More combo, more LD, more counters and more stasis

Only an enemy can unite us, preferably one from above.

Balance the combo stuff with reprints of Grim Monolith, Wildfire and the rest of Kai Budde's 99 world champ deck. Unite the Five.

Can I get Stasis reprint?

Since this seems to be the designated 'Politics in MTG' thread, any opinions on Hambly's posts about pedophilia in the judge community, and how it's been picked up by Milo?

The post is trash and vile and a cruel attempt to gain petty revenge at the expense of people who don't deserve it.

The mere fact that it piqued the interest of Milo Yiannopoulos should tell you everything you need to know about that.

It's annoyed me that people want to bring it up in every Magic twitter thread even if completely unrelated. Sometimes when I see those posts I've started replying something along the lines of,

- Being a certified judge just means you know the Magic and tournament rules. It's not a guarantee that you will get to work as a judge.
- The store or tournament organiser that hires (or has someone volunteer) to be a judge is responsible for background checks.

It's really not WotC's problem. They do have a policy of suspending RSOs from the DCI for their own reasons, but they don't actually need to do this as it's redundant - the law already prevents RSOs from interacting with children.

Even if he was treated unjustly, I don't think trying to tear down the game with bad publicity is an appropriate response. (And it would be highly coincidental if this was "just out of legitimate concern" and happened to occur at the same time as he got banned). Fortunately I think it is starting to die down, not many new people are being recruited onto the anti WotC train. Though maybe Milo will stir up outrage anew; I wouldn't know, I've never heard any of his stuff. Modern day conservatives have enough legitimate arguments about why the progressive movement is bad without having to resort to trolling.

I haven't heard much about this at all, but frankly "Mud covered **** throws mud, helped by other ****" doesn't really merit much conversation.

Seriously, Milo is a sensationalist and trash. Just like MTGHQ/Hambly/Unsleeved/His other 5 personas he has created to try and distance himself from his vitriol and bad reputation.

Anyone who is on the sexual offender list would probably not even be allowed in an LGS, or any sort of judging capacity. The laws about that kind of thing are pretty cut and dry but I think (I'm not a lawyer and haven't talked about this stuff in a long time) anyone on "the list" is required to notify people, and aren't allowed to be near areas "where children gather." The laws DO vary by state, but some are definitely more strict than others.

If he actually named names, then WotC should look into it, and take the same action they did with that Zach guy. If he all he did was say "oh these people are all horrible people" IDK why we should listen to him at all.

If not for hanging out with an L3 tonight, I'd have no clue what the last three post or even most of pages 2 and 3 were referring to. Apparently someone leaked the whole worldwide list of judges from the judge app to Hambly which included the full info of under adult age individuals as in names,phone numbers addresses. And encouraged his followers to look into those on the list to the pointof having a gofundme to help pay for the investigations.

https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2018 ... ge-crisis/

OH, so somebody dox'd judges to human scum

That's great to know.

so this happened https://company.wizards.com/article/new ... aces-safer

Thank god I've never had to pee in public.

Or gotten caught peeing in public.

I can't specify which of those sentences is true because I might want to play magic some day.

I don't like this... I don't like it at all...

Seems fine. They were alerted that there might have been a problem because the neither main ruling body of the Judge Program nor Tournament organizers were doing adequate background checks on people that were hired to work around children. As such they put out a statement and formulated a policy that lets less offenders slip through the cracks.

I'm confused about what there is to be worried about. If you are not a sex offender, then this policy does not affect you. If you are a sex offender that was labeled as such unreasonably, then your issue is with our/your nation's justice system, which WotC and TOs are expected to check their databases against.

This is a problem because most TO's (small, local stores) don't have the time or the resources to conduct background checks, so they either won't do them or won't hire (local) judges to work their events. The TO's large enough to conduct background checks basically already do. If Wizards wants this to happen they should either do it themselves, or make funds available for the program to handle it independently.

It's also gross that this is only happening because a bunch of gross, vindictive people are being gross and vindictive.

I'm not sure about your area, but the small local stores in my neck of the woods generally have a judge that is already on staff or is the store owner, and thus has already been background checked. Do people actually hire judges for events that are not large tournaments held by either conventions or large-scale organizers who can afford to do this?

Wait people are paying judges now?

In a manner of speaking. From my experience, conventions sometimes do in addition to comped/discounted badges and/or rooms. Large-scale events like 300+ pre-releases and the like tend to pay out in boxes of product to most of the lower level judges and probably are already paying the higher level judges some wage because they are store employees or a small stipend for the weekend.

I feel like this will make it harder to become a judge, not because you need to worry about the background check, but because a little local FNM where someone starting out to get practice judging probably won't want to go through the expense of running one to have you.

On a small-town local level, I think things will generally be fine because the store owners tend to know their community pretty well. If one of their players wants to be a judge, I'm sure the LGS owners will let them get their practices in and get a level certification long before background checks become a real thing.

Most stores do not just have a certified judge on their regular staff. Most stores just have a person who plays in a lot of their tournaments and knows the rules pretty well, and sometimes they are certified. If they start comping that person's entry fee to encourage them to help out more, and that person is certified, they are now obligated to do a background check on that person and they definitely will not.