Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - Drive to Work #247 - Judge

Episode Date: July 24, 2015

Mark talks his level 4 judge time experience.

I'm pulling my driveway, so you all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work. Okay, so today I'm going to talk all about an activity that I've spent a lot of time doing. Not a lot recently, though. But it used to be a big part of what I did for Magic that I do a lot less. But I have not talked much about it, which is my time judging. Back in the day, I used to do a lot of judging. And so today, I'm going to talk about judging, and also, I'm going to talk a bit about the feature matches, which are intricately linked to most of my judging experience while I was at Wizard. So today is about judging and the feature matches, sort of two topics linked together. Okay, so let's start.

Okay, so let's start. So I explained this before, that when I was in LA, I was freelancing for Wizards of the Coast. In order to do that, in order to make my puzzles and write my articles and do all the projects I was doing, I had to see the cards ahead of time. I know, poor me. But it meant that I couldn't play in sanctioned tournaments, because I had advanced knowledge. And the rules of the time were just pretty simple. You couldn't play in sanctioned tournaments because I had advanced knowledge. And the rules of the time were just pretty simple. You couldn't play in sanctioned tournaments.

We've gotten a little more subtly now. But anyway, so I wasn't able to play, but I wanted to be involved. And so what ended up happening was I, in sanctioned tournaments, I would judge. Now note that I used to go down to Costa Mesa all the time and play. Back in the day, most of those weren't sanctioned, so I could play in those. So when I wanted to be a player, I would go down to Costa Mesa, but when I wanted to be involved in anything that was more sanctioned, especially stuff like regionals or more formal

things, I would judge. And so when I first got to Wizards, I heard a rumor that Scaffalius was working on some project that involved organized play. That project ended up becoming the Pro Tour. And once I realized what was going on, I said to Scaff, you know, I'm really interested. I have a lot of experience. I've done a lot of judging. I've done a lot of organizing tournaments and stuff. I would love to be involved in this.

And Skaff was like, I'd love the help. And so I got very involved with Skaff of helping to do the creation of the early Pro Tour stuff. Now, let me explain. Skaff, for those who don't know who Skaff is, I explained Skaff a little bit. He was one of the original playtesters, one of the East Coast playtesters, I explained Scaf a little bit. He was one of the original playtesters, one of the East Coast playtesters, designed Alliances, Antiquities, Ice Age, Fallen Empires. He came to Wizards pretty early,

and one of the things that Scaf did was really try to figure out ways to help Magic in a structural way. Not just the game itself, he did work on the game, but bigger than the game. And one of his big contributions, I think, was he really, really was the person who said, you know, what's key to making this work is organized play. And Scaf really pushed hard in saying, you know, one of the

biggest problems for people is they want to play magic, but do they have places to play? Do they have people to play with? And so Scaf was one of the people very early on that pushed the importance of events and organized play. Part of that, the reason that he created the Pro Tour was he understood the need for aspiration and the need for something to want to achieve.

That if I go to my store, it could build towards something. So that's why he felt it was very important to have a pro tour. But he also felt it was very important to have an entire organized play structure from the stores all the way up to the pro tour. Part of that, and Scaf recognized this very early, is in order to make organized play work, you need people who are running the tournaments. Yes, you need people in the tournaments, but you need people running the tournaments. And the key to that is, partially, I mean, you need a good

tournament organizers, that was important, but you also need judges. Judges are the lifeblood of tournaments. If you want to make a tournament run, you need a judge. Usually multiple judges, depending on how big your event is. And so, one of the

things that SCAF and the whole Organized Play team worked real hard toward was figuring out a way to get judges. And what we realized was, it wasn't just enough to have judges, we wanted a system by which we could promote and create judges. Because one of the things that's important, if somebody wants to do something, you need to say to them, here's how you do it. There's a means and a method and a step. There's a way to do it. And we wanted the players to know,

hey, this judge is stamped by us. This is a good judge. They know what they're doing. And we wanted the players to be able to differentiate. So it was very important to create a certification process. So the idea was, we want judges, we wanted some players to be able to differentiate. So it was very important to create a certification process. So the idea was we want judges, we wanted some way to say, hey, these are judges. They are stamped approval.

