Secaucus, New Jersey | Theros Beyond Death Limited
Time: Friday January 24th 2020 – Sunday Jaunary 26th 2020
Main Event Players: 1434 Winner: Isaak Krut


Friday – Kickstart Lead


Fanatics are Fantastic!
Before MF New Jersey even began all the fanatic packages, command zone passes, and main event seats were sold out. So we knew it was going to be a busy show. Luckily, as always, CFBE is constantly innovating, fanatic vouchers are completely digital now and players can use them to sign up online, which eliminates the cumbersome 5-10 minutes of either scanning or manually entering DCI numbers, and makes scorekeeper counts more accurate leading up to the event. Physical vouchers still exist for players who have trouble using the online ones, however. Another side effect of the general business of MF Jersey was that on Saturday, all event registration was closed for about five hours and events were only open to fanatic players, since the room completely ran out of space at about 10am.

NAP has a Bitter Revelation
AP casts Bitter Revelation while he has four cards in his hand, he grab four cards from the top of his library and puts two cards in his hand and two in the graveyard. NAP then claims that AP switched the four Bitter Revelation cards and his hand so that instead of discarding two cards from the Bitter Revelation set, instead he discarded two cards from his hand and effectively drew the four Bitter Revelation cards. I investigated the board state, NAP had skipped two land drops and was slowly losing on board, AP had two temur cards (but no islands on board or in hand) as well as a swamp and a fireball, the two discarded cards were both swamps. For NAPs story to be true it would mean that AP had cheated to get one additional uncastable card in his hand in a game he was already kind of winning. I decided that this seemed very low value, and ruled no cheating.

Nemesis' Cruise
AP controls Sewer Nemesis with NAP chosen as the player. NAP casts Treasure Cruise delving their entire graveyard, does Sewer Nemesis' third ability trigger? Yes, NAP finishes casting Treasure Cruise, which meets Sewer Nemesis' trigger condition, it's put onto the stack above the Treasure Cruise and then we check SBAs and Sewer Nemesis dies.

A Good Kickstart to the Weekend
Leading kickstart was interesting, I've never lead kickstart before, so it was a newer experience, also at something like MF Jersey it was a bit more challenging since events were pretty big and I knew I had a small hall. Luckily we didn't end up running out of space on Friday, so I didn't have to execute too many logistical pretzels.

Saturday – PTQ Head Judge


Spacial Concerns
Over breakfast I found out that my event was about 150 players and that we could only seat 30 of them, by the time I got in, I was told we were at 180 and that the hall as a whole had negative 200 seats. I knew this day was going to be fun. Eventually main event shrunk enough to allow my event some space, about an hour and a half after the scheduled start time, however we were still “sharing” about a row of tables with main, so the solution to this was to set up some auxiliary tables behind the event, and number them “670 PTQ”, so effectively in the hall there were two table 670s, one that the Main Event was using, and one that my PTQ was using. Another side effect of this was that to apologize to the players everyone was given a nonfoil Lightning Bolt promo for the delay, this meant there was another thing to hand out, at the beginning of the event our players were now getting a historic playmat, a Lightning Bolt promo and a Cryptic Command promo. Additionally, because our event was much later, I began to have flashbacks to the draft PTQ in Portland that literally ended at midnight, and wanted to know if we would be doing the top 8 the next morning, or the same day. The show manager let me know that I could decide, and so I decided to let the players decide. I gave everyone in top 8 a plains and an island to vote on the morning or right now. In a dramatic 5-3 vote, it was decided that we would do it the same day. While we were the last event out of the hall, it wasn't quite as egregious as midnight!

I Don't Want to Showcase My Decklist!
A player in main event called me over and let me know he'd pulled a full art Anax, Hardened in the Forge, a foil Anax and a regular Anax, he didn't want his opponents to know he was running three if he drew different copies in different games and asked me if it would be okay for him to go acquire two regular ones from elsewhere to play instead. I thought about it, but saw no issues with this and said “sure” but instructed him to put the fancy Anaxs elsewhere.

