A Full Circle — My 2024 Season-in-Review
It’s been a bit, so some background on what this is: once upon a time, I played the Pokemon TCG pretty competitively. At one point, I wrote a whole bunch for SixPrizes.com, and even took a stint managing its day-to-day operations toward the end. This blog was the result of having some opinions and content that didn’t make sense for SixPrizes. I archived a whole bunch during the PTCG’s brush with national news, but once upon a time, I routinely made season reflection posts here.
For quite a few years as I transitioned from player to staff member, it felt that I’d reached a new height and the year after would be a step back in some way. Those reflections were meant for me as a way to remember the year. They kept lying about the step back, though—the last few years have continued to provide amazing opportunities to do cool things and wear new hats in this amazing Pokemon universe. I think, finally, I might be right about the step back this time, but only because it’s going to be pretty hard to top 2023/24. My first season attending every North American Regional was a great one!
A Year Summed Up
The journey to this year began in the pandemic-shortened 2022 season, when the ever-iconic Jimmy Ballard asked me to shift from the judging floor to the tournament hive for his pair of Regionals that season. It wasn’t something I’d given any thought to before then, but he had an opening (and very large shoes to fill, with the ever-wonderful Dana Pero stepping out of the role) and thought I might be able to make it work. I am an optimization and systems person at heart (my degrees are in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research, which is basically “optimize the things”) and saw an opportunity to make good things happen—and, to do something different!
I’m really proud of how those two events went, and when Day 2 Events emerged in 2022/23, I was really happy to continue in that role for them. I had a great year, balancing Head Judging the largest Regional the game had ever seen with overseeing tournament operations instead in Day 2’s territory.
It’s impossible to understate how much tournaments have grown since 2020, and I don’t think the average player knows how much innovation has gone into keeping the lights on. There were some tournaments in 2022/23 that lost insane amounts of time to match result & drop entry with 1000 attendees (one particularly rough day saw us spend more than a cumulative hour across 9 rounds with no matches playing). Over time, I was asked to take a similar role for Overload Events, working with another great group to make tournaments as awesome as they could be.
That’s how I was setup leading into 2023/2024…and what a year it became! When the dust was settling in Yokohama, I was preparing for a smaller slate; if you’d gotten me in a corner, I probably would’ve said 7 Regionals was my target. Little did I know what was to come. Instead of that relatively-sane plan, I spent the season criss-crossing the world in a combination of roles that saw me as the voice of every Pokemon TCG Premier Event in North America.
Not every event was a complete success, to be sure, but I think the tournament experience took meaningful steps forward this year. A big part of that: I can’t say enough about what RK9 Labs and the North American TO trio partnered on in the last few years to continue adjusting to the immense player growth. When we saw that 1000 players was stressing the pre-COVID drop stickers, the new-era drop stickers were tested and adopted. The time it takes to drop players was shifted almost entirely away from the TOM Operator, whose single point of entry is the most significant challenge at every “mega” tournament. When it became clear that 2000 players threatens one person’s ability to scan every match slip, I started scanning Ties and printing pages of barcodes that could be scanned much more quickly than leafing through match slips.
You might think it sounds insane to care that much about optimizing scanning, but consider: if it takes 2.5 seconds per individual match slip and (conservatively) 1.5 seconds per result while scanning down a page, and there are 200 ties in a round, that’s 200 seconds—3+ minutes—per round saved. Over 9 rounds, that’s meaningful!
From there, RK9 innovated on my stray papers and produced a hybrid system that changed the game. RK9’s Team Scan is the “Result Submitted” you may have seen at a few Regionals or NAIC, wherein the result was scanned into RK9 and a bit of technical magic makes it possible to scan into TOM really quickly. I thoroughly enjoyed being part of the face of the teams that brought Regionals to life this year, but I can’t say enough about the organizers who took chances on unproven tech and the Hive teams that only responded “how high?” to the numerous requests to jump at new processes and procedures that made it all possible.
That’s all Hive-y things, though—the other side of my season was the West Coast, where I was the TCG Tournament Lead. Different organizers in North America used different event structures, so while my East role didn’t exist in the West, I did trade my oversight of VG scorekeeping for leadership of the TCG event’s judges. The West Coast crowd is particularly a high point for me on the year, with many judges making enormous strides from Sacramento to Los Angeles. Some of the best events in the world came out of the West Coast this year, and the crew that made it happen are some of the most genuinely awesome people on the planet too.
The personally ironic twist was that I didn’t make a single ruling all year in North America! Part of my role on the West Coast was sanity checking particularly momentous rulings before the Head Judge made a final delivery, but those decisions were always up to the Head Judge at the end of the day. While I didn’t take a single judge call in North America this year, I did shape the experience of every TCG player in one way or another, and that’s something I will never stop finding cool (and, really, a little scary, but we’ll get to that later).
There was a beautiful detour to Dortmund, Germany, though, where I got to actually judge(!) alongside some of my all-time favorite people. Worth every single moment on the plane—and the outlier die among this season’s souvenirs, too!
