Sept 16, 2017 | Modern | Time: 11am – 5pm
HJ: Tobias Vyseri
Players: 29 | Winner: Liam Malcolm

I love modern, I really do, this tournament was great, we turned every round before the clock ran out. Not a single round went to time, it was amazing, we burned through 5 rounds by 3pm and we even started 10 minutes late!

This was a tournament of regulars, the store is kind of far from central Vancouver so only the more hard core grinders make the trek. Overall the feel of the store was pretty fun, the owner was a super nice guy, and while space was a huge concern (here it is very typical to have games on store display cases, and even outside if the weather permits.) the players didn't seem to mind. Player cap was 25 but we had indoor space for 30. We had two late players who were filling out decklists and picking up singles a few minutes after our start time of 11am, I could've been harsh and started the event, giving them tardiness penalties, but I knew it was modern and rounds would turn quickly anyways, so waiting wasn't going to kill us. A few of the players asked about playing outside instead, and I figured I had no problem with it. During the first round one of the guys actually came to me with a decklist error so he ended up getting a game loss anyways. As I was running solo on this one, I didn't manage to get a start of round deck check done, and instead did mid-round checks, since making announcements kind of disabled my ability to grab decks before opening hands were drawn.

We ran paperless, since they had a TV we could display pairings on and it was small enough we could just take results verbally. Which worked surprisingly well. In the second to last round we did notice a discrepancy, it had occurred in the previous round and I decided that it wouldn't be a good idea to fix it, since people had made Intentional drawing decisions based on the standings we had posted at the start of round, and I would not hear the end of it if this result ruined someone's breakers. Additionally both players were in the very bottom bracket, (one with zero points and one with 3 points) so it wasn't going to impact either of their eligibility for prize support. To my relief one of the players in the erroneous match actually came up to me later and admitted that he (the winner) had reported a loss by accident. Whew.

There weren't a lot of questions, as most of the players present were experienced. Most of my calls were oracle text on someone's french deflecting palm (the player admitted buyer's remorse) and on another players Chinese Bring to Light.

I did have one 'possible' outside assistance scenario, I was sitting at another table watching a Scapeshift vs Tron match when I heard some chatter. Eventually I heard someone say “okay I'm just going to call a judge” I got up as his hand shot into the air, walked over and asked what was up. The storm player points to a spectator and says “he came up to the table and mentioned my opponents chalice trigger.” I looked at the board state and saw a Goblin Electromancer in play, a Chalice of the Void with two counters on it and nothing else relevant. I asked the storm player to go through what happened and he responded “I played Goblin Electromancer, looked at my opponent and asked if it was okay, he said 'yes' and then the spectator came by and asked us to stop, I asked why and he pointed to chalice and said 'chalice on 2'” I confirmed with the chalice player who was very accommodating “yes, that's what happened, I definitely missed my chalice trigger on the electomancer” I nod and say, “alright, as long as the two of you agree on this board state, continue playing, I'm going to speak with the spectator” I took the spectator away from the table and spoke with him. His English was kind of rough but he confirmed what the players had said, he seemed to be familiar with the correct procedure of stopping a game and calling a judge, however when asked the followup question by the player, he felt he had to respond. I knew the penalty for outside assistance was a Match Loss, but I felt that the Storm player's question kind of led the spectator into revealing unintentional information. In addition to this, and we were quite lucky, the chalice player didn't even contest the initial trigger, so in essence, all the spectator did was bring the chalice into the forefront of it's owners consciousness, which he probably would've done if the spectator had followed the correct procedure and called a judge without mentioning the chalice itself.
I thus decided that a match loss did not seem necessary, but did take the opportunity to educate the player about triggers and how missing them is not an error that needs to be amended. In addition to this at the start of the next round I made an announcement informing players the correct procedure to follow if they believe they have witnessed a problem in a game.
After the conclusion of the match I went and spoke with the two players informing them of my decision. The storm player didn't seem too pleased, and mumbled something about losing because of it, but ultimately, I believe a chalice on 2 is kind of death for storm anyways. When I asked if either of them had any problems with the ruling neither of them seemed to want to contest me.

The rest of the tournament was pretty uneventful, top eight took forever, and was basically all eldrazi-tron mirrors. The store owner found it amusing when I placed the packs down by each of the top eight games and called them “packs for the player that doesn't win”. I let him know that we can't call them 'loser packs' any more and we had a good laugh. Realistically though, I like the model of putting the top eight packs on the table so that when the player loses they can just take their packs and leave, rather than having to go up to the front, let the officiate know they lost (which they are already upset about) and then collecting their prizes.

In the same vein, something that I noted was that the owner's prize support was very good. For a store that doesn't have a large player cap, 6 packs per player in the pot with an entry fee of $30 per person seemed very good compared to what a lot of the other stores were doing. In addition to this I got paid in cash and got lunch, both of which I was very gracious for, and wasn't expecting from a smaller establishment.

Overall it was a very fun tournament, the environment at Grey Haven was very inviting, and the players seemed in good spirits.