Richmond, Virginia | Commander
Time: Friday June 3rd – Sunday June 5th
Role: Keystone

Friday – Scheduled Sides


The “c” in cEDH is for Comp REL
It’s a little irksome that “competitive elder dragon highlander” is run at regular REL. I was discussing this with another judge and aid “Well why can’t it be comp REL?” they said “policy disintegrates when we start trying to apply it to multiplayer”. This is... mostly true once you start to think about it. Take a missed trigger for instance, would it be something like “if any opponent wants it on the stack, it goes on the stack”? That would have some strangely political outcomes, which I think is right at home in a game of commander. Or perhaps triggers would be dealt with a la “will of the council” meaning everyone votes. I guess in the case of a tie it just doesn’t go on the stack. That seems fair, right? But how about HCE? While we could vote here, that seems cumbersome. Maybe we designate an opponent at random to make the choice. I think that would end up like every time I’ve ever played Fact or Fiction in multiplayer, everyone just argues about what the best choice is and then the player designated to actually choose the card just gets harassed for the rest of the game because everyone thinks they punted. What about FTMGS? I think there would be a lot more of those. For instance, a scenario where someone commits a GRV and no one notices for a while. Whelp, that’s 3 FTMGS’s. What about a double GRV situation though? If I’ve got something like a Narset it’s going to be really easy for me to get GRVs since I have to police 3 opponents! All in all I agree that just chucking judges into an event that doesn’t have clearly defined policy is probably a bad idea. However, if we every do decide to run an EDH event at Comp REL I’d like a place on it!

Invoke Policies
Once again while browsing the vendor booths before the event began, I was asked what SCGs policy on cards like Invoke Prejudice and Crusade were. I had actually asked this the previous day and was told that as long as vendors covered up the art it was alright to sell them. However when the vendors asked the morning of, SCGs policy was basically “just tell the players before they buy the card that it’s not legal in anything”.

Commanding Logistics
The MTR was never really written with four player commander pods in mind. I asked the day before the event how long round times would be. I know historically for CFBE events it’s been an hour and a half, but SCG opted for 75 minute rounds. I was a little concerned about this, since I know a lot of commander games can run long, however it actually wasn’t a huge problem throughout the event. Sure, many people went to time, but that number was a relatively small percentage of each event! For time in the round it was ruled that active player would finish their turn and each other player would get one turn. In the event of extra turns, they’d actually get added to the turn pool, unlike in regular matches.

Companion is not my Companion
As WotC continues to make negligible headway on the “making companion actually work” front, we were once again running events through some kind of software Frankenstein (Jared’s Monster?). Players were getting their seatings through the companion app (and from the pairings boards) as if it was a 1v1 event. For regular scheduled commander the scorekeeper was giving everyone a draw and then repairing, so that companion would keep players from playing the same opponents again, which is good, I guess we could’ve asked the players to report draws but I think that might’ve ended up with more overall lag time since players would be confused.

The “c” in cEDH stands for Complications
The cEDH scheduled side event actually needed to have winners paired against each other, since it cut to top 4 after two rounds, for this we had match slips that were created through some kind of excel wizardry. All pairings were still done via companion, and cleverly enough, the SK would report anyone who had won as winning in the 1v1 that companion paired them for, and would draw the other two players, since this would actually result in companion correctly pairing winners against each other. Unfortunately, I made the mistake of thinking this event was like a normal event, where nothing less than 2-0 was going to take you to the top table, and I told players this. Of course, the age old adage of “never tell players what they need to make the cut” came back to haunt me. My event was roughly 24 players, that means 8 four player pods, which means 8 winners round one, and only two winners in round 2. that means that the final pod is going to have at most two players that are 2-0. This is further complicated if any tables draw at any point, which one of mine did. So anyways, one of the players that was 1-1 had buggered off to play prerelease when we were pairing the final table, and lo and behold, he had made the cut. I decided to give him the 100 tix all the top four contenders got, and then also gave him another 100 tix, which was 25% of the prizes he would’ve been playing for, had he actually had the opportunity to play.

