Texas, USA | Modern
Time: Friday October 7th,-Sunday October 9th 2022


Friday – Side Events


On Thin Knowledge
A fellow judge brought me a really interesting question. AP controls a land enchanted with On Thin Ice which is currently exiling NAP’s Leonin Arbiter. If NAP Channels Boseiju, Who Endures on the enchantment, what happens? Well the enchantment leaves the battlefield and Leonin Arbiter is immediately returned. Then AP needs to go search for a land, but is stopped by Leonin Arbiter. Because paying for Leonin Arbiter’s ability is a special action, AP can only do it when they have priority, which they don’t have during the resolution of Boseiju’s ability. So they simply can’t get a land. The other variation to this question is what if NAP instead Channels Boseiju on the land that is enchanted with On Thin Ice. In this scenario the land is destroyed and AP searches for a land, then after the ability is done resolving state-based actions are checked and the On Thin Ice is put into AP’s graveyard at that point.

Other Judge
NAP called me over and let me know that AP had forgotten to put the third lore counter on their Saga. I quickly let them know about how it was a turn-based action and that we could backup or not. The player seemed incredibly confused and let me know that recently at a local RCQ a judge had instead ruled that the counter simply be put on immediately and the saga would be sacrificed but wouldn’t get the trigger. This is uh, very not how policy tells us to handle this. At any REL. I explained this to the player, but other judge’s ruling was definitely a more desirable ruling than mine, so they appealed. At regular REL. I shrugged and grabbed the sides lead and was upheld. The player was disgruntled and I said I’d chat with their local judge partially to ameliorate the player and partially to correct the local judge. As it turns out, that judge was on my team the next day! I approached the judge and managed to sort things out pretty amicably.

Saturday – 20K EOR Team


EOR Woes
So, I’ve been on EOR a lot recently and I’m not a big fan of the current system. To be clear I think it’s the best system we’ve currently got, but that’s not saying much. My team lead had a similar feeling towards the current state of EOR so we decided to try a paper EOR for one round. The event was about 300 players, so it wasn’t a big deal, but paper EOR was just miserable, and gave me a new appreciation for the current system, even if it is a far cry from purple fox.

The Policy Does Nothing!
AP cycles a card by drawing then paying two mana after the fact. While this is certainly no good, all we can do as judges is rule HCE – warning and then... not fix anything.

Creativity Caged
AP pulled me aside and asked what would happen if they cast Indomitable Creativity on NAP’s Grafdigger’s Cage and their own creature token. I read the card and was like “Indomitable Creativity will just do what it does” then I paused and was like “Grafdigger’s Cage actually doesn’t interact at all with Indomitable Creativity because Creativity puts the creature into play from exile, not the library”. The player was like “oh, great! Thanks” then I realized that this was uh, a little outside assistance-y. At the time I was just excited at the revelation and shared it without thinking. Upon reflection, I shouldn’t have said that second part and should’ve just answered the question the player was asking. Though to be fair I’d rather judges err on the side of OA than on the side of being obtuse about giving answers.

Goblin Mat-wrong
AP cast Goblin Matron, and put the fetched card on top of their library instead of into their hand. They also controlled a Conspicuous Snoop, which was revealing the top card of their library. They passed the turn and then after drawing for their next turn noticed the issue, the fix was game rule violation – partial fix, draw now. But it didn’t feel amazing because they had effectively missed out on a turn of Conspicuously Snooping.

Time in the Round is More of a Feeling
What do we do if we’ve called time in the round, and then stumble upon a table that didn’t get the memo and is still playing? My personal policy on this is to just announce turn 0 now, since players are entitled to five turns before they draw, and I don’t want to blindside them by cutting them off immediately. I spoke to some other judges who had different ideas about this. One mentioned they’d just cut them off immediately, or only give them one more turn, with the argument that depending on how long they were past time (5-10 minutes potentially) they’d likely already had at least five turns already. If the players complained, well this was a mistake they made and now they were suffering the consequences for it. The other judges argued that the entire event shouldn’t be delayed due to the negligence of two players. At first I was starkly opposed to this, but after discussing it with others I kind of see the reasoning of not lagging the entire event. I think sometimes I put the needs of the individual players in front of me ahead of the needs of the overall event, which can definitely be problematic.

