Denver, Colorado
Time: Saturday May 20th – Sunday May 21st 2023

Saturday – Floor Judge

Always Double Check the TO’s Homework
I’d only worked one TCGCon before this. That event had also had two large headliner tournaments, with larger cash prizes, but neither of them had awarded RC invites. The day before the event I found out that this weekend’s events did in fact award RC invites. I didn’t think too much about this until it dawned on me that TCGCon typically uses third-party software to run events, honestly, this isn’t a big deal, since the software is more functional than EventLink. However I recalled at the previous event that there were some issues with the wrong pairing algorithm being used, additionally I suspected that Wizards likely wouldn’t want third party software being used on the simple fact that it could potentially be programmed to always ensure that people named “tobi” had inherently better breakers, for instance. I contacted a few people to find out, and was told that MTGMelee and Eventlink were currently the only pieces of software authorizes to run RCQs and for anything else the TO could speak with Dreamhack. Only a day before the event, I felt like trying to get the TO to talk to Dreamhack was a bit of a big ask, so instead we switched to using EventLink as the software for Saturday and Sunday. This wasn’t a huge deal because players are generally familiar with the software.

We didn’t have access to a printer, but it was alright, since almost everyone had the app. If they didn’t we’d simply have them report to the scorekeeper for their seat each round. A side effect of running an event in EventLink is that we still don’t have manual pairings, to avoid unfortunate things happening, the HJ added 3 minutes onto the end of each round to allow players to review standings. I personally think this is a bit excessive, since most of the time people can double check their results any time after they’ve been entered. Another current issue with Companion was that players were being shown a notification that said they’d entered their match result, even if they hadn’t entered it! It would apperantly show up whenever anyone in the entire tournament entered a match result.

Back With My Old TO....
The current era of working events really puts judges front and centre when it comes to event organization and planning. More and more I’m finding that the TOs are looking to the judges to help them organize events. For example, the TO wasn’t really sure what to do about side events, or whether they wanted them at all. I proposed that we did $5 commander pods, that gave a pack to each player and $15 drafts with the prize structure 1 win – 1 pack, 2 wins - 3 packs, 3 wins – 7 packs, which has the handy side-effect of being one entire box of packs for a draft (including prizes!). The other thing we needed to work out was how to actually execute ODEs, since it’s really unlikely for a group of eight players to all come up at once to draft or whatever. Back in the old days, CFBE used to use restaurant buzzers to hail players when the draft or commander pod was ready to launch. The way this works is that when a player comes up to pay, they pay and are given a buzzer in exchange. Then when the event is ready to launch, the registration person will buzz all the buzzers which will cause all the players holding them to wander back over to the drafting area. TCGCon didn’t have buzzers, but I recently purchased a set, since I’ve been finding myself doing a lot of smaller shows that could really make use of a nice set of buzzers. Other than not having enough charge time on Saturday, they worked pretty well!

Mid-Game Marks
I had another judge bring to my attention that a player was using two different sets of sleeves for their deck (very noticeably so) I felt that it was a “marked cards - warning” and a resleeve would need to happen. I spoke to the player who had concerns about being able to afford sleeves, I knew they were there with a parent, and said they should talk it over with them first, since they wouldn’t be allowed to continue playing with a marked deck. After the player returned with a new pack of sleeves, I realized that they were actually in the middle of a game! This was a bit of an oversight, since resleeving mid-game is a cumbersome and error-prone, and should generally be avoided. A good rule of thumb is that if the marked cards are bad enough that you need to fix it right now, it should likely be a game loss. Oops. Also weirdly enough due to some Deflecting Palm nonsense the game actually ended in a draw. Which meant the players needed to go to game four, the player that chose to go first in the previous game would choose who went first in the game four.

BestCoastDecklists
Because we swerved to using totally different event software the night earlier, half the players had already submitted their decklists through BestCoastPairings, and didn’t have paper lists. We decided that this was fine, we could still access BCP, and for anyone who couldn’t figure it out, or didn’t know they needed a decklist, we had them fill out a paper one. I asked players who wanted to make adjustments to submit a paper list, since BCP wouldn’t allow players to alter their decklists. This resulted in one player asking me if I wanted a paper list, I asked if his list online was correct, he said it was, and so I told him I didn’t need the paper one. As it turns out, his list online wasn’t correct, in addition to this, his plains were marked enough that I felt it merited a game loss, luckily the IPG says that if a player would receive multiple game losses at once they only receive one.