eplacement Gate
if AP controls Gond Gate and uses Navigation Orb to find two other gates, will they enter tapped or untapped? Currently it’s mandatory that they enter untapped (which is fine since that’s probably what the player wants anyways) because the orb doesn’t actually create a replacement effect, rather it creates an event “put these gates onto the battlefield tapped” that Gond Gate then applies to. It would be a bit of a different story if it was a replacement effect, however, because then the player could choose to have them enter tapped. (perhaps if they had multiple Amulets of Vigor, for instance)

A Rift in the Rules
Wait a second! Mystery Booster drafts aren’t commander related at all! Well I guess they’re about as weird and casual as commander? I guess that’s what SCG was thinking because we had two Mystery Booster draft events at Richmond! Which is where the confusion surrounding the card “Rift” came from. The question was if AP has a Rift in their deck and decides to mulligan to 6, do they have the option of putting Rift into the 6 card hand? I felt like they would, however Rift specifies “opening hand” which is defined in the rules as the hand you have after resolving all mulligans, which we can also see reflected in the wording of the “chancellor” cycle. However Rift also says that “mulligans continue as normal” which is very confusing! To further complicate things, the wording on Emissary’s Ploy says you need to make a choice “before drawing your opening hand”, to me this means that I can make no choice, mulligan, then announce a choice before drawing and keeping six. I don’t think this is the intent of this card, but it sure does muddy the waters. Luckily, for Rift anyways, there are gatherer rulings for the card that say that you can put it in your hand after mulligans.

Best Bolt Ever
AP cast Bituminous Blast and before the Cascade trigger resolved, NAP cast Transcantation to turn Bituminous Blast into a Lightning Bolt, at which point I was called to the table to answer whether the Cascade trigger would still resolve. I was fairly certain it would, but the bigger question was whether we’d be Cascading for a card that cost less than 5 or less than 1! I conferred with another judge, since this certainly was a weird scenario! As it turns out, the CMC of the spell with Cascade is determined upon resolution.

Splitting Headache
Prize splitting was a mess. Payout for the winner for most events was 100 tix. Most events were four players. SCG didn’t have 25 tick denominations, or 5 tick denominations. So... what are we supposed to do when players in the four player pods go to time? I asked during my cEDH event up at the stage and was told that if players went to time they got no prizes. This was terrible for everyone and was just begging to generate IDaW. On Saturday I asked again what the policy for prize tix was, and was told “let the players figure it out” see IDaW for problems with this. I was also told later on that the “highest life total would get all the tix” which is sudden death? At regular? In multiplayer? Eugh. Finally after a round of Prerelease on Saturday I was told that if players drew, to simply add 20 tix to the pool and then split the tix evenly across the remaining players. This meant that four player pods would reward 30 tix to each player and 40 tix each if only three people remained. Finally! A splitting solution that wasn’t awful! In the future I just hope that SCG either a) prints better tix denominations or b) makes the final prizing conducive to three and four player splits.

Saturday - Prerelease


Baffled at Baldur’s Gate
SCG Richmond was actually scheduled on top of prerelease weekend, so we were holding some prerelease events, and boy were they... events. Clocking in around 200-300 players every two hours. They were also draft. They were also commander. Basically how these events went was like this, players would get their pairings via the companion app pretending the event was a 1v1 event and sit down. Then product would go out while another judge made note of who was missing so we could drop them, then for a few harried moments I would grab anemic looking pods and use those players to fill holes in other pods so that everyone (or most everyone) was drafting with 8 people. This was a mess. On Sunday I asked the judge in charge of this if they had come up with a better strategy for the “fix holes in the event” portion, they said they had the players in the last few tables stand up and fill holes on their own. I actually really like this solution, since players can probably work this out without help. Then the players would draft. They needed to take two cards per pick. This is hard. Draft is already hard but this is weird draft. The HJ would wait until most pods appeared to be done drafting and give the players 20 minutes for construction. Then players would get into four player pods and play a game of magic. The pods were created so that players would never be in the pod that the people sitting next to them in draft were in.

