Atlanta, Georgia | Modern
Time: Friday November 2nd – Sunday November 4th
Players: 1520 Winner: Peiyuan Zheng

Friday – Last Chance Trials


Infraction Procedure Guidance Needed
I was actually intensely nervous about working at Comp REL again, my last few GPs has been me prancing around filling Operations and Scorekeeping roles. In addition to this, working the circuit puts me in a position where I am in contact with a lot of very competent judges, and as a result of this I'd been feeling pretty uneasy about my rules knowledge as of late.
Seeing that my line up for the weekend was LCTs/Main/PTQ was both exciting and very unnerving. I also feel that modern is one of the more difficult formats to judge, it has a wide enough card pool to generate some interesting and complex interactions, and players are generally on average, less invested than in something like legacy and will therefore have more questions.
My anxiety wasn't at all abated when I walked into my team meeting, of the 7 total people on my team 3 of them were GP Head judges, and two more were L3s! There weren't a ton of calls on Friday, but overall I felt like my accuracy was very high, I didn't get appealed, and had no instances where I needed to consult another judge to confirm a ruling. It felt good to be in that position.

Last Chance Technicalities
The events weren't dead but weren't terribly busy, so we didn't elect to have a “finals area” like we sometimes do for LCTs. I like not having a finals area if I'm given the choice, giving one judge like 4 finals to look after seems like it can generate issues, and to be honest, as a HJ I like being able to follow an event to it's completion, as I've stated in many other reports.
In general our LCTs were smaller than projected, so very quickly in the day I noticed that our pairings boards were spaced kind of poorly, and a little unaligned with the events they corresponded to. I wanted to move them, but felt like it would be right to confirm with my lead beforehand, unfortunately she was particularly elusive at that moment, so I just moved them and confirmed when I saw her next that the change was okay.

Another instance was that we had to assign our own table numbers, I'm not used to doing that on LCTs, but don't mind it. When placing Matteo's LCT, I did some strtange addition and ended up placing an event in a weird place in regards to the other events around it. To fix this, for R2 Matteo let the SK know the correct starting table number and we moved the players with very little incident. I felt a little dumb about the whole thing, but in the grand scheme of the day it was a fairly minimal issue.
I feel like I recall a time where I would've thought that something like this was a big deal, and a large scale blunder, and would've been immensely embarrassed, but I think I'm starting to be a little more comfortable on the circuit, and have a better sense of what constitutes a “big deal”.

Saturday – Main Event - Slips


An Etude on the Catharsis of Paper Strips
I was on slips team. I think slips team is one of my favorite teams for some reason. It's a little more substantial of a job than pairings, it doesn't take me away from the players at the beginning of the round like deck checks. It actually has a designated task to complete each round, unlike floor, and there is something weirdly cathartic about both cutting stacks of slips and about sorting them again at the end of the round to ensure they all came back. In a weird kind of way I think of them like carrier pigeons, you release them at the beginning of the round and hope they all come back at the end. The one disappointment with working slips is that I don't get to participate in EOR which I do like.

One Staff, Two Staff, R Staff, U Staff
I learned an interesting factoid that I found fascinating and want to share with everyone. On the top of the GP Main event page there is a space that shows the expected player turnout for the event. This is interesting to me, because when we get the final counts in I can then gauge whether the event is going to be very busy or not.
For Atlanta we were staffed for 1250 and hit 1500, so we were a little on the busy side all weekend. Which is good, I like being busy.

Other Judge Insight
On Saturday I felt like my calls all went very well, I had to commune with other judges a few times to confirm rulings, one of which was especially entertaining, it was a Jace, the Mind Sculptor brainstorm under a Lantern of Insight, and whether the fourth card on top of the library gets revealed. I was unsure so I asked another judge, the other judge said no. So that was the ruling I gave. Later she came back to me and mentioned that she had felt unsure and asked my lead, who had told her the answer was yes, the fourth card does get revealed. I was in the middle of watching a bathroom break at the time, and gave her a flat look and asked if she wanted to go back and explain to the players what the correct ruling was. She dithered for a moment, so I gave her my bathroom break call and walked over to the players and explained the correct ruling. The library was still in a relatively similar order, so it was easy to identify the card that should have been revealed, and the player simply revealed the card now. The players weren't thrilled about the mistake and time extension but the game ultimately wasn't damaged in any way.

