Create A Championship Experience

The breakdown is as follows: The goal was to give away a case through the Top 8 players. This was one of the first things decided, as it was a major attention-grabbing headline. The breakdown that was calculated was:
- 1st place would receive 5 displays
- 2nd place would receive 4 displays
- 3rd and 4th place to receive 3 displays each
- 5th-8th would receive 1 display each

This breakdown gave me one box left over to use as I saw fit. We also planned to do a raffle for players. Many judges offered to contribute materials for the raffle, and I planned to include a few gems as well. I consider this charity from my end, and I do not expect to be praised for this, but I will go over the details of this later. To be able to calculate cost price per carton versus how much to charge players, we had to estimate player count. I will come back to this later, but the first major factor in player count is venue capacity.

His Majesty’s VGCS was not the first independently run tournament I have organised. In 2018, I ran GodSaveThe VGCS in Birmingham, associated with Geek Retreat Birmingham. This event was supported and sponsored by the (at-the-time) Bushiroad Europe office consisting of Sascha Schyns and Steven Mao. In 2022, I then ran the TDI YCV VGCS in association with Top Deck Inn in the UK. This event was sponsored by Blackfire ADC. Both events were fairly successful, and I aimed to continue this success. Each time, the limiting factor for the event was the venue. Geek Retreat Birmingham had a capacity of 60, and given that I was running a trios event, this meant 21 teams maximum. A similar number applied to Top Deck Inn. For His Majesty’s VGCS, I was in contact with Tarjei, a player from my local playgroup who was a student at Staffordshire University London and part of their eSports/Digital Media course and member of the Card Games Society. He informed me that his university and society had run a large-scale YuGiOh Regional Tournament at their Digital Campus eSports Arena in the past, which was also streamed. He suggested that given my experience in running events, both official Bushiroad and non-official, that I should use my community influence as a judge and content creator to run an event at this venue. This discussion occurred in November 2022. He gave me some basic details about the venue and how the YuGiOh event was organised. I visited the venue in person to see exactly how much space we were dealing with and what we could plan, as well as information about running a stream. Based on the turnout for the YuGiOh event combined with the total maximum capacity of the space, we settled on 128 players as the cap. The Health and Safety regulations of the space outlined a capacity of 132, but at 128, we would only have a maximum of 7 rounds of Swiss. This decision was made due to time. Time is another factor I will discuss later. Due to Tarjei’s connections, I was able to use the space for zero cost.

We were aware that London was not a central location for some players in the UK, such as those up North (Newcastle, Scotland, etc.), but it would be easier for anyone travelling in from Europe. The first VGCS was held in Birmingham, which is central UK, and had one or two teams from Europe attend. The second was held in Milton Keynes, which was much closer to London, and saw no foreign teams. Tarjei and I had goals of making this an international, almost BCS-level event, and considering the amount of players that travel for the likes of BCS and BSF in London, we felt that this wasn’t a critical issue.

The venue layout is as follows:

My initial plan was:
The Hub would be where our vendor would set up their storefront. Games Lab 1 and Games Lab 2 would be the main play areas. The central wall between them would be collapsed, making it one large, long navigable room. The Hall and Breakout would be where additional gameplay tables would be if needed. Post Production and Green Room would be staff areas, and The Arena is where the stream would be held. The Den would then be a space for people to relax between rounds or have food or anything else.

The previous two events having ~60 players was difficult to factor - not only were these events Trios regulation rather than Solo tournaments, but they were also due to venue capacity. True demand for the previous two VGCS events may have been higher. I am aware of people who tried to sign up for both VGCS events and were unable to. However, both events were run when public attitude towards the game and the general climate were different, which was another factor to take into consideration. In the end, I went with an estimate of 100 players (undercutting the maximum by around 20%, but up from previous events by a significant margin), and then had a low-end estimate of 80 (undercutting by a further 20%). These numbers seem plucked out of thin air, but as mentioned, factors such as attendance to BCS/BSF, attendance of previous VGCS events, venue location, prizing, and potential entry fee were all factors used when discussing these plans.

Considering the cost price of a case (£650 through distributor channels*), this would mean charging at least £10 per player in order to break even on prizing alone, assuming the low estimate signed up. From there, Tarjei and I discussed what else we could do to make the event appealing. We decided on the Standard overdress format, as that was the most popular format at BCS/BSF in the last few years. We also wanted to add some extra prizes, such as trophies, playmats, and a raffle. These would all of course come under costs. In order to factor in these additional costs, I felt raising entry price to £15 would cover this - this would up total revenue to £1200, giving me £550 to spend on additional prizing and materials. Given that we were confident in the expected player turnout, this was a comfortable margin for error.

*The Brotherhood offered to procure product for us on a “buy-back” basis, meaning they would buy back any unused product at cost price, but another friend was able to reach out and help us with the product for much cheaper. The Brotherhood were very understanding and even agreed that this “special price” was significantly better value, and that they would assist the event by vending other products on-site.

