Calgary, Canada | Pioneer
Time: Friday December 9th - Sunday December 11th 2022
Main Event Players: 267 | Winner: Joseph Karani


Friday Pioneer RCQ Head Judge – 90 players


Wedding Investigator
AP cast Wedding Announcement through their own Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, then passed the turn. NAP drew a card then noticed the issue as they were considering casting their own Fatal Push on the Thalia. My FJ wanted to rewind through the cast of Wedding Announcement, which I was fine with, but I also wanted to do a little poking into the situation, as it checked all my boxes of “investigate further”. AP had violated their own card to their benefit, and the opponent had brought attention to the error. I asked how good Wedding Announcement was in this match, AP mentioned that it was a sideboard card that they’d brought in, they mentioned that while it was strong in this board state, it wasn’t a particularly critical play, as it was only turn 3. The Rakdos player corroborated this story, saying that while the game would be better for them without that card but it wasn’t an auto-lose. AP didn’t have other plays for turn three, all of which made my suspicion meter go up, not down. However, while I was talking to NAP, AP mentioned to my FJ that they were having some issues with the technical aspects of the deck, as it was their first time playing mono white humans in paper magic, as the bulk of their testing had been online. While the situation was fairly suspicious, I also felt like it was within the realm of a reasonable mistake, and simply executed the rewind. Upon retrospect, I should’ve asked whether the player queued for the regional championship online or in a store, and if it was in a store, which deck it was with. This is potentially something I could corroborate with the store in my downtime during later rounds.

Force of Policy
A fellow judge brought up a situation that had occurred in an RCQ recently, they were wondering if I’d downgrade the DLP game loss if a player wrote “Force of Will” on a modern decklist. I immediately said that the intent was probably “Force of Negation”. The documents say “the head judge may choose not issue this penalty if they believe that what the player wrote on their decklist is obvious and unambiguous.” I feel that it’s fairly obvious and unambiguous that the player meant Force of Negation. However my fellow judges disagreed stating that it’s possible the player would actually be trying to play Force of Will. I mentioned that it’s unlikely that would go unnoticed by an opponent, and seems like a low value cheat, so the advantage of putting Force of Will on a decklist seems pretty negligible.

Human-Aided Splits
Similar to the 10k at Dreamhack Atlanta, if the players wanted to split the prizes for the RCQ, they’d have to organize it amongst themselves, meaning that the judges and TO wouldn’t do anything to enforce an agreed upon prize split. We’d simply ask for a bracket at the end and send the money to people based on the bracket. So players would have to send each other prize money after the event to regulate their split. This is what happened at Dreamhack in the top 4 (though I’m unaware if the player in first actually distributed the prizes. Based on the lack of Twitter threads I can assume they did). Here however, after the explanation, the players simply decided to play it out.

Saturday - Regional Championship Appeals Judge


Product Panic
There was a bit of a confusion as to who was in charge of distributing what the morning of the event. Which resulted in some last minute changes to the plan, which, combined with the fact that the HJ didn’t make an announcement asking players whether they all had the event-related swag that was handed out, resulted in a rather embarrassing scenario where we posted pairings for round one and half a row of players put up their hands and began yelling for a judge because they didn’t have promos and playmats! Sometimes we go on autopilot when making announcements and since I don’t often find myself in a position to make announcements for large events that include a bunch of product distribution, it didn’t cross my mind as something that we needed to do. Rest assured I won’t be forgetting this mishap any time soon, and will be very aware of the impact of asking players whether they got all the stuff they were supposed to get.

The Answer is Like Night and Day
Right now, I feel like we have two common “trick questions” in policy. One is how to handle Sagas - it’s very tempting to rule missed trigger instead, which is incorrect, as it’s a GRV and you can either backup or not. The other is a missed Night/Day cycle, which judges are very tempted to rule GRV (which is half correct) and then attempt to partial fix it. The problem is, we don’t have a partial fix for this that’s supported by policy! Oftentimes the “Night/Day” question takes the form of “we began the night/day thing a while back, but then the permanent that cared about it died and we forgot to keep tracking it.” The first step to fixing this is to determine what it should be right now, that can be fairly easily figured out by asking whether 0 or two spells were cast on the previous turn. If it was zero, then it should be night, if it was two, it should be day. If it was neither, ask about the previous turn, until you get to a turn when one of these conditions was met. Then, if the player simply wanted to know, your work is done. However, usually the player has done something (such as play a new werewolf and resolved it on the day side) which might be illegal depending on what it should be right now. If they have done the illegal thing and their opponent didn’t point it out right away, then we need to issue a double GRV and rewind to when the night/day designation should’ve changed, or we leave it alone.