Divine Displeasure
A call regarding Anger of the Gods & Totem Armor (on Hyena Umbra, for example), which I ruled by saying that Anger would do 3 damage to the creature and then we'd check SBAs at which point the creature would have lethal damage on it, which would destroy it, but instead, we apply totem armor's replacement effect, and therefore anger's replacement effect wouldn't apply because the creature wouldn't be “going from the battlefield to the GY (or exile in anger's case)”
The players didn't seem totally satisfied, and I wasn't totally sold on my own explanation (but was fairly certain on the outcome) I didn't get appealed but mulled over it for a while,
During slips sorting I spoke with the other member of my team and mentioned that as I continued to think about the interaction I thought that maybe it was more an instance of both replacement effects trying to modify what was happening to the creature and in that case the “effected permanents controller” would decide. I had been kind of thinking about it all morning, and while the final game state would be the same I didn't want to have given players the wrong explanation as to why things were happening. However the other member of my team confirmed that my explanation was correct. I recall being a little nervous about bringing up the ruling since I feel it is a major deficiency of mine and prefer not to bring such things to light (you may notice I don't often include specific rules questions in my reports, and this is largely why) but was glad I did because I felt like I got a little more information and confirmation on it than if I'd just stayed quiet and done research online later.

Hexproofing
The other ruling I made was regarding Vines of Vastwood. A player was casting it on his opponent's creature and the opponent wanted to know if he could target his own creature afterwards. I let him know that he could not, but didn't have a great explanation beyond recanting what the card said. The opponent didn't seem satisfied with my ruling, and seemed like he wanted to appeal, I brought up gatherer and luckily that particular issue was addressed in the discussion rulings, the player seemed a little confused about the why, but seemed to believe me after that. I spoke with another judge about it later and he gave me some good advice in saying “describe it by saying the opponent controls the effect so terms like 'you' refer to the controller of the effect, which would be the opponent.”

“Judge, I Have Been Forced to Look at Extra Cards!”
Another interesting ruling that I got was “judge my opp was drawing a card for the turn and accidentally flipped the top card of his library so that only I could see it!” This is interesting because immediately I went to LEC + shuffle, however when mentioning this to the players, the person who had “looked at extra cards” wore an aghast expression and said, “But judge, this literally had nothing to do with me, and it's not my fault I saw an extra card!” I agreed that it felt strange, having your opponent do a thing and get you a warning did not seem correct. I dithered for a moment, and decided to rescind the warning and simply have the players shuffle.
To be clear, a shuffle with no infraction didn't feel entirely right or supported by policy (which it's not). And additionally one of my peers was watching me take the call, which was a little nerve-wracking. He spoke with me after about it, and I was relieved to hear that he felt the ruling was pretty philosophically, if not technically, correct.
He also mentioned an alternative view, where the player who had revealed a card should not shuffle, and the 'penalty' would simply be that his opponent had some extra information. However we both agreed this didn't feel correct.

Side Event Invasion!
I recall at one point about half way through the day wandering over to a hole in main event and seeing a kickstart cart with a bunch of sealed pools and some promo lands on it. Because of the way main event snaked, the 2HG event was effectively surrounded by Comp REL Modern players! I had some fun interactions with the HJ about how his event was right near the main and how we couldn't be held responsible if his event accumulated Comp REL infractions. I was momentarily free at that point so I also helped hand out some promos in the event.

Sunday – PTQ


Pro Tour Underqualified
If you've every read any report of mine, you know I like to keep busy, and enjoy working in events where there is an ambient amount of chaos and anarchy. For PTQ, I felt like there was an acceptable amount of this. The event ballooned out to 400 players and we didn't really have enough floor coverage to service all the calls that were happening, so deck checks team didn't actually do deck checks until round 4 out of 6. I however, was not on deck check team, I was on the “everything else team”, and I am happy to report that “everything else” got done every round.

Rewind Through a Scoop
An interesting question was brought to me by a friend on sides while I was working the PTQ. He said that both players had kept their opening hands, a player had played a land, played serum visions, drawn, scryed, and then drew another card. Thinking this was a Game lossable offense he scooped and then called a judge. This is at regular and the opponent had taken no game actions. I thought about it for a moment. There is a strong argument for “you scooped too bad”. But while this is an excellent Comp REL answer, at regular, this is a different story, I dithered for a while and settled on the line of allowing the player to “restart the game” with a mull to 6. Arguing that while this kind of thing appears very “abuse-able” it's obviously not codified in the rules and never will be, so ergo a large number of judges will rule it differently, and taking a gamble on a game loss seems unwise. However, because of the appearance of abuseability some kind of penalty needs to be applied, therefore we force a mull to 6 to give the impression of fairness. Because if there is something that I have learned from judging, it's that giving the illusion of fairness is *sometimes* more important than the ruling actually being mathematically fair. The other judge surprisingly thought something similar, but had the player simply restart the game with 7 cards.