After discussing with Mike, the owner of the store, who has run many successful large YuGiOh events in the past himself (not the Regional at the Digital Campus), he suggested that I raise entry costs even further to £20, but then to use that additional revenue to provide entry packs so that players did not feel like they were paying £15 for nothing. After further calculation, at 80 players and £20 per player, my expected minimum revenue would be £1600. This would allow me to buy two cases of product (for £1300) and still have a bit left over for additional prizing. The second case could then be used to not only provide 2 entry packs per person, but potentially compensate my judges or run side events depending on how many were left over. 16 packs per display, with 20 displays per carton means one carton has 320 packs - this would mean that we could hit our maximum cap of 128, give everyone two packs, and still have a few leftover for side events, extra prizes, etc.. Any additional players would then become pure profit. Tarjei and I both agreed that this was reasonable, and this formed the basis for calculations moving forward.

With this basis, I then started planning further prizes, such as trophies, and other materials. The total cost of other materials and prizing was £260. After various shipping and handling fees for the prize/entry packs and the trophies, my total costs at this point were £1715.13. This meant that my “break-event” point was now 86 players.

One other idea that was presented by a friend of mine was to do a “bounty event”. I would put a “bounty” on players in my friend group who were also known as high-skilled players. The way YuGiOh events do bounties is that players who get paired into the bounty players and win would earn extra packs. I thought this was a fun idea, and tried to put a different spin on it - I had some custom cards printed with 8 people’s faces on them. These friends of mine would then check/stamp their opponents cards when they lost. My plan was to give a prize to whoever had the most stamps at the end of the day. I will discuss the success of this later. The custom cards cost me £66.53.

Total event cost was now: £1781.66.
Break-event point was now 90 players. Between the (in our eyes) extremely generous prize pool, combined with the perceived popularity of the standard format, we believed that this would still be reasonable. Thus, we continued to plan the event along these lines.

The previous VGCS events were held early in the year, shortly after February. This lined up well with Tarjei’s university schedule and my work career. We pencilled in a date of early March. After discussing with Mike, we found that he would not be available on that date. We pushed a week back so that everyone could be present to contribute. There was also a discussion about having a two-day event where players would play Best-of-3 Swiss on day 1, then 2-3 more rounds of Best-of-3 Swiss on Day 2 before cutting to Top 8 - this was in the interests of competitive spirit. However, factoring in that many people would be travelling for this event, we decided to keep it a one-day event so that people wouldn’t need to pay as much to arrange additional accommodation/travel. We settled on March 11, which was a Saturday that didn’t seem to clash with any other major event. Once this information was set, I then publicised the event on social media. This was done by December 2022.

As far as planning the day went - given how BCS/BSF in the past has been (i.e. capricious at best, sometimes my fault sometimes not), I thought it safest to plan for the worst and to advertise this plan as the schedule. That is, I planned for a 9am start and a 9pm finish, and instructed players, judges, and everyone else alike to plan for that. The initial plan was as thus:

- Venue staff on site by 8:30am to finalise setup
- Tournament staff (judges, commentators, myself) on site by 9:00am for briefing, run of show, expectations for the day, roles, etc.
- Doors open at 9:30am, check-in/registration to begin immediately
- Given that we were operating on a system of pre-registration, we could take the list of ticket holders from the website on Friday night, transfer them into the tournament software at that time, and then simply remove players who failed to check in from the tournament software before R1
- R1 to start at 10:30am at the earliest (realistically expecting 11am)
- 30 mins per round, with 10 mins of overtime, and 5 mins of round turnover on each side (i.e. results entered, pairings printed) would mean 50 mins estimated per round.
- At 7 rounds of swiss, this means that if R1 did indeed start at 11am, we would be expecting R7 to finish at 4:50pm. This could be rounded up to 5pm for any issues.
- No lunch break*
- Giving the judges 45 mins to perform deck checks for Top 8, and myself time to do the end of swiss raffle, as well as firing side events, we expected Top 8 to start at 6pm at the latest.
- Using the same 50 mins per round assumption, this meant we would be finished shortly before 9pm.
Obviously I did not want to run that long, but in cases like this, I was prepared for the worst. In reality, as we’ll see, things were significantly smoother than expected.

*This turned out to be a mistake. The nearest place for players to get food during the day (such as during the break between swiss and top cut) was about a 5-10 min walk, and given how stringent we were about pushing out the next round of swiss as fast as possible, this caused some players to not have enough time.

Now that the event and its prizes had been published, we now needed to address the logistics - signups, registration, etc.

I definitely wanted to avoid using Battlefy, as that was the system used for BCS/BSF in the past which caused more problems than it solved. We felt the best solution was to sell tickets online through the university’s platform in order to get player names and emails, and then output this list to a tournament software. This would allow us to avoid the method used in the previous VGCS events where one person would manually collect fees from players in advance and have to manually track who had or had not paid/preregistered.

The issue with this is that the university website then had some issues which prevented some players from signing up or buying a ticket. This had to be addressed manually and I asked anyone who struggled with this to reach out to myself or Tarjei. We had two people unable to buy tickets and so they had to be manually added to the system and pay in cash on the day. I am unsure if anyone else was unable to buy a ticket and did not reach out. My personal drawback is that because the money goes through the university system, I would need to invoice the university separately afterwards in order to receive my money. This was not a major problem in the grand scheme of things.

In the end, Bushiroad wouldn’t give us access to the professional tournament management software used in BCS events in the past. We had to use the tournament software provided by Bushiroad to their sanctioned stores. This software isn’t perfect - you are unable to go back to previous rounds and view tournament history, you cannot rewrite history if there is a mistake (without erasing all of the present), and the way it handles some issues (such as dropped rounds or players being assigned losses with no opponents) is definitely not normal. We made it work, but there was one major problem with this that I’ll go over later.

