Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania
Time: Thursday November 10th – Sunday November 12th 2023


Friday – Modern 5K [142 Players] – Paper/EOR/Clock Team Lead

Descend into Confusion
While I was doing modern all weekend the rest of the event was experiencing Lost Caverns of Ixalan prereleases. Since prerelease comes out before the CR update it’s always a bit of an adventure to try and figure out what all the new cards do. The one that was going around at this event was AP controls Stalacite Stalker and their Valakut Stoneforge gets destroyed, will the stalker get a +1/+1 counter at the beginning of their end step? No! Because Descend specifies “permanent card” it is implied it checks the characteristics of the card after it’s entered the graveyard, not before.

Circular Targets
If Golgari Thug dies and it’s the only creature in the graveyard, it’ll have to put itself back on top of its owner’s library! This is.. really weird and caused a few of us to do a double take.

Beastly Verbiage
AP cast Seek the Beast during their second main phase, will they be able to cast the cards during their end step? Unfortunately not, while most similarly functional cards have an effect that lasts until end of turn, this effect expires at the beginning of the end step.

Mountain Moons
If both Blood Moon and Alpine Moon are on the battlefield, what colors can the named land tap for? All the colors! Blood Moon removes the abilities in layer 4 (where it also changes its type) but Alpine Moon adds the abilities in layer 6 so regardless of the order the enchantments entered in, the named land will always have the ability to tap for any color.

Rewinding a Game Loss
One of the judges on deck checks came over and was talking to myself and the HJ about how they had been giving out a lot of game losses. I was interested, so I asked what the game losses were for and they mentioned that one of them was for having sideboard cards in the mainboard during a game 1 deck check. Myself and the HJ both exchanged a look and then began to ask the followup question “was the number of actual cards in their deck still legal when they presented? ie. Was it over 60?” the judge mentioned that it was over 60 and immediately the HJ took off to address the erroneous game loss. By the time both judges returned to the table the player that had recieved the game loss had lost the match and was packing up, but their opponent was still present, and after hearing the situation, offered to resume the match. All this runaround only resulted in a 13 minute time extension on the match.

No Land Like Deviation Land
AP played a land, cast The One Ring then Chromatic Star, cracked it drew a land, then asked NAP if they’d played a land. NAP said no. AP passed, NAP started their turn, the judge on the call stepped in and said that was incorrect, issued a CPV to NAP and instructed the players to “hang on” while they conferred with another judge. When the FJ and HJ returned unfortunately the players had continued playing and the board state had progressed since the FJ had left. The HJ asked some questions but determined that no decisions had been made based on that land having been played or not, so the HJ allowed AP to simply play the land now instead of executing what would’ve likely been a messy backup. This, in my opinion isn’t technically a deviation, since we’re effectively shortcutting a backup.

Saturday – Modern 10k [287 Players] – Breaks Team Lead

Breaking News
A chronic issue I’ve had is lack of preparation, and unfortunately, this event really highlighted that deficiency in spades. I didn’t really do anything in advance for my team since I figured it would be easy. I think my experience with the smallish nature of Canadian events and the chaotic nature of every other TO has somewhat trained me into not preparing for anything. On Friday the HJ of the Modern 10k event had spoken to me about what my breaks plan was and I didn’t really have one. He mentioned he either wanted three rounds of breaks where four people went on break, or four rounds where three went on break. I agreed but then didn’t really plan for either, thinking I’d just plan when I found out how big the event would be. Instead I should’ve just made two plans, one for each amount of players and been more ready to go for Saturday. Another kerfuffle was the fact that instead of doing breaks that were synced with the rounds, they ended up being tied to an actual time, and therefore ended up starting sometime halfway through the round. This meant that while we were covering the deck check team, we were only able to get one deck check in, instead of two. Overall I really didn’t like how breaks were executed on Saturday and feel like something better could’ve been agreed upon if I’d just clarified expectations in advance and done a little more preparation.

...Yet Another EOR
I also failed to communicate well with the other team leads. EOR was split up into finding ghosts and assigning judges to tables. This was being done in the following way: the finding ghosts team would go through the remaining tables and identify any ghost matches, and go and call them, while the EOR team would go, input active matches into purple fox and then assign judges. When I covered this system, it seemed like a mess. The ghosts team was doubling up on the sweep work that the EOR team was doing, and as far as I could tell, EOR didn’t have a strategy for communicating ghosts they discovered to the ghosts team during the course of assigning judges. When my team did EOR it was a lot cleaner, since I suggested to the ghost team that instead of sweeping themselves, they wait until EOR has input all the data into purple fox and then one team member with a phone reads off the outstanding tables in melee to another team member who is looking at purple fox, who can then easily and quickly identify ghost tables.

Another issue with the ghosts team is that it was also the pairings team, however I was so caught up with re-configuring the EOR system that my team failed to post pairings. There were also issues with restarting the round in purple fox as well as getting the scorekeeper to do a melee sync at the beginning of each round (if they don’t do this it means no one can enter any penalties).

