Edmonton, Canada | Modern
Time: March 26th, 2022
Main Event Players: 157 Winner: Ash Loraas
Role: Deck Check Lead

Our New EventLink Overlords
The biggest "new thing" is the slow but steady takeover of all our tournament operations by Eventlink. Gone are the days of slips and paper pairings. Also Scorekeepers squinting to try and read judge's chicken scratch on the back of said slips, instead all penalties are reported in Eventlink. Which is kinda nice and kinda awful since the app isn't optimized for phones, and the only way to enter a penalty on a phone is to put it into landscape mode and even then it doesn't really work great. Also we don't have a way to put in time extensions. Neat.
We ended up putting small slips of paper on the tables with the time extension written on them. Except when we forgot. We also wrote down the time extensions on a piece of paper up at the main stage. Except when we forgot.
Another uh, feature of Eventlink is the lack of ability to do an alphabetized player meeting, But wait, you say, that's fine, player meetings suck anyways. I agree, however since you literally can't input people into Eventlink after a round starts without giving a match loss (unless you delete the whole round and repair) it's useful for ensuring that literally everyone who wants to be in main gets in without a round one loss. Now this all reads rather disparagingly which, well, it kinda is because Eventlink right now has a lot of small annoying things. BUT I do have to say that once that stuff gets sorted out, I think it is going to make events a lot smoother. Not having a gazillion players all cluster around a tiny pairings board at the beginning of the round, and also having players enter their own results both take a lot of boring logistical work away from judging, which is a bonus. Also Eventlink actually has HCE as an infraction instead of drawing extra cards. Yay.

Decklists: the Papering
I guess Face to Face had a limited "technology" quota and used it all up on Eventlink because we still collected paper lists for this event. There were only 157 players so I'm not going to complain too much. But if anyone from Face to Face is reading this, online decklist submission is literally the best thing ever and can we please have more of that?
I decided against indexing the lists (collecting them in "player meeting" order and then keeping a copy of the players names alphabetically sorted with their player meeting table numbers to cross reference) since there weren't that many lists anyways, and instead just organized them during R1. I also felt like this would save me time in the long run.
There was also one really tiny decklist. Like, it was legible, but also a little annoying since it's hard to find in the pile. I'm fine with accepting it, but can definitely imagine some judges who wouldn't allow it, so I found the player and just let them know that when doing nonstandard things they might want to clear it with administration first.

Introducing Our Esteemed Judges...
At the beginning of the event all the staff members were introduced (there were five or six of us on the event) by name and by region and by level, and I felt like it was a little (actually incredibly) awkward. In particular for me, I don't really want to be the center of attention for too long, I start to get uneasy (if you've ever seen me at an in-person conference, you probably notice that I tend to do more workshop type presentations because lecturing is so incredibly draining for me). Some other people mentioned it helps to make the judges more personable, which might be true, but at the same time it's time consume-y and annoying, and if I was a player I'd be bored to bits.

Policy Count: 1
Recently (well not recently, but if you ignore the past two years, then recently) there was a change in how storm players could track their floating mana, basically it was decreed that using a die was not ok. Players whined but then got over it, like most things. Honestly, I was fine with this change since dice are easily bumpable and this change would probably prevent a lot of annoying arguments. At this event I saw someone using mana "cards" to represent floating mana (by grabbing a new card from a stack on the side and putting it down for each unspent floating mana.) The MTR explicitly calls out dice but then says "methods that can be accidentally changed may not be used", after a short conversation with the HJ we both agreed that lil' cards are ok. Also they were cute looking.

Teferi's Reign of Terror
Teferi, Time Raveler is a card I really don't like. It's basically the card version of whatever archetype you don't like to play against. Anyways, I was once again reminded that Teferi ruins not only Rebound, but also Suspend.

Yawgmoth's Hypotheticals
AP controlled Yawgmoth, Thran Physician and a Wall of Roots with four -1/-1 counters on it. They wanted to know if they could both sacrifice it for Yawgmoth's ability and get the last {G} from it. I wasn't totally sure, since I vaguely recalled that in the steps to casting a spell/activating an ability you can create mana before actually paying costs (like sacrificing the Wall of Roots) but I also recalled that if the ability/spell didn't require a mana payment that maybe you couldn't do that. I found the section in the CR and the ultimate answer is, no you can't because Yawgmoth's ability doesn't require a mana payment (if it did, you could totally do this.)

Wagerwut
I was sitting on a match going to time and AP started to say something that I was concerned would end in a match loss. I interrupted them and pulled them aside, quickly going over what was and was not bribery and wagering. I then asked them to tell me what they were going to say to NAP when they went back to the table. I think getting them to tell me what they were going to say beforehand is a good policy because sometimes players can seem like they totally understood what you were saying and then very deftly dash your assumptions immediately afterwards.

Offsetting Advantage
AP cast Profane Tutor through NAP's Teferi, Time Raveler and it was only noticed after the spell had been resolved. The judge on the call ruled that backing up would be too disruptive since it would involve taking a random card from AP's hand and put it back into the library. However I spoke with the judge afterwards and argued that AP probably just tutored for the best card in their deck, so the rewind isn't too bad here since even if we do hit their best card, that just, perfectly fixes the game. (and it’s fairly likely that we’ll hit a worse card, so the player really can’t be that salty about this fix)

...In Conclusion
I had a great time working Face to Face Edmonton, also a one day event was kind of weird. Also an event that small was also kind of weird, but a nice way to ease back into things. I'm looking forward to the return of events, and am really excited for SCG Dallas!