Field of Errors
AP was playing Lotus Field Combo and activated their Thespian Stage, copying a foil, extended-art Lotus Field. To keep the board state clear and unproblematic, they turned their Thespian Stage face-down and went into their sideboard, grabbed a nonfoil Lotus Field and placed it on top of the face-down Stage. Then later NAP had Thoughtsiezed AP, and AP played with their hand face up on the table for a few turns, when AP went to scoop up their hand, after accumulating enough unknown cards, they accidentally scooped up the face-down Thespian Stage as well. A little while after that NAP noticed, and mentioned that AP seemed to have too many cards in their hand. This was initially brought to me by a FJ who wanted to double check a hidden card error ruling, and also rope me into an investigation. Scooping up the face-down Thespian stage was a plausible story, but I wanted to find out how relevant to the game having an extra Thespian Stage would be.

AP they revealed that while they weren’t doing great in this game, they were about to cast Supreme Verdict to keep themselves from dying in the next two turns. The other cards in their hand were two copies of Hidden Strings, which, combined with their 3 active Lotus Fields, meant they had access to enough mana to do basically anything they wanted to do. They told me that at this point in the game, another Lotus Field/Thespian Stage wasn’t terrible, but really they needed a draw spell of some kind. I decided that there just didn’t seem to be enough advantage to call this cheating. However, there were enough extra cards in the deckbox to call this deck problem - game loss. I let AP know that they couldn’t have actual extra Lotus Fields in with their SB and that they were getting a game loss. They nodded and opened the other compartment in their deckbox, revealing even more cards that weren’t part of their deck. I stopped them and let them know that, no, the other half of their deckbox was not a good place to store extra cards either, and that they should just put all the extra cards in their bag.
As I was retelling the story to another judge later, I mentioned that the Lotus Fields in their deck actually looked pretty warped and that maybe we should run a targeted deck check on them. I paused, thought for a moment, and then decided I’d just find the player and tell them to fix that too, before their next match.

Dauntlessly Overturn
AP said “initiate, bodyguard”, tapped two plains and cast both Hopeful Initiate, and Dauntless Bodyguard, putting the Bodyguard on top of the initiate. On NAP’s turn they cast Hidetsugu Consumes All, and whne AP tried to sacrifice Dauntless Bodyguard, they said that a choice hadn’t been made for it! The FJ had ruled missed trigger for the Dauntless Bodyguard. I began examining communication and investigating whether I considered stacking the creatures a strong enough signifier to overturn when I remembered that Dauntless Bodyguard isn’t a trigger at all! It’s a replacement effect! I remembered that we had a partial fix, so I quickly ruled GRV partial fix and has AP choose a creature now. While I think this results in a slightly more correct game state, this doesn’t actually fall under the purview of the partial fix! The IPG says “if a player made an illegal choice (including no choice where required) for a static ability generating a continuous effect still on the battlefield, that player makes a legal choice.” Dauntless Bodyguard doesn’t generate a continuous effect, it’s a choice that impacts its second linked ability. So in fact the ruling is either GRV – backup or, we determine that the communication was clear enough that no infraction has been made. I’m on the fence about whether the communication was clear. AP did have another legal creature that he could’ve chosen, however stacking the creatures on top of each other is common shorthand for visually representing what’s been chosen. I think in the future, I’m probably more on the line that this communication is clear enough.

To Attack or Not to Attack, That is the Question
AP attacked with Adeline, Resplendent Cathar and created the associated token. Then afterwards they drew a card off their Wedding Announcement. The FJ ruled that they should instead create a 1/1 creature, as creating a token tapped and attacking didn’t count as “having attacked with two or more creatures” since the verbiage “attacked” means “declared as an attacker”. AP appealed and I upheld.

There Are Some Things Infractions Won’t Fix, For Everything Else, There’s the IPG
AP was shuffling their library in a way that enabled NAP to see the bottom card. I told them there wasn’t an infraction for this, as otherwise AP could just load NAP up with infractions by shuffling poorly. The players were a little uneasy with the lack of infraction, since it did feel like something had gone wrong, but I think they understood my explanation.