I reached out to Bushiroad shortly after the initial planning had been done. They were interested in supporting the event, but required more information that I had not planned yet. After the new year and announcing the event, I met up with Bushiroad staff at the World Finals in LA where we discussed things, and they seemed more on board than before, which was ideal, but they still needed me to write up an official proposal before approval. This was done with only a month before the event, but fortunately they not only officially sanctioned the event, but even sent me a large stack of the Vanguard Dear Days promo Overtrigger to hand out to players. I added these to the entry packs.

Unfortunately, working with Bushiroad involved several new limitations to work around. The main one was regarding the use of licensed IP and materials. There’s a distinct lack of mention of a certain item that was part of the event, a certain item was not shown on stream, and I had to be very clear that anything officially affiliated with Bushiroad could not be shown or published with this certain item. As mentioned, Bushiroad were also unable to share their professional TCG software with me and were unable to share or promote the event through their own platforms, but I am still grateful to them for believing in my experience from judging and running BCS/BSF for them in the past that they were willing to sanction my event and provide official support, even if that support was only spiritual and not physical.

The bottom line was that this event would not be anywhere near the levels of a BSF/BCS because I didn’t have access to Bushiroad’s resources, but I think the event still paves the way for bigger events as long as I continue along the current trajectory.

Once the signups became public, I then addressed the issue of staff. The “formula of thumb” I use for staffing events is 1 judge for every 30 players, plus one scorekeeper, plus head judge, plus one “extra pair of hands”. This put our staff count at 6 judges, not including myself. I reached out to friends and contacts, as well as through the official Bushiroad Judge server. I made it very clear that I had not factored staffing costs into my initial calculations, but that I would aim to compensate my judges where possible (this may involve profit sharing, should I make profit). Many friends reached out and agreed to staff the event for free because they wanted to see a community event succeed and give back to the community - I am still extremely grateful for this. I also figured that given that this was not a BSF/BCS level event, I would aim to hire some uncertified judges so that they could gain some experience judging and be able to work events in future with more confidence. I decided to add one more staff member in order to help run the stream, as having a dedicated Stream Judge to monitor that one game, as well as relay information to the casters was useful during BRO.

In the end, my final staff list was as follows. I will be using their “online” names, as they are likely more recognisable in this medium:
- Vysus/Core (Head Judge, Level 1 certified - several years of judge experience. Has grown and improved massively as I’ve watched them, but still has areas to further polish)
- CelestialZero (Assistant HJ, Provisional certified - worked a few events with my last year, level head and prime candidate to be senior L1)
- MeloettaMatt (Stream Judge, Level 1 certified - has worked as Stream Judge for two BRO events before)
- Moca’s Corner (Level 1 certified - has worked many events in the past)
- dook (Uncertified. Close personal friend. The person who got me into Vanguard. Shaky on rules, good on management and logistics. He was assigned scorekeeper for the day)
- Mash (Level 1 certified, relatively inexperienced)
- Nightshroud (Uncertified. Has attempted and passed the judge test in the past, but his certification lapsed when the system changed and he hadn’t recertified since)
- SleepyPJ (Level 1 certified. Has not worked events in the past, but has worked BRO)

Overall, my staff had a good balance between experienced judges and inexperienced judges. My hope was that myself and the other experienced judges would be able to give the inexperienced judges room to gain confidence and ability. You’ll notice that this is 8 members of staff, beyond the designated 6. Given that my judges were all willing to work for zero compensation out of the kindness of their hearts, I felt that more was better, and if I was able to compensate them, then I would do so where possible.

Bushiroad would not be providing judge promos for me to hand out and compensate my staff, but after liaising, they were okay with the judges wearing the official shirt, as the event had been agreed to be sanctioned in official capacity.

On the topic of staff, I should mention - part of receiving the venue for free, the university would also supply student ambassadors who would help with crowd control as well as anything relating to the venue (paid by the university). We had 7 additional people doing tasks such as holding doors for players, fetching paper/printouts, guiding players to restrooms, and putting chairs/tables out and away. Their assistance was invaluable and I again thank Staffordshire University London for being such gracious hosts. As well as this, the eSports course also had 3-4 members of staff on hand to run our broadcast and stream. Their assistance meant that we were able to showcase the event to players around the world who were unable to attend. As part of the stream, I also wanted to invite friends and fellow content creators to host the stream and provide commentary. I reached out to JJ (GGMrRogers) and Filip (TopDeckHeroes). Both agreed, and like my staff, were willing to do so for no compensation. Again, I hadn’t factored in caster compensation into my initial calculations, but I was determined to give them something for their time, and in the case of my casters specifically, their travel.

My original plan was to be the “acting Head Judge” in so far as being the person players appealed to. Actual operations and such would be conducted entirely by Core - they have been judging for nearly 6 years now, and over that time, I believe they inch closer and closer to being able to actually run a BSF/BCS on their own. It’s not my intention to discourage or slander them in public, so I mean it positively when I say that this event was a major stepping stone in their development. My main plan for the day was to hop in and out of commentary, similar to the caster rotation in BRO. In reality, most of my day was spent addressing TO-specific tasks, but more on that later. An additional shoutout to Core here; in their role as part of staff for Vision, they also produce digital assets for various uses/purposes. They were able to produce overlays and assets for the stream (with me liaising with Bushiroad as to what we can and cannot show/have on stream). I believe they did an excellent job in this regard. I will address the stream in detail in its own section.

