I had an interesting scenario come up this past weekend and am curious what other judges would have done.

You are in the middle of the deck construction portion of an individual sealed prerelease event. While collecting pack trash from tables, you notice two players looking over a pool of cards in the center of the table between them. Thinking this odd, you investigate and ask whose cards they are. They answer “both ours, why?”

Now, you have seen these players at other prerelease events in the past, but only for Two-headed giant events. You investigate further, and the players state that they genuinely thought the event was Two-headed giant sealed rather than individual sealed. You ask a few more questions and find their story believable. It is effectively impossible to separate a vast majority of the cards back into their correct individual sealed pools.

What would you do?

Convince the TO to let the players pay some amount to reenter the event with the correct product set.
TO doesn’t lose money
Players have a consequence for their error.

Andy

From: Jacob Milicic
Sent: Friday, March 27, 2015 11:44 AM
To: Heckt, Andy
Subject: This is not the Prerelease event you're looking for (Regular REL)


I had an interesting scenario come up this past weekend and am curious what other judges would have done.

You are in the middle of the deck construction portion of an individual sealed prerelease event. While collecting pack trash from tables, you notice two players looking over a pool of cards in the center of the table between them. Thinking this odd, you investigate and ask whose cards they are. They answer “both ours, why?”

Now, you have seen these players at other prerelease events in the past, but only for Two-headed giant events. You investigate further, and the players state that they genuinely thought the event was Two-headed giant sealed rather than individual sealed. You ask a few more questions and find their story believable. It is effectively impossible to separate a vast majority of the cards back into their correct individual sealed pools.

What would you do?

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Originally posted by Andrew Heckt:

Convince the TO to let the players pay some amount to reenter the event with the correct product set.
TO doesn’t lose money
Players have a consequence for their error.

Andy

While I do appreciate this fix as being a clear way to solve the problem, I feel that it also introduces another batch of potential problems.

First off, a very large amount of players that I am familiar with only allot so much money towards the prerelease. Given that 2 players combined will likely drop $40-$50 on product alone, it's entirely possible that the players will either be unable to re-buy into the tournament, or feel completely forced to do so (which is a major feel-bad, especially at a Regular REL- event).

Second, stemming off of the first point, some TO's that I've worked with need (or feel the need) to ration out their prerelease product rather vigilantly and, especially if they've reached an attendance cap determined by product, may also be either unwilling or unable to provide additional product even for full re-entry price. Once again, we run into the conundrum of dropping the players from the event entirely due to a simple error at an event that, ultimately, has no penalties save DQ's.

The timing of the event shouldn't really be affected, since I don't believe we should postpone Round 1 or otherwise extend deckbuilding time for the errors of one or two people. They may end up losing Round 1 due to being tardy regardless if we have them buy back in or take the time to try and fix the situation manually. In either case, they can still take the time to play each other casually while waiting for Round 2 to start, which is a suitable “consequence” in itself for such an error, although we try to avoid these.

So with these notes in mind, assuming that either the players or the TO aren't willing to go through with your original plan, would you say we should still drop the players due to our inability to cleanly fix the problem, or should we do what we can to apply the best fix we can design so that they may still enjoy the event?

In those worst case scenario's you're depicting, I would probably try to
recreate the packs to my best ability.

It will inevitably still be a feel bad moment though and I certainly
suggest to exhaust all other (given) options first.

-R.

2015-03-28 21:21 GMT+01:00 Peter Richmond <

Can we call this Rare and Exceptional? I think so…

If for reasons the players and/or TO are unwilling or incapable of buying new product, you can improvise. Take all rares, shuffle them, then give each player 6. Shuffle all uncommons, give each player 18. Same for commons. Not ideal, but you more or less gave each a random pool and I guess tournament integrity has not been damaged. If you feel this is too creative, too easily abusable or you don't feel comfortable explaining this to your other players, then you have no other option but drop the players…

While it is true that the event integrity may seem damaged to some if you
randomly re-distribute the product among the affected players I think it's
a reasonably good solution, given the TO is not willing to take other
routes.

I'd personally see dropping the players as a very last resource. We're
talking about a Prerelease where player experience is paramount.

//DLI

I would suggest to the TO a clean swap, opened product for unopened product.

If that doesn't work for whatever reason, I'm with Dustin on this, with two
caveats.

If either player is good enough to do very well or win, I'd not be
comfortable with it.