Shocking Conclusion
AP paid two life and played a shockland untapped, then cast Cityscape Leveler, destroying one of NAP’s creatures, then passed the turn. NAP drew a card and looked at their board and realized that AP’s shockland couldn’t come into play untapped because they controlled a Thalia, Heretic Cathar. If the land didn’t come into play untapped AP wouldn’t be able to cast Cityscape Leveler. AP was at a low life total, and while they weren’t dead on board if they didn’t cast the Leveler, they were dead if NAP drew a creature card due to their Adeline, Resplendent Cathar. The FJ on the call ruled that they wanted to rewind but not allow NAP to choose not to pay two life, as that was legal. Doing this meant that NAP both was down two life, and couldn’t cast the Leveler (as they only had forests in their hand) and was now dead on board. The Thalia had been in play since the third turn, however AP had only played basic lands since then, so its ability hadn’t been relevant for the past five turns. I felt like this was reasonable and decided this was likely not cheating. Now I had to figure out what I was doing with this GRV. I did want to rewind the life payment, however I had discussed similar situations at SCG Baltimore, (AP fetches Dryad Arbor while a Grafdigger’s Cage is on the battlefield) and most judges took the firmer approach of only backing up to the point of the illegal action, which in this case, is having the land enter untapped. In the end I couldn’t really think of a way to justify the overturn to my FJ and the opponent, which I took as a good indication I probably shouldn’t rule that way.

Chasing Foxes
I feel like this year has just been figuring out how to deal with all the new software associated with tournaments. I haven’t heard any best practices for when to page players that haven’t reported their match results and aren’t still playing, so I propose that we page them at 0 time remaining in the round, because theoretically, they have until the timer runs out to report their result, in my opinion. Also usually any time before zero there are still too many matches out to productively do this.

Sunday – Regional Championship Appeals Judge


Featuring... Last Minute Changes!
As soon as my team meeting was complete the TO for Face to Face came over and said “I want better pictures! Let’s set up some feature match tables!” His initial suggestion was to make the top four tables feature matches, however a few of us mentioned that later on in the day those tables might just be drawing, and not actually playing magic, ergo, making for poor feature match tables. Instead we should take a more traditional approach to feature matches, calling out specific matches at the beginning of each round, and having judges escort those players to the special tables. We were torn as to whether to name the feature matches Alpha, Beta, Charlie and Delta, or Alpha, Beta, Unlimited and Revised. I voted for the latter configuration. We also set up tablecloths and renumbered the room to accommodate for the stolen tables.

Companion Strikes Again
While the Regional Championship was running smoothly, the Opens that were running concurrent were not going so well. Apparently if you start a round in EventLink, then add players, then delete the round and create a new one, it will drop the added players. This caused massive issues with the events, and eventually they had to construct a whole new event in EventLink just to get around this issue.

Deck Check Confusion
Sometimes, it can be hard to remember the basics. Our deck check team was comprised of a lot of people who had never performed a deck check before, and while giving granular instructions to an experienced team can come across patronizing, doing the same thing might be necessary for a newer team. Multiple times over the weekend, players were swooped after opening hands were drawn, and sideboards were reconfigured weirdly. These sorts of small things are easy to forget if you’re used to working on the circuit with “career judges”.

It’s the Little Things...
Two things that I noticed over the weekend, one, don’t lose the cases that the trophies come in, players want these to carry their trophies home. Two, bring some blank modal DFCs, this was actually a lesson from Dreamhack since there were so few Magic vendors there, they actually ran out of sleeves, making marked cards penalties really awkward. From here on out, I plan to bring about 12 modal DFCs just in case, this also means that marked cards penalties can be more quickly fixed (you can give the modal DFCs for the current game and then have the player find new sleeves if they want after the match.

The Elephant...
So the biggest thing that happened at RC Calgary was a monster DQ that happened on day two of the event regarding an incident that occurred on day one of the event. Historically judges weren’t supposed to discuss ongoing investigations because the PIC might reach out and have more questions. However in the current climate with no investigations committee or PIC I’m not sure what the rules are. To be honest, even just processing DQs is a bit of a mess right now, there’s no official paperwork to give players (a judge has created something reasonable that we can use until we have official stuff) There used to be something on the WPN website, but the link is broken currently, so at the Regional Championship, we had to use a PDF from 2015.

Best current DQ Paperwork

...In Conclusion
Overall this event was a little more work than I expected from such a small amount of players. But I really enjoyed taking appeals and being the double check on calls. I also got to practice doing a lot of investigations, and while I personally didn’t spearhead any DQs I felt pretty okay about some of my investigations. I still feel like I have a lot to learn in this regard but I was really happy for the opportunity to be in a position to practice! The other thing I noticed is that oftentimes floor judges would come up to me for an appeal looking kind of panicked. This not only makes me anxious, but makes the floor judge come across inexperienced and panicky. I reflected that this is often how I approach head judges for appeals (since I want to make sure the call doesn’t take too long) and it’s also problematic because if I’m panicky my explanation to the HJ often isn’t amazing. So I think I have some ideas on how to be a better FJ from this event as well!