Originally posted by Huw Morris:

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!

It should have been obvious from the fact that the HJ announcement didn't include any of the usual caveats for how the 2HG format works, particularly that both pools can be combined and used to build both players' decks. And yet, it still happened. It was a midnight event, so perhaps the players were just tired? They had signed up online and throughout the weekend had issues where the event they thought there were signed up for was not the event they actually preregistered for.

I thankfully had a glut of easy options available to me. The TO offered to give each player a new prerelease pack free-of-charge, taking on the responsibility for the misunderstanding even though, again, we don't really understand why it happened. As it stood, the two players were only interested in playing 2HG, so we sent them home with some promos to thank them for coming out and generally try to make the experience not a complete loss for them.

I posted here because I was curious what others would do if the options I had were not available. I like the idea of attempting to randomly reconstruct the sealed pools as a less-than-ideal fix that doesn't incur additional costs apart from time.

If the players are up for it I'm a huge fan of taking the pool back
and having the players turn up later when there is a 2HG flight for
them to play in. There is a huge caveat on that the players have to
want to do that. But if they do it sounds like an ideal fix. Sure they
have 24 hours to cogitate on the what they opened, but it is a really
clean fix.