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Banks woke me at the crack of 8:30 and we went to breakfast at one of the chain knock-off restaurants that in this case seemed like the illegitimate stepchild of an IHOP and a Cracker Barrel.  All the breakfasts were named after presidents or generals causing me to wonder if the General Sherman was named after its effect on the human colon.  I was feeling seditious and had the Jefferson Davis whose sausage gravy tasted freshed squeezed from the pig but I paced myself and was rewarded by not clogging Banks’ toilet.  My next stop was Livonia and still being a bit gun shy after yesterday’s ticket, I tooled there at a stunning 45 MPH, the posted speed limit… plus five miles per hour.

Livonia is part of a bouquet of towns that surround Detroit, my guide to the area, Ryan Pooya/Hellfighter has what I can only call encyclopedic knowledge of his area.

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Human GPS

The burb clocks in at 100k people and has its very own abandoned mall.  The area has mile streets as vestiges of a French survey plot and my guide showed me his area on foot initially.  He lives near a retirement community and there was a continuous stream of emergency vehicle sirens.  By the time we finished our walk I think the home may have acquired some spare space.

Ryan offered to take me a picturesque spot in Detroit on the way to dinner and in about 20 minutes I was in a weed-encroached side street taking shots of what I think was Ford Stadium.

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A sport field of some sort.

Our ride to meet Brad Stephens/Azuretruth at Fuddruckers was interrupted by traffic and we arrived about 30 minutes late, a perfectly acceptable delay in exchange for their Diet Peach Green Tea.  Upon arriving, I learned they didn’t have this divine beverage, the second of two times I found this deficiency which I assume is merely an oversight on their behalf.  No company would be daft enough to exclude this elixir of life from their drink line-up except due to sabotage by industrial spies.  I had a back-up though; when picking up some items for my future Canadian hosts including two boxes of Trix, a 2-liter bottle of Fanta, and some American Heinz Ketchup, I grabbed the relative of something I hadn’t had since I was 9, diet Squirt.  It was terrible.  It tasted like watered down Fresca that had been mixed with flat Sprite and instantly my fond memories of going to Mexico for my parent’s 25th anniversary were destroyed.

Thursday is game night at Brad’s house and I played one of my favorite games, making color commentary while other people play games.  Brad has a custom table made of white board material which allows everyone to draw an impressive array of multicolor penises and scrotums while waiting for ones turn in 1990s grand strategy boardgames.

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Guns don't kill people; magic missiles do.

The other game for the evening was Magic: The Gathering, something that Brad’s friends play loosely with a format I call “kitchen table type 1”.  Their decks lacked familiarity with basic building tenets like managing manabase, having an appropriate curve, and streamlining win conditions and I got to deck clinic a few of their creations.  I got bored after a bit and build a B/U tempo deck out of someone’s spare cards and proceeded to absolutely crush them.  It felt nice.  A friend of my Minneapolis host had given me a pile of commons which I gifted to these players while giving them a primer on some deck construction ideas.  When they left I felt like I had made the world a better place.

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Nick D brought me the new judge shirt back from PT: San Diego and I was excited to try it on.  The previous judge shirt was creatively termed “the zebra stripes” and had the dubious distinction of turning into a midriff-bearing shirt if the wearer was over 6’1″ or had a dunlopus majoris protruding more than three inches.  I was going to start the next paragraph with the phrase “I put on the new shirt” but putting on implies several things such as the gowning process being free of grunts, cries and panhoots and of being easily reversible.  I more accurately applied the new judge shirt and later peeled it off.   The arms were splendidly sized but my first attempt to pick up garbage would have turned the button line into a sartorial fragmentation grenade (Magic players: I was tempted to make  a Triskelion joke).   I nearly lost my shirt when another player said “Bruce Banner, I just hit your car.”  This was the largest shirt available.

My mass is exceptional and I fully recognize that I should incur extra cost due to it .  I pay more for food, clothing, transportation, health insurance, and the niceties that streamline corpulent living but among all possible communities that would require clothing of exceptional size the Venn Diagram of sedentary, pedantic, and gourmand  which coalesces with “WoTC judge” should be the acme of need.  I’ve heard a large judge took to his shirt with scissors and made patches of the embroidery to put on a larger shirt (which mentally led me to another card allusion).  I enjoy judging and don’t wish to abandon it, but should it become necessary I may need to start scouring for an embroiderer, shirt laster, or personal training.  God forbid the latter.