This was all of the planning that went into the event. You may notice that I have yet to mention the raffle. This was almost entirely ad-libbed. This is the first of many mistakes - I did not plan the raffle properly. While I have yet to receive a direct complaint, I know that I could have done a better job in this regard. I will outline what was given away in the report of the day’s events.

As you can tell from the sheer size of this section alone, there are many, many considerations that need to be made when putting an event together from scratch. Things such as prizing, how you can afford your prizing, how many players you can fit in your venue, and how much that venue costs are all inter-linked pieces of a complex puzzle. And my puzzle was extremely easy by comparison because I had my venue already set in stone at zero cost. For something like BCS/BSF, they often are working from the other way; instead of using their venue to adjust player numbers, they have to predict player numbers and find a venue based on that. Of course, the finances involved are also very different, but that’s a separate story.

As mentioned in the introduction, the way I do things is far from perfect. There is a lot of estimation based on previous years of experience, and I still had Mike from The Brotherhood involved in a lot of these discussions - he has significantly more experience than I do in this field, and his insights were consistently eye-opening and we often adjusted plans on his recommendations. However, the numbers and plans presented thus far were agreeable with him as well, and all parties involved were confident in the success of the event.

This deserves its own small section. Ticket sales went live early February of 2023. The delay was because I was at the World Finals in LA commentating, and Tarjei had various deadlines on his assessments.

As mentioned earlier, there were reports of people having issues with the university website for buying tickets, but sales started strong - we reached 60 by the first few days.

Unfortunately this momentum slowed very fast. After about a week, we were only at 70 signups. About a week and a half before the event, we were only up to 81. I know of two people who bought their tickets on Friday night. The final number was 94 tickets sold, so I did indeed make a profit, but that’ll be discussed later. I wanted specifically to highlight that despite reasonable assumptions being made and estimates based on experience, throughout most of the lead-up to the event, we were at risk of making a loss. This could be down to poor planning/foresight, overconfidence, or just misfortune. Either way, it is something that will invariably affect the next event I plan. Running tournaments is a constantly evolving process, after all.

Another “incident” I wanted to highlight was that I only began promoting the event AFTER all the details had been decided. One avenue I did this was through the UK Trade Group on Facebook. When I published details about entry fees and prizing, I had a lot of comments about how expensive the entry fee was, and how players were only receiving 2 packs (RRP of around £6-7) for their £20. This initial response was worrying - did I massively misjudge how people would receive a high-stakes event considering Bushiroad have been running free entry tournaments for years? You could argue that one case distributed across the Top 8 players is still lower value than an all-expenses paid trip to LA/Japan for BCS winners. But again, as mentioned, I don’t have pockets as deep as Bushiroad’s Events department (who I am confident run these events at a loss/against a warchest of a budget). Either way, I decided to not aggressively engage with these comments out of fear of alienating other onlookers who may otherwise have been potential entrants. The initial surge of tickets sold within the first few days did allay this somewhat, but I still couldn’t stop thinking about how we would potentially miss the mark because of our need to break even.

This is what prompted me to run side events. I did not initially plan for them, because European events haven’t really had the staff/time/capacity to run side events for several years, but upon recalculation, at 80 players registered, that’s 160 packs given out on entry - I still had another 160 packs left from my second carton plus the one box left over from my prize case. I could easily run a “Win-A-Box” side event, charge an amount lower than entry (say, £10) and help recoup my losses. I went ahead with this and announced this plan and advertised it (albeit, not in detail and not very well).

Throughout the weeks leading up, I also asked many content creator friends to also use their influence to share the event as much as possible - JJ and Filip as commentators was natural, but I also reached out to Solemn Vanguard, DifferentFight, and even international names such as Edward Vanmanz and Antonio (Crow) Tutt. I like to believe this helped a fair bit. Members of other communities (such as various other European trade groups on Facebook) also offered to help spread the word, again to which I’m grateful for.

In the end, the event was looming and there wasn’t much more we could do than throw ourselves into it, best foot forward and hope for the best.

The day before the event is when I finally figured out what I was doing for the raffle. I had planned to give away the following items out of my own pocket/collection:

- 1x Judge PR Baromagnes
- 1x Worlds PR Sunrise Egg
- 1x Worlds PR Chrono Dran G
- 1x Judge PR Mac Lir
- 1x Judge PR Cosmo Wreath
- 1x G-TD05 Hot Stamp Alter Ego
- 2x Judge PR Kushinada
- 4x Judge PR Belenus
- JP Event Exclusive Bermuda Colorful Pastrale Sleeve Set (2x sleeves + Gift Markers)

Several judges also contributed items to the raffle, including 2x more Kushinada to complete the playset. For the six 1x cards, the first six raffle winners would get to choose. The two playsets would be raffled off as individual lots. There was also a TD01 Blaster Blade which I felt appropriate to give away to 1st place instead. One judge also brought along a handful of playmats, which instead we distributed amongst staff.