I Wish I was NAP
Under the current rules if I control my opponent and cast a wish-type card I can’t get anything because I can’t look at my opponents sideboard. I was discussing this with another judge and they mentioned that if, for instance a controlled player cast Death Wish, couldn’t they just get a card at random? I mentioned that this seemed fine, but how would we handle if someone cast Burning Wish, for instance? Would they call a judge to select the legal choices and randomize them? This would quickly become incredibly logistically taxing and clunky.

Bound for Orb-Dom
Does Torpor Orb stop Daybound? Nope, because Daybound is a bundle of static abilities, not a triggered ability.

Sunday – 5k EOR Team Lead


Doing Time
I deck checked a player and it took about 7 minutes, I gave them the customary extra two minutes for shuffling or whatever making it nine minutes. The player then asked for an additional two minutes, I was a little annoyed, but gave it to them anyways. My FJ asked about why I did this, my reasoning was that the goal was to give the player the shortest time extension possible, and there were four potential scenarios that could unfold.
A) I could give the player two minutes, this results in a total 11 minute extension and the player is happy.
B) I deny the player the two minutes and they argue with me for 1-2 minutes, which results in a total 11 minute extension, but the player is unhappy.
C) I deny the play the two minutes and they don’t argue with me, this results in a 9 minute extension and they are unhappy.
D) I deny the player the two minutes and they argue with me for 1-2 minutes, then they appeal my ruling, which results in potentially a 15+ minute time extension, and the player will likely be unhappy. In 3/4 of these scenarios the player is going to be unhappy and only one of those saves the event two minutes. Now of course, this becomes a very big problem if players start randomly demanding time extensions because they know that our policy will be to just give the extension, so this doesn’t scale up too well, but at the current rate of players asking for unjust extensions I think we haven’t yet hit a point where this is a war we really need to start fighting.

Ride Past the Trigger
AP cast Eskia’s Chariot and said that when it entered the battlefield they put a die with a “2” on it on the table. The die blended in quite a bit with the table. When they went to combat, they attacked with both Greasefang and Eskia’s Chariot, their opponent took damage and then AP went into their box to get actual cat tokens, NAP said that they’d missed their trigger. The HJ investigated and then decided to say that AP had put the die was onto the battlefield but NAP had likely missed it. The HJ backed up combat, as NAP wanted to block differently with the new information. This felt like a bit of a weird deviation, if the ruling was that the die had been there the whole time, NAP made a mistake and is allowed to block poorly based on misunderstandings of the board state.

Sharky Shenanigans
NAP Cycled Shark Typhoon saying “after damage”, drew a card without looking at it, and went to block. AP wasn’t sure if NAP looked at the drawn card or not, but said that because NAP had said they were cycling after damage it meant that they couldn’t block. I ruled reversing decisions, saying that it was likely the intent was to cycle and block based on the situation as presented, and was likely that NAP didn’t look at the card. I felt that the verbiage “after damage” was simply NAP misspeaking. AP was tapped out and had little they could do about the blocking shark I didn’t think NAP had gained any information.

...In Conclusion
Lately, I’ve been doing a lot of leadership. There are a few reasons for this, the mass exodus of judges from the program over the pandemic left us with a small clutch of experienced folks (many of whom migrated to Flesh and Blood) and a lot of completely inexperienced folks. Also In Canada, where judge skill has always been hard to come by because of the sparsity of Comp REL events, the pandemic thoroughly ravaged our ranks, leaving Canada with only a handful of judges that have ever even seen an event bigger than 30 players. Secondarily, because of the higher costs of travel, a lot of the SCG events are only viable to me if I get lead, which means I only end up at shows where I’ve been lucky enough to get lead. Because of a few factors, I was able to make Dallas financially viable, and went to the show on the FJ rate. And it was nice. The lack of responsibility was a bit of a breath of fresh air when compared to how much more work leading is. It also gave me more time to focus on other things that usually get lost when I’m stuck in a lead role. One of which was finally picking up my feedback from SCG Baltimore from Ward. He mentioned that I had a habit of changing the wording of my announcements each round. I was operating on the philosophy that people would be more willing to listen to something novel. He mentioned that with the high amount of mic traffic, consistency was important, and would effectively allow the players to tune their ears to only listen to the announcements that were relevant to them, rather than having to listen to all announcements and discern which ones were relevant and which weren’t.