What I Learned From FNM Last Week

This hopefully weekly blog post will revolve around my experiences with judging FNM and other various REL-0 events, and the things I learn from them to grow as a judge. Since my current aspiration is to move up to being certified as a level 2 Magic judge, I feel that self-reflection is necessary to identify what I'm learning, and what else I need to learn to continue to grow as a judge.

This past week, my LGS had a Journey Into Nyx release party, executed as a Sealed Deck event using the remainder of our Prerelease product as the pools. Our pre-release had much lower than expected attendance, which set us up for expecting another small turnout for the following Friday. Things didn't turn out that way.

We ended up registering 22 players, close to our logistical capacity for attendance, and I quickly realized that my usual system of calling out pairings and letting players find their own play-spaces was not going to work this time around. The only solution I thought would work effectively would be to arbitrarily assign table numbers to the tables we had available, and point people in the right direction.

Now, this is slightly more difficult than it sounded, mostly due to the fact my store doesn't have table numbers handy, nor did I have the materials available to jury-rig some up for the event. The key to making up a table-numbering system on the fly is pretty simple: make the system obvious. By numbering the tables in a consistent order, and moving from one side of the room to the other, as long as a percentage of your players catch on to how you're executing the system, everyone should fall into place naturally, especially if you only have exactly the right number of tables for your player count.

With everyone seated at a recognizably numbered table, the second thing that became easier for me was recording match results, and being able to identify outstanding matches to spectate and ensure that they move along to keep the tournament flowing. My store's FNM is primarily attended by newer, more casual players, who have a tendency to allow games to run long due to taking their time to avoid making incorrect decisions for themselves.

I find that one of the harder things to do as a judge is having to encourage players to play at a more reasonable pace, especially when the game has already gone to time. Many newer players can feel pressurized in that kind of situation, especially as the play-group's mentality is to crowd around the active games remaining to watch, and the players themselves may not have the comfort level to request that spectators move away from the table, outside of the attending judge. Generally, I tend to simply let these games run out without asking players to make their decisions faster, unless they are absolutely appearing to stall for no reason.

On that note, I'll leave off with some hopes for this week. As it's a Standard week at our store (we rotate formats weekly), I hope that our attendance stays higher than it has been for FNM through the winter and early spring, and I hope that the night brings me something to learn from and post about next week.