Post-Worlds 2025 Update
Welcome readers!
Welcome to our post-World Championship Judge news article! We had an exciting weekend in Philadelphia. No matter if you enjoy a lot of amazing games, news about the next set, or upcoming Judges of Rathe news. This article is here to focus on the announcement and news surrounding the Judge program.
We will cover the following topics:
- Growth of the Judge program
- Level 2 Judges
- Community team updates
- Miscellaneous updates
- Judge Promo news
The program has been around for quite some years! Road to Nationals in 2021 rolled out the first Judge tests with level 2, followed by the Nationals season. The first projects formed shortly after. JudgeHub started in 2022 as our central page, followed by the presentation of the first organized Judge program at the World Championship in San Jose 2022.
That takes us now past the 4th World Championship in 2025! Many tournaments, conferences, and memories have happened since then. We all grew with it and still do. No matter how long the judging and event chapter is, we hope you enjoyed the experiences you have already had and will make in the future!
We currently have over
- 9000 signed-up accounts on JudgeHub
- 5000 certified Level 0
- 1500 certified Level 1 (in over 56 countries around the world)
- 280 certified Level 2
What shows an amazing growth over each year individually, and with that also over the span of the program. Our Level 2 is especially improving! Something we want to accelerate even more going forward.
We want to emphasize that level 2 is not something mystical and hard to achieve. The baseline is that those Judges are capable of judging a Road to Nationals or Proquest event with 32 players and have (if available) another Judge with them. Of course, some of our Level 2 Judges excel at this standard, but that is fine! We just wanna make sure that we reiterate that seeing somebody floor judge on a calling every other weekend is not the standard for that level!
Another common misconception is that there is a language requirement. Being able to speak English is not a requirement for becoming Level 2. We are also actively working on translating tests to other languages. The language expectation of a Level 2 Judge is that they are able to communicate at both a friendly and technical level in the language they intend to primarily run events in. English (or other languages) mostly becomes relevant if you wish to judge events outside your region or want to be a team lead at Callings in your region.
We encourage all Level 1 Judges to review the non-exam criteria from the review rubric used for recommendations. You are most likely closer to ready than you think. You can click here to read it.
That said, we also want to adjust some baselines for the Level 2 requirements to update to the reality of the program, and the last update was a long time ago.
Adjustments
- Time as Level 1 – reduced to 30 days
- Competitive events of the last 2 years count
- Centralized assistance for recommendations
- Simplified maintenance – once per year check
- Reminder: 2 competitive events can also be as a Floor Judge!
Level 2 is meant to be a common Judge level and not something special and rare. The reasons to achieve it can vary a lot. No matter if you wanna learn towards a new goal, help your local community, or specifically mentor new Judges. There are many valid reasons to go to Level 2!
We would also like to give you another reason to achieve Level 2, with the yellow Popped Collar promo!
Our iconic Judge shirt in the style of a previous very sought-after promo! Every current and future level 2 Judge will receive this promo via mail (logistics and date to be announced). For at least until the end of 2026, this will be the only way to receive this promo card.
The program has many dedicated Judges who participate in volunteer projects around the world, and we greatly appreciate all the dedication. We’re going to go over some news for those here:
Mentoring
We want to revamp how we structure mentoring in our event community and have decided on an approach based on three phases. This is not designed for somebody to take all three steps in one go, nor is this the final version, but a first plan of how we plan to go forward.
- Phase 1 – Mentoring efforts that are before attempting the team lead certification
- Phase 2 – Mentoring around the team lead certification and the process itself
- Phase 3 – Mentoring past the team lead certification
Phases 2 and 3 are focused on the advanced certification team, but our new mentoring team will work together with them to have a smooth transition of candidates who are on the edges of the phases. Mentoring is the goal of the process overall, but each has different focuses and techniques around it.
Speaking of our new mentoring team! They have been selected, and we are happy to welcome them:
- Americas: Agustin Garzino
- Europe: Emilien Wild
- Asia-Pacific: James Medland
This team is split into regions to allow for a more regionalized approach to support our community.
As the team for mentoring as well as the process ideas are new, expect some public news on this in 2026!
Advanced Certification Team
Currently, Head and Support Judge evaluations are going on and about to go to the second (verbal) phase. For those of you interested in this process, we will write an article about it to get a better understanding of what is needed to attempt it, as well as the outline itself. The next wave to attempt the evaluation will be early 2026.
Another big task of this team is team lead evaluations. For most shows, we are able to perform one of the evaluations to test Judges on their skills surrounding team leading. Check out this article for more information!
