Barcelona, Spain
Time: Friday July 28th – Sunday July 30th 2023


Friday – Scheduled Sides – Floor Judge

Structural Differences
The first thing about Magiccon, which I actually noticed before I got there, is that it was structured very differently from a MagicFest. There are six different areas:

Red: On-Demand Events
Blue: Regular REL events
Black: Comp REL events
White: Professional REL events
Gold: Command Zone
Green: Multiplayer Regular REL events

Before the event I knew what area I would be in, but not what events I was doing, which was a little unusual in the grand prix days, but not totally unheard of in the current era. The main issue with this is, if I'm running a 3-round modern or whatever, it's not a big deal to just walk in and find out the day of. The thing about Magiccon is that it's chalk full of wacky formats that are made up specifically for MagicCon. The idea is that if you can play it at home, it shouldn't be the main appeal of a MagicCon. I think that's a great thing for players, but less great if judges don't have time to prepare for the events they're running!

New Culture, Who Dis?
This was my first time in a non-English speaking foreign country, and it was certainly an experience. Even though you can kind of get by with English in most situations I still had a lot of trouble, and have greater respect for people who don't speak English as their first language. Oftentimes I had to rope in another judge to help me with a call with a Spanish speaking player, and eventually I started doing my announcements in English and then having a nearby judge translate. I think in Europe, all team meetings should have the judges introducing which languages they speak as well as other things, so us goofballs that only speak one language know who to go for when we need help!
Another odd thing, and this might be a MagicCon thing or a Europe thing, I'm not sure, but we got 2 and a half hours of breaks, which is.. a lot. I'm not complaining but it definitely looked like a logistical nightmare for the leads.

All-Play, All Day
My first event of the day was something called "sealed all-play" it's a wacky format where you open your six packs and shuffle them all together, then set a bunch of basic land cards in the middle of the table. Each turn instead of playing a land from your hand, you can play one from the basic land pile, and there are "infinite" lands in the basic land pile (obviously we didn't have the players grab infinite lands, I just told them to grab 10 of each). For things that search for basics in your library, instead you can search the pile. It was.. odd, I had a slew of other questions but was given the instruction "Tobi, the event is supposed to be fun and casual, make the ruling that is the most fun" and I'm down for that! The other common question was "what about the basic lands in our deck" and I let them know that they had Cycling 0. The biggest issue was the fact that a large number of players that signed up didn't seem to realize this wasn't a regular sealed event. I offered those players the option to drop out and ask registration for a refund but most of them decided to stay in. I think the website was perhaps a little unclear about what exactly the event was and registration seemed a little confused as well. Which is a shame, because it's a neat event and I think the players that actually want to play that kind of wacky format might be missing out because of some communication issues.

A Grand Beginning – Grand Melee 27 Players
The other cool thing I got to do was run the Grand Melee event. It was my first time running one, so I spent a little while reading over all the rules beforehand. For better or for worse, the Grand Melee entry in the CR is short, so it wasn't a big deal to just read all of it over. I knew my biggest challenge would be moderating the turn markers and ensuring players moved when enough players were eliminated. I advised all players to use a playmat because of the constant need to compress inwards, and made a personal rule that I would require players to move only if there were two empty seats between them and the other players. This turned out to be largely unnecessary, the event ended up with 27 players total, which isn't a ton, and most of the time when someone was eliminated early on, they were near the end, which meant only a few players needed to shuffle over. The next thing I was concerned about was the turn markers. I was excited when the stage told me they had some, and I envisioned pieces of cardstock with in stands, kind of like the commander "looking for game signs" (some TOs also use something similar for table numbers) unfortunately, they were just plain old printed pieces of paper with the words "Turn marker" on them. They didn't even use the Beleren font! I felt like this was no good for three reasons, two of which were valid.
1) They were too large and would get in the way of the playspace.
2) They were flat, so seeing them from across the table might be difficult.
3) They weren't cute. At all.
I fixed all of these problems and did some team building by using them to teach the rest of the team I was on how to fold paper cranes.
After sorting out the aesthetics of the turn markers, I needed to figure out how to use them! I'd heard some horror stories about having the wrong number of markers etc. Luckily the players seemed to grasp the concept of the turn marker buffer pretty quickly, and while a few markers got closer than they should've to the next marker, it never caused a problem. I calculated the numbers at which I would need to remove turn markers (multiples of four -1) so for this event I needed to remove markers at 23, 19, 15,11,7 and 3 players. Now that last one is a little odd, when there are three players left in the game, rules as written say you remove the last turn marker..... which means that the game grinds to a halt and no one can take any additional turns. This is obviously, incredibly stupid, and I didn't do that. If I had to guess it's likely an oversight in the rules. In actual practice the rule for turn marker removal felt really bad for the player to the left of the player that was just killed, effectively causing them to skip a turn. It also meant the murderer would get another turn before them! A few times I had to take the marker away from a player who was happily about to take their turn.

