Cleveland, Ohio | Sealed
Time: Friday February 22nd – Sunday February 24th
Players: 1250 Winner: Allen Wu

Friday – Last chance Trails


Chances Abound
I got be in charge of the finals area again, which was kind of nice, I got to practice it for the first time in Memphis and then put those skills to use again in Cleveland! This time we didn't change starting table numbers when we were moving LCTs, instead we simply posted the pairings, had the players gather and then the judges would walk the players over and we would manually seat them in the new area. I thought this was fine for events that were sub 5 players by round 3, but for one event in particular we had 20 players, and in my experience, when you try to move 20 people from one area to another you inevitably lose some or cause some confusion, not to mention the probability of one or two of them showing up late goes up exponentially. They were also trying to count out prize tix for distribution again, this is.. a really good idea in theory. In theory it minimizes the number of people who have access to large quantities of tix so that if anything circumspect happens, the pool of potential responsible judges is relatively low. However in reality this is always a mess, tix will inevitably be counted strangely, players won't show up, events will have late adds. In the end I ended up just getting a stack of prize tix anyways.

Saturday – Scheduled Sides


A Wild Layers Question Appears
I had a rather modest standard event, but adjacent to me, there was a large commander event. And occasionally I stopped by to take wonky rules calls and watch crazy games with more permanents than should be legal in a game of magic. One such call was a game where someone was playing some kind of enchantment deck, he had Starfield of Nyx in play and Humility was coming down on the other side of the board. I let him know that starfield, and all the enchantments would be creatures but they would be 1/1s because of timestamp. Then they asked if phasing would give Starfield a new timestamp, because the Starfield player was currently phased out due to a Teferi's Protection. I let him know that no, it would not. Later the same commander game, I got called me over again because an Opalescence had resolved and a second player wanted to copy Humility to negate the effect of it. I let him know that this was just more timestamp stuff and that if he copied the Humility everything would still be a creature but it would be a 1/1 with no abilities.

Numbering Tables: Required L2+
The last task I had on Saturday was to renumber the main event room for draft pods for day 2. I was initially sent to take care of it alone, but soon got sent 3 more people. I'm not really much of a planning type person, I kind of just do things and if it's wrong I re-do them rather than waste time planning. When you're just one person working on a task this is fine, but when you're supposed to be directing people this can be very frustrating for them. In addition to this, two of the three members of my team seemed to have very disparate ideas of how the task should be completed, which led to some rather protracted discussion about a task that wouldn't really take that long no matter how it was completed. I hadn't really realized it at the time but I was supposed to be in charge of the task, and kind of failed to keep my “team members” in check for a soft resolution of the task. I think in the future I need to be a little firmer on implementation if I want to avoid generating undue frustration in the people around me.

Sunday – Main Event – Deck Checks


ML, DQ or Downgrade?
I got called over to a table where a player, who was clearly flustered, said that the person beside his opponent had just given his opponent information about his deck. I was a little overwhelmed as the player was clearly very much disturbed by this, since the potential OA player had registered this players deck and knew everything that was being played. I began to go through in my mind, what would make this an OA ruling and began to talk to the players through what happened, getting a clear idea of what exactly had transpired here. Eventually I got the story that AP and NAP had sat down for their match and the person adjacent to NAP had leaned over and whispered into NAP's ear that AP was on Temur. I felt like this was definitely OA but wanted to be sure so I escalated to a burgundy, who did indeed rule OA. However after issuing the ruling and leaving he decided to speak with the other HJ as to whether this fit into the downgrade of “information that could have been gained in between games” the other HJ thought that it was, and thus after 25 minutes, a downgrade was issued. I didn't get the entirety of the story but I also heard that the player who had received the ML had talked to his would-be opponent and asked to see his opponent's decklist to have a better idea of what he may be facing in the third round of the draft. Then after the reveal the ruling was overturned, and a deviation had to be performed that made the OA player have to reveal his decklist.

...In Conclusion
MF Cleveland was fun but a slower event for me, and I didn't get to do anything too new or interesting, which was a bit of a shame. I was really hoping to call a draft for the first time, even though I'm still incredibly nervous about it. Working Scheduled Sides on Saturday was a bit of a change for me, and seeing the Mythic Championship as I walked in every morning was kind of a nice touch. Overall nothing really stood out about MF Cleveland in particular but I enjoyed it none the less!