These are good judges. And there's a way for judges to advance. Because just like there's a pro tour for players to aspire to, we wanted the judges to have something to aspire to. So what we ended up doing is we created five levels. There's level one through level five. Now, a lot of the stuff I have something to aspire to. So what we ended up doing is we created five levels. There's level one through level five. Now, a lot of the stuff I'm going to explain today, let me give a little caveat.

I judged a lot back in the early days. In 2004, my twins were born. I gave up most of my traveling, and aside of that, I gave up judging. So I've not really judged since 2004. That's 11 years ago. So a lot of the stuff I 2004. That's 11 years ago. So a lot of the stuff I'm talking about is how judging was.

I'm not up to date on how judging is. So if I explain some things, I'm explaining historically where it was, not necessarily where it currently is. So take my knowledge of the grain of salt, and I'm not giving you the most up-to-date information. I'm more historically explaining where it was. So we created these five levels. At the time, the idea was that there was one

level five back in the day and that one level five would be the person who was the head judge for the Pro Tour. Originally, I think the first level five was Tom Wiley. When Tom Wiley stopped head judging the Pro Tour, Charlie Cattino became the level five. So for a period of time, there was one level five. There shall be only one.

Eventually we realized that we needed more than that. There were more events that needed level 5s, and so eventually there are now more than one level 5. Not a lot. Level 5 is a pretty high prestigious level. And so the idea is that in order to create

somebody, in order to get certified, the way it worked is is you have to be certified by a judge a higher level than you. And what that meant was we enabled each judge to certify the level below, or more than one level below them. So the idea was

level fours could certify level threes, or twos or ones. Level threes could certify level twos or ones. Level twos could certify level ones. So a lot of what we wanted to do, the fives and the fours were the higher-ups running key things. And the idea was, out in the wild,

mostly, you'd have level one, twos, and threes. And so what we needed to do was we needed to seed the world with judges. So first off, there were some judges when we started this. There were people that on their own accord, much like I had, had started judging, not because there was a set-up judge system, but they knew there needed judges this, there were people that on their own accord, much like I had, had started judging, not because there was a set up judge system, but

they knew there needed judges and there were people that stepped up and did that. So the first thing we wanted to do was get all the people that already were judging and sort of officially check them and certify them and then enable those people and give them the tools to create and certify other judges.

So pretty much, the way it would work is, here's how the certification process used to work. Once again, I don't know how it currently works. The way it used to work is, we would, there were three components, I believe, at the time to certification. Number one was, you had to come and judge at an event that we were watching you at. We had to see you in practice. So a lot of what we were focusing on was getting the level 3 certified.

The level 4s and 5s were mostly people that either worked for Wizards or we were closely aligned with. I ended up becoming a level 4. And one of the main reasons is one of our jobs was certifying level threes. And I was a level four, so I could certify level threes. The reason level threes were so important is

we were sending threes out into the world, and level threes were going to find and certify level ones and twos. And so the idea is if we could create a robust world of level threes,

the level threes could have the job of filling in with the ones and twos. So a lot of our focus was trying to give a level 3s early on. Anyway, in order to get certified, what happens is, number one, you need to have done, I mean, number one is just experience of judging. So first of all, we have to make sure that you've judged a bunch of things, and then we want to see you judge how it would work. So we want to first

get your resume of what you have judged, and then we want to see you judge how it would work. So we want to first get your resume of what you have judged, and then we want to bring you to a pro tour, sometimes a Grand Prix, but we bring you to something where we can watch you judge. And then, number two, there usually was a written component where we would, the written component had two different aspects to it. One was rules knowledge. Usually at every level there's a rules test to sort of, are you up on your rules? Because knowing the rules is very important for a judge. Number two was just questions about philosophy and how you saw things and how you did things.

And we would have some, usually the written test was more though in general about rules knowledge and tournament knowledge. And then we'd have an interview in which we would ask you the stuff about, so I guess the written test was more about locked known knowledge being rules knowledge and being tournament knowledge, which are separate things. Rules knowledge is how does the game work, and tournament knowledge is how do

you do things at tournaments? What are the warning system and all the way the tournaments work? And then we would interview you, the third part is we'd interview you, and the interview had two components. One component is we would ask you questions, see how you feel about things, just get a general sense of you as a person, as a judge.

