I’m attempting to judge more often and volunteered to do PA States. I haven’t done States in ages and I quickly remembered why I hated this first Constructed event of the new Standard; people are playing under-tuned decks against other under-tuned decks resulting in a lot of upsets across player skill-level and a slightly higher than usual number of calls that are the judge equivalent of “what’s 2+2?”  to which the correct answer is “game loss”.  Besides this, I had a spot of a cold and the Philadelphia Convention Center was also holding a large Yu-Gi-Oh! tournament which meant we had security.  Yes, we need a security guard to protect Magic players from sticky-fingered Yu-Gi-Oh! players.

The event opened with an underwhelming 72 people which filled a 1/3 of the room resulting in us renumbering after the first round.  I don’t know why, but a lot of players said to me “thank you, Terry, I knew you were behind the renumbering”.  In round 2, we noticed a guy had his girlfriend sit behind his opponent and send text messages to him, presumably about his opponent’s hand contents, but not until a point where we couldn’t catch him doing it so we couldn’t quite DQ him.  The irony gods saw it fit for him to lose two games, then matches, due to tardiness, and get a game loss for failing to desideboard.  The last caused him to scrub out resulting in the loss of more points than if he had just been disqualified.

For lunch, I went to the Reading Terminal Market and went to a taco stand that offered “Mol Chicken” which I assumed was chicken with guacamole not the chicken with mole sauce I received which tasted like burnt toast mixed with sweetened squirrel meat.  I later found out that mole is a colloquial term for “concoction” in Mexico and that many mole sauces contain hints of chocolate.  The lunch strangeness continued when I went to the Amish bake counter and the attendant who was a girl of indeterminate pre-woman age was whistling “Ghetto Superstar”.

You may not see me at States 2011.