conversation is so heated" to "determine if there's anything I can do to make them less upset."

To that end, I wanted to be a few things for them:

• Someone who would affirm their thoughts and feelings about the situation.
• Someone who wasn't involved in the original situation and could be an impartial listener.
• Someone who would take some sort of action to resolve their concerns.

It also came up during my conversation with one of the players that something else had happened. One of their rounds wasn't ended on time. From what I can gather, they had been told they had a few minutes left, but their judge wasn't in the area when the round ended. When he returned a few minutes later, he asked what turn the outstanding matches were on. The players were upset because they thought a match would have had a different outcome if time had been called actively. 

By asking questions and listening to their answers, I succeeded in my first two goals. When those conversations were done, I talked* to the judge who had handled the disqualification and that end-of-round, which fulfilled my third goal. We decided that the best thing to do would be to make sure that the opponent had an opportunity to give a statement (which he did).

The players noticed that this conversation happened, and they also saw the tangible results: someone submitting a statement that told their side of the story. One of the players involved thanked me for asking questions and doing something about their concerns even though, in the grand scheme of things, those actions were pretty small.

That's not the end, though. In the last round, there was a judge call. The same judge who handled the disqualification and end-of-round answered the call. At the end of the last round, as the players were packing up, they were clearly upset about something again. They thought he had made a mistake. Something about a prowess trigger and Temur Battle Rage. After asking some more questions, I think one of two possible things actually happened: either the judge call was correct, or the players had made a mistake when they explained what spells had been cast and resolved when.

That's the end of the story. It brings me to the actually important take-aways from this situation.

*Memories are bad. Players will form biases. Their reactions are a decision.

These things left a bad taste in the judge's mouth. He felt like he had failed the players in that event because they didn't have a good time, regardless of what actually happened in each of these three events.

Let's break it down from the beginning.

Memories are bad.

This is the most important thing here, I think. The very first time I encountered a situation where different people had a different version of events, I was certain that one of them was lying. When I talked to the judge about what the players were saying, that was his immediate reaction too: "I know what I heard. They have to be lying."

Well, no. Different people interpret words and actions to mean different things. This happens all the time, and it's particularly relevant at Magic tournaments. They remember different things, and memories can change, even moments after a thing has happened. The brain has no compunctions about reshaping its version of events to suit a particular favorable interpretation. Sometimes memories just don't match up to reality, no matter how certain you are that what you remember is correct.

It's possible that the players' version of the disqualification is reality. It's possible that it's not, and they're misremembering what happened. It's also possible that as they were discussing it between themselves, their memories changed to support how they interpreted the situation.

In an ideal world, we know for certain what reality is. However, that's almost never the case. Objectively, it's impossible to say what really happened. There's no way to know why the two stories are different or what actually happened.

And that's OK, as long as you acknowledge that it's the case, and keep it in the back of your mind. Someone has to decide what probably happened, and that means taking into account that human memory sucks.

Players will form biases.

And not just players. Everyone, really.

I bring this up in the context of the rules question in the last round. I mentioned two possibilities previously.

1. The judge gave the correct answer.

This question was asked after the disqualification and after the weird round end. I'd already talked to the players and the judge. The opponent had already written and handed off his statement. At this point, the players have had all of these experiences, they're unhappy (though hopefully a little less unhappy than they were to start with), and now this is happening.

Are the question and the answer relevant to how they interpret the situation? If these players have decided that the don't think highly of the judge based on what's already happened, they're not likely to trust him, which means that they're more likely to reject whatever he says. They have a reason for that bias, whether or not that reason is based on objective reality, their interpretation of reality, or some combination of the two (which is the most likely).

So, maybe they don't.

2. The judge gave an incorrect answer.

As I said earlier, I did a bit of investigating into this call after it happened, based on overhearing the conversation at the end of the round. Based on what the judge said, it sounds like he gave the correct answer. But maybe he heard something wrong, Maybe the players left out details about what spell was cast when and when it resolved.

