PPTQ Report – Mar 24, 2018
Bastion Games | Standard | Time: 11am – 6:30pm
HJ: Tobias Vyseri
Players: 23 | Winner: Nick DeBeaupre

Bastion games is a hard place to get out to! I love the store and it's owner, but in relation to transit, he's totally off the grid! So in order to actually get to this place I had to get a ride with a player, which resulted in the strange statement to the TO three weeks prior “I can do your event as long as Will doesn't win any PPTQ's before then!”

Luckily he didn't win, so I got the opportunity to work Bastion! As I posted pairings I noticed a player still registering his deck. I'd passed by him a few times earlier, I walked over to see how much more he had when he said “it's alright, I'll take the penalty, I'm still not done my sideboard” I asked him if everything else was done, and he nodded, I then asked him to give me his sideboard and decklist and said I'd take care of it. Since he wouldn't be using his SB in game one anyways. When things settled a little more, I finished the decklist and gave him his cards back. The event was small enough that I felt this was reasonable, but I think it would've been a better idea to take a photo of the SB and finish registering without having to drag the players physical cards around with me.

Another weird thing that happened was Bastion had a basket for people to hand in their decklists at their leisure before the event. I'm not a huge fan of this because if I end up missing one list it becomes kind of tedious to figure out who I need to talk to. Whereas when I collect them during round 1 it's easy enough to identify when a player doesn't hand something in. Also when I collect lists I can scan them to ensure everyone put their name on the page, and ask them to fix it before it became a problem.
So after all players were seated and playing, I decided to organize decklists, at which point, I noticed that my TO had handed out my match slips, silly me! Because I was using a projector to display pairings I totally forgot about match slips (my previous event had been paperless) The TO was actually super helpful, and was basically a de facto floor judge, it was really cool and I really appreciated it. I finished organizing lists and while I had all 23, one was missing a name. I figured it would take too long to go over each list and cross reference with the enrolled players, instead I looked at the list, it was a very stock looking Red Deck Wins, I wandered around, and only saw one RDW, I pulled the player aside and asked if he could give me a rough idea of his sideboard, he had it mostly correct, admitting that he had borrowed the deck and didn't have it memorized. I figured at that point it was safe enough to ask him if this was his decklist. He quickly looked it over and nodded.

Upon reflection in a 23 person tournament it probably only would've taken max 5 minutes to go through the lists and cross reference with the enrolled players. Not interrupting the players or revealing information (he might've deduced he was the only RDW player at the event) is a pretty good reason for opting for a more unobtrusive route. I'll definitely be doing that in the future

Half way through round 1 things were going so smoothly I decided to spring a surprise mid-round deck check on them. The TO happily helped me do the check, which meant I could check both decks in a reasonable amount of time.

The rest of the event ran without hiccups, even though there were quite a few infractions, since Chilliwack is pretty isolated, a lot of the local players didn't have a lot of Comp REL experience.

Everything was going great until the GRV backup in round 4.

So I got called over to a table, and active player, Andy, says “I cast Verdurous Gearhulk on my turn, and assigned 2-1-1 for his counters, I have Winding Constrictor in play so this Walking Ballista should've gone from 2 to 5 counters but instead went to 4 counters.” Okay, this seemed like a pretty typical problem.
“Where are we now?”
“My opponents upkeep after the mistake. I made the error in my precombat main phase”
“Your opponent hasn't drawn his card for turn yet?”
“No”
“Okay, so let's give you a GRV and you a failure to maintain, and what's happened since then, I think we can backup.”
“Oh not much just a combat and a few triggers”

Okay. The only problem with this standard infraction was that Verdurous Gearhulk was now on the opponents side of the field and the Walking Ballista was nowhere to be found.

Non active player, Nate had reanimated Ravenous Chupacabra in his upkeep in response to Scarab God's trigger, killed the Verdurous Gearhulk, then reanimated the it and placed the counters. We backed up through this.
Then apparently, after combat, Andy had removed all the counters from his Walking Ballista to finish off another creature and then cast Fatal Push on a 4 cmc creature because of his Walking Ballista's ETG. We backed up through that. Then we backed up through some attackers and blockers, and then half way through doing that Nate said “oh and I also cracked this Field of Ruin and also cast a Fatal Push”
I remember just looking at one of the players and saying “What?”
That was the point at which I realized that perhaps a backup wasn't the best option in this scenario and it probably would've been less damaging if I had just “left it as it was” unfortunately, much of this information wasn't revealed to me when I initially asked both players what had happened. And as we went through the backup they kept remembering more things!
I rewound through the second Fatal Push and the Field of Ruin, and we assigned the correct amount of counters on Walking Ballista.

Upon reflection I do not think that a backup was the correct course of action.

We ended with a pretty significant time extension, but both players seemed reasonably satisfied.
Overall it was a pretty light-hearted tournament and players seemed in a good mood overall.