Judge Community Representatives
Our next wave of applications will be up early next year. The following regions will be up for rotation:
- Europe: German-speaking, Iberia, United Kingdom & Ireland
- APAC: Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, South Korea
- North America: had some restructuring and was mostly covered in the last wave (no rotation)
We are also happy to welcome Amanda Budvietas as our new Judge Community representative lead for Oceania! With that, we also wanna thank Jono for having been a rock(star) in the region as the first JCRL in Down Under!
Exams and Maintenance
As mentioned above, a change for next year is that a maintenance check will be done once per year to reduce the amount of upkeep connected with the process, as well as a general simplification.
Here are some other changes to happen:
- Super Slam Release Exam is online
- Adjustment on information flow and expectations for the 2nd and 3rd attempt to make the expectations post-3rd attempt clearer. To read more about the 4th attempt rules, click here.
- 5th Level 2 attempt coming in summer 2026
- Level 2 Policy Exam will be adjusted with set 19 (expected late Spring 2026) to bring the difficulty in line with the Level 2 Rules Exam
Content and Information Team
You have all seen the great quizzes and articles the team was able to put together for you! Overall, we plan to have more articles around to create an even better baseline of information for all Judges. You can also expect a revamp of the Judge blog to be separated and offer different categories. We are also still actively looking for people to help on this! If you want to get involved with this project, the Content and Information team is looking for help – apply today!
At this point, we would also like to welcome the latest two new members: Eric Lee and Diran Bawja!
Conferences
We want to offer you an even better offer in 2026, especially with so many events coming up 2026. With 36 World Tour stops next year, we want to fine-tune the offerings and make sure we’re always delivering quality content.
What can you expect?
- A different variety of time settings, not only Thursday but also during the evenings on the weekend
- More conferences-in-a-box to enable an easier setup of entry conferences
- Easier ways to sign up for being interested in presenting. Click here!
- Adjust for different needs at Calling and individual conferences.
Additionally, we want to welcome the new conference group lead, Chris Agius!
Judge Booth
A revamp for 2026 is planned to build on our existing model for offering a central community anchor point that offers more than currently. No matter whether somebody is an interested in becoming a new Judge, wants to take a paper exam, meet Judges of their community, or chat about the event, we want to enable more of that.
We are also working on better documentation and a prepared kit for Judge Booth for in-person booths, as well as a new version online for Judges and interested people who can not attend an event in person.
Phew! All those teams in events and around community teams are a lot of things to remember, especially with other program news. We are currently trialing a better system for scheduling and announcing program news on Discord via a tag system. Get the information you are interested in, without getting pings constantly! You can choose to be notified on one or more of the following news categories:
- Quarterly Updates: notifications for bigger updates, four times per year
- Monthly Updates: A monthly summary of upcoming things for that month
- Premiere Staffing Updates: Updates on when premiere event signups get pushed or will close soon
- Community and Project Applications: Information about JCR and team applications
- Office Hour Conferences (Online): Notifications for upcoming office hours
We hope to have a better expectation setting to make it easier for you to attend the things you are interested in and know early enough about them.
- Georegion conferences will return in 2026! The first one is in March – at Cancun, for the North America georegion!
- The next wave of judge merchandise will begin in Spring 2026. Stay tuned for more information!
- cardvault.fabtcg.com is now live! Card Vault is the official Flesh & Blood card database. Check it out!
- TRP (Tournament Rules & Policy) and PPG (Penalty & Procedure Guide) are now online and searchable. PDF versions will be re-available soon!
- There have been several new user interface updates for Card Vault, as well as a new rules/TRP/PPG page!
We already spoiled the Yellow Popped Collar promo that you get for becoming a Level 2 Judge going forward… But wait, what about the orange shirts? What do they get? Never fear; we have Orange Popped Collar promo for selected roles, starting with the Head and Support Judges of Premier events.
Of course, as usual, we also want to show you some Judge Booster Season 9 spoilers. Here are the two card spoilers that were revealed at the Philadelphia Judge Conference:
On an additional note, season 9 will not have a token card included in every pack, but rather one of 9 art cards of the Library of Solana!
We look forward to showing you more of season 9 at the London conference in February, as well as more news about Judge Packs during the Pro Tour Yokohama conference.
With that, thank you for reading our updates!
We hope you enjoyed some of the news and shiny cards. Please have some nice last weeks of 2025 so we all start in a great 2026 full of events and memories to make!
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