Las Vegas, Nevada | Commander
Time: Friday June 10th – Sunday June 12th 2022
Friday – Scheduled Sides
Saturday & Sunday - ODE Lead

Chaos Incarnate
The big theme of CF Vegas was chaos. It’s not entirely CFB’s fault, I heard that our two show leads for Magic got sick only a few days before the event and had to pull out. In addition to this we also lost one of our ODE leads shortly before Vegas as well. For a normal event, this wouldn’t be a huge deal, since a large portion of the staff is generally fairly experienced with how the event is going to be run. However a CommandFest is a very different type of event and each TO seems to want to do things differently than the others. The leads didn’t find out until Friday which software was being used, how players were being paired, how the prize structure worked (it wasn’t on the website) how many rounds each event was, and how much time was in each round, and whether we’d need paper pairings or result slips.

The fact that on Friday the show was being held in 4 separate conference rooms instead of the large event hall didn’t help the confusion either, and the lack of any kind of PA system meant that for scheduled sides we’d just have people go into each room and announce that it was time for the scheduled side to start, and ask that any players registered made their way over to the conference room it was being held in. For Saturday and Sunday things were in the large event hall again, so this was a little better, however we still didn’t have a PA system since the hall was being split with Flesh and Blood and I guess their side got the mic or something. A lack of a mic is worse in a commander event than a normal event because late players delay a single extra person in a regular event, but in a commander event, each late player delays 3 other players.

ODEs were also kind of chaotic since we weren’t using Kefka. I’m not entirely sure why, but it’s likely for legal reasons? Or because Kefka maybe tied into WER somehow and now that it’s not being used Kefka doesn’t work anymore? We were using some kind of browser sign-in for ODEs and it was really clunky. Judges were having issues signing players in and players were having issues using their vouchers and paying and just understanding the fustercluck that was the website.

Commander Rules!
The commander round times in Vegas were 90 minutes (more what I’m used to, unlike the 75 minutes given in Richmond) and at time in the round AP would finish their turn and there would be an additional turn per player. Prizing was flat (50 tix per player per round) for almost every event except cEDH events, which were 150 tix for first and 50 tix for second, which was a bit weird because in cEDH usually if there is a second it’s because the player in first combo’d off and picked second place, which is kinda dumb. When I seated cEDH games, I told them the prize structure and encouraged them to figure out a way to deal with the second place tix before they began their game. Some pods threw the 50 tix into the winner pot. Other pods opted for the “combo player phases out and the rest play for second” I think a better solution would be to offer 160 for first and 10 to each other player. The cEDH pods shouldn’t prize less than normal pods but having second place tix just doesn’t make a lot of sense.

Limited Options
Battle for Baldur’s Gate was designed as a draft set primarily. On the schedule we had a Battle for Baldur’s Gate “sealed” event. While logistically this made our jobs a lot easier (My tournament report for Richmond covers all the issues with casual commander draft events involving large numbers of people) it did feel incredibly strange, and I think running this event as a draft would’ve been better since that’s how the set was designed, and if the number of drops before round two was any indication, it would’ve been more fun that way too.

2-Headed Dragon
While Richmond had more information pre-event, and better overall organization, Vegas had WAY cooler scheduled events! We had both a Planechase and 2-Headed Giant EDH event. Unfortunately like most other things this weekend, the rules for 2HG EDH weren’t at all thought about beforehand, and also, unsurprisingly aren’t in the Comprehensive Rules. About 10 minutes before the event we managed to track down the show lead and on the spot decided on 60 life for teams, 15 poison and three turns at time in the round. I felt like 3 turns was a bit much since those turns would be quite long, and while one turn is what all the other EDH events were doing, a single turn at time feels a little light. I personally felt like 2 turns would’ve been a happy medium.

Proxies or Counterfeits
Unlike in Richmond, CFB wanted a stricter policy against counterfeits and proxies and wanted us to tell players to get rid of them or put them away if they were visible, even the free play area. However they wanted to allow gold-bordered cards. I didn’t run into a lot of proxies during the first two days of the event, because it was so hectic, but as things slowed down a bit on Sunday I had a chance to actually prowl the floor and had to tell a few players to put the proxies away. It always felt pretty bad. In particular, one player who had a graded Timetwister in a slab, and was using a proxy in his cEDH deck said “well, how about I play a random common that is unplayable in my deck and the let the rest of the pod know before the game that it’s actually a Timetwister if I draw it”. I shrugged and said “I guess that’s okay”. From what I heard the reason the proxy policy was so strict was because there were a bunch of WotC employees floating around making sure the event was up to snuff. So by that logic, keeping fake cards off tables was the goal, and if this player had a real card in their deck representing another card, I didn’t see a huge issue with that.

Modal DFC Commander
In theory, Commander events are cool because you’re going to answer a bunch of really fiddly, tough rules calls, in reality Commander events are just Logistics: the Gathering. I did however, overheard one interesting rules question, wherein a player wanted to know that if a modal DFC was their commander, and both sides were creatures, would both creatures damage feed into the same commander damage pool. I beleive it would since “commanderness” is a characteristic of the specific piece of cardboard, regardless of whether it’s face up or down, or merged with something or whatever.

...In Conclusion
I had a great time at CommandFest Vegas, but I think a large part of that was because I got field promoted to ODE lead for Saturday and Sunday, I think without the extra logistical challenges to work through both those days would’ve been a bit boring for me. Well, hectic, but also boring, if that makes sense? I think this event had a lot of issues that could definitely be improved upon in the future, however I’m not sure if they will be since I don’t really know what’s happening with CFB. From what it looks like, they’ve kind of swiveled into doing primarily Flesh and Blood. And, I have to admit I’m kind of sad that they don’t seem to be doing Magic anymore. CFBE was one of my favourite TOs to work for. I will admit that a large part of that was the fact that they paid the best out of any TO, but also since they were doing so many shows things were really organized, I always knew what to expect. Issues would be worked on and solved over time. The closest thing we have to that now is StarCityGames, which is a great TO for sure, but they don’t have the ability to run shows with comparable size and frequency to CFBEs.

At this point, I’m still not really sure what the future holds for large Magic events, but I hope it’s not just CommandFests.