The other thing, which was my favorite part, is we'd do role-playing. I don't know if they still do role-playing. This was a big thing back when I certified. And the way the role-playing worked is we would pretend to be players, and they would be the judges and then we would watch them interact with

very difficult situations. So one of the things that we used to do is we, basically the judge community was, whenever something would happen, we would share stories and there are people that I will call innovators, shenanigan

innovators, who really were on the cutting edge of trying to mess with the system and judges. And we would learn stories from them. There were some famous, I won't name names, but there were some people that were famous for being shenanigan innovators. That's my polite term for them. And we would learn the things they did, and then we'd go, ooh, that's very interesting. And then we would do role-playing

sessions, and we would do those same tricks. And the trick was, when you're doing role-playing with the judges, what you're trying to do is trying to, as the player, control the conversation with the judge. You are trying to dictate where the conversation goes.

Because a good... A thing a judge needs to understand is a player will try to manipulate to the direction they want. Especially people that are doing shenanigans. You want to make sure that they're not setting the tone or setting the subject matter

of what you're talking about. And so a lot of what we did was, and the role playing was, we would pit off the judges against very aggressive players that were in very offbeat situations where you had to figure out what to do. And a big part of it was learning how to control the situation so you weren't letting the player

dictate what the conversation was about. Because it was very, and one of the things, the number one thing I used to do to mess up judges is I would walk them carefully through steps to get them to agree to something that they wouldn't agree to the thing initially. But I would walk them through like a series of 10 steps and get them to agree to each thing along the way. And then go, well, you agree with all those 10 things. And they go, well, I can't. You know, I would get them to change their mind, which was a big no-no, by the way. But anyway.

So we did a lot of certifications. I don't know how many certifications I did. Tons and tons and tons of certifications. The way it would work is whenever we went to an event, be it a Pro Tour, a Grand Prix, whatever it was, we would take time to sit down with the people we considered to be the Level 3 opportunities. And the idea was, we were trying to certify. I mean, I say certify.

I want to make sure they were good. We weren't certifying anybody that wasn't good. You know, certification meant we had a bar you had to pass. We had a quality level we wanted. Now, two things. A, if they pass, you certify them and then gave them the tools to certify people lower down. If they didn't pass, you explained to them what they needed to do to pass. Because the important thing was, it wasn't like yes or no.

It was yes, and now let's get you in the system and help you certify more people. Or it was, okay, you're not ready yet, but here is the areas you need to work on. You know, and the idea was a certification was a positive thing no matter what. You know, it wasn't supposed to be like yay them in or boo them out it's do you have the skills, if you don't have the skills let's work on it with you to teach you the skills and one of the things that I think is really important to understand is

being a good judge requires a lot of experience and a lot of knowledge. There's a lot to judging. It is a very complex thing. And sometimes when people are playing, the average player probably doesn't know all the stuff the judges do. One of the things I always say is, the next time you're at a tournament,

if you've never thanked a judge, if you've never just said to a judge, thank you so much for helping us, for making this tournament run smoothly, do that. I mean, the judges spend a lot of time and energy trying to make sure that you guys have a good tournament system and that at times can be a thankless task. That, you know, it is...

I do think it's important from time to time to take stuff and appreciate what people do for you. And literally, if you've never thanked a judge, thank the judge. Anyway, back to history. So we started certifying level threes like there was no tomorrow. You know, we really, I mean, in the beginning, there's a lot of finding the existing judges and certifying those that needed the certification, and who really were qualified just being able to certify them. And then the next step was, once we had a base of level 3s, was starting to get the level 3s to certify level 2s and level 1s.

Now, an important thing, by the way, for those that have never judged, if you want to become a judge, the neat thing about it is there's a system in place right now. It is much more elaborate than even what I'm explaining. There are still, I think there still are five levels, I think that might have changed. But anyway,

if you want to become a judge, it is not hard to take, I mean, there's work you have to do. I'm not saying you just click your fingers to be a judge, but if you are willing to put in the time and energy and learn what you need to learn, there's a system for you to become a judge.

