Los Angeles, California | Standard
Time: Friday August 17th – Sunday August 19th
Players: 1000 Winner: Logan Nettles

Friday - Kickstart Team


Building on a Budget
I'm not sure it it's appropriate to say this but it felt a little like “Grand Prix all our stuff is in Providence sorry guys.”
We didn't have tablecloths, we didn't have gathering points, and our table numbers arrived Friday morning, which we then had to set up. To attack the lack of a gathering point sides and ODEs grabbed blue and red tablecloths respectively and taped them to the two large pillars near the side event stage. We then had players report to the “red and blue gathering pillars” and had their head judge walk them over to the event.
We also had a pairings board set up by the pillar that had round 1 pairings as well as a large sign that said “report to table #” and then the first table in the event. This system worked surprisingly well for how improvised it was. Around noon we got one gathering point. It felt like of like spare tires feel for cars. Like it's fine for maybe one event, but you probably shouldn't use it for too long. It had a different base than normal pillars and was significantly heavier.

Don't Make me Pledge!
I was on kickstart for the second time, the first time I was on Kickstart it was kind of boring because the GP was a little slow, also this time I was also working with a team lead that I'd had a stressful experience with two GPs prior. However I'm happy to report that the GP was not as slow, so Kickstart ran swimmingly, also, I got along with the team lead much better this time, and it wasn't stressful at all! I'm not sure what went awry at the previous GP but I am very pleased to have gotten to work with him again and come away with a much more positive experience this time! I still had a little downtime where I got to watch magic, which elicited once again, some strange looks from various HJs who still aren't used to kickstart floor judging occassionally. Our scheduled commander events ended up getting relegated to the ODE area since they ran basically the same as ODEs. I felt this was strange but got the opportunity to discuss it with my team lead, and understand his reasoning of not wanting to teach some random scheduled judge how to deal with pods and prize tix.

Basically Deficient
Later in the day one of the sealed HJs let me know we were running out of basic lands, I first directed them to the sides lead, but also decided that since I was free for about 1.5 hours I could also sort some lands myself. As a PSA Amonkhet basic land packs are actually harder to sort than regular land packs because at random there are full art basics that sequence break the entire thing.
This is probably the first and last time that I'm going to say that sorting basics was legitimately a skill testing activity.

Gender Maybe?
Once again the most convenient washroom was the gender neutral washroom, which I used throughout the weekend, again, the washrooms were marked as “has urinals” and “does not have urinals”.
Again, I was a little sad I now actually had to share the washroom with more than one or two other people, but on the other hand when I wandered into the washroom with urinals by accident, unlike in grade-school, I wasn't publicly ostracized for making such a weird mistake.
Overall it is still a little weird running into the opposite gender in the washroom but I'm acclimatizing quickly. My biggest problem so far has been walking into people because I expect the washrooms to be empty.

Saturday – Main Event - Slips


Captain Chill Pill
I've been on slips many times and enjoy it because it's kind of easy, I used to work in a print shop so cutting slips is kind of a relaxing familiar activity for me. My team lead had a very calm and placid personality which I really liked. I feel like I a very task oriented and ambitious myself so if my team lead is also a little high strung it can make the entire day kinda stressful. Instead of a team building excersize he encouraged us all to get together with each other and talk about something not magic related. I felt that the activity was cute and more organic than most other “Team Building Activities”(tm) but personally, I really don't like initiating vapid prattle, and I also know a few judges who use judging as a way to escape from their lives, and such a question might make them feel insecure or left out.

Failure to Agree on Reality
I got called over to a table where one player insisted that the opponent had blocked too quickly for him to address his Bomat Courier triggers, the opponent said that he had waited sufficient time for the Bomat player to recognize his triggers. I knew this was going to end in an appeal either way, so I ruled missed trigger, got appealed and grabbed a red shirt. After some investigation the red shirt determined that the triggers had been addressed every turn before, so there was no reason the Bomat player would've missed them this turn. The appeals judge asked me why I had ruled missed trigger, and I mentioned that the Bomat player had never really disagreed with the defending player about there being a temporal gap before blocking, instead insisting that he “still had his triggers though” which felt like not much of an argument in my opinion. Though it might have been a bit of a language barrier thing.

Shortly later, I got called over to the table again for a similar problem, the Bomat player argued that the defending player had not announced a life gain trigger from Aetherflux Reservoir. I first asked the Aetherflux player to go through it with me. He calmly let me know his sequence, he played two spells, then aetherflux, then another spell, gained four, then another spell and gained five. Then another spell and gained 6. the Bomat player didn't disagree on the gain 4 or 6 but claimed that the 5 had been missed. I checked the Aetherflux players life pad and it seemed to match his story. Then I talked to the Bomat player, he went through a similar sequence, but when I looked at his lifepad again it looked like he had added some numbers to support his story. I decided not to confront him on this, because during the Aetherflux players story he had been acting a little, on tilt, flicking cards aggressively and knocking small items around in a pseudo-tempera tantrum. I ruled in favor of Aetherflux player knowing it was going to get appealed. I then grabbed a different appeals judge for some variety (I didn't realize until I was at the call that it was the same table as earlier, otherwise I would've gotten another judge to take the call) and explained the situation to him. I got upheld on this one but was pretty uncomfortable with how the one player had tried to fabricate information. I decided that with all the stress in the match so far, as well as the 20 minute time extension it might be a good idea to have another judge sit down on the match just to ensure no more weirdness happened.

