Hello everyone! I wanted to share a tournament report from FaB Sides at SCG CON Philly, which will also include some discussion from SCG CON Roanoke. I had the role of FaB Sides lead at both events. I’ll also be starting a discussion thread in the #judge-calls channel in the Flesh and Blood Judge Hub server, and I’d invite any discussion or questions in that thread to keep it centralized.

Cross-references:

Application and Initial Staffing #

Initial staffing applications opened for SCG CON Philadelphia in the closing days of 2021. I was assigned to this event on January 12th, about a month before the event (which was February 11th-13th). The side events schedule came out not long after, and I put some work into an initial side events judge schedule on January 21 when I got an early draft of the master judge schedule. Friday and Sunday are both relatively straightforward: we have 6 events on Friday and 5 events on Sunday. It’s Saturday that presents a challenge, since we have a total of 9 events scheduled. It’s also a long day, with an 8:30 AM call for most judges to prep for a 9 AM event, but also with a Classic Constructed event starting at 5:30 and expected to run until around 8:30 PM or later. Luckily, I had a PM shift person on my team - they start at Noon, allowing them to work until close. So, the entire team will help launch our last events, and then the Keystone and PM shift personnel could see those events through to the finish.

Within a few days, the Modern main event sold out, leading to a second Modern event being added and judges being shifted to support it. I somehow gained a judge on Friday, but lost one on Saturday. The changes from the previous schedule were pretty minimal - one person who was previously assigned 2 events on Friday wound up with only 1, while I picked up an event on Saturday due to the smaller crew.

A few days before the event, we had three more judges withdraw, although only one of these affected me, leaving one fewer person still on Saturday - so now a team of myself + 4 would need to manage 9 events. Luckily, this is still completely workable, and this is the version of the schedule that you will see below.

Side Events Scheduling #

Building a schedule for an event like this requires balancing a few different considerations. First, I need to have one person assigned to run point on each active event - they will make sure the event keeps moving, managing tasks like calling time and starting new rounds. That makes sure that even if I get caught up in an issue or go on break, we have a judge specifically assigned to make sure that the players in each active event are being taken care of.

I also want to do my best to see that everyone has a meaningful assignment - an event that they can take ownership of. Most judges will spend most of their time covering the floor and answering judge calls without an active task assigned only to them. I just don’t want that to be someone’s whole day or whole weekend. However, this frequently conflicts with the break schedule. Judges need an hour lunch break midway through their shift, and so there’s usually a mid-day event - the 3:00/3:30PM events on Friday, or the 12:30/1:00PM events on Saturday and Sunday - that requires a judge to launch it and then take their lunch break. If this is a judge’s only specific assignment, it can be a negative experience for that judge, as folks want to be working on something productive during their shift: they don’t want to launch an event, and then miss the next 1-2 rounds due to a break, then have no specific assignment for the rest of the day.

There are a few things I did to avoid this issue.

  • First, on Saturday, the 1:00 PM Blitz event was assigned to our PM shift judge. Matt starts at 12:00 PM, giving him enough time to prepare for and run the event before his meal break. I didn’t do this on Friday, because I wasn’t sure if half an hour would be enough time to brief Isaac and have him ready to launch an event.
  • The other “lunchtime” event was assigned to two judges, both of whom had another assignment: the 12:30 CC will be started by Tim, who then goes on break and returns to launch a Sealed event. Nic will have already run a Sealed event before his break, he returns to cover the rest of the CC event.
  • Another option is to simply leave the choice to the judge. Nicholas (on Friday) and Peter (on Sunday) were assigned to events near the lunch hour. I gave both the option to either take an early lunch, run the event, then take their half hour break after the event; or, to start the event and hand it off to another judge when they took a lunch break closer to the midpoint of their shift.

SCG CON Philadelphia Side Events Judge Schedule

By the way, the columns on the left hand side there - that’s for my tracking of a few key facts:

  1. The time of the judge’s meal break, relative to the start of their shift.
  2. Their role: Keystone, PM, or Partial shift.
  3. A space to mark when the judge takes their meal break.
  4. A space to mark when the judge takes their second break.
  5. A space to mark when the judge is released and to whom.