Fake Dungeon
I’m salty that my old cards that venture into the dungeon won’t allow me to venture into the Undercity. This is stupid and I hate it.

Draft Shenanigans
I walked up to a draft where one player had 68 cards and the four players to their right had 58 cards (they were supposed to all have 60 as it was the end of the third pack and the packs had 20 cards each). After some muddling around, we determined that it was likely an entire pack got mushed into this kid’s pool at some point. I spoke with my HJ about potential fixes. We both agreed taking random cards out of the player’s pool was horrible. I proposed that I open a new pack, take out the rare and mythic and give each of the players with a short pool two random cards. The players seemed happy with this solution. I brought up the scenario to other judges later in the weekend, one judge suggested having the player with extra cards pick eight cards out of their pool and having the remaining players draft from it, however this means that the player with extra cards gets to offload their eight worst cards, and it doesn’t really feel that fair. In retrospect I think I should’ve let the four players draft from the extra pack instead of just giving them random cards. Another thing that happened a lot was players failing to draft two cards each time. The solution for this was simple, identify which pack needed to have cards taken out of it, have the player currently looking at the pack finish drafting from it, then have the player missing cards draft from the pack, then put the pack back where it was in the draft rotation.

Mardon’t
I had a player who was playing Mardu but their commander was only black and red. They were clearly a little new, as they were playing unsleeved and were a little nervous, they were the kind of player that doesn’t want to cause a fuss and if the fix for their error is too cumbersome they’re likely to just concede. It was a few turns into the game, and I knew the “by the book” fix would result in a third of their deck turning into basic lands which would be a pretty bad experience for everyone. I asked to look through their deck to see a) how many white cards were in there and b) if we could just fix the commander, and lo and behold! They had managed to draft a 3-color commander somewhere along the way! I instructed them to simply switch their commander for the legal one and keep playing, both them and their table seemed pretty satisfied with this solution. Later on I had a similar situation with a player who had a monoblack commander leading a red-black deck. I noticed that their commander had “choose a background” and told them that they could just have a red faceless one. They then mentioned that they might have some red backgrounds in their pool. I shrugged and said it was fine for them to choose one of those.

Selective Goad

AP’s Grizzly Bears was Goaded by NAP1. After AP declares it as an attacker at NAP2, AP casts Windshaper Planetar and would like to know if they can have the creature attack NAP1. The answer is yes. Goad is an attacking restriction which is addressed during the declare attackers step. As long as Grizzly Bears was declared as attacking someone other than NAP1, the game doesn’t care what happens after that.

Permanently Gone
NAP1 controls Sarevok Deathbringer and AP kills NAP2 on their turn, will AP lose life from Saervok? No, NAP2’s everything leaving the battlefield definitely satisfies Saervoks’ desire for permanents to leave the battlefield.

Feed-bad
I’ve been doing a lot of presenting lately, with the advent of online conferences, and one of the interesting things I’ve noticed is that often my own lessons will come back to haunt me. On the prerelease, I noticed that one of my fellow floor judges was doing a sub-optimal job distributing prize tix. I went to the HJ to complain but then realized I was doing exactly what I said people shouldn’t do in the feedback portion of my writing presentation! You should always try to give feedback in private to the subject first before escalating to others! Give your mentee a chance to redeem themselves!

Sacrificial Upkeep
AP casts Jon Irenicus, Shattered One and has the end step target be Firestorm Hellkite (or any creature with cumulative upkeep). If NAP refuses to pay the cumulative upkeep on Firestorm Hellkite, what will happen? The time counter will still go on, but the creature won’t be sacrificed.