And there's a great need for judges. The magic has been growing. There's lots of people playing. Organized play is up. There is a need for judges. And if you think it would interest you, I heartily encourage you to talk to a judge. They can hook you up. A big part of becoming a judge, like I said,

is learning the rules, both the actual game rules and the tournament rules, and just getting some experience of working with judges and sort of learning the ropes of how to judge. And once again, there's a lot more than just knowing the knowledge. That's important. But understanding how to interact with people, how to do so in a pleasant way,

how not to let things escalate. There's a lot of really key important things. Okay, so let's talk about my judging. Now I've talked about judging in general. So early on, I was very involved in getting the system started. But also, I was a judge. So the number one place that I judged was at the Pro Tour. Now, the funny thing is for most people, most people, that was the brass ring.

Like you want to be a judge and one day you want to, you want to have the highest echelon of judging. It's getting to judge at the Pro Tour. And it's ironic that probably 80% of my judging was done at the Pro Tour. Um, a lot of my judging was done at the Pro Tour. I mean, I spent eight years, um, done at the Pro Tour I spent 8 years judging at the Pro Tour so I had a very specific role at the Pro Tour which was I was in charge of judging the feature matches

and normally what would happen is I would have one judge with me and the feature match was 4 matches couldn't one judge handle 4 matches? why an extra judge? and the reason was these matches were really important the eyes were on the feature matches and so we wanted to make it as impeccable as possible matches, why extra judge? And the reason was, these matches were really important. The eyes were on the feature matches, and so we wanted to make it as impeccable as possible. Also,

it was a treat to get to judge the feature match, and so I know that judges also used it as sort of a nice little bonus for people that were doing a really good job, because it was fun just judging, like, the name players. So, anyway, let me talk about features matches. I said I would talk about feature matches. I was very involved in the early Pro Tour, and probably my biggest contribution, if you will, to the early Pro Tour was the feature matches. So let me explain.

So in the very first Pro Tour, which was in New York, it dawned on me that there was these interesting matches going on, but that no one knew where they were. Because the way it worked is, early on, you could just wander through. The earliest pro tour, any spectator could just walk by anybody and watch any match. And so the idea was, I'm like, oh, well, you know what's interesting? Table 62, oh my goodness, it is Mark Justice is playing Chip Hogan or whatever. Whatever was the names at the time. And so what I did was I think I circled them or something.

I indicated on the sheet matches you might want to watch out for. That was like the very first. I just like, hey, you might want to check out this match. And then I think at the second Pro Tour, LA, I think my time is right here, somebody who was putting the Pro Tour together noticed I had done that before, and so they decided that we'd make a sign. And the sign was called Rosewater's Pits. And then there was a separate area where I said,

okay, here's where the matches are that you want to watch. And then I think the next time, I said, you know what, maybe we should just put them in one area rather than make people go find them. Because we started to realize that having spectators just wander through the area wasn't the best idea. So I said, well, here's what we want to do. Let's make an area where we pick the matches we think are the most exciting, put them in that area so people can watch, can spectate. And I went to them, I said, you know what, I want this to feel,

I don't want this to feel like some random opinion of me, I want it to feel more official. So instead of Rosewater's Picks, how about we call them the Feature Matches. And the Feature Matches ended up becoming very central, that when coverage started becoming a bigger thing, there's a lot of focus on the feature matches. Being a player and getting a feature match started to have some equity to it. It meant something. Now, one of the interesting things was I spent a lot.

So one of my roles on the Pro Tour, besides judging, on Sunday, on the final day, I was in charge of putting together the video portion of the finals. I was the producer. Early on, I actually used to do some commentary, but I was not that good at it. And so I got commentators, and then I would be in the booth. I'd be the producer. I'd be talking with the director. I'd be setting things up.

I'd talk with the players. And I was coordinating. The director at the time didn't really know magic, and so a lot of my job was explaining to him where we wanted to go and what was important in the moment. And, oh, it's important right now, we see his hand, make sure we see his hand. He'd show the hand. And then also the director would ask me questions if he needed to know things.