Lessons from SCG CON Roanoke #

Schedule and Staff #

I had the benefit of doing this same job at SCG CON Roanoke in late 2021. That event was pretty similar to this one. Compared to Roanoke, we lost a few “special” events (no free Friday Welcome event or Saturday Blitz Precon, and the ProQuest was transferred to a dedicated team), but we picked up a few extra regular events. The Roanoke schedule had 7/7/4 events per day, with 7/7/8 judges. The Philly schedule has us running 6/9/5 events each day, with 8/5/5 judges. At Roanoke, we had 8 events over the course of the weekend fail to launch due to insufficient registered players. I didn’t expect that to happen here - to compare some data, the SCG CON Roanoke ProQuest had 44 players. One week out, the Philly equivalent already had 61 - and we all know that many players won’t register until day-of. So, my planning was based around the assumption that most of the events would fire. That didn’t turn out to be the case - just looking at the ProQuest numbers turned out to be deceiving here. We saw most of the players in Roanoke play in multiple events over the course of the weekend - but we heard from many of the players at Philadelphia that they had only planned to come out for the Battle Hardened event.

Watching Matches #

One area I want to improve is watching matches. I had two pieces of negative feedback from players at SCG CON Roanoke. The first came during our Friday welcome event. This was an event where all of the 68 players used the Ira welcome deck, and played swiss rounds until one player was left undefeated. I sat down at one of the last tables in round 4, loaded up GEM on my tablet, preparing to enter the result (expecting it to be a draw). I looked over at the match as one player defended an incoming attack using three cards, and noticed that they had used two cards to defend another attack still on the combat chain. I inquired and the player confirmed that one of the three defending cards (not a Defense Reaction) had been used from Arsenal. This is an illegal play; cards in arsenal can only be played, they cannot be pitched or used to defend. So far this is a normal judge call - this is the part I regret: When I pointed this out to the player, she told me something like this: “Really? People have been doing that against me all day!”

Flesh and Blood is a notably hard game to table judge. It’s easy to miss things - competitive players know all of the interactions in their deck and can shortcut them very quickly. Opponents are used to this because they know what they’re playing against. This makes it difficult to catch every rules error because the game frequently moves faster than you can possibly read the cards. It doesn’t help that card costs are printed in small black-on-red text, and players frequenly activate equipment abilities by flipping them face down. It’s very important to know the cards. But this isn’t a situation like that - it’s a very obvious rules violation. Judges don’t have a responsibility to catch every rules violation in a game - we don’t have the numbers to do that - but we should have done a better job of watching matches, for this welcome event full of new players in particular.

Concession Policy #

The second point of feedback was related to the concession policy. A player was in a weaker position, but not an unwinnable one, when time was called. They wanted to concede, and a floor judge stepped in to point out that if they chose to concede they would be considered to drop. It was the right call based on the policy. However, this is a scenario that was very unfamiliar to our Magic-heavy audience, where it is common for a player to concede if they are behind when time is called, and even considered discourteous by some not to do so. The player in question angrily stated that they would drop, but continued to argue the matter with the floor judge and myself. I initially attempted to explain the reasoning here, but the player wasn’t in any frame of mind to receive that explanation. Ultimately I told them that this was simply the current rule imposed by LSS, and that while I appreciated his argument, I wasn’t in any position to change the policy.

At the time, I don’t think there was a better answer to players in this situation. TCG players are used to being able to concede, and while I strongly support the FaB policy prohibiting any request or pressure to concede, I think we do need to allow players to concede of their own volition when they are in a losing but not defeated position. However, as of the day before our event, this was changed! Players are still encouraged to call a judge to ensure that no undue pressure was involved, but it is now completely legal to concede of your own volition up until time is called.

Relases #

One potential added complication for this event was the slew of new releases from LSS during the weeks leading up. It started with a major banned & restricted announcement a few weeks out that included a power level errata for the most popular hero. One week before the event, Everfest released, adding new cards to every class. This also included an update to the Comprehensive Rules (to version 1.5, incorporating Everfest changes but not the major 2.0 overhaul), as well as new versions of both the Tournament Rules and Penalty Guidelines.