Maybe they didn't leave out details, but communicated them in a way that was misinterpreted. Lots of questions were asked before the ruling was given — the judge was wary and didn't want to make another mistake, or anything that the players could have perceived to be a mistake.

The take-away I have from this specific part of the story, and the thing I want to pass along, is this:

Previous events can predispose players to believe certain things.

In this case, did the previous events predispose these players to believe that the judge was wrong? Maybe. And maybe he was wrong. Again, it's impossible to be objectively certain.


Their reactions are a decision

The Standard Open judge was super beat up about what had happened. Like I said earlier, he felt like he had failed these players, on the grounds that they had a bad experience.

Let's assume for a second that his version of the disqualification is objective reality and he gave the correct ruling in the final round. Do those things matter?

Nope.

As shitty of an answer as that is, it's true. There could be video evidence of both of those situations, and the players might still feel the same way about them. They choose how they want to react and what they want to think of a situation. They'll talk among themselves, and maybe they'll become more upset or outraged by having their opinions validated by other players.

They'll either decide that the judge made an honest mistake, or they'll decide that they think he's incompetent, and there's not much influence anyone else has on what choice they make.

That's the important thing.

As judges and event staff, we can't really influence how a player decides to react to a situation. We can do our best to explain why things happen. We can be sounding boards for them. We can listen and make sure they know that we're taking their opinions and stories seriously, but we can't tell them what to think, how to interpret things, or what to remember.


In the end ...

Things that we know:

• The players had a bad experience.
• That experience was based on specific things that happened during their event.
• We should do what we can to make that better after the fact, and we should also examine whether we need to make changes to avoid similar things in the future.

Things that we don't know:

• What really happened?
• How much of their reaction and feeling is based on "fact" and how much of it is based on biases that were formed and decisions that were made during those events?
• Could we have done things differently to avoid these reactions?

Something to Think About

My first event of the day was a Sealed Challenge. Several of the players were young kids, and one of them had never played Sealed before. I learned this during build, when he asked for help. He had opened all of his packs, and the cards were in a pile in front of him. He had no idea what to do.

So, I helped him sort the cards into color piles and explained how Sealed deck construction works: 40-card minimum deck size and you can add any basic lands that you want.

Given that this event is Regular REL and this is his first event, what else would you be comfortable telling him? How about:

• In a 40-card deck, it's good to have at least 17 lands.
• You don't want to play more than 40 cards.
• You want a mix of card costs, otherwise you might lose before you can cast any of your flashy spells.

Where's the line between being a helpful resource for a new player and giving too much strategic advice?

(He played all of his red cards, all of his white cards, a pile of lands, and won his first round: D)

SCG Charlotte Open: On Questions (Saturday Edition)

A few months ago, I wrote a tournament report about my last judging experience in Richmond. One of the themes of that report was questions. I love questions. So, naturally, I'm going to continue that theme.

Here's some context:

• On Saturday, I was on the Open's paper team. Jonathan Aiken was my team lead. The format was Modern.
• On Sunday, I was on side events. Michael Grimsley was team lead.
• I worked the sales booth from 7:45-9:45 each morning before my shift started (which means that I got to miss most of my morning briefings, sadface).
• Most of the weekend's events were being scorekept in Walter. There were some software issues that caused delays, especially in the early rounds of the Open.

(This report is divided into two posts, because otherwise it's just a giant wall of text. You can read the Sunday Edition is here.)

Saturday

Because I was on paper, I spent most of the day either posting pairings or wandering up and down the aisles watching matches of Magic: the Gathering. I've played a little bit of Modern, but I don't know the ins and outs of the format, so this was a great learning experience.

In particular, I learned that I hate Amulet Bloom. More specifically, I hate watching Amulet Bloom do its thing.

Moving on.

These two situations stand out in my mind from Saturday, and I think they do a good job of illustrating why asking questions is important.

