Dallas, Texas
Time: Friday June 2nd – Sunday June 4th 2023
Players: 1174 | Format: Pioneer | Winner: Bradley Schlesinger

Friday – LCQ/ODE Floor Judge

We Don’t Backup for the Elites
Ap cast Elite Spellbinder, looked at NAP’s hand and chose a card. This was all well and good until NAP’s combat phase when they both realized that NAP controlled a Phyrexian Censor, and the Elite Spellbinder that was just being put into the graveyard because it blocked, actually should’ve been tapped. I ruled no backup because the point of the error was AP putting Elite Spellbinder into play untapped, which would mean rewinding the triggered ability, and allowing AP to choose a different card. However now that I think about it, I don’t think this backup is so bad, since we can probably identify what NAP drew for turn, based on what notes AP took on their hand, we can set that card back on top and then re-do the spellbinder ability. It’s not the worst ever upon reflection.

Veiled Rulings
AP activates The Chain Veil and then casts a planeswalker, how many times can they activate its loyalty abilities? I screwed up and answered “once” and they were like “uhhhh appeal?” I went and consulted with another judge and felt well and truly silly and returned with the correct answer.

Dubious Attackers
AP attacked with a bunch of creatures, including a goblin shaman token which went unblocked. Neither player remembered to record the damage for it and now it was NAP’s turn. I examined the board state to see if this was a case of “I just didn’t indicate my attacks clearly enough” but the Goblin Shaman was tapped and a treasure had been created, I ruled double GRV since we both screwed up the damage but I wasn’t super keen on backing up. I told the players that the fix here was to either backup or not, and asked them if anything at all would be different if the life totals were adjusted now, ie. If any of them would be inclined to change any of their plays. Both players shrugged and agreed that they’d do all the same stuff if we backed up, so we just changed the life totals now.

Saturday – Regional Championship - Appeals Judge

Three Heads are Worse than One
Something weird about Dreamhacks Head Judge structure is that instead of having a single traditional “Head Judge” they have three head judges. This is... problematic for many reasons, it means that there’s no single person who has the final say on anything, and we all know how policy arguments can go on forever. Also it’s really unclear who has what responsibilities, we did of course talk about a few things before the day of, but there’s always unexpected things that come up that you’d want to pass over to the “true” head judge. As it stood, I was not only the singular L2 on my HJ team, but I was also the least experienced of the crew. I made this clear to my companions and slipped comfortably into the role of Appeals Judge.

Productive Product
So, product distribution at Dreamhack events is always an adventure since about 80% of the players get a personalized nametag. I was in charge of this in Atlanta and it took forever and was the worst. I didn’t have any involvement in San Diego, but apparently it was great! In Dallas Alderfer and Joe spearheaded the project and I just kinda helped and learned the process. So what we did, was we created player seatings in MTGMelee on Friday evening. Then the scorekeeper printed off sheets with lists of 32 names in alphabetical order on them, which corresponded to the rows of chairs and tables in the room. Then the player decklists were printed out and put with the appropriate list of seatings. Then we had to get the nametags and organize those onto the appropriate list of seatings and decklists. All this was done on Friday night, so it would be ready for Saturday morning, which we knew was going to be a bit of a crunch,. Judges got in at 9am, and the player meeting was slated for 9:30 and like, we wanted to have some kind of all hands meeting, and then individual team meetings, which realistically take us to 9:20, leaving only 10 minutes to distribute this stuff. During those individual team meetings after the all hands, myself and the other HJs went out and put the pieces of paper onto the ends of the corresponding rows of tables. After the team meetings, FJs went out and distributed the deckslists and nametags. We got kind of lucky in that there was a long line to get into the building since Dreamhack has something similar to airport security, so the delays allowed us to get all the product onto the tables on time!

Decklist Conundrum
The Regional Championships are all open decklist, this means that for each event we have to determine a number of policies because they aren’t really defined anywhere. The first one, is how long we’re giving players for decklist revision and if that’s gooped in with their play time. At the previous Dreamhack RCs it’s been a separate two minute timer. This isn’t a huge bump to tournament time, since over the course of the day it’s only about 20 extra minutes, but most players are done in 30 seconds and are twiddling their thumbs for two minutes. Also players are going to want to look at their lists during sideboarding and this separate 2 minute period doesn’t help with that at all. I think I prefer just putting 52 minutes on the clock and telling players to use it responsibly. Now I do agree that there are the situations where players are trying to rush their opponents or are annoyed that some people take longer to look over a list, but realistically none of those players are taking more than two minutes, and if they are, a judge should’ve been called a while ago to watch for slow play, or uh, slow list-looking. The other thing that frequently comes up is “is it okay to look up a decklist or show a decklist to my opponent on my phone”, I personally think it’s fine as long as both players can see the phone at all times.

The Boogeyman in the Night
The other big policy bogeyman right now is Day/Night and how it should be handled. Policy doesn’t give us great answers, at this event we agreed that it would be double GRV and a rewind to the error or not. I’m not a huge fan of this, and was thinking of iterating for the upcoming RC Edmonton.

Was Lost But Now is Found
At large events I usually like having lost and found in one centralized location. I know sometimes judges want to go and return specific player’s stuff, but most of the time that player will be looking for their stuff and will be told to go to the lost and found, and will panic when the stuff isn’t there. At this show, we had a policy of keeping lost cards and decks up at the main event stage since it was more likely that players would ask for it there before asking at registration where the general lost and found was being managed.

Even MTGMelee has its Off-Rounds
There was one round where MTGMelee just kinda... stopped working. We think it was because the strain on the internet was just randomly too much that round, but we’re not sure. So judges put up a few extra sets of pairings and went out and told players their pairings via their own phones, which were working slightly better. In this fustercluck a judge told a player a wrong seat and only realized after his match was over and he had won the match. Normally, players get a match loss for tardiness for sitting in the wrong seat, however here we double match winned both players because this sounded like a legitimate judge error.

