Hello,
At GP Nagoya, we had sealed tournament on Saturday, in which top 16s can play in Sunday's special event.
TO decided to run this Saturday event on Regular REL. No decklist. TO want to make this tournament casual and play-and-have-fun.

Now tournament finished, and we have some response from players in this tournament. Many of these are like this: “Every time I faced against Pack Rats, I could not help doubting his Pack Rats really come from his packs or not. I understand this doesn't solve anything, but I could not help doing this.”

Well, why do we run tournament in regular REL? Having fun, casual, not-too-complicated procedure.
However some players actually have not good emotion because there was no decklist.

Then my question: is there any easy method to solve these player's concern?

0) We don't care. Some “competitive” players always complain about these kind of cheat possiblity, but we can catch cheater even without decklist.
1) We can suggest TO that we need to do in Comp REL. But this is not good solution.
2) We can just do “pool registration”. Still, many players are not used to fill out limited decklist, and it makes tournament longer (30+min), so I want more easy (for players) solution.
3) Pool registration of only rare cards…? I know this is curve ball, but this is actually easy. “please write down all 6 rares in your seat.” that's it.

What is your opinion? I understand 2) will be reasonable solution, but if there are any other method, I want to know.

Thanks,

Hey Kenji,

do you think it would be possible to pre-register the decks for a
tournament like this?
Then players just write down their name + DCI nr + table nr and you'd have
something to check with.

Kind regards,
Richard Drijvers

I don't think that just writing down the rares is likely to solve your problem. What do you then do about the player who suspects that his opponent didn't really open 4 Auger Sprees, or 3 Skymark Rocs, or something?

The only case that I have definitely encountered of cards being added to a sealed pool, it concerned a handful of commons and uncommons. Adding rares can be a bit too obvious, but adding ‘lower rarity’ cards can dramatically increase the strength of your deck.

I've often heard of judges making an announcement like, “If you have an unbelievable pool, call us over.” You could expand this to multiples of a card, or a Pack Rat, or whatever. You know what unusual opens people had just in case, and you can high five people over their pool for community.

You could also ask for a five minute pass across just so someone else sees the pool.

Kevin Binswanger

It always bugs me when a TO chooses Regular REL, but attaches a very attractive prize to the event - which always inspires Competitive behavior, including suspicion of other players.

I tend to disagree with your caveat, Kenji - running that event at Comp REL *would* be a good solution.

Granted, this is just my opinion - but I don't think Regular REL, Sealed Deck, and “big shiny prize(s)” should ever be combined; it just tilts the risk/reward calculation too far towards the reward. I'm a little less worried about constructed, because of the (mistaken?) belief that the advantage gained (over honest players) by adding “bombs” to a sealed pool is greater than things like pre-sideboarding, in constructed.

* * *

Now, one thing that can be done, fairly easily with today's high availability of technology: tell all the players to clear the table before opening their product; watch for players “diving” into their bags; instruct them to open their pool and lay it out in front of them, so that every card name is visible; take pictures. Remind the players that adding cards to their pool will be easily detected (don't admit it, if the resolution on your cell phone makes that difficult!) … and then tell them to have fun.

d:^D

I'd definitely like to recommend the taking pictures of pools approach. We've done it at PAX East, where we had some big prizes (uncut foil sheets!), but the point is really about having people fun (for many people it was their first organized play experience of any sort) and so Regular REL was appropriate. We just told people to lay out their cards, and we came around with a cell phone camera.

Works pretty well as a deterrent from any shenanigans, without the un-funness of decklists.

Thanks for your suggestion. Taking picture is good idea!

* If any player said “I cannot do this because of no-phone/whatever”, judge can take picture.

And I agree that shiny prizes should not be combined with Regular REL Sealed.

Taking photos of their card pools is a very good suggestion.
I'll try to implement it the next time at the LGS to save time for Reg RELs with slightly bigger prizes.

Originally posted by Kevin Binswanger:

I've often heard of judges making an announcement like, “If you have an unbelievable pool, call us over.” You could expand this to multiples of a card, or a Pack Rat, or whatever. You know what unusual opens people had just in case, and you can high five people over their pool for community.

You could also ask for a five minute pass across just so someone else sees the pool.

Kevin Binswanger

Define “unbelievable” :) I certainly can't, as I'm an amazingly bad Magic player.

I like the idea of taking a photo of your pool; most everyone has a phone with a camera these days and those few that don't can be helped by a judge.

Of course, I await with bated breath the story of the person whose phone battery died five minutes before he was investigated for adding cards…

On Wed, Feb 20, 2013 at 9:13 PM, Thomas Ralph
<forum-2212@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:
> Of course, I await with bated breath the story of the person whose phone
> battery died five minutes before he was investigated for adding cards…


I'd add a request to email them to a given email address, with the
judge backup option as well.

We always just had a judge take all the pictures. Just have the players lay out their pools first thing and call over a judge when ready. The judge with the camera just goes over, takes the picture, and notes the player name. Takes a lot less time and is a lot less un-fun than decklists, and acts as a great deterrent. I think that it'd work better to have the judges do it than trusting the player to take the picture correctly and send it, and hope that the network access at the venue is good enough, and so forth. (But I may be thinking specifically of PAX East here, where the sheer amount of technology people use in the venue means that you really can't trust the network to work.)