Calgary, Canada | Modern
Time: Saturday, June 25th 2022
Role: Deck Checks
Players: 175 | Winner: Shayne Brown

Esteemed Mentor
I was specifically told that my role on Saturday was to help mentor a judge who had never lead before. I’ve been in this kind of support role a few times, and I think the most important thing is to be very conscious about doing too much. It can be tempting to effectively say “no give me the job you’re doing it wrong” but then the mentee won’t learn anything. There’s value in letting them make a few mistakes (as long as they don’t ruin a players experience or significantly tank the event in some way) and at the end of the day a few extra minutes added to the event is worth training a judge. A few times during the day they tried to defect to me by asking how something should be done, and I’d just throw the ball back by asking how they thought it should be handled. There were a few times that I had to softly prompt them about upcoming tasks, by asking them how we were going to handle them. Overall I think I did okay in the mentor role, but it’s always hard to know!

Saga’s Don’t Require Trigger Warnings
I was shadowing another judge, who took a call where AP had forgotten to put their lore counter on Urza’s Saga. They got halfway through issuing a missed trigger ruling when I realized what was happening and pulled them away from the table. They were a more experienced judge than me so I was a little flustered and kind of clumsily told them that putting a lore counter on a Saga was a turn-based action, so it would be a GRV, not a missed trigger. They thanked me for the correction and fixed the ruling.

Pattern Matching
One of the decks my mentee checked had seven very curly foils, four of which were a critical card in the deck, the others were a sorcery, a land and a creature. They mentioned this might be a pattern and were leaning towards a game loss upgrade for marked cards. I softly steered them back saying that if it was just the four-of that was foil, this would definitely be marked cards, as is, there were seven marked cards and a little over half of them were one thing and the others were just random stuff. While a player could certainly gain advantage from knowing that the top card of their deck had a 50% chance of being a critical spell, it’s not enough advantage that we want to hit them with a game loss. Also like, by policy this just isn’t a pattern.

We had a call with a player who had what looked like three opened packs of midnight hunt in their deckbox. My mentee knew this would be a game loss, however they also had some concerns about marked cards, since the sleeves were quite dirty. I disagreed about the sleeves, since the dirt was all on the front face, so it couldn’t provide any strategic advantage, while my mentee was away grabbing the player the HJ walked by and I decided to confirm that this wasn’t marked cards before my mentee got back. Unfortunately I didn’t communicate that clearly and instead of quietly confirming my suspicions about the lack of marked cards, the HJ thought that they needed to take over the call. This was a problem because the player had told my mentee that they had gotten permission from another judge to have those cards in their deckbox (this was unknown to me at the time) because of this communication mishap, the HJ ended up issuing a game loss and sending the player on their way. The player was also, uh, my ride to the event, so I decided to touch base with them later, since they were a reasonably experienced player and I was suprised they’d just have a bunch of jank in their box. They explained to me that they kept the jank in there to keep their all-foil deck from curling. It was also at this point they mentioned that not only did they get permission from another judge to do this, but they had also been presenting their sideboard to their opponent’s before each match. I felt so silly for not asking this when the game loss was being issued. I spoke with the HJ and he also felt kinda dumb for not remembering. We both apologized to the player. I also bought the player lunch on the drive home as obeisance for my mistake.

FFFFFFFFFFFFF..............
A player walked up to me near the end of round 2 and asked me if they could get their decklist out of the main event pile and use it in the invitational, I said “sure” and on my way to the stage I saw a judge call, I looked around but no one was nearby to actually take the call, and after a few moments of nervously looking at the player and at the hanging call I said “this is live, just give me a moment and I’ll be right back”.

AP cast a Teferi, Time Raveler and NAP (who for the rest of the event I will refer to by the alias “Nathan”) said “ok”, then AP went to plus Teferi and Nathan said he wanted to respond. AP said he couldn’t do that because of Teferi’s ability, and Nathan said he wanted to respond before Teferi resolved. I asked about previous communication in the match, and both players agreed that Nathan had said “ok” to every spell and hadn’t yet responded after saying “ok”. Getting this far with the players was a challenge since Nathan was very pushy and kept wanting to give me irrelevant information or saying things like “I’m just here to have fun” or “this is my first event”. It was hard for me to get words in when speaking to him, since he just kept talking. Eventually I began to work through the ruling in AP’s favour, since it seemed that previously “ok” had been synonymous with “resolves” and there was also a non-negligible pause between Teferi resolving and AP trying to do something with the Teferi. About halfway through the call, one of the spectators said that Nathan had been belligerent and obnoxious the entire match, and should get a USC penalty. I was kind of shocked that a spectator would say this right in front of Nathan. Our appeals judge was fairly close so at this point I roped them into the call.

While the Spectator was talking to the AJ, Nathan’s brother (who had joined the growing circle of spectators) said that the spectator had been very rude and was calling Nathan “stupid” and had been trying to get him disqualified. I nodded and told them that we certainly would be looking into everything. The AJ spoke to everyone individually, while I kind of held down the fort. Eventually the HJ came over and sat on the match while the AJ talked to me away from the table, when I returned he told me to issue USC – Minor after the match to Nathan. I nodded and finally, the AJ made a ruling and told me to sit on the match. I issued a 13 minute time extension (I hadn’t taken down the time when I started the call but the AJ told me that it had been 25 minutes since they entered the call and it was currently 15 minutes past time in the round, and I guessed that I’d taken about 3 minutes before handing things over to the AJ.

