Baby’s First Con

What’s good, Spirit Squad!

So I just came back from the Pokémon Regional Championship at Pittsburgh at the time of this writing, and this was one of the more unique weekends in my life. This wasn’t my first Pokémon regional (we went over that experience in our “I Want To Be the Very Best” article), but this was the first large tournament for my friend’s daughter!

(All names are being omitted here, but this weekend’s stories are being told with permission.)

See, Pokémon splits players into three groups by age: Masters are 18+, Seniors are 13-17, and Juniors are 12 and under. You’d think that being in the kids’ divisions means that the days are easier, but that couldn’t be less true. My boy had the task of preparing his 8-year-old for:

• being among the youngest in her age group, even if it does only go up to 12-year-olds
• being the least experienced player there; some of the 12-year-olds have been playing for 6, 7 years already!
• not having access to her dad and being forced to do things like shuffling her deck without help, making sure she didn’t lose her deck or anything else, and calling a judge on her own

These are all things that we don’t typically think about as adults, but for an 8-year-old having her first big gaming experience it can all be a bit overwhelming. Her dad was able to help mitigate some of this by taking her to various Cup and Challenge events (bigger than Friday Night Magic, smaller than a Regional Championship Qualifier), and setting her up with a Pokémon TCG Live account on her own tablet so she could practice playing on her own. But when the big day arrives, who knows what’s gonna happen right? And happen, things did!

First, let’s all have a laugh at my expense.

Signing up for a Regional Championship in Pokémon is very different from Magic: the Gathering. Regionals in Pokémon are open tournaments instead of invite-only, and each one fills its 4,000-or-so player cap so quickly that you’re unlikely to be able to register for one unless you make the queue in the first minute or so of tickets opening. Think of trying to buy a Secret Lair.

I knew this already. I didn’t get into the regional, but you can still buy spectator passes that allow you to just walk in and interact with the dealers, play side events, and generally just vibe. I’ve done that 3 or 4 times now, and have always just walked up to the front desk and bought a pass on-the-spot. What I didn’t expect is that spectator passes could also sell out.

I reached out to customer service and got the answer of “they sold out, keep refreshing the website every couple of hours and maybe you get lucky”. Not wanting to waste a trip, I kind of tip-toed my way into the event hall on Friday but was able to legally buy a pass on Sunday morning. So I did that and no longer felt bad about it.

(Shh, y’all heard nothing.)

Enough about me, though. We’ve got a kid’s first big experience to talk about!

A small child learns a big truth: Life Isn’t Fair.

Just like Magic’s Pro Tours, a Regional Championship in Pokémon is treated as a professional-REL event. For anyone who isn’t a tournament Magic: the Gathering player, this means that the rules are very to-the-letter and there is no such thing as taking a mistake back for any reason.

One part of ensuring tournament integrity is conducting deck checks. So, before you enter a tournament you submit a list of the cards you’ll be playing and cannot change your deck once the tournament starts. Each round, the tournament judges will randomly select a few people for manual deck checks, where a judge will take both players’ decks and make sure what they’re physically playing matches what they submitted online.

This time, the judge accidentally dropped one of her cards when giving her deck back. No one noticed this until it was too late, but the unfortunate truth is that after she was given her deck back, she simply shuffled a little and presented it to her opponent to cut and continue gameplay. While this is a very easy-to-make mistake and not at all her fault, it’s still her problem that she presented her opponent with a 59-card deck instead of the 60-card deck she registered.

This resulted in a game loss since it’s a professional-level event, and most adults I know would have probably crashed out. The fact that she took it in stride as an 8-year-old child is very commendable, and everyone who knows her was super-proud.

The Concession Stand

This section isn’t about food, but about the act of conceding games when you’re in a match.

So our undersized protagonist is playing in her 5th round and is doing quite well! She’s paired up against a much older kid, and she’s holding her own. Tournament rounds are best-of-three, and they’re going into Game 3 with just four minutes left on the clock.

Realizing this, her opponent decides to ask if she’d be willing to concede. She says no and keeps playing, but the older kid asks for a concession a couple more times, getting increasingly more aggressive about it each time. It got to the point where this seems more like bullying a smaller child than just trying to give yourself a better position in a tournament.

What neither myself or her dad knew is that you actually can’t ask for concessions in Pokémon. You can in Magic, as long as you don’t try to offer your opponent anything in return for the concession. In Pokémon, even asking is against the tournament rules. So it was very easy for the judges to talk with players, spectators, and parents to determine that this kid was choosing to do things he knew he couldn’t do, and the decision was made to disqualify him from the tournament.

So how’d she feel about all of that?

Despite the honestly-valid crashout opportunities she had, our tiny hero handled everything very well! Some conversation with her dad and a couple of plushies from the STACKED merch tables later, and the day turned into a very positive learning experience.

Thankfully for her, her dad is an experienced tournament veteran and was able to convey the following lessons:

• Celebrate your wins; we play games to have fun, after all! She stopped wanting to play after that 5th round, but finished the day with a 2-2-1 record. For a first huge tournament, this was an AWESOME result.
• Both her dad and the tournament judges would have her back if someone did her dirty.
• As far as gameplay itself went, she performed very well but has a lot to learn if she wants to truly be on par with the older kids. This is completely OK.

Hopefully the story of this weekend gave you some inspiration to take the leap into a large tournament if you haven’t been, take a negative event in stride if you are a veteran and maybe just have an off day, or if you’re a parent who is thinking about taking your kid to their first tournament maybe this helps you to say yes to that choice. If so, I’d love to see you at the next one!