I decided to strongly encourage judges to consult with each other on rulings, especially those who had been part of the extensive discussions as part of the CR 2.0 review. Since we had a total of 8 L2 FaB judges at this event, there were plenty of people available to consult on rulings. I also asked them to let me know about any interesting or contentious rules calls, so that we could share them here and with the rules manager.

As it turned out, the new cards definitely affected the Constructed metagame, with the new Bravo, Star of the Show deck being the dominant hero, and various modifications being seen to the existing Prism, Viserai, and to a lesser extent the other Runeblades.

However, there weren’t many unexpected or difficult rules questions. A fairly common one was about the timing of Bravo, Star of the Show’s triggered ability. As a trigger that resolves during the start of turn phase, no player gets priority to respond to that trigger. I did have a player ask me “how long” their Bravo opponent has to acknowledge and resolve the trigger. I believe the Bravo player was thinking about whether they wanted to reveal to it, so they were looking through their hand and planning out their turn. I explained that there was no specific time limit on it, but that the Bravo player needed to reveal to the trigger before taking any other game action.

Beyond that, there were also a number of questions regarding closing the combat chain (especially with Prism, where closing the chain to play an action can allow an opponent to defend with equipment a second time), some of the new copy effects (if you have a copy of Haze Bending in addition to the original, you’ll get two Spectral Shields for each destroyed aura, including the original Haze Bending), and some other common timing and card interaction questions.

Logistics Plan #

That brings us to day 1. I’d like to talk about how we did scorekeeping for this event. Side event scorekeepers are generally very busy, and may have multiple events to turn over at the same time. In order to speed up our events, I brought a tablet and received permission from the TO to log in to GEM and scorekeep the events locally. In Flesh and Blood tournaments, players enter results from their phones - the tablet was used to correct result entry errors, drop players who came up to a judge to ask to drop, handle no shows, and flip rounds. The scorekeeper at the stage still managed the launching of each event - since only they are in contact with registration and know when an event is ready to launch - and the scorekeeper also closed out each event, awarding prize tickets via the TO’s electronic system. At SCG CON Roanoke last year, we walked up to the stage to check in with the scorekeeper for both of these tasks. For this event, I shared a tracking spreadsheet whereby we could mark the starting table for each event (allowing the SK to start the event without talking to a judge) and where we could mark the status of each event (allowing the SK to know when an event was ready to be prized out).

This worked pretty well. We did check in with our Scorekeeper to actually launch each event, but we were frequently able to get the starting table numbers into GEM so all he had to do was import players and start the event. We did rarely need to call players up to the stage to get their GEM numbers, especially if their Melee account was missing their GEM number and they had used a nickname to sign up for one of the sites, so we couldn’t uniquely identify them by name. Adding a starting table number into GEM is weird - you simply edit a text field with the correct table number. It appears to save that information immediately, but there is no visible confirmation that it has done so. Since our internet was spotty in the room, I was always worried that it hadn’t saved, and I would refresh the page to check. It seems to have been pretty reliable.

Speaking of spotty internet, we also had players who were unable to find their online pairings, so I would regularly be asked to help look up pairings. This worked for us, but doesn’t scale well, so I would recommend that sides leads be prepared to use paper pairings for larger sides in case there is a large number of players who cannot get online.

Day 1 #

Each day I had a slightly different team. Everyone was familiar with Flesh and Blood rules and policy, but for some it was their first time on an event like this. Each day started with a team meeting. First I introduced myself and invited the rest of the team to do the same. Then, we covered some basic points for the day. I used the same notes as I did at SCG CON Roanoke with some hastily scribbled modifications to account for the various rules and logistics changes, I’ll transcribe them here.

SCG CON Daily Meeting

  • Welcome/Introductions
    • (where from, TCG history, experience, goals, whatever)
  • Healthy/Hydrated: Breaks
  • Tournament HJ Responsibilities: Paper/EOR
    • “Responsible for” ensuring that they happen - ask for help
  • Opening Announcements
    • Draws worth 0
    • If you want to concede, the default is a drop - call a judge first CHANGED
    • No asking for concessions after decks have been presented
    • Prize tix awarded at stage after your last match is reported
  • Judge Calls
    • Empowered to… MT, GRV, W - IP5, Tardiness GL
    • “Empowered to” does not mean “must do alone” - ask for help if unsure
    • Remember time extensions
    • GL/ML/DQ/Appeal/Investigations/Deviations
    • Shadow

A lot of these points are shorthand for things that I cover in most of my team meetings. For example, the “healthy/hydrated” section is a reminder to take a break if you need to, even if you aren’t scheduled for one. The “shadow” note is a reminder to shadow as many judge calls as possible - you can provide confirmation on a ruling if the first judge is unsure, and both parties can learn from each other.

