Orlando, Florida | Commander
Time: Friday, July 22nd 2022 – Sunday July 24th 2022
Role: ODE Lead
Badges Sold: 600

Last Minute Lead
This is now the second event where I’ve replaced Abe Corson as ODE lead, luckily this time it was because he was promoted to show manager and not because he got Covid. I’m glad I got to work with Zwanger at CF Vegas on ODEs since it gave me solid expectations for this event. Basically, launch Commander pods and organize breaks. That’s literally it. Maybe you get a 2HG question, but that’s kinda unlikely.

An Ode to ODEs
The TO’s system for handling ODEs was to have the players register at the front desk, put the players into a spreadsheet which would then be transferred over to the scorekeepers, who would then register those players for events in EventLink. At which point they would print out a list of players registered in the ODE and give it to the judges. This is... fine for drafts, since having Eventlink organize seating is nice, and also drafts fill up a lot slower. However this method for Commander pods is actually really annoying, since realistically, grabbing the first four players to congregate at the gathering point for a pod would be much more efficient. I suggested to the TO that in the future, instead of having the scorekeepers generate specific commander pods, it would be easier to just give the players some kind of token to show they paid, then when four players congregated around the commander gathering point, the judge could take the token back from them, and seat them. Then after the event the TO could put all the pods into EventLink.

2HG Rules
First, teams got 60 life, and we were told that 20 poison and 21 commander damage would kill a team. Initially I felt like it didn’t really matter whether the 21 commander damage was per player or per team since it wouldn’t come up that much, so I ruled per player thinking that it was obvious that players would assign commander damage to the same head over and over anyways, and that it would only matter if the commander had an ability referring to which player it dealt combat damage to, which seemed like a corner case. However halfway through Saturday, one of the judges on my team asked me how the rules worked and I mentioned the per player thing, and they mentioned that not only was this different from poison damage (which was per team) but also ghostly prison effects actually made who you were attacking a lot more relevant, I decided at that point to revise the ruling.

The other 2HG rule that came up was a AP1 asking whether they’d be able to see NAP2’s hand if they mindslaver NAP1? The answer to this is, yes! In fact, AP1 will control BOTH players for the turn! I actually ruled this wrong on the floor, incorrectly thinking that AP1 would only control NAP1 and wouldn't be able to see NAP2's hand, however after publishing the report another judge brought to my attention this rule that I overlooked! 805.8, and specifically the line that says "If an effect causes a player to control another player, the first player controls the affected player's team." Initially when I checked the rules I found 810.5. With the exception of life total and poison counters, a team's resources (cards in hand, mana, and so on) are not shared in the Two-Headed Giant variant. Teammates may review each other's hands and discuss strategies at any time. Teammates can't manipulate each other's cards or permanents." and interpreted it as "cards in hands are not shared so teammates may reveal them to each other but aren't required to.

LPV Does Nothing!
The most challenging thing all weekend was fixing drafts. Never before have we had so many issues with drafts. This is largely because we were running both Baldur’s Gate drafts and Double Masters drafts. For Baldur’s Gate, players needed to take two cards at a time for every pick, but for Double Masters players were only supposed to take two cards for the first pick. Understandably, this caused problems.

Over the weekend, I developed a few ways to fix this. First, if the player’s picks are all in a single pile, and if they were still in order, I’d have the player reconstruct each two-card pick that they had made. Any picks that weren’t supposed to be two cards I’d have the player select one card from the two cards to keep and one to put back into the draft pool. After this was done I’d take all the picks they’d returned to the pool and send those around the table as a standalone pack. It’s not perfect, but it returns the illegal cards to the pool. Alternatively, if the player has only erroneously picked incorrectly once or twice, it might be reasonable to rewind just those two packs.

The next method is if the player hasn’t been keeping their picks in a single ordered pile. Have the player select a number of cards that seems reasonable depending on the pack number (if it’s pack one 3-5 cards, pack two 6-10 etc.) to set aside, then randomize the rest of the cards in the pool and remove cards until the player has the correct number of cards. Then either randomly redistribute the extra cards to the other players at the table, or have them draft from the extra cards.