Reliquary Tower?

In one of the early rounds, I was called over to a table where a player had forgotten to discard during cleanup and had four extra cards in his hand. When I got to the table, he had already discarded the extra cards. He explained early on that he hadn't discarded because he thought he had a Reliquary Tower in play. Whoops.

It's easy to just apply the appropriate fix and issue a penalty (which I did after I double-checked with Abe, who was shadowing me on the call, that there wasn't anything from the new Drawing Extra Cards rules that were relevant to this situation; no one's safe!), but I really like asking questions.

I want to understand what's happening, in part because I want to make sure there's nothing I'm missing about a situation. In this specific instance, I also want to poke a little bit deeper because suddenly having four extra cards is kind of a Big Deal.

So, I asked some things:

• Who noticed the mistake? My opponent.
• Did you have a Reliquary Tower in play earlier this game? No, but I had one in play last game.
• When was the error noticed? At the beginning of the next turn.

That the opponent was the one to notice wasn't a huge red flag for me because, as the player said, he thought he had a Reliquary Tower in play. It did make me want to ask some follow-up questions, so I did. It was also fairly early in the game and the first time the player had to discard during cleanup, and I was satisfied with the player's explanation of what happened.

Abe Corson, L3

Colorless Tarmogoyf

Tarmogoyf is (frequently) a green creature, which means that you kinda have to have green mana to cast him. Unless you mess up and you don't have green mana, but you cast him on turn two anyway. Whoops.

At the beginning of this call, it seemed like the game had only progressed to the next player's turn. He described playing and activating a fetchland and casting a Noble Hierarchic as the only things that had happened since the 'Goyf was cast. It's also his second turn, so the number of options he had was still fairly limited. At this point, I'm thinking that maybe backing this up isn't super unreasonable, and I might want to go find Abe or Nicholas to make that happen.

But, I always want to know more.

• Who noticed the mistake? The 'goyf player.
• When? On the next turn.
• Why did you notice? Because I played Verdant Catacombs and when I started to search, I realized I didn't already have a green source in play.

That puts us at the Tarmogoyf player's third turn, not his opponent's second turn. We've added a couple extra decision points and an extra card draw, and that's too much for me. I tell the players that the game is going to be left the way it is.

Except for the 'goyf, right? That's the opponent.

Well, no. We're either going all the way back or we're not going back at all. Of course, I told the opponent that I'd encourage him to appeal if he wasn't happy with this outcome. He chose not to, but he clearly wasn't thrilled with it.

Clarifying the situation turned out to be super important, because otherwise I might have started down the backup path, which would have resulted in a lengthier time extension. These are bad for two reasons. One of them is that it might delay the round. The second, and more important, is that players have to twiddle their thumbs longer before they get to keep playing Magic, and that makes everyone sad.

I hovered for a while just in case. The 'goyf player flashed the opponent a second green source from his hand after he finished fetching, explaining that he could have had green mana on his last turn, but he had failed at putting the right land into play. His opponent seemed much happier after that. (Of course, this isn't relevant. I just like it when players are satisfied, even if I really didn't have anything to do with it.)

Questions in General

Specific situations give rise to specific questions, but there are some questions that I (try to remember to) ask every time I approach a table.

• What's up? What can I do for you guys? How can I help you?
• What does that card do? (No really. I know what I think it does, but that's probably different from what it actually does.)
• Why is this question you're asking important?
• Have you received any other penalties today?*

That last question is my favorite, though I usually phrase it differently. Especially for rules questions, it helps me figure out what the player is actually asking, as opposed to what the player thinks he or she is asking. It's also useful for identifying other things that might impact the answer to the question--other cards in play, spells that have resolved, that sort of thing.

(*I never remember to ask this. Never. Well, except in round one or two. I'm working on it though.)

