Columbus, Ohio | Modern
Time: Friday, September 2nd 2022 – Sunday September 4th, 2022
Friday-Saturday 20k: 182 | Winner: Ross Merriam
Saturday-Sunday 20k: 130ish | Winner: Brady Munroe

Friday – End of Round


Everyone Makes Top 200!
The 20k had about 25 judges on it and only 182 players. If all the players split they’d walk away with around $110 and tournament entry was only $80. Needless to say, it was a little disappointing. I think one of the main reasons for the low turnout was the fact that there was some kind of college football game going on during the same weekend, which was causing the price of flights and rooms to skyrocket. Also some players might, you know, want to actually watch the football game instead IDK.

Player Pandering Policies
Before the event began the HJs set out some ground rules, first if you declared a companion at the beginning of the match, it would be ruled that it would be your companion for the whole match. If you accidentally shuffled it in for game 2, and never mentioned that it wasn’t your companion, then we would simply rule it as a deck problem and issue a warning and remove it from your library.
Next, ideally, all decklists would be on MTG Melee, however since the software would stop accepting lists prior to the event starting, it would be unfair for last minute list-editers. Also I guess the HJs wanted to be more lenient on decklists or something, because if players didn’t have a decklist submitted at the start of the round, we were to give paper lists to those players, and then give them 10 minutes to fill them out. The only way to actually acquire a tardiness penalty for not submitting a decklist, would be to start playing and then try to hand in a decklist.

First Judge World Problems
There are two major issues that arise with overstaffed events, one: judges inevitably end up having more policy conversations with each other and end up watching less magic. Two: when a call does happen, everyone swarms to it, causing like 5 judges to end up awkwardly watching an oracle text call. I think having two judges on a call is great, but having any more than that is going to make the players feel really crowded and uncomfortable. Additionally a problem I saw on this event in particular was that a newer judge would be unsure of a ruling, they would go to double check with another newer judge, and after realizing that neither of them was certain enough of the answer, they’d come get a team lead (sometimes me) who would then sort out the call. Then if the players were unhappy, they might appeal, meaning a fourth judge would need to get involved. I’m not sure what the correct solution here would be, but this kind of judge chain lead to some calls taking upwards of 10 minutes, when they really shouldn’t have taken that long. I’m not sure what the solution here is, on one hand, I want judges to double check when they’re uncertain, and I also want to be able to mentor judges when they come to me with a question, but I also don’t want to use a ton of player time to do that.

Grief Over a Grief
On turn one AP cast Grief targeting NAP. AP claimed they had NAP discard an Arboreal Grazer, which NAP had two of in hand, and then wrote down the Breeding Pool and the Cavern of Souls. The game progressed after that, with NAP playing an Urza’s Saga and creating a few construct tokens. They attacked with both constructs, to which AP responded by casting Violent Outburst and cascading into Living End. At which point NAP put the Primeval Titan in their graveyard into play. AP asked how it had gotten there, and NAP said that it had been discarded by Grief on turn one. Obviously AP disagreed with this recollection of events. NAP claimed that on turn one AP has cast Grief, but that Primeval Titan was the only legal choice in their hand, so they’d discarded it automatically. While I didn’t do the investigation, I was fairly suspicious that the Primeval Titan player had switched the Arboreal Grazer in their graveyard with a Primeval Titan in their hand. For NAP, they had no chance at winning the game after Living End resolved, with the Primeval Titan however, they could definitely win (and actually did). For AP it makes no sense that they intentionally took the Primeval Titan, since NAP was nowhere close to casting it when their hand was revealed, and also it’s just a terrible play since AP’s on Living End.
So we have a few options, either AP is lying, and did discard the Primeval Titan but is trying to lie their way out of it.
NAP is lying and switched Arboreal Grazer and Primeval Titan in response to Living End.
Or one of the players misremembered what happened at the start of the game.
The HJ investigated and determined that there both wasn’t enough evidence to DQ anyone, but also determined there wasn’t enough evidence to move the Primeval Titan. So he just issued a time extension and moved on. I asked him about it later and he mentioned that the act of switching the cards would be fairly obvious, I countered by saying that NAP was already interacting with his GY while Living End was resolving, so a switch wouldn’t be too obvious, additionally AP would be busy moving his creatures around as well and wouldn’t be paying as much attention to NAP. At the time I very much thought NAP had done something weird, but again, I was only the judge asked to sit on the match, so I had barely any involvement with the investigation. Upon reflection I think I agree a little more with the HJ since evidence seems really scarce in this situation.

The Backup That Wasn’t
AP cast Explore without green, allowed NAP to draw two cards off their two Esper Sentinels, then AP played two fetchlands and passed. NAP drew a card, attacked and went to pass the turn but realized that AP didn’t actually have legal mana at the time to cast Explore. I decided that backing up would be pretty bad, since it would allow AP to shuffle a card from their hand into their library, and it also meant backing up through an attack step, and three card draws from NAP. Additionally, AP could’ve gotten green off a fetchland, so it wasn’t incredibly damaging to the game for AP to have played this Explore on their turn.