The best way, however, to fix a broken draft is to ensure it doesn’t break in the first place. By Sunday I was telling judges that whenever they launched a Double Masters draft to watch the table for the first few picks after giving the instructions.

Mutual Dissatisfaction
There was a situation where AP was drafting two cards a pick, after the table realized this AP took it upon themselves to fix the problem and began handing cards from their pool to other players. A judge noticed this and asked AP what they were doing and was ignored several times before they roped in the team lead at the time (I was on break while this was happening) The team lead fixed the draft and then had a talk with the player about why their behaviour was inappropriate. I wasn’t involved in this call at all, but we do have a line in the MTR that if players can fix a problem to their mutual satisfaction they don’t need to call a judge to intervene. Now according to the judges involved, the other players didn’t seem satisfied with the solution, so it’s unlikely this line applies. And while ignoring a judge isn’t appropriate, I’m also slightly concerned that the judge staff’s intervention and heavy-handedness might’ve exacerbated the situation. After discussing the situation with all the judges involved, I think this is unlikely the case, and both the intervention and the scolding were likely merited.

Event Tetris
On Saturday I knew I would need more space, I had half the hall which had seats for about 320 players, however 64 of those seats (two rows) were currently being used for the free play area. I decided to take the two rows of free play and move them to the other half of the hall, leaving 192 seats for scheduled sides (since the back two rows of the scheduled sides area were also dedicated to free play) I should’ve done this at the beginning of the day, since I think there would be a reasonable expectation that I’d need that space, seeing as I had almost run out of space the previous day. However there were also two events we expected to be large on Saturday, the Mystery Booster Sealed and the Double Masters Sealed, both of which capped at 64. I had initially wanted to wait to see how big those events would be before robbing the scheduled sides area of space. When the events seemed small I took the space. Now you might be wondering why I was so reticent to simply steal the free play area for the paying players. Normally, I agree that pilfering free play tables is fine, however this event was requiring attendees to purchase a badge to even enter the hall, meaning that even players in the free play area were also paying players.
Now this all sounds great and like I was the best lead until you remember that players are players and they only sign up for stuff like 15 minutes before the stuff starts, which means that ten minutes before the Mystery Booster event was set to begin we realized that scheduled sides was out of room. This resulted in a rather weird table reclamation from scheduled sides, where instead of moving the free play area yet again, we just took one row of ODE tables and put some of the Mystery Booster event there. Luckily I had enough judges on ODEs that I could keep a judge assigned to the row until the event shrunk enough that we didn’t need the space anymore.

The Mystery of the Missing Tix
AP and AP’s partner both claimed that they’d only been given 40 of the 60 tix for their 2HG event. The correct prize support for 2HG was 60 tix per player. The FJ was confused about this and asked AP’s opponents how many tix they had gotten, both opponents confirmed that they had received the correct amount of prize tix. The FJ then asked AP and AP’s partner to show him the tix they had received. AP’s partner opened their deckbox and found 60 tix, shrugged, apologized and conceded that they’d gotten the correct amount of tix. AP however just had a bunch of loose tix in a bag. The FJ felt at this point it was fairly obvious that AP had probably gotten the correct amount of tix and had just forgotten or was lying, so he escalated it to the Show Manager, who ended up giving AP the 20 tix, but also giving AP a stern talking to, regarding their somewhat belligerent behaviour towards the FJ. I’m not sure how I feel about this, on one hand, I don’t like rewarding pushy or dishonest players, however on the other hand, 20 tix is like, $3, and I will always pay $3 to make a player happy. I think in this situation I’d probably end up just giving AP the tix as well, but there is definitely a part of me that wouldn’t be upset if my FJ decided not to give them the tix.

In Conclusion...
I had a great time at CF Orlando, while I’m not a huge fan of casual/non-comp REL events, I didn’t mind the logistical puzzles, and also got to exercise my creativity in fixing drafts, which was something I don’t get to do often. I also got to lead on a hectic event with a somewhat inexperienced team, which is a bit of a challenge. Overall I had a ton of fun at CF Orlando, and really enjoyed my role! I think if I hadn’t had a lead position I probably would’ve been kinda bored, since CommandFests don’t often offer much beyond logistics, and logistics without challenges can become somewhat monotonous.