Working as a judge can often feel like an isolated venture, depending on your local/regional community. Finding the inspiration to continue study when you find yourself in this situation, running fnm after fnm can be daunting. For me, finding recurring resources (like this blog!) can be a lifesaver in keeping motivation up. Eagerly awaiting the next episode of JudgeCast was actually a crucial step in my journey to becoming a judge in the first place. Reading the weekly articles on Cranial Insertion became a ritual for me, as well.
My aim with this post is to point you all to some resources you may be unaware exist. Some of these will be recurring (such as the aforementioned Judgecast and Cranial Insertion) and some are more persistent resources (such as the Annotated IPG) that update but don’t really release new content on their own. I’d love to also hear from all of you what resources I may have missed. I’ll be happy to amend this post with any additional ideas, so feel free to shout at me about them!
Judgecast (www.judgecast.com)
JudgeCast is the actual reason I became a judge. The combination of great host chemistry and relevant and authoritative rules/policy discussion can’t be beat. Really. Others have tried, and JudgeCast still prevails.
Cranial Insertion (www.cranialinsertion.com)
If you want real-life, player-sourced questions, look no further than this website. It is a mainstay of rules interactions, and every week is a fresh batch. Even more handy, if you sign up with the site, you can set all questions to have the answers hidden, so you can try answering them before revealing the correct solution. One of the best tools for study around.
The Annotated Infraction Procedure Guide, or AIPG (https://blogs.magicjudges.org/rules/ipg/#annotated-ipg)
The Annotated Magic Tournament Rules, or AMTR (https://blogs.magicjudges.org/rules/mtr/)
The actual description of these documents is better than what I’d come up with, so I won’t try to do better: The Annotated MTR/IPG is a line-by-line deconstruction of each sentence in the MTR/IPG. The MTR/IPG is a very dense document with very few extraneous words. Each sentence has meaning, and it’s the AMTR/AIPG’s goal to call attention to the finer details hidden in those sentences. It can be used as a study guide for L2, a refresher for judges coming back, or to settle judge nerd-fights, but its primary focus is education.
Both of hear projects are tremendously useful for contextualizing highly dense policy into more tangeable, digesteable chunks. And great for nerd-fights 🙂
Bearz Repeating (https://blogs.magicjudges.org/bearz/)
This blog, written by Paul Baranay, is a great source of self-reflective posts. While it seems to be on a slight hiatus, there is quality content here worth digging for.
The Feedback Loop (https://blogs.magicjudges.org/feedback/)
Reviews and feedback can often be a stumbling point for judges. This blog is a fantastic resource about all things feedback-related, and has a variety of recurring authors. I can’t recommend this one enough.
I’ve linked a few blogs that actual exist under this one, as this is the main place to go for judge content. A great idea is to simply browse around from this main page, as you never know what you’ll find. From program announcements, policy updates, to conference-related content, it’s all here. Get digging!
The Elvish Farmer 