Vegas, Nevada
Time: Friday September 22nd – Sunday September 24th 2023


Friday – Schedule Sides Floor Judge

Illegal Looks
AP is supposed to exile the top card of their library face down, but doesn’t realize they can’t look at it first and does so. NAP calls a judge. It’s a little weird but the fix for this is LEC – Warning, and shuffle the offending card back into the library and have them exile a new card face down without looking at it.

Cursed to Remain on the Battlefield
AP controls a creature with a Cursed Role on it, which is an Aura controlled by NAP. Can AP sacrifice the Aura? Nope. AP can only sacrifice permanents they control, not things that they don’t control but are attached to their creatures.

Companionable Mana Cost
AP has Jegantha, the Wellspring as their companion. Can they play Fire // Ice? Unfortunately not, since the mana cost of Fire // Ice in the library is {U}{R}{1}{1}. The disqualifying factor being the duplicated single colorless mana.

Deck Problem Breaks Things Now
This interesting theoretical question came up. AP has a sideboard Bojuka Bog in their deck. It's supposed to be Slayers' Stronghold. AP notices during the resolution of Primeval Titan’s ability, and calls a judge. The judge correctly rules deck problem – warning, and the opponent chooses to fix the issue the next time a player would get priority. AP chooses Bojuka Bog for Prime Time, puts the trigger on the stack, then they get priority and exchange the Bojuka Bog for a Slayers' Stronghold. This is... obviously terrible for many reasons.

Infinite League
The league play was infinite value on Friday. Winning awarded you 800 tix and losing awarded you 600 tix. If you split each round, your $10 league play voucher would get you 2100 tix, which was a pretty good deal, since collector boosters on the prize wall were 2500tix, and regular standard legal packs were 500 tix (meaning $10 got you 4ish packs or one collector booster). This exploit was patched on Saturday.

Saturday – Side Events Floor Judge

The End of Warnings
NAP cast The End and didn't search AP's library. AP called judge, confirming that NAP needed to search, I shrugged and told AP that they would need to remind their opponent to search their library, and that they couldn’t just let the spell resolve incorrectly. They sat down and reminded their opponent, who declined to search the library. They then also asked whether or not NAP should get a warning for resolving their spell incorrectly, I let them know that if NAP didn’t want to search they wouldn’t have to, and that they were likely shortcutting because they didn’t want to waste time searching AP’s limited deck for additional copies of a card. AP argued a bit and I got the HJ and was upheld.

Mystery of Mysteries
A common feature of Magiccon is Gavin Verhey’s secret mystery event. It clocked in at about 600 players on Saturday. The frustrating thing about this event is that the HJ of the event isn’t given all the information about the event before it starts. Initially the HJ was told that he had five different objects to hand out, but then at the 11th hour Gavin announced that they actually had an additional promo card to hand out. The HJ was also given a lot of judges to assist, but he was given them all piecemeal and didn’t have the bandwidth to explain the tasks to each of them individually. The HJ also decided to be the main point of contact for the 15 or so judges on the event, which was my most visceral lesson in the merits of delegation, to date. Frequently there would be a cluster of 8+ judges around the HJ looking for information or clarification. I ended up realizing that the league sheets that players would need to fill out had been forgotten in the chaos and after approval from the HJ I took charge of the activity and fulfilled that job. The event ran similar to the one in Barcelona wherein players would deckbuild for a period of time and then when they were done they’d report to a judge at a gathering point who would randomly pair players around them against opponents.

The biggest bottleneck on this event was the silly player pairing, one method is to tell players to all go down a certain row and sit wherever. They will kind of pair themselves okay, but this ups the social anxiety of having players effectively pairing themselves.

Another method is to point to two random players and tell them both to go find a place to sit in a specified area. This results in much less social anxiety but is really slow. Optimally it would be good if the players self sorted, I suggested putting shapes on the back of the league sheets and having players pair with others who have the same shape. I then jokingly iterated on this and said that you should just put the same shape (maybe a circle) on the back of every sheet and the players would just find literally any other player and pair themselves. An alternative method is to put several different shapes on the back of the papers and ask players to find someone with a different shape on their sheet, this would mean that players would pair with more of the field. And would more likely self pair but wouldn’t feel as weird about it.

Sunday – Side Events Floor Judge

PreConstructed Times
There was a Commander precon event wherein players were given a random precon to play two pods with. There wasn’t “build” time for this but most judges ended up giving the players around 20 minutes to try and negotiate trades (which were fine, so long as nothing new entered the trade pool and decks were being traded 1 for 1) and to sleeve up.

Gavin Rules
by far the biggest feature of the Gavin event is the quirky cards and weird rulings that come out of it. If you’ve ever wanted a greater respect for extensive playtesting and R&D, just be a judge on Gavin’s event!

Barce, Friend Finder
If this isn’t my commander, when its triggered ability resolves, does it change my deck’s color identity. The answer there is yes! It does, however it also has its own pool of commander damage. There was also some ambiguity as to whether the triggered ability was a continuation of the previous ability, but in context that doesn’t make a ton of sense.

Banned Eldraine Card
This card as written has a color identity of WUBRG but it was ruled that it actually had a colorless color identity. I think that does make sense, since the card becomes much less exciting if you can only play it in a five color deck, however I wish they’d have written that on the card!

Taught by Serra
When this aura is attached to a commander in a command zone, is it on the battlefield? Yes! There’s no rule against Aura’s enchanting something in a different zone that they’re in.

Command from the Shadows & Taught by Bruce Tarl
If I’m playing with “Command from the Shadows”, that means both my commanders are face down and my opponent doesn’t know what they are, could I enchant say, a background with Taught by Bruce Tarl? No. A Background is still an enchantment and isn’t a legal target for Taught by Bruce Tarl.

Emrakul and Chatterfang
This card caused a lot of problems, as written it has protection from instants and sorceries unless they’re tribal squirrels, so after it being unbeatable on Saturday due to numerous rulings made by myself on the card, I found out on Sunday that Gavin intended the card to say “protection from squirrel creatures” not... what it actually says.

Prized Employee
I spent the last few hours of my shift on prizewall because I kid you not, there was a lineup of at least 200 players there for about 2 hours straight. This was due to multiple issues. 1. prize tix denominations were all over the map and made it time consuming to count and verify. Tix came in denominations of 1300, 500, 600, 200, 100 & 1000 among others. Imagine you’re working a busy day at a Starbucks and every customer comes with a handful of change to pay for their order.

2. there were about a zillion different items on the prize wall and they all cost varying amounts. Most detrimentally, even the different kinds of booster packs cost all different amounts. There were packs that were 400, 500, 600, 900, 1500, 2500 and 3500.

3. There was no pack fast track lane. There really needed to be a separate line that was just “only x kind of pack” and people would be able to buy that pack in varying amounts which would cut down significantly on the purchase time, since often people didn’t know what they wanted when they approached the prize wall, or how much they could get. By the end I was doing math for the customers and making them offers (by mushing various types of packs together to use up all their tix) to get them through faster and make the process easier for them.

...In Conclusion
I had a good time overall on Magiccon Vegas. My primary goal on any event is to be busy and unfortunately scheduled side events aren’t terribly busy. Oftentimes I found myself a little bored and the area a little overstaffed. I would’ve liked to have been on the 100k on Friday or any cREL events over the weekend since on average those are busier, however I also understand that the staffing for those is more competitive and more desired on average. I might try to get Saturday or Sunday ODEs, or Sunday prize wall at the next show since those are likely to be more busy than scheduled side events. However I also just sincerely hope to get staffed again at the next show regardless of where they put me.