I would also check the pool for double rares/mythics: I would not want to
be responsible for randomly building a double Dragonlord Atarka pool.

Keep in mind that the seeded packs make this solution slightly more
difficult, if both players had a different tribe. I would give each player
their pre-release foil if possible.

Originally posted by Evertjan van Veelen:

I wouldn't check for double rares/mythics (we're not responsible for any broken decks that may result, results-oriented solutions are not objective & generally a Bad Thing™), but I would attempt to recreate the seeded packs as well by ensuring each player has their prerelease promo & sorting cards from the clans of those two promos to randomly recreate the 3 uncommons/11 commons (these didn't have basic lands, right?) that would've been in those packs, then return any remaining in-clan cards to the common pool to be used for recreating the remainder of the packs. Given that this event also used 1 pack of FRF, I'd also sort those cards out and recreate the FRF packs separately from the 4x DTK.

This would be very likely to take significant time & run into Round 1. Giving them both Tardiness match losses for Round 1 would be the “correct” solution for tournament timing and integrity, but it also feels like poor customer service & could leave these players with a bad aftertaste. If there's sufficient time in the round (and this is not likely given the pool-randomizing and build time they'd need,) it seems worthwhile to at least consider pairing them against each other. The pace of the tournament would be the overriding concern to me here though, but if there's a way to avoid having to give a double match loss, I'd want to find it.

Edited Andrew Herber (March 28, 2015 06:01:16 PM)

Pairing them against eachother actually violates tournament integrety here.

-R.

2015-03-29 0:00 GMT+01:00 Andrew Herber <

I was going to suggest randomly recreating the packs, including seeded packs, but it seems Dustin De Leeuw beat me to it :) This shouldn't take up too much time, and would ensure the integrity of the event as well as letting the players play without too much disruption. I also wouldn't see any problem with extending deckbuilding by about ten minutes if this happened near the end of deckbuilding, but I probably wouldn't give them any more time than that and wouldn't at all if things had just started.

One thing to consider if trying to recreate the pools separately is that players may well have knowledge of what they've opened.
I know when I play 2HG, I am keeping a mental note of the rares/mythics I pull in order to get them back at the end, and also as a vague track of what colours are going to contain bombs.

Would It be worth asking these players if they can remember the distribution of the rares, as this would preserve some of the initial configuration? This relies on the players being completely truthful, and as we can't guarantee they aren't switching things round to their own benefit, might not be the best solution.

There are also lists online where the possible seeded booster configurations were crowd-sourced - this would be a handy reference for reconstructing that booster.

Originally posted by Jon Lipscombe:

There are also lists online where the possible seeded booster configurations were crowd-sourced - this would be a handy reference for reconstructing that booster.

Although I like the idea, please keep in mind that you have limited time available: other players need attention too, and those players need time to build their decks. Sometimes you have to settle for a less perfect but much faster option…

I do think that getting the players to buy new pre-release packs is an ideal, but unrealistic solution. If the players and TO are OK with that, fine. Otherwise, attempting to recreate the pools is just about all you can do. If it means that these players are not ready to play round 1, so be it. I'm not going to disrupt the rest of the tournament for just these two. I generally give players all the time they need (within reason) to build a deck at a pre-release, so they would have a chance, if they were quick deck builders.

The only Judge-implementable solution is to attempt to re-create the prerelease packs. The better solutions come from the TO, but depending on the amount of product the TO received in their allocation and whether this is the first or last event of the weekend (and, left unsaid, the TO's creativity in solving problems), there might be little the TO can actually do. Agreed that the best of all worlds is for the TO to hand out new prerelease packs and take back the open ones as a goodwill gesture. Perhaps returning those same packs to the players to use in a later 2HG event with the judge's permission as a fudge to balance the books.

As a TO, if 2 players have messed up in this situation, there's no way I'm taking back the opened product and giving the players new packs. If they want to buy new packs (and I have them available), that's fine. But the players messed up here, so it's unreasonable to expect the TO to pick up the tab for that.

I am wondering what set of circumstances could lead to players mistakenly thinking it's 2HG - it should be completely obvious, from the sign-up through to the HJ's player talk. I can say for sure, nobody has come close to making that mistake in one of my tournaments!

I do like Gordon's suggestion if those players are signed up for a later 2HG event though, that is certainly one way of ensuring everybody is happy.