I was informed late Friday night that one of my judges would be unable to travel down, as the weather in the UK that week was very disruptive (snow) and that a lot of trains and coaches in his area were being cancelled. Fortunately, we were still more judges than realistically needed, so this was not a huge problem. I told him to take care of himself and that we would manage. In hindsight, his lack of presence was missed, but it did not cause any of our issues and would not have solved any of them. I would have liked him to be there for the social factor more than anything, but the weather will do what it wants. I did think about whether this would affect player turnout, but in the end I chose not to dwell on it because tickets were non-refundable.

Also a note here about the Chronojet set. I initially had planned for Jet to be legal. A lot of people I know were excited to practice Jet ahead of BSF. A lot of people I know also voiced concerns about game health/metagame diversity in the presence of Jet. About a month before the event, when the set was scheduled to release in Europe, we heard about product shipping/distribution delays. While reasons like this are why the 2-week buffer is in place for official events, I realised that the extent of the delays would impact the event. I announced on social media that I would keep on top of things and that this may affect Jet’s legality for the event. I got in touch with multiple stores from around Europe who were happy to provide information and work with me.

Two weeks before the event, I was receiving reports from various stores in mainland Europe that they had received their products. Some people in Europe even purchased the Deckset from America or Asia. I announced that I was aware of issues and monitoring the situation, and that I would make a final decision by Monday 6th. In hindsight, I should have made a decision earlier, because 5 days before the event is not enough notice. I knew that some people really wanted to play, but I also should have considered the fact that tickets were non-refundable and if someone didn’t want to play in the event as a result of Jet being legal or not legal should not have factored into my decision, but I was still in the mindset of “keeping as many players happy as possible”, which I still believe is a good mindset to have. I will also mention here that metagame diversity or balance/game health did not influence my final decision. It was purely down to accessibility. By Monday 6th, one or two stores had received the product, but their allocation was lower than they expected. A few other stores also had not received the product, and therefore I made the decision to declare Chronojet as not legal for use. This was due to fairness more than anything - someone who could have won if they had access to Jet being beaten out by someone who bought from overseas should not have to deal with that disadvantage out of their control. By disallowing Jet, every single participant would be on the same playing field. I would have made the same decision earlier, but wanted to wait on the off chance that the situation would resolve itself by then, thus allowing Jet. It was just an unfortunate situation overall, and I do not blame anyone, especially not Blackfire ADC. But I simply made a decision in the interests of fairness. I’m open to hear other viewpoints or discuss why this decision was right or wrong.

I woke up at 7:30 and cleaned myself up. Everything was packed and ready to go the night before. I was collected by EKo who was driving both MrTimeLeap and TDH Filip to the venue, and my house was on the way. This helped massively so that I didn’t have to carry several boxes and bags worth of items.

We stopped by McDonalds for breakfast and continued to the venue. Finding parking was a minor hassle but we navigated to the multi-storey carpark in the end. We arrived shortly before 9am.

All the Student Ambassadors and University staff were already on site, and most of my staff were also there barring one or two who were still on the way. I explained to everyone the basic set up and what we had planned - most of the judges there had worked events before and knew what they were doing and could easily guide the rest and I had faith in them to do this. I made it clear that I would be actively judging as little as possible, and to rely on Core for anything to do with the tournament and Tarjei for anything to do with the venue.

I then talked to stream production and my commentators. We put together a brief schedule/run of show and from that point I let them handle it - both JJ and Filip were experienced in this sort of thing before and I had full trust in them.

We did some last minute rearranging to determine where people would go, and at 9:30 we opened doors to registration and for people to start checking in. Players were to hand in their Decklog IDs at this point. During this time, I would go collect Mike from The Brotherhood and help him set up the store - he had issues with finding the venue. This would be a common theme between a lot of people.

At 9:45, Brotherhood were all set up with product for the players. This was fortunately done before registration ended, so players needing to buy new sleeves for failing deck check at the start weren’t left out of luck. At this point I went back to focus on the stream. From the corner of my eye, registration was still proceeding relatively smoothly. However, I was far busier than I expected to be and didn’t have time to say hello to anyone.

I did inform Core to be slightly more lenient than usual when it came to start-of-day deck checks and sleeve checks, and while a few people did have issues, the presence of Brotherhood to vend product and people having spares meant that there were no major kerfuffles.

We quickly talked about how the stream would go, and at 10:15 we went live with JJ and Filip introing the event. The stream throughout the day, as well as the feature matches will be discussed in a later section.

At 10:30 we still had some people going through the end of the registration process, so Round 1 was not starting at the expected time. The final player was checked in and we had the list of players from our Spreadsheet checked against the players on the tournament software done by 10:40am. The final checked-in player count was 91. I knew of 2 people unable to make it due to personal circumstances, but they had already reached out to me. I did some basic announcements and Core handled the rest. We forgot to account for both the stream table and the one player who required fixed seating. These were both addressed by Round 2.

We then began printing out R1 pairings, but had some slight issues with the printer pushing things out double-sided. The Round pairings were up by around 10:55, and I began the welcome announcements to the players as they were seated. Round 1 then started at 11am, which was the tail-end of our expected timeframe, but still within expectations.

Once the players had started, we began preparing the match slips for result entry. These again would constantly come out double sided and we were unable to fix this. By 11:15, many players had finished their games and we still had not handed out match slips. We had four copies of double-sided match slips at this point, so we decided to roll with it, cut them out, and manually figure out which side had the one we needed. This took a lot of time, even with three people going “I have 1, I have 3, I have 4, where’s 2?” etc.

