London, England | Limited
Time: Friday April 26th – Sunday April 28th
Players: 1526 Winner: Alexandre Habert

Friday – PM Sides Lead


Realms Uncharted
One of the biggest challenges associated with working a European MF is how multicultural it is. In the US and Canada, language barriers are rarely a problem, with the exception of the francophone regions of Quebec, but even then it's difficult to locate a judge on staff that isn't bilingual. With Europe, and the UK to a lesser extent, many of the players and judges speak 2-3 languages, and English isn't necessarily their native one. During the team meeting, something valuable I wanted to find out was what languages each member of the team spoke, in order to be able to find someone quickly if a language barrier arose. Trying to recall which judges spoke which mix of languages was difficult because there were so many of them! It made me feel rather embarrassed for only speaking one language, and encouraged me to explore the idea of learning another.

Collected Countries
In a Modern event, there was a kid that could only speak french. I went to ensure we had a francophone judge on the event in case something came up, but by the time I found one of my francophone judges and reassigned them, one of the judges on my event who was less fluent in french but still spoke a fair amount of it had taken a call on the match. The opponent had cast Collected Company and the kid asked what the card did, the judge gave him the oracle text. The kid seemed fine with it, the spell resolved and the opponent began comboing off. The judge explained what was happening, and the kid got upset saying that he wanted to cast Surgical Extraction on one of the combo pieces before the Collected Company resolved. The judge on the call ruled that this was not allowed to happen, as rewinding a winning Collected Company seemed like a great way to generate a salty player. The judge felt as if their bad translation had exacerbated the situation. On the contrary, it sounded like the kid didn't know what was going on and and when he realized he was going to lose decided to ask for a backup. It was one of those situations where it felt like everything perhaps wasn't totally above board. But when you have a crying child, the last thing you want to do is open a grueling investigation and shove some DQ paperwork into the mix.

Loyal Even Through a Supertype Change
War of the Spark limited is a very interesting and wild place. A neat question that came up was “Can creatures activate loyalty abilities?” the answer is yes, creatures can activate loyalty abilities. The once per turn and activation restrictions on the abilities are hard-wired into the abilities themselves (you can activate a loyalty ability of a permanent as long as you haven't activated a loyalty ability of that permanent already this turn), not the planeswalker supertype. This didn't used to be the case, however under the old rules, Experiment Kraj could gain loyalty abilities and activate each of them as many times as it wanted resulting in instant and multiple ultimates.

Saturday – PM Sides Lead


Cryptic Card Count
I had a call where a player cast a Cyptic Command and wanted to know if he'd drawn his card for the spell already, it was T7 of a control mirror. Having completely punted at my last card count at Tampa in front of another judge. I was determined to redeem myself by doing this one properly. I started by asking what turn we were on, and who had gone first. I also asked if any mulligans had taken place, I determined based on this information how many cards the player should have, if they'd drawn for cryptic. I then began going through the count, I counted all the permanents, and cards in hand, I went through the GY and removed all the cards from the count that replaced themselves, and counted extra for each card that generated an extra card. The count went really smoothly, and we determined that the player had not drawn for cryptic. The players were really happy with this resolution, and so was I.

Reasonably Affecting Decisions
If a player plays Contentious Plan, draws a card and then chooses which things to proliferate, is this a problem? This could potentially be filed under out of order sequencing, the documentation mentions that the out of order sequence shouldn't result in a player prematurely gaining information that could reasonably affect decisions made later in the sequence. Usually drawing a card is a pretty significant piece of information that will affect decisions made after it's completion. However an argument against this is that generally regardless of what the card you drew is, you're going to want to proliferate the 'good things' and not proliferate the 'bad ones'.

Filling the Workshop with Assistants
In an on demand draft a judge was called over and the player said “judge the first time this pack went around there was one Workshop Assistant in the pack and now that its come back there are two!” It was a chaos draft and there were only two Kaladesh packs. Three players recalled there only being a single copy of this common in the pack the first time they saw it. The judge on the call had everyone count their pools and the number of cards in each pack, but the numbers all seemed to add up. He thought about it, but determined it would be virtually impossible to catch by counting if the player had taken a Workshop Assistant out of the other Kaladesh pack and had switched it in for something in the current pack. In the end no resolution was arrived upon but the popular theory is that two cards had stuck together during the first wheel of the Kaladesh pack.

Sunday – Scheduled Sides


Deficient Manabase
I had a player that cast Kodama's Reach, he called me over and said that he had found his forest, and was pleased with that, but also wanted to find his mountain, but realized that he forgot to put it in and therefore probably had a 39 card deck. I counted to be certain and realized he in fact, had a 38 card deck! I thought for a moment and instructed him to put two basics into his library and then to finish resolving the spell, as the judge call occurred in the middle of his spell.

Humble Ballista
One of the funner parts of working a slower event is getting to communicate with other judges, in particular getting to discuss interesting interactions. One such interaction that was brought to me was casting a Walking Ballista with Humility on the battlefield, and whether it enters the battlefield with counters or not.
The ruling is that it does not, for the same reason that Shocklands enter untapped under a Blood Moon, we look ahead to see what the Ballista is going to be on the battlefield, and determine that 1/1s with no abilities do not enter with +1/+1 counters.

Missed Trigger or Clever Bluff?
If a player has Burning Prophet on the battlefield, and casts a non-creature spell, but doesn't demonstrate any awareness of the trigger, are they considered to have missed the trigger? No, in this case, the result of the trigger is invisible, therefore, if they “miss” it but call attention to the P/T buff when it becomes relevant, it's not considered to be missed, because not scrying is the same as leaving the card on the top. More interestingly, I was wondering if this was okay to do intentionally, I think under current policy it is, however it feels like a pretty borderline action.

Casting Two Artifacts Simultaneously
AP has Relic of Progenitus in their Graveyard. AP Taps 2 Islands, and puts a Relic of Progenitus and a Grafdigger's Cage onto the table. NAP says “in response to the Grafdigger's Cage, with the Relic of Progenitus still in hand, I want to Surgical Extraction the Relic of Progenitus”. This I felt was a really interesting scenerio. I wasn't the judge on the call, but feel like I would more likely rule in AP's favor, since it's unlikely NAP would've chosen to cast Surgical Extraction without knowing that there was a second Relic of Progenitus in AP's hand. However there are a lot of differing opinions on this call, and elements to consider, the fact that perhaps AP was intending to cast Surgical anyways is definitely true, and in more ambiguous cases it may have been the line, and we cannot allow NAP to take a bunch of actions to prevent AP from doing that. Another judge also mentioned that seeing if the cards were in a physical order (one on top of the other perhaps) on the battlefield would be a good way to determine an order.

...In Conclusion
Overall MF London was a fun experience, however it was a little disappointing in some ways, it was really similar to an American MF, I kinda wanted it to be wildly different, but it kinda ran the same. Another challenge as a Team Lead was not knowing everyone, while I may not be good friends with everyone on the American MF circuit, I have an idea of who they all are and their specific strengths and weaknesses as judges, I also generally know when we have someone less experienced on the team and can allocate tasks accordingly, unfortunately working London I was completely in the dark about the experience and skill level of the team. I really enjoyed MF London, and definitely want to try more overseas events, since the staff is very different.