Penalty Descriptions
(aka how to answer your SK's questions before they ask)

I wouldn't be me if I didn't bring up something about match result slips or software, right? No worries. I got you.

Late in the day on Saturday, the event scorekeepers handed me this match result slip:

First things first, you'll notice that the penalty format is completely different from what you're used to. That first number is the table number. P1 indicates the top player on the slip, while P2 is the bottom player. The judge's name is Last, First. Walter has a different penalty entry interface than WER and DCI-R. In fact, it has two different penalty entry interfaces.

This was the layout our scorekeepers requested for this weekend, and I expect it will become the standard for large events soon. Until then, either keep doing what you've been doing, or follow the directions of your HJ or scorekeeper. If you're not sure, ask :)

But here's the more important part of this:

Those penalty descriptions don't really mean anything.

Describing a GRV with "resolved spell incorrectly" is basically the same thing as describing a GRV by saying that the player committed a GRV. It doesn't tell anyone anything about what actually happened, which kind of defeats the purpose of tracking infractions in the first place.

These descriptions should be much more specific. I was tasked with communicating this to the judges on staff.

My advice was three-fold:

• Use card names.
• Explain what happened that wasn't supposed to.
• Keep it short.

You can usually describe what Bad Thing happened in about as many words as it takes to say "failed to resolve spell correctly."

For example: Shuffled after Ancient Stirrings. Yep, that's not how that's supposed to work, and now I know exactly what went wrong.

As I was talking to judges, they raised a not unreasonable objection:

But we've been told not to write card names on the slips, because it might give players extra information.

This is true. It's especially true for deck list penalties. Please don't name the card that the player forgot to register or used a shortened name for--that could actually give their opponent information they wouldn't have otherwise.

However, if the spell has been cast and resolved incorrectly, both players know it. But what if they forget it's in the deck? That's super unlikely. Not only was it cast, but something weird happened, too. A judge had to be called. Those kinds of events tend to stick out in memory, and it's extremely unlikely that a player will both forget *and* look at the back of the slip later in the match. That possibility is an easy trade-off for having more complete information.

It's likely that, if you use vague penalty descriptions, your scorekeeper is going to have to track you down for more information when they go to enter the penalty.

That's particularly true in this case, where there's not enough information to figure out why both players were issued a GRV for whatever happened instead of one GRV and one Failure to Maintain. That kind of difference could be a game loss later.

Make sure your penalty descriptions are detailed enough to answer the questions someone else might have about what happened. You can often lean on the type of penalty you're issuing. "Mulliganed to 7" paired with Improper Draw at Start of Game explains what happened. "Flipped second card" paired with Looking at Extra Cards also paints a complete picture of what happened.

Penalty descriptions don't have to be long, they just have to be specific.

Overall, Saturday was pretty tame, There were some delays printing pairings because of software, but online pairings helped to mitigate some of the time that was lost as a result.

Something to Think About

Here's one more parting thought for you. This happened at the end of round one, in extra turns. I'll call the players Jund and Bloom.

There's a small pile of dice on the table to the right of Jund's playmat, and Bloom has his own dice in a plastic box behind his playmat. Trust me, this is important.

On Bloom's turn, he casts Summoning Pact twice. He grabs one of the dice from the small pile and sets it on top of his library to remind him to pay for his Pacts. He has plenty of lands in play to do so. At the end of Bloom's turn, Jund activates the ability of Scavenging Ooze, which doesn't currently have any counters on it. He grabs the die from the top of Bloom's library and sets it on Scavenging Ooze to represent the counters.

Questions:

• Is this Cheating? If not, do you think it should be?
• Is the situation different if the die placed on the library belongs to Bloom?
• Is the situation different is Jund says explicitly that he removed the die in hopes that his opponent would forget his Pact trigger?

A few seconds after the die was moved, Bloom grabbed the lid to his dice box and put that on top of his library. He paid for his Pact triggers at the start of his turn. I think the game ended in a draw, but I don't really remember.