Below, you’ll find a list of some of the updates and changes that you should now able to see live on the website:

Website:The look of our site has started to change!

• Landing Page (Goodbye, little acorn buddy!): The landing page now links to information for interested judges, game publishers, TOs, and players.
• Badge Glossary: Under the “Resources” header on the website, you’ll find a new resource available. The Judge Academy Badge Glossary is our way of clarifying the base-level expectation of each certification/badge to potential staffing managers or tournament organizers. This is just another step in our push to ensure that we are doing our best to educate organizers on what it means to be a judge.
• Notifications for New Events: We implemented a few quality of life changes to the way you set up notifications for new events – the selection boxes now default to ‘None’, and we’ve added a ‘Select All’ in case anyone did what I did and accidentally signed up for notifications for ALL-THE-THINGS. If you are looking to set up emails for new events, you can do so on the “Notifications” tab of your profile.

New Modules:

• L1 Practice Tests available: One of the biggest pieces of feedback we’ve heard from new judges certifying through JA for the first time, is that there is a large jump in difficulty between the quizzes at the end of each module, and the actual certification exams themselves. To combat this, we’ve created separate L1 Rules Practice and L1 Policy Practice quizzes. You can choose to take either, both, or neither, and is open to all judges regardless of level or certification. You can find these under the L1 Elective Skill Tree.
• 2020-2021 Review: Everyone is a little rusty. The last time I worked an event I think Theros Beyond Death had just released! On the L2 Elective Skill Tree, you’ll find a new course titled MTG: 2020 and 2021 Rules and Policy Updates. The module includes updates from Theros: Beyond Death, Ikoria: Lair of Behemoths, Core Set 2021, Zendikar Rising, and Kaldheim. While this is on the L2 Skill Tree since it touches on policy changes as well, it is available to all certified judges.

Conferences:

• Conference Promos: We received PROMOS yesterday!!! At the moment, we are working hard to get everything packed up to send out to organizers and regional distributors for all the January and February conferences. If you organized a conference in January or February and have not yet replied to your conference approval email with final attendance numbers, please do so as soon as possible so we can push these out to judges as soon as possible!
• Conference Education: Okay, I personally dropped the ball on this one, and I apologize! Over the last few weeks, I was hoping to create some additional resources for organizers and presenters to ensure future conferences are set up for success. I had some complications getting my wisdom teeth extracted, and between that, promos, and a couple of other things, it fell to the back-burner. I’m actually partly glad it did because I’ve gotten a ton of feedback and had some great conversations with folks just over the last week on how to improve conferences. So, I’m excited to keep working on those materials but hope that you’ll see those available sooner rather than later.

Thanks,
The Judge Academy Team