The season capped off with the honor of being the TCG Lead at NAIC 2024. In 2012, I attended my first US Nationals at age 13, and BDS’ opening announcements are burned into my brain forever. To return to NAIC at 25 and make those announcements myself was truly surreal—I’m immensely grateful to the support I’ve had throughout the last few years for allowing me to look good doing these things & those who took the chance on me.
It was not the season I set out for, but it is not a season I’d have traded for anything else—I’m forever grateful to everyone who made it possible and was a part of it. I would inevitably leave someone important off the list if I tried to make a full list of everyone who made a memory, but I appreciate everyone.
Onwards — 2025 and beyond
Something I struggled with in 2023’s season was the ever-growing tension around every ruling made by a judge. Charlotte was a flashpoint of negative sentiment toward judges in 2023, but it certainly wasn’t unique—for awhile, it seemed that a player could say literally anything about interactions with judges and Poke-Twitter would believe it was ordained truth. Part of why I didn’t cling to the judging floor when other positions were offered was because of that environment: if anyone could say anything they wanted and be believed, and my hands were to be tied in responding, things seemed pretty bad.
I’m relatively anxious as a person, which colors the above perspective—I like to believe that every interaction should be resolvable as two good-faith people seeing the same thing differently, or with different levels of information creating varying context. Of course, that’s exceptionally naive and a notion I was disabused of a long time ago, but sometimes idealism seeps back in. The reality, of course, is that sometimes people are bad-faith scumbags who set out to do bad things—that’s, of course, why judges think about cheating in the first place.
In 2024, I had to reckon with a different form of that dilemma—sometimes, decisions I made were just plain unpopular. Without getting into too much detail, everything from players forgetting to submit their team/deck lists and protesting at the Hive when Round 1 pairings didn’t have their name, to the way lunch breaks worked for judges at some of the TCG events presented opportunities for people to be mad at me. Worse, even if I wanted to be naive and believe that there was enough context in the world to make some of the angrier people understand, situations often presented where I wasn’t able to give the full context for bigger-than-me reasons.
For someone who spent a lot of time in judging leadership aiming to build consensus, accepting personal unpopularity or opposition in the name of decisions I made (or, worse, decisions that other people made, but that I had to own anyway) was an uncomfortable thing. My big step in 2024 was growing to be okay with that discomfort, knowing that I did my best. I am, genuinely, a bit sad about the folks I had less-than-stellar interactions with in 2024, but I am personally grateful that I’ve grown to be able to move on from those situations without most of them eating me for days. That’s my personal win for the year.
What’s next? Well, a few more words about 2024 first. There was something beautiful about the progression of 2024: there were early challenges, but by the end of the year, everything across the country was working as well as it ever has. Orlando, Indianapolis, and Los Angeles all had 2000+ players and finished within 6 minutes of each other, showcasing the incredible consistency that events developed. All 3 events did things a bit differently, but they all achieved many of the same ends.
I’m not the only staff member that showed up frequently cross-country, and the group that bridged Regional TO gaps this year was a big part of why many things were down to a science by the end of the year. It’s not a coincidence that you didn’t see many different faces presenting medals during Regional finals this season; I’m reasonably sure we had the fewest unique Head Judges across the US that we’ve ever seen. I’m also fairly sure that most inside the program would agree that North America’s judging had its most consistent year so far—we’re a far cry from every call being reliably handled the same way between Orlando and Vancouver, but the improvement from even 2022/23 was profound.
That’s a big set of statements, though—the game is bigger than ever, but had fewer people in the tippity-top roles than it has in the past? Interesting!
I feel strongly that this isn’t anyone’s specific fault (like I said, I did not set out to do every Regional), per se. In a lot of ways, it’s the natural outcome of the shrinking organizer base and each organizer having fewer events—if someone believes the best choice for Event A is person A, that opinion probably isn’t going to change for Event B unless person A screws up. When you organize 4 events, it’s easy enough to fall into a template and make minimal changes.
While I generally believe that stability led to good things for the 2024 Championship Series in North America, there’s no doubt in my mind that it’s an unsustainable model for the future. 2024 was unique in its challenges, with constant growth posing unprecedented obstacles that made “hey, mix up the top of the leadership ladder too” something that nobody was incentivized to do.
In my mind, the 2025 Championship Series has to be about both conquering whatever growth is yet-to-come (I still suspect upside is large!) and transferring the lessons learned in 2024 to a larger group of people. There’s going to be a balance to strike, and it’s not going to be successful if it’s done overnight—but, the road has to start somewhere. (Frankly, Step 1 involves compensation changes. Right now, there are valuable folks who, understandably, would not attend Regionals if not asked to staff a role important enough to justify extra compensation).
To that end, I fully expect you’ll hear more voices of TCG in 2025! Nevertheless, I do quite hope that I’ve not led my last tournament, but nothing’s ever for-granted in Pikachu’s world. For today I’m happy with the year I got to be a part of. The winds of change are ever-blowing, and who knows where they’ll carry next—I can only ride them.
For now, thank you for reading—and thank you for whatever part you played in 2024’s season. To all of the judges, hive teams, parents, players, parents, and organizers that made 2024 into reality: thank you for your part in this bright spot in life.
All the best to you in all that you do.