The first thing I screwed up during actually running the event was announcing the free mulligan, and there were a lot of questions about it. Silly me! Of course they get a free mulligan, this being the "most multiplayer game" that most of these players will ever play.

The other thing about this event was the prize tix system. Each player got 400 tix for participating and then 400 to give to the player that killed them. First this distribution system is great, it takes all the onus off the judges. Next, a bunch of players asked what we'd do if a player killed themselves, I shrugged and said that would count, but only if they actually killed themselves in the game, conceding didn't count. Finally, the players were wondering what would happen to the tix if a player milled out. I shrugged, and said that the CR shouldget the tix, because they'd been killed by game rules (yes I know technically all the kills are CR but like… you know what I mean here). But honestly, removing tix from the prize pool feels kinda bad, at the point where this was being brought up, there were only four players left in the game, and I said I'd just split the tix among the remaining players.

Gimli, Counter of Kills was the only interesting card interaction that happened. This trigger will go on the stack even if there's no way for its controller to have priority. Say it's the turn of the person two spots to my right if they do something that kills a creature of the person directly to my right, Gimli will trigger on their turn. That's odd but feels like what the rules say.

Approach Triggers Fearlessly
Éowyn, Fearless Knight is a really confusingly worded card, especially to non-native english speakers. I got the question "power greater than what" several times over the course of the weekend. For informational purposes, Eowyn will exile a creature with power greater than her own power (usually 4+).

Saturday – Secret Lair Showdown – Deck Check Lead

Schedule Shuffle
I was originally slated to be on late shift ODEs, however I heard that the PTQ and Secret Lair Showdown were looking for more judges. Also the rest of my room was coming in early anyways so I felt like it might be a good switch. Getting moved over wasn't such an easy task in execution, First I spoke to my Lead, and then the Lead of the team I wanted to move to. They both spoke with their Area Leads (I think) and finally also sought verification from the Scheduling Manager. Overall, I'd say the entire switch was a tad laborious, but in the end I got moved.

And I'm kinda glad I did, the event still felt light on staff even though they were up two judges. The PTQ and Secret Lair Showdown both started at 11am and together had about 600 players. The team of judges in total was around 10, to be split between the two events.

I took on the job of deckchecks and spent most of the first 3 rounds organizing lists and tracking down people who were missing lists. Because the event was on MTGMelee there were a few lists that were on melee, then some lists that I had to fish out of the previous Secret Lair pile, and finally some lists that players tried to submit and were simply eaten by Melee. I did this task mostly alone since I didn't think it was worth taking a judge off the floor, though at 1pm when the evening shift came in, I got some assistance with mopping up the last of my list hunting.

Polishing up on Deck Checks
I did get a few checks done even in the first few rounds, as random judges were sent over to the event to help out. What was particularly interesting is that many of the European judges that I checked with opted for the polish method of deck checks. Which constitutes of keeping the deck in order and putting tick marks beside card names on the decklist. I tried it a few times, but wasn't very good at this method. I do think there are some upsides though.

Pros:
-Players don't have to reshuffle their decks
-If you're good at it, it might be slightly faster
-It's much less likely you'll de-sideboard the player

Cons:
-If you make a mistake you essentially have to recheck the entire deck.
-Marking up the decklist makes it more annoying to check the same player again

Overall I subscribe to the philosophy of "do the deck check method you're best at". For me I think that needs to be the "sort by color, then start checking". I found myself missing a lot of cards during the Polish check and I think this is an issue that is unlikely to get ironed out with practice. But I'm glad I gave this method a shot and am excited to offer as an option to newer judges since it might be better for some of them.