Watching the match, I began to feel sorry for AP since Nathan was increasingly annoying and rude, saying things like “oh right, I forgot who I was playing against” when AP corrected or clarified a sloppy play, and muttering about how he was just here to have fun and that AP was being too competitive (which he was not). Finally the match ended, I talked to AP away from the table and let him know that his opponent would be getting a warning, and that I was sorry he had to put up with that, and that he could take 10 minutes to just decompress before the next round if he needed it. I then went to the HJ to clarify whether it was me or the AJ that was going to issue the USC-Minor, since I certainly didn’t want both of us to do it. The HJ said that the AJ would do it, so I left it alone.

I asked the AJ about the USC-Minor later, and he said that he had decided not to issue it, since it might make things worse. I felt like this was a huge mistake since the player was being pretty rude. The AJ shrugged and said he’d talked to the player and that the player said he’d behave better the next round.

We had a judge float around Nathan’s match during round 3 but they reported that things seemed to be going okay. However the AJ was doing some more digging since one of the spectators said that Nathan had been banned from Magic after assaulting a tournament organizer. And if he was currently banned from playing, we had grounds for a DQ.

The AJ looked up the old WotC banned list using a historical website viewer and discovered that the player was on the banlist in 2015 but was removed for every subsequent year. When the AJ asked the player about this, he said that the TO was a pedophile and that him and his brother had taken the ban to court and gotten it removed. At this point the AJ was beginning to think that the players were potentially chronic liars, because one of them had also claimed that they were a pro wrestler, that they’d invested over 100k into starting a game store as well as saying this was their first event. However, being a chronic liar is not a DQable offence, so the AJ left it alone, hoping the player would make good on their intent to not disrupt the event any more.

Unfortunately during round 4 another thing happened. AP had cast Ledger Shredder and Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer and had grabbed a card for the connive ability before Nathan had the ability to respond. Nathan interrupted AP multiple times while he was giving his side of the interaction, once again, inflating the time the call was taking. I noticed that Nathan was talking to a judge and sent the AJ over to see what was up. The FJ spoke with the HJ and asked if it would be okay to issue USC-Minor to Nathan for continuing to interrupt his opponent even after being asked not to. The AJ said it would be alright. The FJ took Nathan away from the table to issue the warning and upon seeing the AJ walk away Nathan said “I guess you need training”. The AJ was a little frustrated with this, but pressed forward with the USC ruling. Nathan’s brother ended up ambling over during the call and started interrupting a bunch as well. Eventually the FJ ruled in favour of of Nathan, backing up the game and allowing Nathan to respond to the card draw generated by Ledger Shredder. This resulted in yet another round going to -20 on the clock. Some players approached me to complain that round turnover was taking a long time, and to imply that a single player making an entire tournament wait while they argued with a judge yet again was not great. I agreed and let them know that this kind of thing is fine if it happens once, but this player certainly shouldn’t be allowed to do it multiple times in a single event, and I let the players know I’d speak to the HJ about it. I said to the HJ “this cannot happen again, if that player starts arguing with us, we need to shut him down”. The HJ agreed.

About halfway through the next round, I yet again saw the player speaking at length with another judge. Frustrated I looked around for the HJ to get him to shut it down, aaaaand he was on the stage eating a sandwich taking his break. OK. I grabbed the AJ and immediately sent them over to the call. The same FJ from the previous round ended up taking this call as well, AP used Solitude’s Evoke ability and Nathan wanted to cast Ephemerate on his own Solitude in response to AP’s solitude’s ETB trigger, but had stated that he wanted to respond to AP’s Solitude. Once again, talking to both players at the table seemed impossible with Nathan’s continued interruptions, so the FJ took him away from the table where he began instead to vent about how his opponent’s kept calling judges on him in an attempt to cheat him out of actions. Before the FJ even got to issue the ruling, Nathan said “I’m out of here” in a huff and collected his things to leave. His brother decided to drop at the same time. Nathan then had a lengthy discussion with the AJ which actually ended with them fist bumping, and he left the building. We had lost about 2 hours to judge calls involving only Nathan, but it was finally over.

It was not, in fact, over. About 10 or 20 minutes later, Nathan’s brother re-entered the building and began yelling at one of their previous round opponents about how they had ruined the event for them. The AJ very quickly got in between them and their opponent and told Nathan’s brother he needed to leave. They exited the hall aggressively saying “keep 2 meters away from me” to the AJ as he followed them out of the venue. However, they decided that they hadn’t tormented everyone enough, and found a judge in the food court on break and decided to berate him before actually leaving the building. After this the TO decided that these two players were banned from any future events.

...In Conclusion
I’m glad I wasn’t AJ for this event. The experience with Nathan was bizarre and I hope to never endure a repeat of it. I did (somehow) manage to get some mentoring in between all the drama surrounding Nathan, and overall I’m still glad I went, I think it was a good lesson in when being lenient can become really problematic and also educational on how you need to put the needs of the event before the needs of an individual player.