While this was something out of my control, it is something we should have addressed sooner and better. Unfortunately, the round had already ended at this point, so I decided “hand out slips however we can and we’ll just collect results manually going forward”. Abandoning match slips is definitely a deviation from standard tournament protocol, but I felt that with less than 100 players in attendance, manual collection of results was still manageable given that I had 2-3 floor judges at all times.

However, due to the number of tables we were able to acquire for the two Games Labs, several players ended up having to play in The Hall and the Breakout areas. The PA system was just about loud enough for the players outside of Games Lab to hear, but it meant that we needed a judge in The Hall/Breakout area at all times to collect those results.

Back to the issue of slips, by the time we handed out slips and collected results for R1, it was already 11:45. We then had to wait while the results for R1 were input and R2 generated. During this time Core and I discussed how to handle results collection, and while we came to an agreeable, serviceable solution, it was still a minor concern.

Halfway through round 1, we had a player turn up late - they had missed check in but still wanted to play. I agreed to let them continue from R2 onwards with a R1 loss. This player will remain anonymous, but failures with Bushiroad’s Tournament software caused issues with this player later down the line. I’ll explain when we get to Top Cut.

R2 eventually began at 12pm. From this point on there were no other critical issues regarding tournament operations. I then checked up on the stream and learned of a major issue (again, to be discussed in The Stream’s section). The decision was: do we delay the event for the stream, or do we just abandon one round of stream?

In the end I chose to abandon one round of stream - R2 would continue while technical issues persisted, and the stream would hopefully be fixed for R3. However, this decision took some time to make, and between a few other factors, such as ironing out the kinks regarding manual result collection, meant that we finished R2 at 12:45pm. This was slightly behind schedule, but still not so late as to cause major headaches and issues.

R3 and 4 were uneventful - at this point all staff had settled into a rhythm. I was able to make a stream appearance, but didn’t feel like things had calmed down enough for me to actually commentate a game, but instead I patrolled the venue, saying hello to people, socialising, and still being around to solve any problems.

R3 did start and finish a bit late due to stream production issues - R3 started at 1pm, meaning we were on a pace of 1hr per round - this would mean swiss finishing at 5pm, which was a bit concerning as it gave us a later start time for top cut, but credit to my judges, they pulled through and we were done with swiss by 4:30pm, as originally expected.

Considering that by Round 4-5 people would start dropping, I decided to open sign ups for side events earlier. The original plan was to take sign ups for side events after the raffle, so that I could direct people towards them after the raffle, but it was recommended to do it straight away so that on the off chance 8 people drop and sign up, we could fire one pod and have a second one afterwards. Unfortunately, I miscommunicated this, and we had one person sign up as the 8th person but hadn’t dropped from R6. The side event fired on R6, and then we had one player in R7 with no opponent. I should have stuck to my guns and ran the side events only after swiss ended. I chalk this up to my inexperience with running side events and will be better prepared in future. Beyond that, there were no other major problems with Swiss.

I let my judges handle deck checks for Top 8 - Core had the particularly good idea that as soon as top tables finished their games, their decks would be checked immediately. This took a few judges off the floor, so I helped in carrying deckboxes and grabbing deck codes. Just as I was about to start the raffle, the judges had already all finished deck checks and were ready for Top 8. This is where the player turning up late causes an issue. This player received a loss in R1, and then proceeded to win 5 out of the next 6 rounds, putting them at 15 points. We expected one or two players on 15 points to make it into top cut, so this was normal. However, he was listed in 7th place, at the very top of the 15 points crowd, despite having an extremely low resistance. If you looked down the column of “Opponent’s Match Win Percentage”, his was a lone 0.47 in a sea of 0.59s and 0.6s. When I went back through the Bushiroad Tournament Software, I found that I could view a player’s history, but not the round history. When I viewed this particular player’s history, I saw only 6 games listed - this seemed to make sense, as they had no opponent for R1 and were given 0 points appropriately. The only conclusion I could logically draw in the heat of the moment was that given that this player only played 6 rounds (instead of 7), their own win% was calculated based on the fact that they had won 5 out of 6 games (83% win rate), as opposed to everyone else who won 5 out of 7 (71% winrate), and thus the software placed him as the “strongest person with 15 points'', instead of “weakest person with an 5-2 record”. I am not 100% confident that this is actually what happened, so anyone who is more well-versed in Bushiroad’s Tournament Software, please get in touch. I did feel bad about having to tell this player “sorry, due to software issues, you are not actually in Top 8”, but I felt that going by Opponent’s Match Win % was fairer, and if you factored in the fact that he technically did lose R1, his true placement was further down the standings. I asked my other judges for their opinion and we all agreed that the software diagnosis made the most sense and that pushing 8th and 9th place up to 7th and 8th respectively was the fairer play. I never found out whether this player was late for R1 due to difficulty finding the venue or other issues, and I regret not doing so - if he was one of many other people who found it difficult to navigate to the venue, then that is on me for not providing clear enough directions. In the end, I stand by my decision.