I drove over the morning of the event, since it’s only about 90 minutes away. So, I was a little bit early, and had a chance to check out the room layout and talk to the side events scorekeeper before we officially started. The team arrived, we had our start of day briefing, and opened up the hall.

Then, it was time to start our events! Friday turned out to be a slow start to the weekend, so I moved some breaks up and also encouraged judges to take the time to discuss the recently announced rules and policy updates. We only had two Flesh and Blood events launch on Friday - we heard from a lot of players that they only planned to come on Sunday for the Battle Hardened event, so the lack of any “headlining” Flesh and Blood event on Friday or Saturday was probably the cause of that. The Magic events were pretty popular, so we periodically sent a few judges over to support those groups, especially Magic side events to help cover those events during lunch breaks.

As we approached the end of the day, it was clear that we would be able to release the non-Keystone judges a little bit early. We focused on ensuring that the Keystone folks (who would be staying) had taken their breaks, and then released the non-Keystone judges around 7. I stayed with Isaac on the CC+ event until it ended (he had just started his partial-day shift at 3, so it would have been silly to release him so soon). Joe and Lamberto supported other parts of the room, and the remaining judges were gradually released as time allowed.

Day 2 #

We started day 2 with a smaller crew, more events on the schedule, and hopes that more of those events would actually happen. It turned out that the main challenge on Day 2 was space: with almost 800 of the room’s 1050 chairs occupied by the Modern 10K main events, there wasn’t much space to split between the Prerelease events, Magic sides, and FaB sides. The plan at the start of the day was to pin the Prerelease events to the end of the room. They would need to renumber tables periodically due to their two-headed-giant events, and it was best to do that at the end of the room to avoid leaving gaps of table numbers that do not exist. Magic sides were next to them, and FaB sides would directly follow the main event.

Our first events of the day launched 1 hour before the main event was initially scheduled. We started at table 411, in order to leave some space after the area planned for the main event: due to the combination of in-room and online registration, it was possible that we could have slightly exceeded the posted caps. We didn’t have any trouble during these events, as there was still a buffer between us and Magic sides.

However, the Modern 10Ks got off to a rough start, with an initial delay of close to an hour plus some additional delays during round 1. Floor coverage on the 10k was low, and as you can probably expect, there were a number of cases of players on the Modern event calling Judge and asking questions that we didn’t know the answers to. (I got a number of judge calls for players wondering how to enter their result, as they hadn’t received match slips and their match had ended. I couldn’t initially find anyone on the main event to investigate that issue, so I finally escalated it to one of the head judges - who was quite surprised to learn that his players hadn’t received match slips, and was happy to get slips reprinted to solve that problem.) As a result of these delays, that event didn’t shrink as quickly as we expected it to. We launched our midday CC event right after the last table of Modern as planned (to the amusement of judges who were surprised to find an unfamiliar card game right next to their tournament), but the floor manager quickly realized that he would need that space in order to accomodate upcoming prerelease events. So, we moved in between rounds, placing our CC event in a few spare tables in the Commander area.

Our next wave of events was scheduled close to the peak of activity for the day: around 3 PM, we had almost every chair in the room in use, and wound up adding a few extra tables in a corner behind the artists' area to fill in some extra space. After scavenging some unused chairs from around the room, we were ready to launch that sealed event. Most of our players today were focused on Classic Constructed, likely looking to test with the new Everfest cards in advance of the Battle Hardened event on Sunday. This wave of events included a Sealed event (5 players) and a Blitz event (0 players), so most of the players from our earlier events probably decided to take a break before the 5:30 Classic event. At this point the Modern event was also starting to condense, opening up some space in the main room for our other events.