Flipping Tables is so 2019
I walked by a table where a player was furiously wiping off his cards, I asked if there was anything I could do to help because, well, uh it seemed like something was happening, initially I thought it was a case of someone's drink leaking in their bag. However the player said, “Yeah, some new sleeves would be really helpful, I was at the table that collapsed and there was a Wild Bills(tm) cup on the table and it spilled everywhere.” This sounded pretty outlandish, since tables collapsing isn't really a thing that happens every day, however his opponent corroborated this story, I realized that there really was no merit in lying in this scenario for the player. So I went over to the CFB booth and poked them for some ChannelFireball(tm) sleeves.

My Hand was So Bad I Scryed it to the Bottom
I got called over to a table where a player let me know that he had scryed his hand to either the top or the bottom of his library, he wasn't sure which one. And furthermore, he couldn't really remember how many cards were in it either. I did a quick card count and managed to identify that he should have four cards. As for the fix, I think it would be tempting to file this under HCE, but felt like this was reasonably fixable with public information, I asked the player away from the table what was in his hand, he gave me 2/4 cards, which were in the bottom four cards of his library. It wasn't super satisfying evidence, but it was enough for me to believe that pulling the bottom four cards of the library and putting them in his hand would restore the game state. I issued the GRV and got them back to playing.

Pioneer Horizons
There are a lot of formats in magic nowadays, and it can be difficult to know what products are affiliated with which formats. I noticed a player playing Snow-Covered Islands and Swamps in pioneer, while this isn't anything he could do to gain advantage by doing this, it's still kinda, not okay. I let the player know he should change them out, he seemed confused and kinda resistant, but said he would. Later on I was flagged by a floor judge about a player playing snow lands in pioneer, and lo and behold it was the same player. I was kinda irritated to be honest, I think there are many reasonable hills for players to die on, but this really wasn't one of them. I spoke to the floor judge and said that a USC-minor might be in order for not following official instructions. The floor judge came back and let me know that he couldn't issue the infraction because the player said he thought he was specifically instructed to take out the Snow-Covered Islands, but not the Snow-Covered Swamps. My floor judge seemed pretty convinced that this guy was just a little out to lunch rather than malicious. I sighed and said “make it very clear this time that anything snow-covered shouldn't be in that guys deck!”

Promotional DQ
I had a player in my event that claimed he didn't get his promo Cryptic Command at the beginning of the event. I've had this situation come up a few times before, and it's been players trying to game the system to get more stuff. I checked in with his first round opponent because he didn't have a bye and we didn't have any no-shows. His first round opponent got his stuff, and also thought that the player in question had received his stuff. Again, there are many hills for players to die on, and this seems like a pretty silly one. I escalated to the PM show manager, who spoke with the player and let me know that it seemed like the player legitimately believed he didn't get his stuff, the PM show manager figured that perhaps he lost it or something, and gave the guy an extra Lightning Bolt but didn't give him an additional Cryptic Command, nor did he give him his DQ.

One with Subtypes
On my way to the scorekeeper I took a call on main event. AP had cast One with the Stars on his opponent's Mantle of the Wolf and wanted to know if the Aura would fall off. I ruled that it would, as One with the Stars eliminates the card types (and as collateral damage, subtypes) of whatever it's enchanting, and replaces them with 'Enchantment'. NAP didn't think it worked this way, and claimed that a judge had ruled it differently earlier, AP then responded with a similar story of “earlier judge told me it works my way”. I shrugged, and gave NAP the appeal speech, and he appealed. After speaking with the appeals judge (and after the appeals judge spoke with another judge) it was determined that while One with the Stars doesn't do anything specifically to subtypes, anything that isn't a valid subtype for an enchantment is wiped, in this case Aura is still a valid subtype for enchantments, and therefore isn't going anywhere.

Is a Deck Check Ever a Courtesy?
As usual at an event that is... slightly smoldering, not all of top 8 had been deck checked before top 8, I decided to do a quick deck check with each player before beginning top 8. I like doing this because if there are any issues we can address them outside of the game before they become catastrophic, I once had a PPTQ where I did deck checks in top 8 and discovered that a player had registered a fifth Chandra and had to issue a game loss at one of the most critical times of his event. Another time I recall not checking all of the top 8, before I handed off the lists to a store employee to put on the website. A few days later he let me know that one player's list was only 59 cards and another player had written “Ulamog” in a format with two playable Ulamogs. Had felt, pretty embarrassed and would rather not have to explain to another coverage person the meaning of “Ulamog”, so I just do courtesy checks now.

