Toronto, Canada | Pioneer
Time: Friday November 25th - Sunday November 27th 2022
Main Event Players: 367 | Winner: Christian Trudel


Friday – Side Event Floor Judge


These Aren’t Even My Final Blocks
NAP attacks with some creatures, AP says “these aren’t my final blocks”, moves some creatures around, then creates a creature token and tries to block with it. I think this is fine and within reversing decisions as long as the opponent hasn’t done anything, or given any information.

Events in Parallel are Not as Good as Circuits in Parallel
The current F2F system is that players sign up online, but have to physically go up to the front to sign into events and get the Eventlink event code, even if they paid and signed up online already. This is because Eventlink doesn’t allow late entries, so if someone fails to sign into the event on companion for whatever reason, we can’t put them into the event. This means that if there are multiple events starting at the same time, there’s a huge crush as the registration line up. On the flip side, it means that players can get their event associated swag at registration when they check in, rather than having judges pass it out during round 1.

Break Me Off a Piece of That Event
The event I was working was delayed due to registration issues, and then halfway through round 1 both me and HJ of the event were asked to go on break, which meant the floor would be left with a couple relatively inexperienced L1s for a 100 player Comp REL event. In addition to this, a few other events were starting and the evening shift hadn’t yet arrived, which meant that things were a little chaotic. I pushed back a little proposing a break time later on in the day. The sides lead mentioned that there wouldn’t be anyone to cover my break at that point and I mentioned that it probably wouldn’t be necessary as the event would likely be small enough it wouldn’t require a second judge dedicated to it. It felt a little weird because on one hand, it’s kind of disrespectful to the lead’s authority to challenge them like that, but on the other hand, if I think my lead is doing something actively detrimental to the event I want to put up some amount of resistance. In this case the lead eventually relented and let me “have my way” and things were fine, but I’m not really sure if I should’ve been that pushy.

Logistical Commander
The commander events were being run really weirdly. The rounds were an hour and a half but it was a 3 round event, which meant that in total the event would be 4 and a half hours, which is a long time. Also the prize structure only paid out for wins, which meant that at time in the round, after turns, the games would go into sudden death. This, I think is pretty terrible for a commander event, which is going to be pretty casual by nature. Finally the second commander event started in the middle of the third round of the first commander event, which meant that it ended up not launching due to lack of attendance. I think the gold standard for scheduled commander events is to not have them. But barring that, they should be two rounds, with 90 minute round times, and prizing that is distributed at the beginning of the round that is relatively flat and easily split between both three and four players (120 prize tix total in the pool works like a charm). Finally at time in the round active player finishes their turn and each remaining player gets a turn.

Saturday – Regional Championship - Floor Team Lead


Close the Door on Game Losses
At Dreamhack Atlanta we were doing open decklists, and because of this if a player received a game loss for the first game of their match we were allowing them to sideboard. I asked why we did this and was told that one of the HJs said so and the other two were like “yeah this is fine”. Also because they felt it was justifiable, even though it was in opposition to policy. In pioneer a lot of decks have a huge advantage pre-board, meaning that the game without a sideboard would be kind of a wash for one side, and then the final game (if it even got that far) would be the only game where decisions actually mattered.

I Plead a Fifth
The HJ of the event heard about a major pileup on the highway that would potentially cause a large number of players to arrive late. So they decided to delay the event by a half hour instead. I think this is ...somewhat alright. I think my threshold for this is 20% of the event. If 20% of the event is delayed I think it’s reasonable to wait for them, if it’s any less than I think we should probably just issue them a penalty and move on.

Once You Drop, the Fun Don’t Stop
At Dreamhack Atlanta, there was a fairly high profile DQ of a player who was playing with warped foils. Understandably, players were concerned about getting DQ’d for curled foils. The HJ announced over the mic that any players that wanted to get their foils checked should come up to the front. This resulted in about 100 players meandering over to the front to get their cards checked. I personally think this is kind of a waste of time, and if we weren’t already delaying the tournament we shouldn’t have made this announcement. Without the announcement, players who are particularly concerned would get their stuff checked of their own volition, with the announcement players that weren’t previously concerned are now likely to get their stuff checked.

Ruler of GRVs
AP tapped Sky Sovereign and all of their other creatures, and mentioned the on-attack trigger, but never actually designated any of their creatures as having crewed the vehicle. The ruling was that AP had illegally attacked with an uncrewed Sky Sovereign and the game was rewound to declare attackers, which meant AP wasn’t allowed to crew their vehicle now.

The Game Loss That Shouldn’t Have Been
AP had SB cards in their mainboard, the judge on the call ruled GL because the SB cards were additional copies of MB cards, however they were discovered during mulligans, so it didn’t qualify for the upgrade. After consulting with the HJ they realized that it should’ve only been a warning. By the time the HJ got back to the table, the game loss was a distant memory and the players had already completed game two of their match. The HJ ruled that the game the players had just played didn’t matter, and instructed them to finish playing the remainder of their match with a time extension. This seems like a pretty bad solution to me, I think this might be a candidate for the fabled “double match win” since there aren’t a ton of great ways of fixing this.