Creative Errors
AP was playing Indomitable Creativity, and was on turn 6 or 7 of a draw-go type match. NAP asked AP how many cards were in their hand, AP fanned them quickly and then scrunched them into a pile and said “7”. NAP felt like this wasn’t totally correct and asked AP if he could count again. AP proceeded to count one by one and arrived at 8. At which point a judge was called. AP had just finished their turn and had played a land for their turn. NAP mentioned that meant that AP had 9 cards in their hand at the start of the turn and that was unusual. NAP mentioned they didn’t know the matchup that well, but AP felt like it was a poor matchup because they had a lot of dead cards. Upon further investigation AP showed me a hand with 3 dead Creativities as well as a Spell Pierce and mentioned they could easily discard any of these cards as they all did nothing right now. I asked both players how the extra card had arrived in AP’s hand and they mentioned that two turns earlier AP had missed a land drop and cracked a clue, they said they must’ve only discarded one for turn instead of two and then not noticed for two turns. I felt like this was very suspicious but not suspicious enough to DQ. Now that we were no longer in DQ land, the correct fix for this is GRV - partial fix, discard now.

Field of Suspicion
AP was playing the Lotus Field combo deck and was in the middle of searching their library for a resolving Emergent Ultimatum when their opponent noticed that they had the wrong amount of mana floating. They had announced 4 but after re-examining the turn, it appeared they only had 3 mana floating, and had missed paying a mana for an opt earlier, (or marking it off of their lifepad). This was turn 5 of turns and if AP had 4 floating mana they’d be able to pay for NAP’s Make Disappear (if NAP had one, AP didn’t know). Both players were x-2 which meant a loss or a draw would knock them out of top 8 but not day 2 (though getting day two would mean going on a winning streak until the end of day 1. I noted that AP’s boogie board was kind of a mess and felt, as a fellow storm player, that this was a pretty easy mistake to make, and simply issued the GRV and executed the rewind.

A Trigger Remembered is Worth Two in the Bush
AP remembered to announce their Worldspine Wurm trigger, but forgot to uh, you know, actually do it. And since then they’d drawn a card for their turn and played a land. This wasn’t a missed trigger, since AP had very much remembered their trigger. This was a GRV, for not correctly resolving their trigger. A rewind would be to shuffle a random card from hand back in and then also shuffle the Wurm into the library. I expressed this to the players, who both agreed it was kinda worse for the game, and asked both players if they felt like just shuffling the wurm in now would be better than leaving it in the GY. They both agreed that yes, this would be a more accurate game, so we did that.

Dig Into HCE
AP cast Dig Through Time, setting their hand of one card aside. Then they dropped a Dig card into their lap, picked it up, and put it on their hand. Then after looking at the Dig set, they realized it was actually supposed to be there instead, so they took it out of their hand and put it back into the Dig set. The correct fix is to reveal both sets to the opponent and have them choose a card from each to exchange, or not exchange if they don’t want to. I uh, for some reason didn’t do that and had the AP reveal both sets but performed no other corrective action.

Triggering Value
AP controlled Elesh Norn, Mother of Machines and played a Tolsimir, Friend to Wolves, putting both Voja triggers on the stack. Once the first one resolves, two more triggers will go on the stack, AP will gain 3 life and can have Voja fight twice. They did, and this caused Voja to die, then the second Voja trigger resolved and they did the same thing again. It was very... value.

Sunday – Regional Championship - Appeals Judge

Looking at Extra Hands
AP cast Cavalier of Thorns, NAP wanted to know what was in AP’s graveyard and reached over and grabbed a pile of cards that turned out to be AP’s hand, and looked at it. There isn’t a fix for this, since there’s no way I can take the information out of NAP’s brain. Both players were pretty chill about the entire episode and it didn’t seem like NAP had done it on purpose so I issued the LEC warning and called it a day.

Reverse that Deluge
If AP casts Narset’s Reversal on Memory Deluge they will look at zero cards and put nothing into their hand. This is because no mana was spent to cast the copy.

Deck Issues
AP presented and drew their opening hand, they mulliganed and then while thinking about their new hand, they checked their sideboard and noticed that they had 16 cards in it. They called a judge. I knew this didn’t fall under mulligan procedure error, because it’s not an issue with mulligans. I also don’t think it fits the upgrade for deck problem, since it wasn’t discovered during the presentation period, so I think it’s just a warning for deck problem, and shuffle the mainboard card back into the library.

To Copy or Not To Copy
Making double-faced cards into copies of other double-faced cards can result in some fun shenaigans. For instance, if you have Lazotep Convert copy something like Enduring Angel, whenever you go to 0 life, the Lazotep Convert card will transform but the copy effect will still make it an Enduring Angel, and you basically can’t die. However if you control something like Valki and make it a copy of Huntmaster of the Fells even if you meet Huntmaster’s transform condition the Valki card won’t transform because it’s not a transforming double-faced card, it’s a modal double-faced card!

...In Conclusion
This show was a wild ride, it was crazy busy and I feel like 10 more judges could’ve been well utilized. I didn’t even mention the fact that half way through the day the lights went out, I think the reason for this was because the lighting panel was actually accessible by the public and a player just leaned on it. I also didn’t mention that halfway through Sunday after the 10k capped, Dreamhack invented “pop-up” 5k that we suddenly needed to assign judges to. Overall while exhausting I enjoyed Dreamhack Dallas and really enjoyed the Appeals Judge role, and would be honoured to do it again someday!