Madison, Wisconsin | Limited
Time: Friday May 10th – Sunday May 12th
Players: 953 Winner: Ben Beydler

Friday – PM Sides Lead


Honesty is Detrimental
There was a player who came up to me after a match of EDH he'd won in the scheduled commander event, and said that he felt like me may have cheated. I asked why, and he said “My opponent attacked me with Dimir Doppleganger, he then said he was changing it into Phage, the Untouchable to try and kill me, but I said I wanted to flash in a blocker. My problem is that if he had asked me to declare blockers before changing the creature, I wouldn't have flashed in a creature to block, because I forgot Phage was in the graveyard, but neither of us were super clear on where we were in combat so it might've been before blockers, but I'm concerned I may have cheated.”
I let him know that these sorts of things happened all the time, and that if the opponent was okay with the sequence it didn't matter too much. If combat steps were clearly defined, such as the opponent asking if blockers were declared, and none had been declared, obviously there would be no backup, but in this case it wasn't clear when the opponent was activating the ability, and therefore it was legal to assume he was doing it before declaring blockers.

Turning on the Sprinklers Before the Fire
Something important about leading is anticipating when problems might happen, and working to prevent them from happening. Halfway through Friday, while I was covering the ODE leads break, I noticed that ODEs were filling up pretty quickly, and that we may run out of space really soon, I decided to set up some extra ODE rows to avoid this. We didn't end up needing them, but it's important to always be looking ahead to ensure that you aren't scrambling to fix something after it's become an issue.

Check with PM lead
At the end of the day, I assigned some judges to disassemble the extra ODE rows I created earlier in the day, however in the middle of it the PM lead came up to me and let me know they wanted to keep them around for Saturday. I felt a little silly, but it was a good reminder to check in with the PM lead before just doing tasks I thought needed doing. I also remembered to check in with the PM lead before I let mid-shift go, because I recall being a FJ in situations where the lead had not done that, and it ended up causing late shift to have to do large amounts of work to compensate for the lack of personnel.

Saturday – PM Sides Lead


Disconcerting Diction
A FJ came up to me and mentioned that during the discussion at end of round a two players had made some kind of agreement on conceding or not based on what the top card of one of their libraries was. The player had flipped the top card of their library and the phrase “that wasn't the wager” came up and the FJ got nervous and grabbed a lead. Flipping the top card here wasn't an issue because they were merely revealing their draw for T5 of turns, however the use of the word wager definitely raised some red flags. After a fair amount of discussion we determined that this was probably not an issue, but that both players should be educated about their use of language and specific phrases when it comes to determining match results. By the time we came to this conclusion the players had disappeared. At the beginning of the next round we assigned a judge to each match and by chance, one of the judges overheard the player mention that if either of them conceded they would be getting 600 prize tix and that he was a “generous guy”. This seemed pretty bad, after some interviewing of the players and some discussion it was decided that we would be removing this player from the event. Myself, the FJ, the AM lead and the HJ of the event were all involved in the call, and this, to me, felt like way too many people to be involved, I asked the AM lead what they'd like me to do in this situation, after some deliberating she said she'd like to have me just take care of leading while she processed the DQ.

Self-Rearranging Library
The player began by saying, “Judge last turn he tucked my Karn, the Great Creator third from the top and then cast Totally Lost on my Bloom Hulk. So we should know the top and third card of the library, but when I went to draw this turn, it wasn't Bloom Hulk, what do I do?” The FJ checked the top three cards of the library and confirmed that while Karn, the Great Creator was correctly third from the top, the Bloom Hulk had somehow ended up second from the top. The player only had one card in their hand, so it was determined that we would have them draw the Bloom Hulk and shuffle the card that they had incorrectly drawn back into the library, and then put the Karn, the Great Creator second from the top. This way it ensured that they didn't know the top card of their library, but that the position of Karn was still retained.

Frenetic Combo
I walked over to an EDH game where a player was attempting to activate Frenetic Efreet's ability an amount of times equal to the cards in their library, and he claimed that because he had Zndrsplt, Eye of Wisdom in play he would draw a card for each activation. He said that it worked this way because a coin flip that resulted in a loss for him was the same as his opponent's winning a coin flip. I began to explain that this wasn't how it worked, when he interrupted my ruling and said “Could I get a judge that actually knows what is going on here? It just seems like you're trying to figure it out and I'd rather have someone familiar with the cards in the interaction.” I sighed, I wasn't thrilled about this player assuming I didn't know what I was talking about, but decided that it was better to just get another judge as it didn't seem like they wanted to listen to me in particular. Effectively I rationalized it as the player, rather impolitely, asking for a second opinion, which they are entitled to. I grabbed another judge and ensured to highlight his rules knowledge to the player to hopefully abate any additional 'appeals'. Later upon discussing the interaction with another judge he mentioned that perhaps it wasn't a great idea to effectively allow the judge to “bully me” into getting another judge, though I'm uncertain as to how to resolve that interaction any differently.

Vraska's Unseen Tokens
NAP had created a Vraska, Swarm's Eminence 1/1 Assassin with deathtouch, cast another spell and passed the turn. AP then attacks and NAP blocks with the token, and mentions deathtouch, AP then mentions he didn't realize the token was there, since it was only signified with a single die, and asks to re-do combat. The judge on the call determined that this fell under the MTR reversing decisions clause and was okay, since the information he gained was information he already had access to. This made me a little uncomfortable because if a player forgets what they put on top for brainstorm and asks to take a look at it later in the turn after we don't allow them to. I was a little uncomfortable because it feels as if information was gained, even if it was information the player was entitled to, and remembering information is a skill that we expect players to excersise.