Voluntary Card Disadvantage
I was placidly walking by and noticed a player discard hostage taker. Afterwards his opponent cast abrade targeting an artifact, in response to which the Hostage Taker player cast Disallow. I searched the board to see if there was any reason he had discarded Hostage Taker, other than to hand size for clean up step but there wasn't. The players continued and after a few moments the Hostage Taker player asked me if there was a reason I was there, he seemed uneasy. He had also noted my presence when I had arrived at the match with a friendly but slight wary smile and greeting.
I then took the opportunity to ask him why he had discarded hostage taker, to which he responded “I didn't want to cast it”, while an adorable and kind of humorous response, it wasn't quite what I was looking for, I asked if he discarded it to hand size. He agreed and I explained that the last thing in a turn was discarding to hand size, and no player had the opportunity to cast spells afterwards, and logically the Hostage Taker should've stayed in his hand because the only time the opponent could've cast abrade was before he would've had to discard cards, and because he had cast Disallow, by the time he would've had to discard, he would've had the correct number of cards in his hand.
The hostage taker player seemed a little confused by how end and cleanup step functioned, but the opponent kind of gave me the impression that he may have noticed the error but not said anything. The Hostage Taker player seemed a little unnerved by my presence in general for some reason, and since he was the disadvantaged player here I decided to just let it go for the time being and leave the players alone. It was a little too late to backup as well because I had spent about 1.5 turns carefully combing the board to see if anything could've possibly made the player discard Hostage Taker for any other reason.
I spoke with my team lead about it, because I felt a little uncomfortable about the situation, and he noted that it was probably an ok customer service response, while probably not technically correct. This made me feel a little better about the action but I wish I had just asked immediately why he was discarding so we could've fixed the mistake right then and there.

Sunday – PTQ EOR lead


Little Baby PTQ
PTQ only had 220 players and while I was missing a member of my team I still felt like we had a lot of staff, until breaks started happening anyways.
The PTQ was a surprisingly busy event with a lot of infractions compared to the size of the darn thing, I recall in particular at the top of round 2 there were very few other judges in my area, and because of this fact, I took about 6 consecutive not minimal but not major calls. Of which two were GRV backups and one was an HCE

Taming Purple Foxes
I was EOR team lead, which I have never done before, there were a few things, such as setting up the event and ending the round in purple fox that I've never really been shown or done before. Luckily the software is super easy to navigate, and I managed to figure it out pretty quickly.

The Seventh Sun
The player told me he had cast Approach of the Second Sun, Then, 7 turns later he drew his card for the turn, and instead of putting Approach of the Second Sun on the stack and winning, he called a judge because the Approach was in his Graveyard. I ruled that under the GRV partial fix rules we could put it 7 from the top, I half expected this to get appealed, so I proposed the idea to the players, they actually agreed and it was fine. Upon discussing it with a few other judges though, I got a few different answers, some judges thought that backing up through his most recent draw, and then putting the Approach on top for him to draw would be a good solution, another proposed fix was to put Approach on top now. Many of us couldn't really seem to agree on what the “correct” solution was, if there even was one, which I found generated some interesting discussion. I recall one judges argument was “in the IPG under the partial fix it says move it to the correct zone if it would cause minor disruption to the game, I think the difference between a player winning the game and not winning the game is pretty disruptive.”

Remember, Remember the Replacement Text of Memory
Another interesting call that was discussed was Commit///Memory, the player had cast Memory, but during resolution had accidentally shuffled Memory into the library and then had drawn it. He mentions that he has two total copies of Commit///Memory in his deck. I proposed the fix of shuffling the hand back in, removing the offending Commit///Memory and then re-drawing the 7. Another judge proposed removing the Commit///Memory from the hand and having the player draw a replacement card.
Which got me thinking,
is drawing 7 with one memory in the deck the same probability as drawing 6 with two memories in the deck then if you get two exiling one memory and drawing another card? If anyone would like to melt this down statistically I'd actually be pretty interested in looking at the math. I unfortunately remember nothing from statistics and can't do the math myself :/

Collusion is a Team Based Activity
After the PTQ a bunch of us judges were moved over to sides, to start giving the side event judges breaks, in one team trios event I sat down to watch a match go to time and as I was sitting watching the match I heard some of the other teammates chatting. I was vaguely listening and overheard something that sounded like a mention of prize tickets and one teammate saying “well we could just concede-” I immediately cut them off and told them to stop. I wasn't entirely sure what had been discussed but it sounded like IDW. I think I could've DQ'd both teams, but wasn't entirely sure what I had heard. I had the other judge stand closer to the teammates. And when turns finally ran out I turned to the teams and told them that if anything was being offered for a match result and we found out, no one here would be getting any tickets. The players seemed a little frightened and soberly signed the match slip 1-1-1. I'm not sure if it was the correct decision. I feel often in the last few GPs I've had a myriad of possible DQ cases that I've decided not to push in that direction for a multitude of reasons. I feel it's mostly out of uncertainty but there might be a small part of me that desperately doesn't want to wrongfully DQ someone.

...In Conclusion
I had a lot of fun at GP LA. The people I got to work with were super fun and the players were in good spirits! I even had to endure less Nexus of Fates than usual! I was feeling a little down after Orlando, but LA reminded me why it's so much fun to be a judge! I'm looking forward to Richmond!