The Shortened Season: The 2020 Pokemon TCG Championship Series

Some months ago, during the lull between the 2019 Pokemon North America Championships and the 2019 World Championships, a friend-who-shall-remain-anonymous and I predicted that 2020 would be a wild ride, perhaps the season to end all seasons.

We didn’t quite know what we were saying at the time.

With official confirmation today that the 2020 Championship Series is suspended, there are a lot of people in a tough place over the news. I’m in the middle of a longer blog post (rant?) about some of the effects of the ongoing pandemic, and one of them is definitely that a lot of people are suffering through a cancelation of their entire calendar and wondering what to do with it. Within the game, this effect ranges from the person who looks forward to one big thing a year to look forward to (say, NAIC) to those who’ve made their social scene out of Pokemon and now face a long route without much prospect of seeing those friends again anytime soon. It’s a loss of structure, and a loss of hope, that’s hitting a lot of people hard.

To that end, I’m heartened to see the response to the decision has still been largely positive. There are, as per the practical laws of humanity in 2020, some naysayers, but it’s heartwarming to see so much of the community coalesce around the idea of a greater good in the face of something that will cause a lot of sadness.

A lot of people get a lot of very different things out of this community. For some, it’s a side hobby with some income; for a very few, it’s a bit more financially significant. For many, it’s the people that make it all worthwhile. Some really enjoy the ability to be competitive in something. Many Professors enjoy that sub-community and the opportunity to work events with such a great crowd of people. I’ve personally spanned a lot of these perspectives to varying degrees at different points in my involvement with the game: SixPrizes had financial elements; at the peak of my playing, it was all about the people; being involved as staff is an entirely different motivation and feeling to me. The depth and breadth of what this means to the variety of people involved is as expansive as that variety itself.

I see a few calls for “perspective,” too—that these events are nothing in the face of the ongoing reality. That’s true, too, to a degree. But, the sadness many are carrying, in its own right, deserves the space to exist even in the greater context of global pandemic. Now more than ever, people deserve to live their feelings, and I think acknowledging that this is one more element of normalcy removed—one that will have varying impact on varying people—is a step to healthy empathy for all involved.

In the meantime, while the 2020 season may have been taken from us months before we envisioned, it still was a wild time. 16 Regionals across the world, a pair of Internationals, and a whole lot in between led to…a lot. North America saw a number of breakthrough winners, with a lot of repeat performances too, and events around the world explored formats that, for the most part, have been fairly solid throughout the season. In the interest of reflecting on some of the good that’s predated a whole lot of not-so-great, this is me running through what the 2020 Championship Series was to me.

My 2020 Season

Going into the year, we did have a few interesting elements, with the best finish limits foremost on the mind. Normally, I’d probably have some sort of math as far as who managed what in their best finish limit, and things to show, but we are not in normal times, so just some empirical observations will have to do.

The biggest two concerns going in were the stipend+Challenge/Cup interaction and BFL of 8. I think we all agree that the stipend interaction didn’t quite work as intended, and I expect that will be addressed for whatever the next period of normality we get is. TPCi has sent signals that they want to reduce the grind of competing at the highest level. It’s unfortunate that a lot of people went through what happened this year, but I do think that’s something that will be addressed, and something not worth spending more words on.

The Special Event saga did continue this year. It seems like TPCi took a new approach, as events seemed to come online about two months ahead of their date, rather than being approved at once. If I was trying to prevent travelers, that would be one approach—don’t give them much notice. Unfortunately, the reality we saw was a bit more complicated, with essentially Florida reaping the benefit of flight prices being more competitive closer-in-time. As long as the best finish limit is relatively low, it’ll incentivize these Special Events. It’s that simple, and we did see that play out this season once more. I think I have written more words on that subject than anyone could still endeavor to read, so I’ll also let that go for today.

While this isn’t quite the map I’ve created over the last few seasons—thank goodness—it was still pretty full:

I got to play a pair of the major events—the Internationals in Brazil and Australia. The season was a weird one for me, where I was outside hoping to get the invitation to play in Worlds as a combination of contingency plan and “wouldn’t-it-be-cool-if?” scenarios. At the same time, working a lot of Regionals makes that a tad more difficult, but the change to Best of 8 Cups was a fantastic boost. I was definitely a huge proponent of the move in the first place, and I think this example of being able to succeed fully over part of the season, without dedicating a lot of care to local events constantly every few months, is a sustainable model for Worlds-level participation, and I think worked out really well.

With GenCon to get an initial bump of Cups and a Top 128 in Oceania, I landed at 435 by the time chaos descended. For the first time in my playing career, my Play Point/Championship Point ratio might be worth looking at. I still won’t be doing it.