A Blood Moon Rises over the Township
When you walk over to a call you never quite know what you are going to get, sometimes it's a 1 second rules call and sometimes it's... well, sometimes it's a problem. AP started by saying, “Okay so on his last turn, my opp activated Gavony Township through a Blood Moon” I nodded and looked to NAP, who agreed. I then asked what had happened since then. AP said, “I activated Ajani Vengeant targeting the Gavony Township, which is when we realized, I also activated Chandra, fire of Kaladesh, revealed a card and burned NAP 2, I also exiled Simian Spirit Guide to cast Stormbreath Dragon. On his turn he activated Gavony, cast a spell by untapping Devoted Druid with it's ability, since it was previously locked from Ajani Vengeant and had a -1/-1 counter on it, which was cancelled out by Gavony's counter, and then NAP all out attacked my Gideon Jura, which honestly would've died even if everything hadn't had a counter on it.”
It was a pretty hefty call, I mentioned to the players that we could either leave things as they were or backup the entire turn cycle. The players kind of blanched visibly when I mentioned “doing nothing”, so I felt like perhaps they were more in favor of a backup. I didn't think it was unreasonable, so, after quickly going over things with my team lead, I got to work. I shuffled the card revealed by Chandra, fire of Kaladesh away, and put a random card from AP's hand on top of her library and reversed all the the other actions, planeswalker loyalty, casting Stormbreath Dragon, uncasting the spell from devoted druid, the combat, everything. It took a while but the players seemed satisfied. I gave my ruling and left.

Chalice Half Full
Less than 7 minutes later I was called over to the blood moon table again because a bystander had mentioned a Chalice of the Void trigger after NAP cast and resolved Noble Hierarch through a Chalice on 1.
A short talk with the players confirmed that the chalice trigger had been missed and luckily the chalice player didn't argue or try to get that trigger on the stack somehow. I took the bystander away and tried to talk to them, they seemed pretty flustered and defensive initially, because I had mentioned “Outside Assistance” and I later found out they knew that penalty was associated with a match loss. I managed to calm them down long enough to explain OA to them and how to properly draw attention to perceived errors in games, I also let them know that while I had sufficient grounds to issue an OA, I wouldn't be doing so in this instance, the reason I cited was because the chalice player hadn't really gained any advantage, he had fully admitted missing the trigger, and the spell had resolved. It is important to note that the player might now be more aware of his chalice triggers going forward, which could be considered assistance, reflecting on it, I'm not sure if I should've issued the OA or not. In the moment it didn't seem like the right course of action but I'm not so sure of that now.

Vizier of the Moon
Then less than 5 minutes later I got called back to the table, where the Gavony player had cast a Vizier of Remedies with a Temple Garden and a forest into a Chalice of the Void on 2, gotten it countered and then realized that Blood Moon was in fact, still in play.

I sighed, issued the warning and did a quick rewind. I was starting to get a little suspicious and thought about what kind of advantage could be gained by casting a Vizier of Remedies into a Chalice of the Void, perhaps he was checking his opponents' awareness of his chalices, perhaps he was hoping his opponent missed both the blood moon and the chalice of the void. However this was round 1 of the PTQ and since Vizier was not a game winning play, the advantage gained here is not worth the gamble of a second GRV, especially when he had other sources that could cast that card on board. Therefore I chalked the entire thing up to a simple mistake.
I moved the blood moon to a more visible location on the board in a joking manner and warned the player that a third GRV at this point was a game loss. I let him to know to take his time and be aware of everything that was happening in the match. Both players seemed in a good mood somehow and were satisfied with the ruling.
Later the gavony player even came up to me and thanked me for my professionalism in handling the situation, it was very sweet of him to do so. And kind of weird, to be honest.

...In Conclusion
if you've every read any report of mine, you know I like to keep busy, and enjoy working in events where there is an ambient amount of chaos and anarchy. If I could choose, every event I would work LCT-Main-PTQ (unless the format is limited or standard), because in my opinion those are generally the busiest and personally most challenging areas of the GP. And that is exactly what I got to do this weekend. I was very nervous going in, but feel like I was a really strong judge this weekend, I completed all my tasks with a high degree of proficiency and gave players really solid, correct and amiable rulings. I also somehow didn't get appealed all weekend. This is probably a first for me, since I usually get appealed 2+ times over the course of the weekend. Sometimes I feel kind of alone at events but this weekend I felt like I was surrounded by allies and friends, and I think that really helped me to exude confidence and think clearly, which really helped me to give players a solid experience.
I also have a much greater appreciation for judging after having worked operations. I didn't mind operations but, it is honestly a little too boring for me. I feel like recently I was starting to get a little worn down, and I would get pretty upset when I bumped into a knowledge deficiency, however after working ops, I feel much more excited to run into unexpected and challenging situations.
Another thing I did differently this GP was spending a little more time shadowing others on calls, and being a little bolder when people shadowed me on calls. I don't often shadow other judges or discuss rulings with them because I am used to being more of a lone wolf on the floor. However I gave it a shot this time and felt like it was really beneficial, not only did I enhance my rules knowledge, but it was also more fun in general. Collaborating and hearing other peoples methods and perspectives is really neat!
Overall I enjoyed Atlanta more than most GPs and had a fantastic time, I'm really sad it's over, but I'm really looking forward to Milwaukee! If Atlanta gave me anything it was a renewed zeal for the GP circuit!