This small event also provided opportunities to give the team their half-hour breaks, which were all completed during this event. After this event wrapped up, we had only two events left on the schedule: the 5:30 CC and 6:00 Blitz. Our PM judge managed the CC event while I helped answer judge calls throughout the area, especially on some of the Magic sides that frequently didn’t have any judges near the area. Once the CC was underway and it was clear that the Blitz would not have enough players to launch, the rest of the judges were released.

Concessions After Time #

In round 1 of our Blitz event, I was watching a match when time was called. After the one additional turn, one player seemed to want his opponent to concede. He turned to me and asked if they were allowed to discuss the outcome of the match.

I explained to the players that FaB tournament policy prohibits asking for a concession, and once time has been called, the only option to concede is if a player is able to give a legitimate reason why they are unable to continue playing the current match. While both players were at 1 life, they had been effectively defending their life totals over multiple turns, and both player had access to a decent number of cards left in their decks. I explained that since both players clearly had a fighting chance, it was unlikely that I would accept an argument to concede in this case.

The player then followed up asking if he could reveal his hand. He was currently defending, and only had 2 cards left to make his attack. I don’t recall if they were or if they would represent clear lethal. It is unlikely, since the opponent had access to AB and was about to draw a full hand. I explained that revealing his hand would be an instance of trying to get his opponent to concede, and it would not be permissible. At this point, I asked “so that’s a draw, right?” and reported the match in GEM as a draw.

Incorrect Seats #

Despite the small size of the afternoon Sealed event, it probably included the greatest ratio of judge calls all day. In addition to various rules questions, we had a player who incorrectly started to draw a card for a conditional effect before realizing that the condition was not met, a few other rules violations, questions about the timing of various things during combat (Bramble Spark and Rites of Replenishment’s triggered abilities), as well as a few players who played against the wrong opponents.

There is no way to create seatings for build for a sealed event, and so we simply create round 1 pairings for build, delete that round, and then create new random round 1 pairings when it is time for round 1. A few players hadn’t refreshed the pairings on their phone after build, so they didn’t see that the old round had been deleted and a new round created. We discovered this when the player who actually received the bye was unable to report his “result” for the first round. We edited the pairings to match reality.

I suspect that this is a common confusion during sealed events, and it might be beneficial for GEM to support a specific “seatings” mode, where players will not be shown an opponent’s name or any buttons to report a result.

Adjacent Events #

One scenario that I found funny happened later in the day. We had been close to Magic events all day and I occasionally took judge calls on that event. (I hadn’t specifically planned to be judging Modern this weekend, but it seems like Magic hasn’t changed all that much in the last couple of years.) However, none of the judges on my Saturday team were familiar with Magic at all, and so when they saw a judge call, or when a player approached them with a question, they would look for a judge assigned to the Modern event (or me) to handle the question.

During the middle of the day we had moved to the Commander area and to an improptu play area set up behind the artists to make space for other events. However, as the day wound down, we started our last 23-player event close to the Magic sides. We had originally planned our starting table to line up our last table with the end of a row, but we had two players who didn’t appear on the pairings, so we added them and paired them against each other. This put them on the first table of a new row after a small gap.

At some point during the round they raised their hand for a judge call. As I was making my way through a crowd of players to get there, I saw a judge assigned to the nearby Magic event hustling to get there, signaling to me that he would handle the judge call. I was close enough that I saw him arrive, look at the table, see not-Magic being played, say “Oh.”, and turn around and walk away. I thought it was funny how quickly the FaB cards scared a Magic judge away, since the same thing had been happening the other way around all day!

I wish he had stuck around - the judge call was simple enough, basically “is X an activated ability”, which has the same answer in FaB as it does in Magic. Of course it doesn’t always work that way - I had a question in a Modern event about two simultaneous replacement effects. I don’t remember the specifics, but I do remember telling another FaB judge about it simply because of how different the answer is in the two games: in FaB, the turn player decides which player’s replacement effects are applied first, and then each player orders their own replacement effects within that group. In Magic, the controller of the affected object orders all replacement effects. (Both have a number of complicated exceptions, but none would have applied here.)

Day 3 #

Sunday had a side events schedule, but given the CC Battle Hardened event starting at 9:30, and the low interest in Blitz and Sealed this weekend, we expected to be providing reinforcements to the Battle Hardened team. The Battle Hardened event wound up with a bit over 100 players, and given the 6x XP multiplier, even players who were not live for top 8 generally stayed in the tournament in order to gain XP for the upcoming wave of Pro Tour invites.