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Preparing for tournaments is a process of continual refinement.  I found that I’ll stay more hydrated by consuming two 1.5 liter bottles of water than a single gallon bottle as I won’t tote the gallon bottle around.  I found that if I count to three before delivering a ruling, I’ll probably give a better ruling.  Finally, I found that the easiest way to keep an area clean is to remove trash as it accumulates.  Once a trash depot appears on a table it will become a magnet for other garbage.

My goal for improvement this tournament was to not flash players while picking up garbage.  The judge shirt is a bit shorter than I prefer and bending over either involves me contorting like I’m wearing a miniskirt or doing an impromptu plumber impression.  So, I decided to simply wear suspenders which bring the pants up higher causing more coverage and conveniently concealing my dunlop. So, I asked who I thought was the head judge intending it to be a joke and to show my cleverness:

Me: Can I wear suspenders Saturday?
Him: I don’t know, they’re not part of the official uniform.
Me: So?  They keep my pants up, that seems like a good thing.
Him: Let me think about it.  I don’t know, I’m going to leave it up to the head judge.

2nd conversation with other guy who was the head judge

Me: Can I wear suspenders Saturday?
Him: It’s not part of the uniform, why are you wearing them?
Me: …to keep my pants up.
Him: I don’t know, let me consult some other judges.
Me: YOU HAVE GOT TO BE SHITTING ME.
Him: Hold on.
Him: Ok, I asked some higher-level judges and we’ve come to a few conclusions.  Maybe.  First, are they tasteful?
Me: They’re black.
Him: Ok, you may wear them, but there’s disagreement, so we’re not going to allow them at PTQ-level events or higher.

It appears alternate modalities of keeping ones pants now requires a pardon from the president or the pope.

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Pre-releases are the second most grueling Magic tournaments behind GPs which are the modern judging analog to working in a coal mine.  I slept 9 hours the day before, arrived at the station early and well dressed and received odd stares from those seeing me a scion of the Romanovs with my ushanka, gloves, and dark slacks.  The Convention center was crawling with Autoshow people and I assumed my day was going to suck as multi-event security is best described as Kafkaesque.  There’s a single entrance to what would be three different events requiring Autoshow security to go at us each time. I landed in the security line, waiting for my chance to employ a combination of supplication and excuse fabrication I now incorrectly call bullshido to avoid a pat-down, when the clouds parted and something amazing happened: I was reviewed by a competent security person.

Him: Ticket please.
Me: I’m here for the Gray Matter Conventions event.
Him: Hm… So you don’t have an Autoshow Ticket.  How many of you are there going to be?
Me: A few hundred, but we’ll be going in and out a bit.
Him: Okay, go through… wait.  If I have to do this for everyone that’s going to your event, that could take ages.
Me: Yes, it could take a while.
Him: How about we unlock a door past the security station.  *shouting* If you’re here for the card jaun, come over here.

30 or 40 of my pasty white card-slinging brethren left the line, emancipated from the tyranny of mini-metal detectors.  My people were free.  Later when I met up with the rest of the staff we all shared the story of “Tyrell, the Competent Security Guard”.  He will be venerated in song.

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The Worldwake Pre-release is tomorrow and the questions have started.  Most involved the new mechanic called “multi-kicker” and the seemingly odd wording of some cards.   Normally I walk the player through the thought process of how the mechanic works to help the player reach the appropriate conclusion.  This tends to be somewhat trying but the results save me many questions later.  I met my match tonight when a player having seen my normal method preempted my attempts at a guiding explanation with “I’m old, tell me how to play the card”.

Well then.

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The shelf immediately to the right of my computer desk represents roughly 90% of my net worth.   With roughly 4 of every card printed from Alpha to Zendikar (that’s chronological not alphabetical) with some glaring exceptions of Arabian Nights, Torment, and Homelands, I’ve been filtering out some excesses that I could sell to buy some burn-time when I’m unemployed.   I purchased someone’s collection this past summer that I’m now dismantling and word of such has gotten around.  Today, I received a Facebook message of roughly the following:

“Hey, heard you’re unemployed and selling your collection for gas money.  I’ll cut you a break on buy prices.”

