Pastimes | Modern
Time: Sunday Sept 23rd 2018 11am-8pm
Head Judge: Tobias Vyseri
Floor Judge: Derek Schofield
Players: 40
Winner: Nam Dang

Home Sweet Home
It's been a while since I've done a local event, so as always I was a little nervous about running an entire event on my own, after all, working a GP is different than working a PPTQ and I'm always worried I'll forget something important. The other challenge in this event would be mentoring, most of the time at GPs I'm one of the less experienced staff members, so I don't get a lot of opportunities to do mentoring. I'd never worked with this particular L1, I'd had them recommended to me for the event by the other L2s in the area, so I wasn't really sure what to expect. Whenever I work with any less experienced or unfamiliar L1 I try to set aside some time before the event to go over some common IPG situations to ensure that they have either a baseline if they are less experienced or a nice refresher if they simply haven't worked an event in a while. Historically judgelings seem to appreciate this kind of coaching, we had a fair amount of time so I was able to go over each section of the IPG in light detail before the event began, and for the most part, he seemed to have a good grasp of policy, which let me relax a little. He also seemed to have a pretty strong grasp on the flow of an event, so I tried to let him take on more of the responsibility of the event, and run more autonomously than most.

Ensnaring Bridge... Kind of Resolves
A red player had tapped out for Ensnaring Bridge and the opponent said “okay” and then shortly after said “no wait, remand.” My FJ opted to lock the opponent in on having let it resolve. This answer is fine, if a player gets upset you can tell them it's Comp REL and that communication needs to be clear. In addition to this my FJ asked if previously in this match the player had been allowing spells to resolve with the syntax “okay” and he agreed that yes, that was how it had been going, but this time he had momentarily forgotten he had Remand in his hand, but had quickly caught himself. Personally, I feel like locking the Remand player into their mistake in this situation feels kind of bad, the the Remand player seemed to have caught his error fairly quickly, and since the red player had tapped out, there wasn't really any extra information gained by either player. I discussed this with my FJ, letting him know that either answer was correct in this situation.

Hazoret the Unexilable
AP cast path to exile on Hazoret the Fervent, NAP placed Hazoret in the Graveyard. Two turns later the NAP cast Kolagan's Command targeting the incorrectly zoned Hazoret. Then after the creature was placed in NAP's hand NAP began her turn, and cast Hazoret. At which point, AP finally noticed that perhaps that card should've been in a different zone. My FJ was pretty uncertain about this one and consulted with me, we went through the GRV and he puzzled out that a full backup was not a good idea. We discussed a partial backup, but as that was against policy, we elected to not do that. We also discussed the GRV zone change additional remedy where you can move the object to the correct zone if it's unobtrusive to the game. We both pretty quickly agreed that moving a Hazoret from the stack to exile felt pretty obtrusive. After the round AP asked me why we didn't do a partial backup (rewind to the point of Kolagan's Command being cast at end of turn and put Hazoret in Exile) I let the player know that policy didn't support that so it would have to be a deviation, and also that there had been a lot of chances for both players to notice the error before it became relevant to the game state. But looking back on it, I think that might've been a much better solution to the problem.

I was more concerned about why the Hazoret hadn't been exiled in the first place. NAP is a frequent local, and generates a few GRVs every event. Notably at the last local Open I judged she quickly got two GRVs of the same type and then remained well behaved for the remainder of the event. I haven't judged many local events recently, and only really began to work through the implications of this suspicious mistake after the call had been dealt with and very little investigation done. The judge that had largely taken over the local PPTQ scene was present at the event so I pulled him aside and discussed the suspicious player with him, asking if he had noticed the player generating suspicious calls recently. The other judge admitted this player wasn't really on his radar for suspicious behavior. I decided to leave it at that, but let my FJ know that if he had the opportunity to watch that player in particular. Amusingly enough, in the next round the judge I had spoken with was paired against the suspicious player. If I had known they were in the same bracket I might've waited to discuss this kind of thing with the other judge.

...In Conclusion
It was a very easy event, and I was pretty impressed with my L1. For me it was more of a teaching event than an event I had to run. I got to practice mentoring and got to refresh myself on the flow of a PPTQ. My L1 seemed pretty satisfied with the experience.