And I would sort of set an order of what match we were going to start on. I set all that up. I'd also prep the players. There's a, you know, the day before, if you got in the top eight, there's a speech I would give you and sort of explain what the rules were. And there's some stuff that's on camera that's specific to just being on camera that you have to

learn that you wouldn't know having never been on camera before. But anyway, because part of my role was that, I really felt a lot of what I did in the Pro Tour was star building, was sort of getting the audience interested in the tournament through ways of really creating a narrative. And the big way I wanted to do a narrative was creating a lot of people that were...

I was very big in archetypes. So if you look at early Pro Tour, and I've talked a lot about this, that I really wanted to get people to root for people. And sometimes I wanted to root against them. I was big on sort of promoting villains, of, you know, these are the people to root for, and these are the people to root against.

You know, in wrestling terms, you've got your face and your heels. And I really wanted to sort of get players invested. I wanted people to watch a match and want them to root for somebody. Didn't have to be the same person, but I wanted people to feel invested in the match. They cared about the match. So in feature matches, there was a

similar thing, which is I wanted to pick feature matches that were exciting and did some of the star building that I wanted. Now it's funny, Randy Bueller and I used to get in arguments over this because I tended to prioritize names over how good they were, meaning that I tended to put people in feature matches that people knew. And Randy really believed that what I should be using the feature match for

is to educate people who the best players were, and so in the earlier rounds I should be featuring the better players playing each other, not the better known players playing each other. And so my take on it was, I said, look, when we get to the later rounds I'm going to focus on the rounds that matter. So when there's rounds in contention that are important, those go in the feature matches. So the reality is being good will get you in a feature match. But the early feature matches are not about getting you to know those people

because you'll eventually learn those people. It's about giving the audience what they want. And what the audience want, and I spent a lot of time on this, is they want to see the players they know. That's what they want. My goal was to make the matches the players wanted to spectate, not try to teach the spectators who they should be wanting

and Ren and I had a big, I mean we weren't super far apart, but I really believed that part of becoming a known player was do well, you'll end up at the feature matches because you're doing well players will get to know you through that, and then you start becoming someone players know, and then I start including you.

I think the big argument that we used to have is as the Pro Tour got older, we'd have players that once upon a time were really good players and for whatever reason started a job, whatever. You know, they didn't have as much time to focus on the Pro Tour. And so they weren't quite as good of players.

And I'm still focusing on them only because they're named players. And Randy's like, they're not, you know, here's the up-and-comers, focus on the up-and-comers. We had a lot of debates about that. One of my favorite things, by the way, one of my favorite players to put in the feature match here, Tom Gavin was a player out of New England.

He came in second in the second Pro Tour. He lost Sean the Hammer Regner at PTLA 1. And Tom was a hoot. Tom understood that when you were in the feature matches

you were putting on a show. And I loved putting Tom in. He made it fun to watch. He, players, loved watching Tom. And he is one of the ones I think that Randy yelled at me for.

Because there's a point at which Tom wasn't quite as on his game as he was in the early years. But he was always fun to watch and people knew him and he was a name. And I loved putting Tom in the feature matches. People would gather around. Like one of the things to me that was very interesting is I was very, I would put people in the feature matches and then see who came and watched them. Like who were the feature matches that people, A, the volume turned up, a lot of people turned up.

Or B, they were excited. there was emotion coming from there. Like, one of the things about Mike Long, I've talked about this before, is players were emotionally invested in any match Mike Long was in. Now, they wanted him to lose, they badly wanted him to lose, but they were invested, meaning they watched it and they cared. And that is a real important part to me of good feature matches is I want the audience invested in caring. I mean, I want a good game. I want

a good match. That's also really important. But these are the... Look, this is a pro tour. The people in the pro tour know how to play Magic. There's exciting games in Magic. You could pick any match. I mean, even without names, you'll have exciting Magic. But what's really exciting to me is just watching the personalities and getting the audience to have emotional investment.