Eradicated by Early Intent
A theoretical question that came up was the following: NAP declares they want to keep, then AP says they want to mulligan, then NAP says they want to mulligan. This technically falls under the purview of Mulligan Procedure Error, and NAP is forced to mulligan to 5. This feels weird to me, because in other parts of policy declaring an intent to do something early, doesn’t lock you into that decision unless the opponent does nothing (ie. Saying “Pithing Needle Scalding Tarn” locks you into naming Scalding Tarn, unless NAP does something, for instance, cracking Scalding Tarn).

I Foretell a Warning
While this hasn’t come up since Kaldheim, someone for some reason, was playing some weird Foretell cards in modern. Foretell cards, like morph creatures, need to be revealed at the end of the game to verify that they do in fact have either morph or foretell, but unlike with morph creatures, there’s no game loss for failing to reveal foretell cards. I believe I discussed it in a tournament report a while ago, but I believe the reason for this is that while paying {3} for a 2/2 isn’t great, it’s still somewhat impactful on the game, and there are certainly games where you’d want to do that. It’s hard for me to think of many circumstances where a player would want to pay {2} and exile a card from their hand. Certainly there are corner cases, but I think the avenue for advantage is much more minimal here.

Exchanges Made
AP casts Exchange of words, choosing to switch the text boxes of Snapcaster Mage and a Morph creature. What is in each creatures text box? The morph creature will have Snapcaster Mage’s text, however it can’t be turned face up, since when the game goes to check what its morph cost is, it will only find Snapcaster Mage’s text box, which doesn’t contain a morph cost.

Sunday – Floor Judge

Restrictions, Reschmictions
AP presented a deck that was only 74 cards with Yorion as their companion. A few turns into the game they noticed a pile of 6 cards off to the side of their mat that should’ve been in their deck. This doesn’t fit the definition of the upgrade, so the fix is to have the opponent select cards from the cards that aren’t in the deck until they’ve picked six. We uh, didn’t do that, we just issued the infraction and had the player shuffle the six face down cards into the library, since we felt it was obvious that those were the six that should’ve been in there.

Promo Token – This Event Only
Players were using the promo card (Unholy Heat) face down as a token. This is slightly questionable, since many decks are actually playing that card. Personally I think it’s fine as long as the player isn’t playing unsleeved, or as long as the unholy heat isn’t sleeved in the same sleeves as their deck.

Last Chance to Avoid Sudden Death
The ReCQ judge gave players in their event 55 minutes each round to avoid having matches go into sudden death. This is certainly and interesting approach, though I disagree with it, I think we do want to avoid sudden death, but 55 minutes feels very arbitrary,

Salty-Boy Simon
I wandered over to shadow a judge call and immediately saw that it was getting contentious. The players were starting to get aggressive with each other, I waited a little while to see if the floor judge would separate the players, but when they didn’t I stepped in just as Simon interrupted NAP for the third or fourth time, and asked him to talk to me away from the table. I spoke with Simon for a little while, allowing the judge on the call to hear NAP’s side of the story. After that I spoke with NAP away from the table while the judge heard Simon’s side of the story. In an effort to avoid taking over I didn’t get too involved in the mechanics of the call, but from what I was able to glean, Simon was playing Amulet Titan and had played an extra land on their turn, NAP noticed the issue and then a judge was called to fix the situation. NAP mentioned that Simon was just being generally unpleasant to be around and was playing slowly. I asked NAP how the matchup was, and he mentioned it was a rough matchup so I attributed some amount of his stress and frustration to that. Eventually the judge on the call issued a warning and rewound the extra land play. I stayed at the table to keep the peace for the remainder of the match, though nothing significant happened.

Things went okay until the second to last round, Simon sat in the wrong seat and played someone else’s opponent. 25 minutes into their game another player noticed that Simon was in the wrong seat and alerted a judge. Simon claimed the companion app showed him table 5 and not 8. It also turned out that the player at table 5 had also no-showed, allowing Simon to sit in their seat and play their opponent without realizing it, Simon never confirmed that he was playing the correct opponent. The judge on the call went to address this issue, giving Simon a match loss for not being in the correct seat. At this point, Simon got very upset and began to throw blame everywhere, first accusing his opponent, the player at table 8 of being sharky and not notifying Simon that they were in the wrong seat, the player at table 8 retorted that he didn’t know who Simon was, and Simon continued to goad him. Then later he said that his longtime nemesis in the community had spoken to the player at table 8 and somehow colluded to ensure that the player at table 5 never showed up, after seeing that Simon had sat at the wrong table. This is... exactly as tinfoil-haty as it sounds. We determined that nothing of the sort happened (there’s no consequences to doing our due diligence if we have the time and bandwidth) but I chalked it up to a player being mad and making wild assumptions and left it alone.