Saturday – Main Event – Floor/Features & Draft Caller


Tobi, Caller of Drafts
I've never called a draft before, not even a single draft pod that got paused while working day 2 or a top 8 of a PPTQ. A few times previously I've had the opportunity to call a draft pod on day 2 when it's become unhinged from the rest of the draft, but I've been too afraid and ended up handing it off to someone else. This didn't seem okay, so I decided that I'd overcome my fear of calling a draft and apply to be draft caller. I made a script beforehand and practiced during lunch the day before. I was so nervous that my first three picks were too quiet to hear and the draft had to be stopped to catch up. I worked really hard to speak more loudly during the rest of the draft, and from the fourth pick onward it actually ran really smoothly. I got a lot of great feedback from other judges and want to give it another shot just to practice the skills I learned.

A Penaltyless Fix
I got called over to a table about two minutes before time in the round was called, a player mentioned he felt like this opponent was playing slowly, I didn't really have enough time to watch the match and determine whether that was true or not, and also knew that doing nothing was going to make the player frustrated and could cause him to appeal or argue with me, which would eat up more time in the event. So instead of doing any of that, I encouraged both players to play faster and gave them an additional 2 minutes without issuing any infraction. From a tournament perspective, I think this was best because it means there's the least delay to the event. However having a system where players can effectively “ask” for additional time is problematic. If he didn't think he could win in the time that was remaining, but could with a few extra minutes, it seems very good to ask for more time. However from a philosophical perspective, I don't like games timing out, or people playing to ensure they get the draw. Games of magic should be decided by games of magic and not by the clock, so giving players a little extra time to bring the game to it's natural conclusion doesn't seem like a huge issue. But policy-wise it was pretty inconsistent, and I think it was a mistake I'd rather not repeat. The game did end in the 'non-slow players' favor, but not significantly after time was called. I checked in with the opponent a few rounds later to see if he had a problem with my ruling, as he seemed a little dissatisfied at the time, however he let me know that he was simply upset that he was losing, and wasn't upset with the judge call.

Appealing to a FJ
I was on features and a player asked me if he sacrificed Burning Prophet to Spark Harvest if he'd get to scry 1, I let him know that, no, he would not, he seemed pretty concerned by this, and was very certain it worked differently, and sheepishly asked to appeal. I was concerned that perhaps I was being dumb, and went to talk to another judge before grabbing the HJ, I certainly didn't want to bother the HJ with a trivial rules question if he had more important investigations to be attending to. If the FJ said I was correct, I'd grab the HJ to uphold my ruling, but if the FJ disagreed with me and had some good evidence, I'd go and overturn my own ruling. The other judge agreed with me, so I grabbed the HJ to uphold my ruling. However I think this may not be the best course of action, I think when I was a little weaker in rules and policy and got a lot more stuff wrong, simply conferring with another judge when a player seemed uncertain was fine, but at this point, it's probably best to simply escalate to the HJ as that is the correct procedure.

Nahiri, Venerated Pinger
On features I saw an interesting interaction, Nahiri, Storm of Stone was activated for 0 targeting a 1/1 creature, the player said that because he had Jaya, Venerated Firemage in play, the Nahiri, Storm of Stone would deal 0 + 1 damage, thus killing the 1/1. I thought about it for a moment, both players seemed satisfied with this interpretation of the rules, but I was pretty sure it was incorrect, I double checked in the CR and confirmed that it was indeed incorrect, I paused the match and went to get a HJ for the backup I now needed to do because I didn't initially pause the match. I'm never sure when it's appropriate to pause the match. I know a lot of judges err on the side of 'pause the match', double check and then let them resume, but this is very disruptive, and oftentimes I've thought about pausing a match and decided to double check myself first and found that there was simply something I was missing or had misinterpreted. So overall I'm currently of the mindset that on average it's less disruptive to not pause and just do the resulting backup if I happened to be correct.

Infraction Harvest
On the MCQ I got called over to a table where a player cast Spark Harvest for 4B instead of 3BB like he was supposed to. I went through the motions of issuing a GRV like normal and asked if he'd received any infractions of this nature previously in the event, and he, in a rather distraught tone, let me know that yes he had received an infraction earlier in this game for the same thing (or similar enough, casting Spark Harvest for 3B instead of 3BB) this made a few red flags go off in my mind, and I decided that perhaps we should investigate, but I wasn't really sure what to ask. So I went and grabbed the HJ, or rather I tried to, but he was in another investigation, so instead I grabbed a free main event HJ. He did a really good job of investigating, he asked who was going to win, what other plays the player had instead of Spark Harvest and if casting it for 4B was going to really change things. He didn't have double black but had enough mana and resources to play and sacrifice an irrelevant creature to still accomplish legally casting Spark Harvest. It was really neat to watch this investigation play out and I feel like I learned a lot from it.

...In Conclusion
Overall Madison was a really enjoyable event, I got another crack at Team Leading, and got to build skills in that, as well as working day 2 of an event, which I haven't done in a while. I also got to try out a new skill, calling a draft, which was extremely difficult and intimidating for me. There were a lot of new challenges with this event and a lot of exciting situations to tackle. I really feel like I learned a lot and I'm really excited to work my next event!