It's a big, I'm, it's funny if you look at my time on the Pro Tour that I think my philosophy was a little bit different in how I did things. And I was very, very into making sure there was an emotional bond between each match and the audience. And I was very big on story in the sense of,

what's the story of this match? Like, one of the things I would do when I was producing is, I would always make sure that my commentators set up the context for what the match was about. That was one thing they used to say. Every match is about something. Figure out what the context is. Explain that up front what the context is.

Do these two players hate each other? Are they best friends? Have they played before at an important moment and something happened? These two played in the finals of this Pro Tour. I would love to do that. Two people that played in the former finals of a Pro Tour. And I go, okay, it's all

about the rematch. You know, so and so beat so and so. First guy won, the second guy lost. The second guy gonna, you know, finally get the victory that was taken before, or is he gonna lose again to the guy that beat him last time, you know, I like having context, and I think that's really important, and so, a big thing for me when I was picking feature matches and stuff was trying to make sure that there was a story going on, I'm a storyteller, for those that haven't figured that out. But anyway, I ran the feature matches for eight years.

It is very funny, by the way, how I worked really hard in the early years doing all the video production and doing the feature matches and seeing what they have to do now, the resources they have now, makes me so jealous. Like, oh, if I had the resources back in the day, if we had streaming and I could do video and, oh. Anyway, that was, I'm very jealous. When I watch it now, I'm very jealous. Because a lot of what we were doing was through print.

It was like, you know, the duists would come out a month and a half later and tell you about things. They were trying to make contextual things. They get to do it in the moment, right now, live. Anyway. The other thing at some point is maybe one day I'll do a podcast about doing future match coverage.

Not future match coverage. Doing the final day. I have a lot of stories about shooting finals and stuff. Maybe that'll be one of my upcoming podcasts. This is how I get new podcast ideas, is I do a podcast and while I'm doing it, I go, ooh, that would be a good idea, I should write that down. Anyway, maybe what I'll do one of these days is stories from the finals. There's a bunch of fun stories about things that happen in finals. Maybe I'll have to do that.

Anyway, let's talk a little bit about judging. Like I said, a lot of my judging was on the Pro Tour. I did do early on, I did the opportunity, I ran, I had judged some PTQs and I got sent around.

I went to Vancouver to run a PTQ and I went to Eugene to run a PTQ. They used to send us all around in the early days when there wasn't enough level threes. I think at the time, PTQs were run by level threes. They might be run by level twos now. I'm not 100% sure. But anyway, I had a chance to be a scorekeeper at a Grand Prix. But anyway, and I had a chance to be a scorekeeper at a Grand Prix, one of the Grand Prix, not San Francisco,

one of the Seattle Grand Prix I was a scorekeeper for. But I really did enjoy my time. And one of the fun things about judging was getting to know the other judges. Like right now, for example, they just introduced, they're doing a Judge Hall of Fame, which is very exciting. Because one thing that's neat is just seeing all these names that I know from way back in the day, all these different judges. There's just a lot of people I know that I've got to spend a lot of time with. I always say that magic is different things to different people.

In some ways, it's different games. It's also different experiences. And that there's a group of people who they've chosen for a lot of what their magic experience to be is helping other people, is creating experiences that other people can play and have fun. And I cannot... I mean, obviously, I've been a judge,

but having been a judge and seen the judges and talked with the judges, and just, I really have a very firm understanding of the amount of passion and energy that goes into the judges. The Magic judges are truly an amazing group of people. And when I talk earlier about thinking a judge, it has been truly heartwarming

to see how much the judge program has grown and how much the people who are in it care. Like, for example, there is a whole website you can go to. You have to have, it has to be logged in. You've got to be a judge. But where judges talk about judging issues, and, like, I know

in R&D, we spend so much time talking about small minutia that you have no idea about of should drawing be targeted or not. Stuff, we spend so much time talking about small minutia that you have no idea about of should drawing be targeted or not. Stuff that we spend hours and hours debating that you guys probably don't think two seconds about. The judges do the same thing on every

little nuance. And I know we interact with the judges of just talking with them about what's the best way to template things so the cards, you know, we want to make sure the players aren't confused and, you know, we want to make sure the players aren't confused. And, you know, I know our templating team often will consult with judges to make sure that as we do something, or if we come up with crazy things, we'll consult with the judges to go, okay, we're trying to do a crazy thing.