After finalising Top 8, I then ran the raffle. The way I did this was I had a projected screen showing a random number generator. Then whichever number it spews out, I looked for that player’s standing position. For example, if it spat out 22, the player who finished 22nd would receive a prize. The standings included players who dropped as well, which was handy. I gave out most things but forgot a lot of others, but it was mostly fine. I found out here that the Bounty Challenge did not land as well as I’d hoped. There were 8 faces on the card, and between 7 rounds and judge calls, it was technically possible for someone to fill in the card. I wasn’t expecting anyone to get all 8, but I thought there may have been a 4 or a 5. Turns out there were four players with 2 stamps, and they were the highest/best performing. I severely overestimated how many people would play against a member of “Team Brexit”. In all honesty, the Bounty Challenge was a good idea but extremely poor execution. Should I try this again, I know what needs to be improved.

The actual rest day itself was quite enjoyable. Top 8 was smooth and fast, people started leaving after everything was done. Only one side event pod actually fired. We had the venue until late so we were happy for people to sit around and play casual games. We projected the Top 8 stream onto the monitors in the play area for anyone still around to watch. I spent most of the Top 8 time on the commentary desk, but also giving out prizes. After taking winners pictures and prize pictures, we had a staff photo, which I’m still waiting to be sent, and then everyone went for food. We actually were done by 7:45pm, which is a full hour and a bit ahead of schedule, which to me was insane considering we had so many delays at the start. The fact that we were able to rush through Top 8 definitely helps, but again, applause to my judges for powering through and getting things done.

I noticed that a small handful of players from Italy travelled all the way over, so I’m very grateful to them and got to chat with them for a bit - I’ve seen them around at events before, but had no idea they were coming. To my knowledge there were no major issues as far as penalties goes - a few things here and there. I had to answer one or two rulings queries while the other judges were dealing with manual results collections, but on the whole everyone I spoke to seemed to enjoy themselves. It was great seeing not only friends from Europe, but also friends from outside of London. I also was able to convince a large portion of my LGS’s playgroup to come along. Off that, I’d like to tangent a bit about my locals.

I will say this now - “Team Brexit” is not a formal team the way WCC or King Slayer is. We are a group of idiots who picked up the name in cheek and use it to refer to our friend group. It has reached the point where it contains Europeans, but they are not associated with us beyond “being cool people to hang out with”. Dave Vecht and Alex Kuan’s worlds victories are not team victories. I’m not sure if this misunderstanding or misperception has caused friction in any way, but if it does, I apologise. But this was one issue I’ve felt at my locals before. Hal, Kaelan, Mohammed, myself, and a few other “high profile UK players” from the south often hang out at Dark Sphere (from as early as 2018) to chill, test, hang out, etc. Over the last year or so, Dark Sphere have also built a fairly sizable Standard playerbase and gathering, who come along to actually play in a tournament. When that group first started establishing themselves, I felt a fairly large chasm between us. I wasn’t sure if it was because we were focusing more on Premium to their Standard, or if they just didn’t like the way we approached the game (from a significantly more competitive mindset). Even though we didn’t take locals as seriously, I couldn’t help but wonder if we weren’t subconsciously alienating them in some way. For what it’s worth, I never had issues with any of them - getting to know a handful of them in the last few months has actually been pleasant. Regardless of the cause of the initial chasm, as said, over the last few months the two groups have been coming closer and closer - “Team Brexit” have started playing in local tournaments more often, and the other players have started branching out and interacting with us more often. Seeing these guys come to VGCS and do fairly well was great to see, and I think it only helps to bridge the gap between different playerbases and communities, and I can’t help but feel a bit of pride at seeing this come to fruition. Of course, there are some comments to be made about how often the Dark Sphere regulars got paired up against each other, but that’s another story. Sorry to Roland, Kihyce, Yuban, and others, but congrats to Andrej, Shayan, and Ansab for some really strong performances. I’m forgetting several other names, but you all know who you are. Really appreciate all of you.

So To Recap:

Issues/Mistakes/Problems:
- Vendor wasn’t properly authorised
- There were some stream issues
- Match slip printing failed
- Side events were not calibrated properly
- Latecomer caused issues for tournament software top cut
- No lunch break plus no easy way to get food/drink for players between rounds
- There was no round timer for players sat in The Hall/Breakout
- The Bounty challenge was ran poorly

Successes/Good points:
- No major penalties/complaints as far as judge staff goes
- I did not lose money on the event
- We finished well ahead of schedule
- We overcame most of the issues we encountered on the day

I believe the event was still a success, and I very much enjoyed myself. Despite taking on a different role and different responsibilities compared to what I would usually be doing as HJ for a Bushiroad event like BSF/BCS, I took it as both a learning experience as well as being able to put what I have learned into practice.

First of all, massive shoutout to Callum and the rest of the team from SUL. Extremely professional group of folks who without, the day would not have been anywhere near as enjoyable. It would be unfair of me to compare this event’s broadcast to the BCS World Finals stream earlier this year, but I still felt like we came extremely close. Of course, we weren’t without a few stumbling blocks.

The first major one was the fact that caster audio was not being broadcast during gameplay. At the beginning, viewers could hear JJ and Filip fine on the desk as they introduced the day, but when it came to actually going into gameplay, nothing they said was being heard. The VOD is still available here.