I felt like it was somewhat reasonable that EventLink hadn’t refreshed Simon’s pairings or something, so we offered him a refund for his tournament entry. Simon calmed down and we un-dropped him from the event... or so we thought. The next round rolled around and lo and behold Simon had been dropped from the event somehow. We weren’t about to repair the entire tournament for this guy, but this was definitely our bad, or potentially EventLink’s bad. The TO offered him a free entry into Sunday’s event and prized him out as if he’d won the last round.

The next day Simon returned and there weren’t any problems until the final round. Simon witnessed another player getting a game loss for marked foils beside him and so Simon asked the judge to check over his deck to avoid similar issues. The judge mentioned that a Kiora and some forests were marked, but that because Simon had spoken to the judge about it, he wouldn’t be receiving a game loss. The judge let Simon know that they had 10 minutes to find replacements. Simon took longer than 10 minutes and wasn’t able to find a replacement for Kiora. The judge informed him he was getting a game loss due to Decklist Problem, since now we had to change the list to accommodate the removal of Kiora and the addition of a Forest, and he blew up. To his credit perhaps the responding judge could’ve been clearer on delineating what exactly Simon wasn’t getting a game loss for, but Simon’s response was definitely disproportionate to the situation. He repeatedly berated the judge and continued arguing. The HJ spoke with me about assessing a DQ. I mentioned that if Simon continued the way he was, we had fairly strong grounds for USC-Major for harassing the judge, since his behaviour was clearly taking an emotional toll on the HJ. But I mentioned that we should just see if Simon would refuse to follow instructions, because without a legal deck, we would simply drop him for tardiness.

While myself and the other judge were conferring I heard later from Simon’s opponent that he slammed his deck down in front of her and demanded that she find the foil. She didn’t know anything about it was simply stunned and afraid. She brought up to me that she felt anxious about playing against him, because he was just so angry. I let her know that no single thing he had done up until this point really constituted removal from the event, but that there would be a judge watching the match. The player eventually begrudgingly accepted and what followed afterwards was the worst 90 minute match of my life. The player was just constantly making small quips and irritable remarks and just being generally unpleasant.

There was a point in the match where he had a draw a card trigger on the stack and a trigger from Cavalier of Thorns, which would have him look at the top five cards of his library and select one. He looked at the top card, and then began grabbing additional cards, the motion was suspicious, and it certainly seemed like there was potentially an avenue where he looked at the top card and then decided he wanted to order the triggers differently. I ruled that the card draw trigger was resolving first and left it alone without assessing a penalty. A few turns later his opponent forgot to make a food token off Witch’s Oven and a spectator pointed it out. I also didn’t issue an infraction there and Simon got very upset insisting that we issue an infraction. I admit I probably should’ve just issued infractions as normal, but I’m also used to hand-waving some amount of loose play here and there. We asked each player if they’d received any infractions earlier in the event and Simon said he hadn’t, which we later realized wasn’t true.

Luckily his opponent managed to beat him. What followed afterwards was a huge sigh of relief from the rest of the tournament. He proclaimed he would “get his lawyers involved” due to all the horrible judge calls.

Upon reflection his behaviour was unacceptable, and he should’ve definitely been issued a USC-Minor on Saturday, and I think before the top 8 match even began we should’ve just DQ’d him for his behaviour right then and there. I also feel like both situations, the extra land play and the ambiguously stacked triggers were both highly suspicious, and if we’d had the emotional bandwidth to investigate them further it’s somewhat likely there was some amount of foul-play. But I think that deep into the pile of interactions I was just so exhausted with this player. Looking at his behaviour as a whole, as well as some of the lies he told, it’s likely there was other dishonesty at play. I was never the primary judge on the call, and as such didn’t really get a great feel for Simon until that top 8 game, but even so I think I made a mistake in not encouraging the HJ to remove Simon earlier. We did end up DQing him from the event without prizes after the conclusion of his game after we’d had a little time to reflect on the entire thing.

...In Conclusion
Overall the event went well all things considered, the Simon issue was certainly stressful but I think myself and the HJ both learned something from the situation and will be better about stamping out problematic behaviour in the future. I had an overall good time working TCGCon.