Originally posted by Bryan Prillaman:

I will also point out, that nothing like it has happened since. ;)

That's a weak point if there wasn't an opportunity for that…

A neat thing happens when you decide not to do something…

You tend to not do it.

…Why not just do away with the foils all together?

A common defense of this change is that “it shouldn't be about the foils” and that some of the judges that are upset about the change are “in it for the wrong reason”.

So just get rid of the foils, no more drama, and you'll see how many Judges are in it purely for the fun of it.

It should be possible to collect a lot of feedback from the Judge program even without the Exemplar team asking for it. Any judge could set up a Google form to gather thoughts from judges so that we'd have more than anecdotes to draw on.

So I know I'm a bit late to the party here, but I think I can help some of you feel better about some of this. Some of this is guesswork, but it really has to be, due to the “can't tell you why I can't tell you thing”.

The Exemplar team has a few goals, some of which are explicitly laid out and some of which aren't, but are reasonably assumed.

!: Recognize cool things publicly.
2: Get judge foils to people without going through conferences.
3: Don't let people game the system
4: Get WotC to continue to support the Exemplar program.
5: Do this all legally.

So someone brings up a point to the Exemplar team, possibly about people gaming the system or something isn't quite legal. The Exemplar team brainstorms solutions, picks a couple they like, and sends them off to WotC or something for review. Then they get told that the only one that Legal will sign off on is the worst one. Why do they have to add a randomizer? Because if they didn't, WotC or the Judge Program would be PAYING people based solely on the number of recognitions they get, and/or their rating of those recognitions. You could hand me $50 in exchange for me getting WotC to give you foils. WotC can't let random judges control the outflow of foils. Now, before you try to argue that foils aren't compensation or payment, remember that there has been at least one lawsuit against WotC on the basis that foils are compensation. I pay taxes on the judge foils I get, and depending on where you live, you might have to as well. It doesn't actually matter if you think it's compensation or not, you have to convince WotC not only that it's not compensation, but that any suit arguing it is would get tossed out immediately. That's a tough argument. Especially considering this is an international thing. We have judges in probably hundreds of countries with different tax codes.

No one buys the argument that foils, at least on a large scale like this, isn't about the market value of them. Maybe it doesn't mean much to you, but it means something to the IRS. The fact that you can take your Exemplar foils to the nearest GP and exchange them for cash makes them valuable, and probably taxable. But I'm not a lawyer so don't quote me on that.

So when you're complaining about a lack of transparency here, the Exemplar team hears that and complains about it too. They wish they could share more with us, but they can't, because they're probably all under NDA and even if they weren't, they still probably wouldn't tell you because if you knew exactly how they decided who got how many foils they'd probably have to change it again. But they can't actually tell you that, because the NDA probably prevents them from telling you why they can't tell you, and/or there's some legal issue with that I don't know about. That's also part of why they can't take the brainstorming process public. We're not privy to a lot of the stuff we'd need to know to figure out what's possible, and we can't be, or else Legal will pull the plug on the whole system. And they can't actually make good use of something like a google form. They don't have the manpower to sort through all the input or explain why some seemingly great ideas aren't feasible. And if they spend enough time telling us which ideas can't work and especially why, we might figure out enough that the opacity thing falls apart and we're back to the lawsuits.

So, if you want to know why they had to make these changes, the answer is “because Legal said so” and that's also the answer to why they can't tell us much.

I suspected that what you're saying is what's true but it seems a little off.

First, if I understand correctly, RC's were consulted on this, so if what you say is true, then I would expect all RC's to know it to be true, not just the Exemplar team. That means there would be many (perhaps twenty?) people like this. It feels strange that none of them would talk about it publicly.

Next, I'm not sure how you put this under NDA, or why would you. What do you think would be in that agreement? My feeling is that there is no NDA.

In any case, if things are the way as you described them, I understand why randomization might need to be added, and I understand why Wizards might not want to say publicly that it's compensation for judges, but do you think that the silence on behalf of the Judge program leadership has some legal significance? That the Exemplar program is legal if most judges believe it's about the recognitions, but that it might become illegal if most judges believe it's about the foils?

My guess is that WotC just puts anything like this under NDA because better safe than sorry. At the very least, if there is a lawsuit, this would slow it down since everyone who knows how this works is under NDA. WotC probably wants judge foils mailed to be at their (and/or the Magic Judge Program's) sole discretion, or as close to as possible. Maybe they needed to prevent people from laundering money through Exemplar? These changes probably prevent that, though I have no clue if they actually care about that, and I think a lot of judges already don't report their Magic related income on their taxes, at least here in the US.