Round 1 was between two Dark Sphere locals, and I chose this specifically because I wanted to shoutout my local players as mentioned above. After Round 1 finished, we took the stream down to solve these technical issues. There was a significant delay, which I appreciate was a poor viewing experience. Fortunately we were back by R3. From there, it was almost entirely up to the casters and the stream judge as to who to feature - I think they went for players on top tables as opposed to picking say, someone who was 3-3 but playing an off-meta/fun deck.

I was able to join the stream for a bit and talk, but then I was off to handle other things again. I unfortunately wasn’t able to actually commentate any rounds of swiss, and so out of selfishness and wanting to actually sit down and talk about Vanguard, I put myself on throughout the finals.

After Round 5, we even worked with production to get some “guests” on stream. The VOD timestamp is 2:15:52, I’ll let you decide how this goes. Particular shoutout to Mench (Tom, @VGMench on twitter) who was willing to come along and be my media guy for the day. He ended up contributing some really good ideas for the stream and helping us run errands as well. We also did some player interviews and just generally were able to fill time while we did deck checks during the swiss break before going into the finals.

We had a full professional technical setup, and there were times where audio levels were not synced properly, but that was more because people on camera weren’t used to having to have the mic right up in their mouth. Beyond that, Core also put a bunch of time and effort into producing our stream overlays, and we unfortunately weren’t able to have the venue cam be windowed onto the overlay, we still improvised and made it work. Again, massive thanks to both Filip and JJ for coming all the way out and working all day. The individual rounds will be pushed to the YellowCard TCG YouTube channel later.

Again, this wouldn’t even have been remotely possible without the guys from SUL.

My initial thought as soon as the stream turned off was “I need food.” My second thought was “how on earth are we going to find a restaurant to seat this many people?” We were 24 bodies. At least. Fortunately we figured something out. Anyway, onto the actual post-mortem breakdown.

We sold 94 tickets. This meant that my collected revenue was £1880. I also ran one side event pod for 8 people, bumping the income to £1960. 92 people checked in at the end, and 2 no shows were accounted for.

My total costs were £1781.66. This meant I made a profit of £178.34. Due to the number of people left and the fact that side events didn’t fire, I had exactly enough product left to give each member of my judge team one display each as compensation. I also provided some leftover materials to my casters. £200 for a day’s work, plus several days worth of planning is from a raw monetary standpoint, not worth it. And yet I would choose to do this again. I would change some things to avoid making some easily dodgeable mistakes. I would be stricter and tighter on making decisions. I believe in the end most of the decisions I made were for the benefit of the majority of players and the event. Again, I was very lucky in that every single member of my staff was willing to work for free. This is not normal. I still feel awful for being unable to at least match Bushiroad’s new level of Judge Compensation, even with the new reductions. Additionally, as far as staffing goes, I mentioned that throughout the day I was too busy with other things and as a result spent less time on the stream than I would have liked - I probably could have delegated most of these tasks to my staff and put myself on stream and trusted that my judges could handle the decision-making process themselves. I think perhaps I still have room to let go and to just focus on what I want/need to do, rather than feeling that I have to be the one to make every decision and be part of every process.

As far as expectations went, I am extremely happy and satisfied, and I believe the event was an overall success. This was the largest VGCS I’ve put on by a long shot, with significantly more ambitious prizing and operations, and despite the various hurdles, we were able to pull through.

The day after I created and published a feedback form, which is available here.

I will be accepting responses on it forever. This form is open to anyone - regardless of attendance. Obviously if you are situated in NA/AO then the “why you didn’t attend” will be pretty obvious, but I’d still be interested to hear anyone’s thoughts. I already have some responses at the time of writing, and some are even very useful and helpful and constructive. I unfortunately do have to mention that some are the exact opposite. The form is anonymous so I cannot (and would not) name and shame anybody, but responses along the lines of “I do not like Ben as a judge” are not helpful. I’m happy to take legitimate criticism where it is due, such as side events, the bounty challenge, etc.. But personal attacks do not make the next event better. I shouldn’t have to defend myself by saying things like “I didn’t actually do much if any judge work all day”. If you fundamentally dislike my decisions or the way I make them, even after I’ve explained and justified them here, that’s totally within your right. But I very much appreciate you keeping it your problem and not making it mine. I still consider the event a success, and not a lot will change that. I will run more in the future. You are free to have a nice life. Thank you to anyone who has provided helpful feedback. Some comments such as “there was nowhere to get food” and “please give us a lunch break” are considerations I’ll definitely make in future. Complaints about location and prizing are significantly harder to address, but will still be taken on board.

I appreciate this article has been excessively long and far exceeds any reasonable reading, but as long as someone who was thinking about planning and running their own events out there finds this useful or can learn from my mistakes, I consider this to have done its job. Again, thank you to the Vanguard community at large for being willing to support me and the event, in the past, present, and future. Thank you to all my friends who were willing to staff the event at personal cost to themselves and help. Thank you to anyone who saw/interacted with the announcements and did everything from share/spread the word to signing up and travelling down. I’ve always said that card games are a social tool more than anything, and this event proved that in full force. Everyone coming together and enjoying the day throughout its hiccups and stumbles.

I look forward to hearing your feedback on the event (whether you attended or not) and to see others running their own independent community events around the world. Crow runs similar events with King Slayer Cards in his neck of the woods in the US, and WCC also do the same now and again in Australia. More opportunities to play Vanguard equals more opportunities to come together. Thanks for reading, please follow on various social media:

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