Sunday – Scheduled Sides – Floor Judge

Gavin's Wild Ride
On Sunday I was slated to be in the black comp REL area along with five or six other judges. However for the entire day there were four tournaments in that area that were all capped at 32 players. This job did not require 6 judges. I quickly got moved over to the blue area, where Gavin Verhey was running his large "unknown" event. That event was very interesting. First, all players got 3 Commander Masters packs, 2 Lord of the Rings packs, 1 Mystery Booster and 10 special Gavin Verhey cards. There was no hard deckbuilding time cutoff because it was league play only, what does that mean? Well, once players were done deckbuilding, they were instructed to go find opponents. The judges could help with this, in that players would go up to a judge (resulting in a large clump of players by the judge) and the judge would randomly pair them off and point to some empty seats and tell them where to go. You might be wondering how this event functioned, being completely divorced from pairing software, well you see each player was given a "league sheet", this was a small piece of paper that had space for player to write their name, then three spaces for them to write their opponent's names and whether they won or lost. After players played three games, regardless of their record, they could hand in their sheet and get a promo card.

Gavin's Wild Rulings
There were a number of rulings on odd cards that I had to give, I've taken down the more interesting ones below, along with a photo of the card to help.

Form of the Stax Player
AP wanted to know whether it happened each upkeep. I carefully read the card (as one does with mystery weirdness) and let them know that each upkeep they'd choose a card off the list and create a token copy of it. AP then asked "wait I get to choose?" I shrugged and said "that's what the card says" AP then said "but Gavin said you have to roll a d6 to decide!" I facepalmed and let the players know that whatever Gavin said was final on this event. I also asked the player if Gavin had made any other rulings on this card that I should be aware of. According to the player, he had not. I reached out to Gavin later to find out why the card uh, said something totally different from what it did and he both confirmed he had, in fact made this ruling, and that it was supposed to be that way. Apparently somewhere between concept and production the word "random" had fallen off this card.

Tax Keeper
AP pointed to their commander, who was still on the battlefield, and asked what bonus Tax Keeper would get, seeing as they'd only cast their Commander once this game. The Commander Tax ticks up when AP casts their Commander, though it only matters when you're re-casting your commander. So I ruled that the creature got +2/+2.

Khallist Rhoka
This card is super interesting from a design standpoint, since it copies as an on-cast trigger, so you know what it's going to copy before it resolves. I actually kinda like this card from a design perspective, the question for this one was the typical clone question of "I want to destroy the thing they're copying in response to ruin the copy effect". Unfortunately it still doesn't quite work that way, as the choice is made upon the resolution of the ability.

A Tied Up Ruling
AP controlled Éomer of the Riddermark and wanted to know what would happen if AP controlled a creature tied for the greatest power. I read the card a few times and let them know that nothing would happen, because they didn't control the creature with the greatest power. I deduced this based on cards like Triumph of Power and Triumph of Cruelty, which both address ties. However after consulting with another judge they let me know that this specifies "a creature with the greatest power" which means that first you calculate the greatest power on the battlefield, and then if you control a creature that matches that number, you control "a creature with the greatest power" and the condition is met. Cards like Primal Empathy are also worded this way, and I'm guessing they dropped the "if you're tied" wording to cut down on card text sometime in the recent past. I immediately went back to the table, but the players had finished their game, luckily they let me know that the ruling hadn't made a huge impact, but were happy to know the correct answer going forward.

Rebound PTQ
On Sunday there was a free event for any players that had qualified for Pro Tour Barcelona (but weren't playing day 2 because of skill issues) that awarded Pro Tour invites for the top four and no other prizes. I thought this was a super cool idea for an event. I can't really tell you anything else about it because I wasn't on the event, but I do think it was pretty swell.

...In Conclusion
I had a great time at Barcelona, this truly reminded me of the Grand Prix/MagicFest days that I sorely miss. It was a big event with lots of stuff going on and a ton of players. I liked the wacky formats and the unique rules questions I bumped into. I liked how there was always something to do, and a little bit of everything for everyone. I truly, honestly, hope I get accepted to another MagicCon in the future.