Sheoldred, the Triggering One
AP took their turn, untapped, drew a card and waited for a moment, then went to attacks, at which point NAP mentioned their Sheoldred trigger. The FJ ruled that nothing had happened in the game to make the trigger missed. He was appealed and upheld on the ruling. I’m not sure how I feel about this, while current policy says that “triggers are assumed to be remembered unless otherwise indicated”, I kinda feel like there should be some kind of temporal cutoff for having forgotten your trigger.

A Foxy Solution
We decided to use purple fox for EOR since it now has integration with MTGMelee, but were supposed to enter our penalties into melee. No other TO has instructed judges to enter penalties on melee but I didn’t really know why. I found out why half way through round 1 as judges approached me mentioning that the penalty entry dialogue box in MTGMelee wasn’t correctly formatted for a phone screen size. If you select “Desktop mode” some phones will show the “submit” button which allows you to complete entering a penalty, but others won’t. I shrugged and told people to enter penalties on PurpleFox since I knew that worked. Except it didn’t, apparently PurpleFox wasn’t syncing properly with the event for some reason. So then I told judges to just keep a log and we’d figure something out. The Scorekeeper made a google form for us to enter penalties (like SCG usually has) and we used that until I discovered a Google Chrome extension on the PurpleFox discord server. I sent it to the scorekeeper and after installing it PurpleFox was back in business! This was, obviously, a bit of a mess, however it all happened before round 2, and we had no other issues for the rest of the event (technologically).

Your Assistance Has Been Noted
I had a judge come to me in R3 mentioning that NAP had mentioned that their opponent might’ve been playing slowly, so they watched the table. Indeed the judge felt like AP had been playing slowly but wasn’t sure about issuing slow play. The match was now over, so I let asked them to cycle back around and watch the player for slow play the next round. After doing so my FJ came back to me and mentioned that while he thought AP was playing slowly, there was a different issue. AP had a paper with some notes on it that they’d had near their lifepad during the game, and then when they’d went to sideboard, they took it out and the judge realized that the innocuous little scribbles were actually sideboarding notes. Normally looking at sideboard notes during a game is outside assistance, downgraded from match loss to game loss. I went over and issued the game loss and was appealed. The HJ spoke to the player for a while and decided that he’d deviate and issue a warning instead, based on the fact that the matchup the player was playing wasn’t actually on the notes, and the fact that the whole reason the notes were on the table in the first place was because the player had them off to the side and covered, but they’d fallen down, so he picked them up from the floor but hadn’t covered them back up. In retrospect, I believe my ruling was potentially incorrect because in general we don’t infract for historical errors unless it’s cheating. (ie. If a player comes up to you in between rounds and tells you about a GRV they committed in the previous round, we won’t issue that penalty) Overall I was uncomfortable with the deviation, but if I were writing policy from the ground up, I probably wouldn't stick a game loss to this player.

However there was still the issue of the slow play to mention. I spoke with the player and let them know what we had noticed and asked them to play a little faster. They were argumentative and kind of brushed me off, but I didn’t think arguing was productive, and resolved that as long as they played faster it wasn’t an issue. I sent a new judge to check in on him the next round, because I didn’t want the player feeling like it was only one judge that thought they were being slow, and also wanted a fresh pair of eyes on it. The FJ mentioned that he felt like it was slow enough for the penalty and issued it. However later on the player complained to the HJ because he felt like all the judges were out to get him. In attempting to make it feel like one judge wasn’t targeting him, I’d made him feel like we all were. Ugh. Perhaps I should’ve issue the ruling, but the player was already not a fan of me, so I’m not sure if that would’ve been correct.

Sunday – EOR Team Lead


The Final Day
Day two of the RC was a lot smaller and a lot smoother, all the kinks in the process had been resolved during the previous day and I got to spend a lot more of the day mentoring my team, and rotating them through the different tasks. At some point during the day I wandered over to a different Comp REL event that looked a little understaffed during the middle of the round and got sucked into a policy discussion, which caused me to forget about sending my team on their half round breaks! Luckily my team members knew when their breaks were supposed to be, and autonomously took them without my supervision.

...In Conclusion
Overall while Toronto wasn’t necessarily the placid event that I had been hoping it would be, it was quiet enough that I didn’t spend the weekend running around like a chicken with my head chopped off. I didn’t get to do as much mentoring as I’d have liked, but I did find a few opportunities to give good feedback and also got to help train the Canadian judges on both MTGMelee and PurpleFox. Overall I had a good time and am glad I get to make some course corrections for the Regional Championships in Calgary.