My friends (4 judges, that included Mortals, 2 other players) and I traveled from the SF Bay Area down to Long Beach with high hopes for this event. It was my first SJC as a player and my second overall. It was my first premier event as a player in over a year, and I had done some playtesting to boost my confidence. We were going to SoCal to play amongst some of the well known/more recognizable players and we thought it was going to be a blast. But, as you read on, you'll see why it wasn't quite so...
I started off 0-3, losing the first two rounds to time, and then later on another round to time. I was basically stuck in the 200s (Table #) for most of the day and ended up 5-5. Yeah. I sucked major. This is what I get for judging for the past 6 months and having not played in a regional since over a year ago.
I did better in the Sunday regional, going 5-2 at one point. My second loss was to some jerk from Team Hustle. He was a very good player and baited out my better cards, BUT, he made it a repeated point about one move he made that cost me 3 cards.
I had a set Smashing as a bluff from long ago. I later brought out
Cyber Dragon and then set a
Sakuretsu Armor, anticipating a Smash and a Don/Reaper etc. On his turn, he brings back Frog and tributes it for Mobius, destroying my 2 set cards and then killing my CD in battle. After that, he kept saying how that was a good move and telling me that he would never do something like that and how I lost cards but losing my non chainables to Mobius.
In my head, I'm like: OK, I get your point. I've done this move before too. You're good and all, and you didn't hit any
Bottomless Trap Holes I might've set, but you don't have to ******* repeat this to me over and over (and he still did this after the next round). I was too tired and annoyed to start anything with him, so I just let him keep saying what he wanted to say.
So, I'm at 5-2, which was still decent. I play another good player with a Monarch
Time Seal deck. I'm not griping about this one because this guy is really nice and good.
At this point, I'm 5-3. I end up playing a friend I traveled with. Game 1, his Decrees and monarchs wipe me out. Game 2, he drew monarchs with no support and I went aggro on him. Game 3, he sides in Stein and god hands me for 8000 on his 2nd turn.
I end up 5-4 in the regional, and essentially came away with nothing except for having $150 less in my wallet. (I DID have a blast with the people I traveled with, and I'm really glad I was able to tag along with them at the last minute)
About the judge issues, from what my friends have said (some of whom were also judging on Day 1), there was some disappointment expressed on how things went.
Day 2 regionals was atrocious. I can't believe that they decided to give game losses to players standing in the aisles. The 9 round regional took FOREVER to complete. We were there from 10am until 9pm and the Top 8 was just getting started at that point. There was so much lag between each round. It was about 20-30 minutes after time was called until the next round would start.
Back to Day, 1, it was just as bad. On 3 occasions, the lights went out for a few seconds each time. They had all the judges sign and collect the results slips (which was a good and bad thing) for 650 players for all of the 10 rounds. Since 4 of my friends were judging, we didn't get out until after midnight.
In addition. some of the SoCal judges weren't always doing their job properly, so my friends had to deal with so much more than they should've had to.
This event was decntly run by SCGE, but I expected very high class from the overall experience. Instead, I was thoroughly disappointed about many things.