This meant that we only had two players signed up for our Classic Constructed+ event at 12:30 - not enough to launch it - even though the Battle Hardened was in round 3. I had expected more players to drop, because I was focused on the prizes for Top 8 including the 2 PTIs, but more than 90 of the original 114 players actually played all 6 rounds.

Most of my team spent the day providing floor coverage support for the Battle Hardened. The Head Judge had already given his team members assignments and a breaks schedule, so apart from one of my team members who handled posting the paper copies of this event’s pairings, my team was mostly able to just answer judge calls. We mostly followed my original breaks schedule, with just a few people shifted to ensure that we had no more than 2 people on break at a time. My partial shift judge ended their shift on schedule, and after my break, I moved over to the MTG Legacy event to help cover breaks there.

Shock Charmers #

I had a few judge calls about Shock Charmers over the course of the weekend - mostly players hoping to use it after learning that their opponent did not have any defense reactions. This day’s version of the call came early in the Battle Hardened, and the players reported that it had gone something like this: “Attack with Chilling Icevein” “No blocks” “No attack reactions” “No defense reactions. So, 2 spectral shields pop, and I’ll take 4?” “Before damage, I’ll use Shock Charmers”.

Suffice it to say, this just doesn’t work. If the turn player passes priority in the reaction step, and the defending player doesn’t do anything, then the turn player doesn’t get priority again until after damage has been dealt. We never had a case that we felt should be escalated to Cheating, but that is certainly a possible outcome if we have a player who knows better and tries to sneak in that extra one damage anyway.

Deck Stacking #

We can’t share much information about investigations that lead to a disqualification, both to protect sources and methods that are relevant to an investigation, and due to the privacy aspect. However, it should be safe to say that one of our eagle-eyed judges noticed some suspicious shuffling behavior, which we are always on the lookout for, and an investigation confirmed that a player was illegally stacking their deck. Suffice it to say that if you are able to know any information about the location of any cards in your deck after shuffling it, then you are not shuffling, you are cheating, and you will be disqualified.

End of the Weekend #

Despite being a slower weekend on Side Events than we expected, I think it was a productive one. The inaugural Battle Hardened event went well, and most of the players in side events over the course of the weekend were testing their Classic Constructed decks and practicing for that event.

Here’s the final summary spreadsheet for the weekend.

SCG CON Philadelphia Final Events Tracking Sheet

Future Suggestions #

We didn’t really have anything go wrong, so I don’t have any process improvements for future team leads. Coordination with other team leads is definitely important, because as long as the FaB sides are on the smaller side, we will be able to share some judges to help cover breaks on those other events. I still think that building a schedule like the one above is important in order to ensure that you do have a judge on each event at all times, and clear planned times for judges to take breaks, but obviously those plans need to remain flexible as events may not launch.

A few key things to be aware of: When planning for starting table numbers, always include some extra tables. There may be players who arrive late or who registered in Melee but are missing from the pairings. Additionally, note that GEM likes to place players receiving a bye in the middle of the tournament instead of at the end, so you need to round up the number of tables you need instead of rounding down unless you plan to move one table every round to compensate.

While there will probably always be some staff members who don’t know enough about the other games being played at an event to answer judge calls there, it should be emphasized to ensure that all judges are aware of the layout of the room. Players will frequently ask any available judge where their event will be located. Additionally, when newer tools like Melee and Companion are being used, it would be helpful to give judges a tutorial on the player experience of those tools, so that we can help players who do not know how to find their pairings.

For the organizers, I think that we have generally seen that side events alone are not drawing Flesh and Blood players - between Friday and Saturday, at peak, we had 24 concurrent players, but there are already 95 registered for the Battle Hardened as of Saturday night. At Roanoke we had a headlining event each day, which had the potential to feed players into our other side events.

One option may be to pivot into running a “learn to play” sort of area while side events are slow, staffed by idle side events judges. Either the Ira welcome deck, or the current Blitz preconstructed decks, could be used to give players a gradual introduction to the game. In addition to providing a task for extra judge staff, this could also get players interested in joining sealed events later in the weekend.