Vancouver, BC, Canada | Modern
Time: Saturday August 3rd
Players: 124 Winner: Cedric Phillips

Team Lead for Not Checks


Cryptbreaker's Supplier
AP had tapped a swamp and put a Cryptbreaker into play, said “trigger” and had milled 3 cards. He then said “pass”, looked down and realized that instead he had placed a Cryptbreaker into play instead of the Stitcher's Supplier in his hand. I think there is an option to GRV here and back up the trigger, (shuffle the three cards into the library) but instead I felt this was very similar to an MTR takeback situation, for example if a player played a swamp but said island, it would be a pretty simple backup. I simply told the player to swap the cards out and issued no infraction.

Ghost of Tournaments Past
The HJ for this event wanted to do a player meeting. I felt it was kind of unnecessary as we had so few players, I think it might've been more efficient to just organize decklists during R1. The HJs reasoning was that he wanted to prevent R1 byes, so during the player meeting he had a judge go through and write down all the no shows. I feel like byes are also just a part of the event, and don't feel it's worth delaying everyone to mitigate them. I was supposed to distribute promos during this time while other team members were marking down no-shows, however decklist collection went a little rockier than expected and I totally forgot about promos until halfway through R1, luckily we only missed a few players, I took down their names and I was planning on hunting them down at the beginning of R2 but the HJ decided to page them instead.

Faithless Taxes
I had a player that cast a Faithless Looting without paying the extra mana for Thalia, Guardian of Thraben. This felt suspicious, but didn't really know what questions to ask, the Faithless Looting player didn't look to be in a position where he would need to cheat, however in retrospect I should've brought in the HJ to investigate a little more. I ruled GPE – GRV and had the Thalia player rewind his turn, had the Faithless Looting player return the two discarded cards to his hand and randomly put two cards from his hand on top of his library.

Search for Snapcaster Mage
I had a player who activated Narset, Parter of Veils and fetched a Snapcaster Mage, his opponent was the one who noticed the error, I was suspicious, we rewound the ability grabbing three cards from the bottom of the library to rebuild the set and then instructing the player to make a more legal choice for his Narset, I felt more at ease seeing the set, if it had been all crap, I would've been fairly suspicious of cheating, however there were a few other fairly decent options for the Narset player. It was still a little strange.

Seasoned Looting
A player called me over letting me know that his opponent had failed to discard to Seasoned Pyromancer, he hadn't been getting his elementals either, but had been drawing two cards, I ruled GRV at the time and set two cards random cards from the hand aside as cards that could not be discarded and then instructed the player to discard. Then returned the cards to his hand. The correct ruling here is to simply discard immediately but that doesn't feel very good. The player also let me know that he had been playing Seasoned Pyromancer this way all day. I thanked him for the info but let him know we weren't going to be penalizing him for past mistakes.

Sometimes it Actually is a CPV
Tarmogoyf had attacked for two turns in a row and both players had miscalculated it's power and toughness. I rewound to the most recent offense, ruling GPE-GRV. However after discussing with others they let me know that this was very much a CPV.

...In Conclusion
Working local events is always a very different experience from being on the circuit, judges and even players at the MF level are much more experienced and accustomed to Comp REL, rulings and just the general flow of an event. I was fairly busy even though the team we had was quite large, and the density of player questions was much higher than at an MCQ of comparable size at a MagicFest. Another by-product of being away from my local judges for so long was the fact that many of them have improved immensely since I've worked with them last. It was exciting to see so much growth in the local community in my absence!