Card Stamping
From Judge Wiki
Draft Stamping - Best Practices
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Find other articles in the Judge Article Index.
| Author | Kaja Federowicz, Eugene Bazhenov |
| Date Published | 2011-07-21 |
| Original Site | Judge Wiki |
| Link | This article is only available on the wiki; see below. |
| Language | English |
| Tags | Nationals, Tournament Procedures |
| Recommended for Level | all levels |
| Notes | Coordinated by Jurgen Baert and Damián Hiller. |
| Abstract | Kaja and Eugene detail how to prepare stamped product for Nationals. |
Why do we do it?
Stamping draft packs for Nationals seems natural for most of the countries where such tournaments are held even if it’s not something mandatory to do. So why do we do it? The idea behind it is very clear. Nationals is an event that usually gathers the most competitive part of the player community. In fact, it is the highest level of competition for most of the countries where Magic is played. Prizes, prestige, and an invite to represent your country at Worlds are what people compete for. Thus we need to be extra active to make sure that such a completion is run fairly and professionally. Stamping the cards makes it very hard to add extra cards to one’s draft pool. You can be 100% sure that your players will appreciate cards being stamped.
It’s important to mention that it’s not only a valuable tool for judges in their quest to avoid shenanigans, but it’s also something players themselves can look up and catch.
For invitation-only Nationals, we strongly recommend stamped product. For open Nationals, we believe it’s still a very good customer service if you have resources (note that it’s usually much less product that you need for open Nationals so it doesn’t take as much time).
When do we do it?
This question’s answer will depend a lot on whether you have several things available: the packs, the room to do it, and the manpower and good coordination with the TO of the event who will be needed to coordinate all this, especially when it comes to giving judges the packs. Usually a couple of days prior to the event is recommended because that gives you enough time to solve any issues you might encounter and let the ink on cards dry well enough. That said, as late as a day before the event should do, if you’ve taken care of checking how the ink dries.
Gathering the people to do the stamping might not be an easy task because it requires quite some time which not everyone might have and, in some cases, it’s not an activity for which tournament organizers allot compensation. We must first say that as the stamping process is a quite repetitive one, after you get a grasp on how you’re doing it, you can go on automatic mode, meaning that loads of chats will arise among those working so it’s an enjoyable task in itself. As well, in many places the compensation comes out from the stamping itself and the foil cards which need to be removed from packs (that is of course, if stamping is done in judge’s free hours and not as their task for the day while, let’s say, the other half of the crew is judging the LCQs). In any way, planning when you can get together with some fellow judges for this is a crucial part of the planning.
What do we need to do it?
Stamps and inks
You have to be careful when choosing an ink. In general you will need a fast-drying ink that explicitly says it’s good for use on rubber, plastic and metal surfaces. Normal ink that is used to stamp paper will not dry at all on Magic cards. Make some tries on some cards seeing how they dry before committing to one. (European judges recommend noris-color ink, either 191 or 199 models.)
You can basically use any kind of stamp either if you order or produce one yourself (such as with mana Symbols!), or any kids’ stamp (flowers, hearts, and smileys) will do. Just make sure the size makes it visible but not too large as to obscure the cards’ text.
If your National consists of two drafts, we certainly encourage you to use different stamps or ink colours on each one to avoid players from using cards from draft #1 on draft #2. Another option, if you can’t get different stamps or ink colour is to stamp cards in different places of the card (such as illustration and text box) on each draft. While still useful, this method might be harder for players to identify while playing.
Scissors, booster boxes for storage, paper
Unless you have some other storage method such as plastic boxes or paper bands, the most common method for keeping packs together is using the same wrapper of the booster where they came from. In order to reuse them, just pull the cards to the bottom of the pack and cut the top of it with scissors. It’s pretty fast and super tidy because it removes the problem of not knowing afterwards which set each pack is. After you’ve got your packs stamped and ready for drafting, just store them in displays, carefully marking on the outside which draft they belong to!
Room
You’ll need some big space with tables for quite a few hours, so this should definitely be taken care of in advance. The amount of room you’ve got can be a limiter to the speed at which you can advance because with the time you need to leave between stamping and collecting, you can run out of space quickly. As well, if tables are somehow dirty or if they are too slippery (and cards start moving all around), a good solution is to stick sheets of paper to the table.
How we do it?
Stamping is done differently in different countries. We’ve gathered a few tips here that you might find useful when preparing for the task.