Saturday – EOR Lead


Hieroglyphs Are Back In Style
Currently we lack Purple Fox integration with either Melee or Eventlink, so we aren’t using it, instead we’re using Discord to manage end of round. Here’s how: When there’s less than 50 matches left one person on the EOR team pulls up the list of outstanding tables in Melee and reads them to another person on EOR, who types them into Discord as separate messages. Then another member of the team goes out and manually checks all the outstanding tables to ensure there are players still playing, if any tables are bereft of players and a match result, we dub them a ghost and respond with an “x” emoji to the appropriate message in Discord. (Halfway through the day another judge mentioned that instead of the “x” emoji we should be using the strictly superior “ghost” emoji. I agreed with this QOL improvement.) A little before the end of the round, we’d usually page any “ghosts” asking them either to come up to the stage or report their match result. During the sweep one of the EOR team members would scroll up in the EOR chat and take a look at the time extensions that had been reported throughout the round, as judges were instructed to record any time extensions over 3 minutes in the Discord chat. This team member would read the tables with extensions to another team member, who would mark any that were still outstanding with a “clock” emoji. Then EOR as we know it could begin, judges would report to a member of EOR and that member would send them out to tables and mark those tables with a “judge” emoji. Then when the table either disappeared from Melee or the judge let us know it was done, we would mark the table with a green “x” emoji. Overall I kinda hate this system, but it’s the best system we have.

Cruel Rules
AP casts Archon of Cruelty and before its triggered ability resolves, NAP casts Veil of Summer, what happens? The entire ability is removed from the stack.

Sunday – EOR Lead (But I was the only one on my team)


GhostBusters
As stated earlier, a lot of EOR is busting ghosts, which sounds much cooler than it is. There was a ghost at table 10 and a cluster of players kind of milling around the area. I wanted to wait until time to see if table 10 would remember to report their match but the HJ said “why don’t you just ask that cluster of players if any of them were playing at table 10?” I shrugged, there wasn’t anything better to do, since Day 2 of the event was like, 40 players, so I asked the group. They returned my inquiry with blank stares and shaking heads. I shrugged, not having thought this would actually work, and walked away. A few minutes later, another judge who had been watching the interaction said “as soon as you walked away one of those players entered their match result.” I paused, and said “did that player just lie to me about where they were sitting last round?” In conclusion, I did not DQ the player at table 10 for lying to a judge.

Ice Cold Communication
AP attacks with their 2/2, NAP takes their 0/3 and pushes it in front of the 2/2. AP taps two mana and plays Fire, pointing at the 0/3 and at NAP. NAP then casts Lightning Bolt targeting the 2/2, intending to kill it before damage is dealt. The players then get into an argument about exactly where they are in the turn, AP believing they’ve passed the combat damage step, and NAP thinking they’re before damage has been dealt. The judge on the call thought that the best solution here was to back up the bolt, and have AP acting when they want, which is after damage has been dealt.

You Can Count on Counters
AP attacks with an Ozolith animated by Karn, the Great Creator, and an Arcbound Ravager with 5 +1/+1 counters on it. NAP kills the Arcbound Ravager, and AP moves the counters over to the Ozolith. Will the Ozolith gain +5/+5 from the counters? Yes. Yes it will.

Controlling Triggers
AP casts Emrakul, the Promised End to take control of NAP. Then on NAP’s turn AP casts NAP’s Emrakul, the Promised End to take control of... themselves? Actually, after AP is done taking NAP’s turn, NAP will have control of AP’s turn. It helps if you think about controlling another player as basically standing behind them and moving their arms like a puppetmaster.

(Not) Paying Taxes
If AP controls a Planeswalker with one loyalty counter on it, and Carth the Lion, would they be able to activate its -2 ability? Yes, even though it feels odd with loyalty abilities, they’re treated the same as all other activated abilities, any additional costs are calculated, then cost reductions, then payment is made afterwards. In this case the additional cost of +1 loyalty allows AP to pay only -1 for the ability.

Sometimes, it’s CPV
AP casts Prismari Command targeting NAP’s Walking Ballista with the “deal 2 damage” mode and NAP’s Spellskite with the “destroy target artifact mode”. NAP redirects the target of the damage mode to Spellskite, then activates Welding Jar to regenerate the Spellskite. Afterwards, AP confirms that there’s two damage marked on Spellskite and NAP agrees. AP then casts Lightning Bolt to finish off the Spellskite. At that point a spectator pauses the game. On Prismari Command, the “deal 2 damage” mode comes before the “destroy target artifact” mode, which means that Spellskite is dealt 2 damage, then destroyed, then regenerated, which removes all the damaged from it, which means it doesn’t, in fact, have 2 damage on it, even though both players believed it did. I kinda panicked a bit and allowed AP to take back their Lightning Bolt, but issued no infraction. After discussing it with some other judges later, we agreed it was CPV for NAP, which would result in a similar backup to the one I performed.

...In Conclusion
I ended up having a lot of conversations with other judges and doing a lot of mentoring and shadowing, however I worry that I spent too much time interfacing with other judges and not enough time actually watching magic. It was also a little mopey because the hall was so big and empty, and makes me worry about future events, since the last two SCG events have had poor turnouts. I hope some of the upcoming events in the fall end up being busier.