What's that going to do with the tournament environment? How are we going to handle that? And it is the passion that these people put in to, that the judges put in to making your experience smooth. Like, one of the things we talk a lot, I know back in the judging was, was the best judging is invisible. And what that means is, when a judge is doing a really good job,

you don't even notice they're doing it. You know, when a judge, so much of what makes judging judging is so that things don't happen. You know, there's judge, so much of what makes judging judging is so that things don't happen. You know, there's so much prep work and so much put into it so that,

like, when you see a giant thing happen, I mean, those happen, but that's, that is not what most of judging is. You know,

most of judging is not the giant moment where something happens and there's a big discussion. Most of judging is making sure that everything runs smoothly, that there isn't a problem.

You know, that when you have a tournament and no problems happen, that is perfect judging. That is things going wonderfully because, you know, I mean, it's not just judges. Also, I should give

a tip of the hat to the TOs, the tournament organizers. They work hand in hand. That's another group of people who are connected with the judges, but they're the people who organize the actual events. but the two of them work very closely together

it's awesome by the way if you've never think a T.O. think a T.O. but those two people work together very much to bring your thing and it is neat being in the judging you know to be a judge and go out with judges and do the judge dinner and just interact with the judges it is

heartwarming. It is really fun to see people, and their passion truly lies in judging. I enjoy judging. I was never a judge in the... My passion, probably my passion for magic is making magic. That is where it lies. And I enjoy judging, and I really, especially in the early days,

spent a lot of time doing it. In the days, it was real fun for me. But probably, the judges now are so, that is their forefront thing. They want to judge. And it is, I don't know, it's an awesome thing to see. So what do I try to think of as the things that I learned judging? It's funny because one of the things that I... My judging experience, which is very different than the average person, is most of my judging,

when something happened, it wasn't just some match. It was name player playing other name player in feature match at the Pro Tour. Like, I was judging the creme de la creme. So for starters, pretty much, I didn't, I mean, I got some rules questions, but mostly the players

at that level know their rules. I mean, when I was getting rules questions, it was either very complex rule questions or something new that they just

hadn't encountered before. Sometimes in limited Grand Prixs, you just get combinations you've never seen before. That usually limited, not Grand Prixs, pro tours would create

more rules questions because there's a more chance of you not knowing your cards were constructed look you've played your cards a long time you know the deck there's less chance

of things coming out and it was I had a chance to be I had a front seat to history like there's a lot of classic moments where I was there in fact I mean one of the most famous things I'm almost a I mean, one of the most famous things,

I'm almost a dwarf, but one of the most famous things was, so people know the story of Mike Long is playing in the final round of U.S. Nationals in 1996. He's 13-0. If he wins his last match, he will sweep U.S. Nationals, which at the time had never been done, I believe. And Mike Long, while playing, they discover a cadaver's bloom in his lap.

And his opponent calls a judge. Do you know who the judge was? Me. I was the judge. That's probably my judging, my highest, you know, most famous moment was I was the first judge called to the cadaver's bloom in the lap. And I remember getting Charlie Coutinho involved and Mike Donne involved.

And anyway, it's fun. I've been there for a lot of history. I've been there for a lot of, you know, there are definitely some feature matches where I was right there. And then even on the finals, I was producing. So, I mean, I wasn't quite on stage, but I was very close, you know, and watching through monitors, seeing all sorts of information.

But anyway, like I said, I'm driving to work. I had a fun time judging. Judging was an experience I'm really glad I had. I'm really glad that I, and one of the things that has helped me be a better designer is having a good sense of experience of the people that are using our cards. And being a judge really made me appreciate the importance of simplicity, the importance of clarity, the importance of people understanding

what it is you do. So, anyway, let me end today by saying, once again, if you've never thanked a judge, thank a judge. And even if you have thanked a judge, whatever, thank them again. The judges do a lot of hard work, and so, please, I hope you recognize, I hope today may give you a little breath of appreciation for all the stuff the judges do. So, anyway, I'm in my parking space. We know what that means.

It means it's time to end my drive to work. So, instead of making magic, sorry, instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. I'll see you guys next time.