Getting Started
First of all, you need to know expected attendance. You probably have an estimate from the previous years already. Otherwise, your WotC representative will be able to help. Each player at Nationals will consume three or six boosters (depending whether the National is a one-day or two-day event). Therefore a booster display is enough for 12 or six players. Stamping one booster display takes roughly an hour. Happy counting. Just be sure you have enough product before your Nationals starts.
In addition to this, you’ll need some packs to replace any foil cards that appear. Remember, always replace foil cards with a common and try to make sure that card isn’t already in the pack (as repeats rarely happen in a closed pack and always raise players’ questions, which are better avoided during the draft). Depending on the amount of staff you’ve got available, you might want to assign someone in particular to do all swappings (in addition to other duties) or just have the stamper(s) have some spare cards to make the exchange.
For every pack you open, remove the land card and the token / rules tip that comes along with it. You can (and probably should) set up two separate boxes to store these. The lands (even if few) will be useful for the land stations while offering the tokens to the players for their use during the event is a much better customer service than throwing them away.
Make sure you put the boxes you use to store the tokens, lands, and foils somewhere near the place you open packs or stamp them so you don’t waste a bunch of time going back and forth when removing and/or replacing these.
The actual stamping
Laying cards down is the most time-consuming activity. Once, five (or even more) people were doing it and only one was stamping and they still weren't doing it quickly enough. The perfect ratio of pack-people to stamp-people will depend on how fast your judges are, but we recommend starting with only one stamper and add more only if they're far behind.
There are many ways of laying cards down. One is making one vertical line of cards, in a way that only the text boxes are visible–it takes just as much time as any other to be put on the table, but collecting the cards back is super fast: one swift move and you have a pile you can put back into the wrapper. Another advantage is really, really small amount of space used per booster. This method has one small disadvantage, though: sometimes the cards start to glide, especially if you're using a lot of power when stamping them. This is something that can be improved–after several tries you should be able to feel how to do it properly.
In this method, the wrapper should be always put “below” the column, i.e. near the table's edge, on the judge's side. If you put it “above,” you’ll have to extend your arm twice per booster, instead of just once.
If you don't like that gliding when cards are put one on top of another, there's a variety of other methods: horizontal or vertical lines - also quite easy to collect back. Rectangle is another option, though it doesn’t present many advantages: it takes a lot of space, it's difficult to collect back, it creates a more complicated pattern of stamping—straight lines are easier than zig-zags (and you should always stamp cards from one booster in sequence, so they dry in the same time and you don't have many half-dried boosters).
However, if you like this method anyway, two tips: make 3x5 or 5x3 rectangles, using the empty 15th slot for wrapper, and lay adjacent boosters in opposite directions, i.e. every second pack should be put upside down. This way you can put packs close to each other and the person who collects them easily recognizes the beginning and end of each booster. If you don't have to look closely and think, “this is rare, so it's the first column, so the booster starts there,” you save time on every pack!
One more piece of advice regarding laying cards on the table: when you open a foil, tap it—ie. if all other cards are in vertical (untapped) position, put it horizontally. If horizontal, put it vertically. It's the easiest way to spot it, both for the swapper or the stamper. Some people think it's so easy to spot a foil; it's so different, shiny, etc.! No, it's not. If you're doing something really fast, you might not notice it's foil and stamp it. Sure, the stamper could just pay more attention, but it means wasting time, and if you can get the same result without making the stamping slower, that's better.
Finally: in our experience, when stamping cards, you end up collecting faster towards the end of the process than in the beginning. Point out that it's important to wait long enough so that all ink is dried. It's extremely problematic to have backsides of cards becoming marked, or cards sticking to each other, if it's systematic with entire boosters at a time!
Tips
Don’t forget to have everything you need for stamping at the venue during Nationals. Your first 3 rounds are Standard – that’s more than enough to stamp product for a few extra players.
Note that you might usually need slightly more product then your number of participants. There’s two main categories of draft problems you should be aware of:
- player opens a faulty pack (wrong number of cards, cards not stamped, cards from wrong expansion, etc.) - for this, you’ll need some spare packs to replace the faulty one quickly;
- entire pod is in an incorrect and irreversible state (two packs mix together, players realize after several picks that there’s a faulty pack in circulation, etc.) - for this, you’ll need an extra set of 8 packs per expansion used, so either 24 total for NPH-MBS-SOM or 8 total for triple M12. This way you can always restart the current booster on this pod, if there’s no other way to fix the problem (or the fix would be too time consuming).
This page is a part of the Tournament Operations, Professional and Competitive (Sphere).
