Vancouver, Canada | Modern
Time: Saturday, June 18th 2022
Role: Appeals Judge
Players: 177 | Winner: David Bishop

Tech Plays
AP casts a spell with delirium and realizes they don’t have an instant in their graveyard, so they cast Flusterstorm, targeting their own spell. Then the judge on the call reminded them of their storm trigger, they begrudgingly targeted their original spell again with the extra copy. Instead they should’ve targetd the OG flusterstorm with the copy.

Let’s Rewind to When I Remembered My Trigger
Can AP miss an upkeep trigger, draw and then under the “reversing decisions” policy, get their trigger? In the MTR it’s unclear whether this is okay, however there is an article on the old JudgeBlogs that says this is very much within policy. It certainly doesn’t sit right with me, since it feels incredibly strange, however if the people who make policy want it to work this way, who am I to argue. Additionally, other than a vague “this feels stupid” swirling in my gut, I cn’t really think of any other reasons why it shouldn’t work this way.

Who’s Ability is it Anyways?
AP controlled a Giver of Runes equipped with NAP’s Sword of Fire and Ice, both players wanted to know what abilities the Giver had. While it would still have +2/+2 and protection from blue and red, the combat damage trigger is actually an ability of the sword and would therefore be under NAP’s purview. After hearing this AP decided that attacking was probably not a great idea.

HCE My Entire Board
I was called over to a table where AP shuffled their entire board into their library. This was definitely a first for me. My first inclination was that this might be HCE but 1) having NAP Thoughtsieze permanents into play is horrendous and 2) this is correctable with public information, so it’s actually a GRV, I got the players to collaborate on what they could remember being on the battlefield before the... incident and had AP just put those permanents back into play. All things considered, this went surprisingly well.

Remove Grief, Get Relief
AP cast Valki, God of Lies and used it to exile NAP’s Grief, so that NAP would be happier. Then Valki died and neither player remembered to get sad again. Then a turn later AP cast the last card in their hand, a Liliana of the Veil and had both players discarded. Then on their turn NAP noticed that Grief was still in exile, they said that if it had been in AP’s hand, it would’ve been discarded to Liliana, so maybe it should be in the graveyard. Both players agreed that this would be a good fix, and the HJ decided to deviate instead of rewinding the game. I don’t think that by policy this is really a deviation we should be doing, however the difference between Grief in exile and Grief in the graveyard is fairly minimal, so I don’t think it’s the worst deviation ever, even if it doesn’t quite sit right with me.

Secret Lair Drop: Invisible Lands
AP put their Arid Mesa into their graveyard and said they were going to get Sacred Foundry. In typical burn player fashion, they said they would grab it later, said they were using it to cast Goblin Guide, attacked, didn’t forget the trigger and passed their turn. In atypical burn player fashion they completely forgot to actually get their Sacred Foundry until after their next draw step. The qualifier HJ decided that deviating and allowing AP to fetch now would be totally fine. There may be an argument to cramming this under the GRV partial fix of “if a required zone change was missed put the thing in the correct zone now” but like, I know that I’m treating policy like a piece of bubble gum and stretching it abnormally to accommodate this fix. However a full backup is going to be awful and leaving it as is, and having the burn player stone rain themselves because they were trying to play quickly is also pretty bad.

Double Decker
AP was being deck checked, they had one of those deckboxes that had two decks in it,one was modern UB mill and one was legacy slivers. The only cards playable in both were Ancient Ziggurat and the Galerider Sliver. I decided this wasn’t deck problem since the sliver cards weren’t really playable in mill.

Possessed Decklist
AP registered “possessed” in their Eldrazi Tron deck. Upon checking the deck we discovered it was supposed to be a Possessed Portal. Myself and the judge on deck checks searched to see what other posessed things existed in modern, and the only other card was Posessed Skaab, a blue zombie that is barely playable in limited, and completely unplayable in Eldrazi Tron. I felt that this wasn’t a card that could conceivably be played in the player’s deck and didn’t see any potential for advantage here, unless the advantage the player was chasing was not getting a cramp from writing the word “portal” on their decklist. No infraction.

Communication Correction
AP attacked, NAP controlled three Giver of Runes and wanted to block and activate all of them. After NAP did a bunch of stuff, AP asked “are you done?” NAP nodded and AP then went to cast a Stomp, a judge was watching the table and stopped the player, saying that by asking NAP if they were done they had passed priority in the declare blockers step and could no longer cast spells before damage. AP was rather dissatisfied by this and the ruling became very contentious very quickly. I was quite frustrated since I disagreed with the floor judges decision to step in. Before the FJ stepped in, the players were content with their game. After the FJ stepped in there were 5 or 6 minutes of arguing and both players ended up being rather stressed out by the end of it. While it is a judges job to step in if an error occurs I didn’t feel like that had happened here. While technically, yes, AP no longer has priority, neither player was strictly adhering to the rules of priority and NAP was perfectly fine allowing AP to cast a spell after their final Giver activation. I think that communication is one of those things that we can try to codify as best we can but will always be difficult to jam into a strict set of rules. I ended up not overturning my floor judge however, since while I wouldn’t have stepped in, now that the problem had arisen, the rules wouldn’t allow me to justify AP being fast and loose with their communication.

Omnath, Locus of Durdle
My FJ came to me and said they thought that a player was stalling, the player was on 4-color Omnath, Locus of Creation and was playing against U/R Murktide, they had begun mulliganing a few minutes before time in the round, and finished on a mulligan to five when time was called. 4-color Omnath can’t really win with that much time left in the round, but Murktide can, however with only 3 turns neither deck can win. I watched the players play in turns and the timing of plays seemed reasonable. I interviewed both players to find out how they felt about the matchup and how much time they needed to win. The Omnath player had kept a reasonable hand and had claimed the reason they mulliganed twice was because they had no lands or one land in the two previous hands. While I felt that it wasn’t unreasonable to suspect stalling, I didn’t have enough evidence here to confidently issue the DQ and while in retrospect, interviewing the FJ and perhaps a few spectators might’ve been reasonable, at the time I didn’t see any other lines for investigation. So I ruled not stalling. The problem was that the Floor Judge had told the Murktide player that they thought the Omnath player was stalling. This made the Murktide player feel entitled to a stalling ruling, I had a chat with the floor judge later about why it’s important to tell a player that you think they should get a certain ruling if you’re not the one with the authority to give that ruling.

...In Conclusion
I was really excited to be Appeals Judge and don a red shirt, and even more excited for the role in the place where I essentially “grew up” as a judge. It was really nice to see a bunch of familiar faces and to take another step towards advancement there. However, I was frustrated with the amount of deviating that went on at Vancouver, while none of the deviations seemed particularly horrible, there were a lot of them, and none of them really had just reasoning, and left me feeling like we were kind of just making up policy as we went along. Overall it was a good event, and I do feel like I got a lot of valuable experience, and hope that in the near future I’ll get to be in charge of one of the Face to Face opens.