Written by Bryan Prillaman

Level 3, United States, Florida

Ready to learn all about the start of Wave 5? I sure am! But first some quick administrative updates on some of the earlier waves.

Wave 2 Make-up Mailings!

As a reminder, due to the number of mailing issues with wave 2, Wizards of the Coast agreed to resend mailings that were lost or stolen. Information has already been collected and sent to Wizards. Mailings will be going out “soon“.

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Exemplar Wave 3 Mailings!

Judging by social media, mailings have been trickling out for the past few weeks. Starting with Wave 3, and continuing with Wave 4 and all future waves, your Regional Coordinator will be serving as the distribution hub for any Exemplar related mailings. This means that having your region correct in Judgeapps should be important to you.

Exemplar Wave 4!

So, turns out adding a lot of slots added a lot of nominations. Almost double last wave. There is a huge volume of positive nominations that I can’t wait to share, but I’m going to have to. Double the nominations also means double to work. We have added a few more people to the Exemplar Team to help deal with this increased volume, and have completed the initial review of the nominations and are now in the process of contacting people if their nomination needs a revision. If you are contacted, please do not delay in responding to these emails. The release of Wave 4 nominations is directly related to how quickly these issues are resolved.

As I mentioned above, when Wave 4 is posted, foils will also be sent directly to your RC at the same time we start collecting addresses. This is to save time. It is very important that your region be accurate in JudgeApps. Do that now. If you live in Bolivia, but your region is the United Kingdom, then you are going to have a bad time.

Exemplar Wave 5!

Now the part you care about! If you are reading this then Wave 5 is open for business. Wave 5 is going to function very similarly to Wave 4. There is a slight change to the schedule though; we are attempting to go to one wave every 3 months as opposed to one wave every 4 months.

As a result, the end of this wave will be 23:59 PST May 1st (that’s a Sunday)

The slot breakdown is unchanged from Wave 4. It seems to have been a popular change, and we want to gather data from another round to see if it’s working to bring in the hoped-for number of nominations.

Recognizing Judge’s Level Max L1 Nominations Max L2 Nominations Max L3+ Nominations Additional “any level” Nominations Level 2 2 1 5 Level 3 3 3 1 6 Level 4 4 3 8 Level 5 5 4 8 RC Extra 6 6 1

As a brief reminder in what we are looking for in a nomination. We will have another article in the near future on what makes a good/bad nominations, but a brief summary is : A nomination is intended to be public recognition of actions or behaviors of a judge that are:

Meaningful to you or the Judge Community

‘Above and Beyond’ expectations for a judge of that level

Can be described

Can be emulated by other judges.

If your nomination can meet this criteria, you’ve written a good nomination and we want it! Fortunately, you can start writing them RIGHT NOW! You don’t even have to wait till the deadline sneaks up on you and you have to scramble at the last minute.

Well, that’s all I have for this update. Check back in the next few weeks when we update our Anatomy of a Nomination article.

TTYL