Chandra Can't Send You on an Adventure!
AP asked me whether Chandra, Acolyte of Flame's -2 ability could be used to cast the Stomp half of Bonecrusher Giant. Initially, I recalled that Kess, Dissident Mage can do this, and thought that Chandra worked the same way, so I ruled that he could. The player thought this was pretty cool, his opponent thought this was pretty cool, as they were in a casual game, and I thought this was pretty cool. Until I double checked with another judge later and realized it was wrong, Chandra has a targeting restriction that forces AP to choose an instant or sorcery card, which Bonecrusher Giant is most certainly not (at least while it's in the graveyard).

Just a Temporal Anomaly
AP tapped five lands, cast Teferi, Time Raveler, put the die to one, and told NAP that he was bouncing his creature, AP didn't draw a card. Then AP said 'pass, untap two lands' and went to untap at which point NAP was like 'wait'. After a little investigation I figured that AP meant to play the Teferi, Hero of Dominaria in his hand (even though that wouldn't let him untap two lands anyways), and that the sequence of actions was pretty quick overall. NAP was tapped out and there's no 'free' interaction in pioneer, so I ruled it was a bit of a dexterity issue on AP's part, got him to exchange the Teferis and issued the GRV.

Sunday - ODEs


Rewards Once More!
If there's one thing we can count on to always be different, it's how we prize commander pods, for a while it was 50 to everyone and 50 to the winner, then it was 50 to everyone and the winner just gets glory, and now it's 50 to everyone and 30 tix (and glory) to the winner. I have mentioned in the past that I like it when there's some kind of reward for winning, but not one that is good enough that people will want to grind it. I'm not sure if 30 tix quite fits the bill, but at the very least, it's not something that can really be split among four players, so that definitely incentivizes playing.

It's a Mystery Where Those Packs Went
I was working ODEs on Sunday, which means I was working mystery drafts. And boy was I working mystery drafts. I remember at the beginning of the day there was a line of about 200 players trying to get into mystery drafts. Instead of giving the players buzzers we were giving them pieces of paper with a letter on them that was effectively a buzzing buzzer because pods were filling up so fast. I was just seating and launching for about 45 minutes. And then it all abruptly stopped because we were completely out of space. Drafts were closed for about two hours. One pod in particular I ended up simply losing two packs, it was pretty suspicious, but I didn't have the resources or any idea how to investigate, and it was fairly possible that product prep had just screwed up, since the way we were prepping product was to dump all the packs into a box, mix them around, and then portion them out. On the bright side, because of product anomalies I managed to generate two additional packs throughout the day, so I suppose it all balanced out.

Very Good Idea*
Because of space concerns at MF Jersey, the Very Good Idea(TM) for this event is to stack tables on top of other tables, if we span a table over two rows (perpendicular to the tables beneath it) and assign four matches to it, we can increase the amount of players a single space can support. To address backpacks and other personal effects that might end up on the lower level battlefields I think we should just have each player “lose” their bag at lost and found and then “find” it later.

*Disclaimer: Oftentimes Very Good Ideas (TM) are actually Very Bad Ideas (also TM) that have been re-branded by the Vyseri marketing team and should not under any circumstances be implemented in an actual tournament. Tobi and anyone who was talking to her during the inception of the Very Good Idea(TM) are not liable for angry players, destruction of tournament material, destruction of tournament judges or the destruction of the tournament. Tournaments that are destroyed as a result of, or in direct correlation with a Very Good Idea(TM) being implemented cannot be regenerated.

...In Conclusion
Overall I had a blast at MF New Jersey, by the time Sunday evening rolled around I was exhausted, however, I haven't worked ODEs that busy since Vegas two years ago! I really enjoyed the challenges and the business of a large event, and this, as I'm personally naming it, Tiny Vegas, was definitely that. I'm really looking forward to MF New Jersey next year, I hope that one day we're big enough to grow to another venue, or maybe even just rent another hotel!