Tampa Bay, Florida | Modern
Time: Friday March 14th – Sunday March 16th
Players: 988 Winner: Roshen Eapen

Friday – Last chance Trails


I Would Like to Call to the Stage All Judges Running a 12:45 LCT
My first event of the day was the 12:45 LCT. Interestingly enough, so was my last event of the day, and every other event I ran in between! Due to a minor scorekeeping error every event was marked as the 12:45 LCT on the match slips and pairings. This was kind of problematic because while the cover sheets on the pairings boards for the events had the correct event name on them, it was difficult to see what players those were correlated with, and to actually figure it out you'd need to ask the players what event they were in, which is kind of unprofessional and disruptive.

At one point , I came off break to find 3 events that seemed kind of orphaned, I flipped each round and set the players up, and since there were only a few matches in each event I decided to write the round end time on the page and not cut the slip, this way if another judge needed to flip the round, they'd be able to do it quickly and easily and not have to interrupt the players to ask which event they were in.

Unearned Insight
AP draws for turn then looks at the top card of his library, obviously, he doesn't have anything on board that lets him do this, so a judge is called, while speaking to the judge he mentions that he was going to play Lantern of Insight this turn and that's why he thought he could look at the top card. The judge issued LEC and that was that. However, afterwards, more interestingly the player didn't end up playing lantern that turn. I wasn't the active judge on the call, nor was I watching it when it happened, but I heard that this suspicious behavior was mentioned to the HJ of the event for further investigation.

Saturday – Main Event - Pairings


An Appealing Reputation
So last year GP Orlando was a hot mess of appeals, investigations and generally shady players doing shady things. One of the first things that was mentioned to us when we got on staff was that an extra appeals judge had been staffed to address the... Florida. That's right, simply because we were working in Florida an entire extra red shirt was staffed. Thanks Florida.

Missed Trigger – No Sportsmanship Required
I've found that often, players get a little anxious when being asked whether they'd like to put the trigger on the stack when a Missed Trigger penalty is issued, players sometimes feel that if they say “no” they will be seen as a jerk or unsporting. This is worrisome because philosophically, the option is given to players to compensate for “situationally detrimental” triggers like Dark Confidant or Phyrexian Arena, not to allow players to be “nice” (though they can do that if they wish). Oftentimes after a player makes a decision for MT I will try ti positively reinforce their choice by saying “seems good” or “yeah that's what I would do” to ensure that both players understand that that is completely supported by policy. Though after discussing this with another judge, he mentioned that perhaps it would be better to let them know their decision is supported before they make their decision, as opposed to afterwards.

Self Remedying Errors
I made a pretty large error on a situation involving an extra card drawn. NAP said “AP drew for the turn, then I targeted him with Vendilion Clique's ability, he drew for clique and then drew again for turn” AP seemed to have a pretty difficult time answering my questions, or understanding what was going on in general. After listening to both players, and checking out NAP's lifepad where he had taken down the cards in AP's hand, I decided to apply HCE. Before doing so, however, another judge mentioned to me we should do a card count. I'm not super experienced at card counts and kind of screwed it up, at which point I ended up turning it over to him, he determined that AP had the correct number of cards in his hand. One of the things that was mentioned earlier was that AP had perhaps forgotten to draw for his first turn, but this wasn't really brought up after the count, so no fix was applied. I think after discussing the idea of performing a count with the other judge I kind of panicked a little and more of less failed to convey a lot of the relevant information to the judge I effectively handed the ruling over to.

The next day NAP came over and spoke to me about it and mentioned that he was fairly certain AP had simply failed to draw for his first turn, but the player wasn't really upset, and mentioned that he was still happy with how the call was handled and that he understood we did everything we could to ensure the call went well.

Sunday – Scheduled Sides


Emergency Reinforcements!
The day started off with a very large Modern DU which was adjacent to my less large Standard DU. I wasn't really that close to the modern event, but tried to keep an eye on it, seeing as after R1 there was one judge servicing roughly 200 players. I saw the judge leave the players unattended while he went to cut match slips after stating R2 and determined that the area probably needed another person. I noticed an adjacent ODE judge listlessly pushing in chairs in the ODE area and I asked him what he was doing he responded by saying, “Pushing in chairs and cleaning up.” I let him know that while this was a very important job, perhaps he could help out with the Modern DU for a little while instead until ODEs got a little busier. He nodded, mentioned he'd check with his lead, who I know said yes because I saw the little judge appear in the modern event a few moments later.

Villainous Alters
I sat down to watch a match in my Pauper event and noticed some alters in a players deck, specifically his unhinged basic swamp had been completely altered to depict Kylo Ren from Star Wars instead of it's original art. It also looked like a very good alter. I decided to take a look at it and lo and behold it wasn't really an alter but a fake, printed card. I felt that this was not really ok and when I brought it up, the player mentioned, rather demurely that he had some basics on the side if they needed to be swapped out. I replied that, yeah, they should be changed. I guess I didn't make it super clear that I kinda wanted it done immediately, because he uhm, didn't do it. Seeing as I didn't really have anything else to do, I swapped out his basics for him. Upon doing this I realized that the mountains were altered in the exact same way, and from across the board the artwork was virtually identical. This was immediately problematic, of course. I determined to educate the player on altered or proxied cards ie. That you need to always clear them with the HJ of your event, and that proxies are never ok in sanctioned Magic. But unfortunately I lost him after his match had concluded.

I thought about this as potential cheating, since the cards had a slightly different texture and thickness from regular cards, though I didn't think they'd be marked in the deck. I brought my concerns to the Sides HJ just as a sanity check but found their opinions mirrored mine, this wasn't a huge problem, and it would be best if the player swapped out the cards and was educated.

...In Conclusion
The one call I executed very poorly on Saturday kind of shook me up for the last two hours of my shift, which wasn't great. For the most part I'm pretty good at rolling with mistakes, but every now and again one will just hit me really hard and kind of throw me off for the whole day. I'll really need to work on my ability to bounce back, since working when you're not 100% on is no good. Otherwise though, the event went very well, LCTs were a lot of fun, and being on multiple 12:45 LCTs was a joke that I never got tired of, and Sunday sides were a nice chill atmosphere with lots of players having a good time.