What?  I did some homework and it turns out the whisper-down-the-lane-style transfer went as such:

Me–>Person #1: I’m selling some cards I got from other people’s collections to fund a trip after I get unemployed.
Person #1–>Person #2: Terry’s selling some stuff from his collection to pay for gas for a trip after he’s unemployed.
Person #2–>Person #3: Terry’s selling his collection to pay for stuff when he’s unemployed.
Person #3–>Person #4: Terry’s unemployed and selling his collection.

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I started cutting my own hair this past weekend and did a touch-up today as I realized the spots I missed.  A seasoned autosartorial maintenance wiz told me that doing a blind shave followed by a mirror-assisted second run is what separated the men from the boys.  Next time I’ll try.  For now, I’m collecting the shavings into a cardboard box as I don’t want to muss up my dad’s bathroom floor.  The box is full of magic wrappers from opening stuff for the latest set and is now interspersed with a few strata of clippings.   Normally, I reseal the box but failed to and left it in the master bedroom.

Heard in the Robinson household at about 7:00 PM.

My Dad: Terry, what the hell have you and your friends been doing?

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I started cutting my own hair this past weekend and did a touch-up today as I realized the spots I missed.  A seasoned autosartorial maintenance wiz told me that doing a blind shave followed by a mirror-assisted second run is what separated the men from the boys.  Next time I’ll try.  For now, I’m collecting the shavings into a cardboard box as I don’t want to muss up my dad’s bathroom floor.  The box is full of magic wrappers from opening stuff for the latest set and is now interspersed with a few strata of clippings.   Normally, I reseal the box but failed to and left it in the master bedroom.

Heard in the Robinson household at about 7:00 PM.

My Dad: Terry, what the hell have you and your friends been doing?

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It’s been 20 months since I’ve judged a DCI event that wasn’t Friday Night Magic so before jumping back in the saddle I decided to audit an event to see what I remembered. Some things came flooding back immediately:

  • 90% of questions consist of the following: what time is it, do I have enough time to do x, and where’s the bathroom.  Players are somehow still angered when you lack the ability to accurately estimate how long it will take them to pinch a loaf, down a cigarette, get food, or have a quickie.
  • The other 10% of questions regard ridiculous hypothetical scenarios consisting of game or tournament events unlikely to occur before the heat-death of the universe.  “If I have 7 of this one good rare card in play during a Rochester draft…”
  • 1/2 of all rules questions can answered by reading directly off of the card.  “Lightning Bolt deals 3 damage”
  • 1/4 of all rules questions can be answered by pointing out how the scenario the player proposed is impossible. “Sir, you can’t attack enchantments with lands, normally.”
  • One can vindicate one’s poor performance in the main event by repeatedly losing in booster drafts and 8-man-for-a-box tournaments.
  • Level 1 judges still think that the word “should” exists.  Maybe for normal people it does, but tournament judges either tell a player to do something or not do something.  The police don’t ask the public to “refrain from stabbing people”.
  • Players who narrowly miss the top 8 cut can make it up by being really intrusive during the quarter-finals so when observers take pictures it looks like the scrubbed player matters.
  • Providing a pseudocelebrity or pro with a homemade cookies gives the giver license to ask any ridiculous question one wants.

It felt good to be back.  I still contend I have more fun judging than most players do playing.

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A staff member contacted me to sell his collection of Magic cards and the conversation was laced with talk of past victories, great indeterminate cards and the lure of great wealth on the resale market.  I left work early to give adequate time to review the collection and printed out two copies of my 60 page price list so we could haggle over fees and such.

I arrived, and he presented me with a stack of cards that could have been towered over by a GI Joe…  I reviewed his collection, offered him four dollars (almost as an insult), which he accepted (with glee, boo) and I walked back to my car. I spent more money in gas than I did on his collection.  I spent more money to buy a hotdog, drink and Twinkie than I did on his collection.  I spent more money fixing the hole I punched int he wall after seeing the farcical wasting of time of the visit.  Now I’ve got a new small collection I have to sort, and my hand hurts.