Washington, DC | Sealed
Time: Friday June 14th – Sunday June 16th
Players: 1520 Winner: Joseph Wagner

Friday – Last Chance Trials


The Perceived Value of 10 Tix
MF Washington was the first MF with the revised prize tix structure, or rather, prize tix inflation. A lot of players complained about the value of prize tix at other events, simply because 10 tix is a standard pack which has a market value of about 4USD, but an actual cost of around 2USD, because of this dissonance, when other items were priced at 10 tix = 2USD it made them look overpriced in comparison to the 10 tix packs. AT MF Washington CFBE re-balanced prize tix value and the cost of items on the prize wall, so now a standard pack is 20tix. I think this is a really interesting example of perceived vs actual value, now the tix will have a more consistent perceived value, but the actual value of them has actually gone down.

Rules Questions on the Horizon
I was on LCTs again, which I'm usually excited about, but I was on sealed, which I'm usually not excited about. However the format was Modern Horizons sealed, which I wasn't initially excited about, but quickly had my opinion changed when I saw how many strange interactions there were. Modern Horizons is an awesome format with a lot of quirky cards and challenging questions. Usually I don't feel like I really get to work on my rules knowledge while judging sealed, but this was definitely not the case for this set! In particular Reprobation is simply a confusing card for players, it asks for some knowledge of layers and with all the enchantments and equipment in the set, it's easy to lose track of what the creature is.

Looking at Revealed Cards is a Choice
I heard about a call where a player drew an extra card during mulligans, both players seemed perfectly okay with putting a random card back in the library. However HCE doesn't really support that. The players were told the fix but the opponent decided that he'd still like to pick a random card to be returned. The judge on the call just shrugged and was like, “Well, you're not required to look at what your opponent is revealing.”

Command the Stack
This interaction was brought to me by another judge, AP casts Command the Dreadhorde targeting four creatures, and in response your NAP also casts Command the Dreadhorde targeting three of the same creatures (as an instant possibly because of Teferi, Time Raveler) What happens? You only lose life for the creatures Command the Dreadhorde actually gets you. The other targets become illegal if they're no longer in the graveyard, and therefore you won't lose life for them upon the resolution of the spell.

Saturday – Main Event - Slips


Sword of Reading the Card
Another judge consulted me on a rewind. NAP had a creature with a Sword of Truth and Justice equipped. AP cast a Mob, and AP responded by casting Shelter giving the creature protection from black and drawing a card. NAP then untapped and drew for their turn, at which point the judge who was standing by the table at the time, noticed that Shelter couldn't have targeted the creature because the creature had protection from white. The judge was leaning towards no backup, but wanted a second opinion. I disagreed and felt like a backup was perfectly okay here, I asked the other judge why they were leaning towards no backup, and they mentioned that they'd be rewinding through two of NAP's card draws, perhaps unraveling some delicate planning that had been done. I mentioned that it was less of a problem here if we screwed up some of NAP's planning because they were the player that committed an error. Because not all errors will be caught, it's important that the fixes slightly disadvantage the player that committed the error, otherwise there's not enough of a disincentive for cheating.

No On Really Understands Layers
On the table there's a creature with Treefolk Umbra attached to it, AP plays Reprobation on the creature. The players then stare at their cards and call a judge to confirm what the creature actually is, the answer is that the creature is an 0/3 that deals damage equal to it's toughness. This is pretty interesting because I initially thought that the creature would be an 0/3 nothing, but the line that talks about dealing damage equal to toughness isn't an ability, instead it's changing the game rules regarding that creature.

Sunday – Scheduled Sides


Worship the Two-Headed Giant
Modern Horizons is a complex set with a lot of weird cards, and when we add 2HG rules into the mix it can get even weirder! Serra the Benevolent's emblem creates a “Worship” effect, more than once I was asked how this interacts with the 2HG rules for shared life totals, luckily in this instance it works as intended, and so long as the player that created the emblem controls a creature, the teams life total won't dip below 1 due to damage.

Shrouded Meanings
Smoke Shroud is a really well designed card, it works exactly how it's supposed to with ninjutsu, unfortunately not many people really understand ninjutsu, the idea of bouncing a creature as a cost is really, so the fact that there's a priority pass and SBAs happening before the ninja is on the battlefield is not something a lot of players really think about. So when a player came up to me with Ephemerate and asked if this would allow the Smoke Shroud to come back like with ninjas, he wasn't too far off the mark. Unfortunately though, we do not check SBAs in the middle of spells resolving, so I had to let the player know that doing this would get his Smoke Shroud snugly in the graveyard.

...In Conclusion
I really enjoyed MF Washington, I got to brush up on my Comp REL some more, and interacting with Modern Horizons was really awesome. The format presents some neat scenarios and is really interesting to judge. I'm looking forward to the Modern MFs so I can check out what new impacts this set has on the format!