Draft and Drop
Another annoying thing about the weekend was how exactly to handle players that simply wanted to get their packs/tix/whatever and then leave without playing. For prerelease policy was that players who wanted their product had to sit and wait to get product before leaving. This was annoying since it meant that we’d have to fix more draft pods than if they could just get their stuff and not be seated. Then for round 1 each player would get 50 tix just for sitting down in their commander pod after the draft (and 100 tix were put in the middle for the winner but this isn’t important right now). The point to note here, is that you actually had to sit down to get that 50 tix. This was frustrating because it meant that we couldn’t get rid of these players while we were filling holes, so some pods would just end up with three people. I think by the end of the weekend SCG was allowing judges to just give these players their tix so they could leave and not cause pod problems. This was also an issue for ODEs, many players, especially near the end of the weekend, wanted some way to turn their ODE vouchers into tix, since they didn’t have enough time to actually play that many events. This resulted in people entering commander pods and immediately leaving. This sucked for the players who actually wanted to play a four player pod of commander. I remember CFB gave players a conversion option and wondered why SCG couldn’t do the same. The answer I got was “something something WotC said so” which like, okay, I get that. Eventually near the end of the day Sunday SCG managed to find a way to pay for player’s vouchers.

Sunday - ODEs


A Myriad of Rulings
AP controls a creature with Myriad and attacks NAP’s planeswalker, will they get the myriad trigger? Yes. Also notable with myriad, AP doesn’t need to create a copy for every opponent, which makes this ability more political than it first appears.

Absent Champion
A few years ago at the GP Vegas where WLTR melted down, I remember main event judges were all sent to other areas of the hall while the scorekeepers frantically tried to pry the GP from WLTRs ravenous maw. The event I got to sub in on was the Commander Championship, and it seemed really cool. It was huge and semi-competitive and even had a trophy! Maybe I’m just too used to big dumb scheduled flagship events, but this weekend, for me anyways, felt a little empty. I’d like to see one of the CommandFest TOs at least try to run something like this. Perhaps it’s not actually what players want, but I think it might be worth a shot?

Dredge Up a Ruling
NAP controls Urabrask, Heretic Praetor and AP controls The Gitrog Monster and has a card with dredge in their graveyard. During AP’s upkeep, both the Gitrog trigger and Urabrask trigger go on the stack in APNAP order, (Urabrask resolves first) then AP sacrifices a land to Gitrog and would like to dredge, they can since there are two replacement effects applying to the event, they can choose which order to apply them in. What will happen on their draw step? Urabrask will replace that draw with the exile since AP still hasn’t drawn a card yet. Alternatively if AP has more dredge cards they can just keep doing that and effectively invalidate Urabrask entirely.

Like a Germ
On Friday, we had a few players who had heard from a judge that in limited, commander damage wasn’t a rule. This is incorrect, and these players were quite irritated when they were told this, since they had previously been told otherwise by ‘other judge’. Throughout the weekend this ruling seemed to be impossible to kill. Despite me and another judge personally talking to everyone on the prerelease and ensuring they knew the correct ruling. Despite all the judges answering the call correctly after Friday, and despite multiple HJ announcements, people were still asking about this throughout the weekend! It actually spread so virulently that I was wondering why. My theory was that it’s a very relevant ruling that’ll come up almost every game, so every time someone with the misinformation sits down, they’ll spread it. Then to add to that, commander games involve four players not just two, so each time someone spreads it, the number of “carriers” of misinformation quadruples.

...In Conclusion
I actually enjoyed this event a lot more than I thought I would. Event-wise it was a little empty because of the lack of a big headliner event, but the prerelease kept me busy enough that there wasn’t a huge hole in my heart. It was also kind of strange since the skill divide between the staff was very stark, there were a few hyper-experienced people and then a lot of people on their first or second event. I’m just not really used to being one of the more experienced people on staff, it’s a bit of an odd feeling. Even more odd was my ODE lead asking me for feedback, I’m not really used to being asked for feedback (I just force it on unsuspecting victims!) so it was unusual. In any case, I’ll definitely be doing CommandFests in the future, and am especially excited to see how SCG and the other organizers iterate on the model, but I do still miss the large Comp REL events of yesteryear, and hope they come back!