My second season spent mostly on staff was a pretty wild ride in its own right, too. The nature of that engagement is that I often can’t get into specifics, but I can point to a “wait, the player did what?” moment at almost every event this year. By Richmond, I’d say, it was a given to expect the unexpected, and the season really did not disappoint in that arena.

Admittedly, at some point, you do start crossing your fingers for the expected to occur for nine rounds. Like I wrote about a few months ago, there’s a fundamental difference between open-and-shut cases, like drawing an extra card rewinds, and confused game states/unsporting conduct/conflict/miscellaneous fun calls.

There’s an implicit emotional toll that goes with hard decisions, and the season presented a lot of them from the get go. For me, the fear of getting it wrong comes up a lot, and there were a lot of situations that cropped up early in the year that stuck with me—stick with me—as painful. The key within a given day is to move on as quickly as possible and do right by the next set of players in having a clear head. It’s not always easy.

I was fortunate to get my first Head Judge opportunity at a major event, with Knoxville’s Juniors. I’m not sure my soul was the same on Sunday night, but a good team is what counts, and I had one of the best teams I’ve worked with to make my first time in that role be about as smooth as could be. It was a little eerie being the final authority for the first time, but in general, I couldn’t have asked for a much better time or much better support than what I got from an organizer and peer level. Truly an awesome time.

In fact, I was only a true floor judge at two events in the shortened season, with some degree of assistant head judge authority at every other, and end-of-round management roles at many of those. I enjoy managing end-of-round—logistics are fun—so those were some of the best, but every event really does manage to be its own special (or, admittedly, sometimes “special”) thing.

On what would become the last real weekend of the season, I got to cross off a country from my bucket list that’s lingered there since I was a fairly-strange kindergartener with Regionals in Malmö, Sweden. In a crazy twist, I spent a few days in the country before the event, and Stockholm is now confidently one of my favorite places. This was also my first European Regional Championship, and what a time that was.

I’m not quite entirely sure how to describe it, but the charm of a not-mega event, working with some truly incredible people, and with some absolutely phenomenal kids as Junior/Senior assistant head judge, combined to make for an experience that was probably my favorite event of the year. In so many ways, many of which I didn’t remotely expect, it was a perfect bookend to a lot of my experiences to date on the staffing side. In some ways, I couldn’t have scripted a better event.

With the European Championships being formally cancelled in anticipation of SARS-CoV-2’s spread on the day before the event, this team was truly great in pulling off an event in spite of the heavy hearts—and in the face of many questions looming about the virus’ potential impact—many were carrying. Admittedly, this was right on the border between business-as-usual and pandemic, and I did struggle for awhile with whether it was right to go. In the end, it obviously worked out for me, and the event was not a hotspot of transmission to our knowledge, but heading to the airport on Sunday was palpably different, knowing I had probably flown closer to the sun than is my usual comfort level.

My decision with regard to Toronto the following weekend was made a bit easier by the Schengen exit stamp in my passport and looming border control concerns, and I knew I’d be unable to attend by midweek. I wish everyone else’s decisions had been made easy, but unfortunately, for whatever reasons persisted, that was not to be.

Obviously, from there, the rest is now a future that will never be. I was once excited to wear the red stripes as Juniors HJ in Albany and reprise the role in Seniors for Milwaukee, among a slate of other once-promising events over the rest of the season. The European Championships have historically been my favorite event of the year, and it was painful in the moment to see them go. It was, nevertheless, for the best, and it was not really much of a surprise to me when I learned that the North American and World Championships would follow.

A Foreign Future

In full transparency, for a sea of reasons, this is not hitting me as it once might have, so I don’t stand here and claim to be any derivative of devastated. Nevertheless, it’s important to remember that for many this meant a lot more than it meant to some of us. We may live in extraordinary times, but that does not dull the pain of the ordinary losses.

It, obviously, remains to be seen how the exactly details of a shift to Worlds 2021 will be handled. I wouldn’t want that job. No matter how the giant mess of best finish limits, age divisions, stipends, Day 2 invites, and assorted excitement are handled, there’s going to be a group that has legitimate reasons to not love it. That’s going to hurt, and acknowledging that now—before we know who, or what, may draw the short stick—is a first step, in my mind, to accepting that TPCi is going to do the best they can with a situation that is without precedent and without roadmap. I haven’t always been able to say this, but I could not be more confident that the folks who will make these calls will make the one that works out in the end—for reasons seen and unseen.

I’ve said at the end of the last few seasons that I wasn’t sure what the future held for me in a game that’s been so many different things to me at different times. Now, more than ever—in so many more ways than ever—I’m not sure what the future holds.

All I can say for sure today: I am fully content with my choices along the road that led to here.

That’s all that matters today.