Don’t Blink
AP registered 4x Blinkmoth Nexus in a modern Hammertime list. Hammertime doesn’t play Blinkmoth so I wanted to downgrade to a warning instead of a game loss and change the list. I think while some decks play a one-of Blinkmoth Nexus, Hammertime is pretty unlikely to be playing that card, especially as a four-of. I’m also slightly more lenient in this particular case because decklist entry was online, and if the player was entering the cards one by one, this seems like an easy misclick or autocorrect that because with online entry this seems like a very easy-to-overlook autocorrect.

Appealing Shadows
This event was rather odd in the fact that twice when I was taking a call, after giving my ruling the players would look to the judge behind me and ask if it was correct. This hasn’t happened to me in recent memory. Both times, the judge shadowing my call refrained from answering. It was certainly a little weird, though I can understand the desire to get a second opinion on a ruling that is unfavourable or not delivered with confidence, perhaps I was particularly underconfident this event?

Sunday - Modern 5k HJ – 110 players

Starting Off With a Bang
Saturday wasn’t a great day for me, there were a lot of mistakes and I’d made the personal mistake of asking for my Saturday feedback that very evening, which kind of put me in a dour mood and added pressure to do a better job on Sunday to make up for the issues on Saturday. Unfortunately, the day started off with me realizing that the “team email” that I’d sent through Discord had the wrong call time on it (8am instead of 8:30) which caused two of my team leads to come in a half hour earlier than required, and they were somewhat grumpy about it. Luckily (or unluckily) it didn’t seem anyone else on my team had read or followed the instructions in the communication, so no one else showed up early. Probably because I sent out the email something like Wednesday or Thursday evening, which is, realistically, way too late anyways.

I spent some time in the morning trying to prep for the day but despite my best efforts I still missed moving the gathering point and never assigned a team to take care of the task of starting the round clock (I had forgotten to address it in my HJ briefing and even after discovering that the event had clocks on Friday and Saturday). I also didn’t prepare time extension slips and didn’t really think about how to handle no shows, I pivoted to having judges just select the “no show” option in MTGMelee but didn’t realize that there was also a “drop” button and I wasn’t sure which one would be preferable (it’s the “no show” button, for the record, the “drop” button destroys everything). I prepped some notes for my team meeting and announcements, but missed some critical stuff like how to handle HCEs/Backups/Appeals/Investigations as well as how to handle paper deckslists or what we would be doing about feature matches, since they were quite far from our area. I also forgot to gather emails for my judges to get them into MTGMelee (which I realistically could’ve done before the event). I failed to give EOR team a time to talk about their plan during the meeting and my opening announcements didn’t give players a chance to hand in any paper decklists they still had kicking around.

And this was all before round one started!

Once the event began to progress more issues began to appear. The stage was so far from the event area that telling players when to start playing was a bit of an issue (usually the HJ can just look at the field and determine that the majority of players are seated) but in this case, I didn’t have the ability to do that. I was aware that this was an issue on Saturday, but hadn’t thought of a plan for how to rectify it on Sunday. I asked a judge to text me when players were seated halfway through round one so the problem would be fixed for future rounds. Though a couple times when I had beginning of round quests I forgot about starting the round and had to do it on the floor (luckily by the time any of this happened the event was ~60 players). However when I did announce the start of round on the floor, features couldn’t hear me so they began yelling a minute or so after the rest of the event had already started.

Not Appealing After All
AP said they had a question about Dress Down and Not Dead After All. They leaned back in their chair and asked whether things would “work” I paused since the interaction was more complex than I felt I’d be able to answer at the table, I let the player know that I didn’t think I’d be able to answer the question at the table without giving away information. The player seemed annoyed by this but begrudgingly got up and we walked away from the table. I began trying to explain the interaction, but the player kept interrupting me with nonsense jargon like “this applies in layer 0” and “it’s a state-based ability so it always works”. After 30-40 frustrating seconds I looked at the player and said “would you like to answer the question?” This was... not amazing. I think I should’ve just let them explain to me how they thought it would work instead of fighting for airtime. My comment while unproductive in deescalating the situation did cause the player to stop talking long enough for me to explain the interaction. I let them know that if they responded to Not Dead After All on the stack, Dress Down’s ability would have the earlier timestamp and Not Dead After All would grant the creature the ability. If they waited for Not Dead After All to resolve first then played the Dress Down it would remove the ability because its effect would have the more recent timestamp.

The player seemed dissatisfied with this explanation, and interrupted me again, trying to assert how it actually worked. I began trying to explain again but he interrupted and asked for an appeal. I paused, I was beginning to get frustrated at this point due to the ridiculousness of it all, and let him know that I was the head judge of the event. He insisted that he wanted to talk to another judge with the argument “I’m telling you, you’re wrong” I sighed and realized that continuing to butt heads with this guy wasn’t going to work, and it’s not like I didn’t have other judges on the event that I could rely on to answer simple rules questions. The other judge quickly explained exactly what I had explained, the player was like “oh, I guess I didn’t understand” and sat back down. I was pretty frustrated with the player and needed a moment to cool off.

I think I did several things wrong here. As soon as I realized things were getting contentious I should’ve sat the player down and listened to how he thought it would work. I should’ve probably pulled up the rules sooner, and as soon as he asked for an appeal I should’ve just grabbed another judge to expedite the process. Obviously in some circumstances I think it’s not reasonable to give an appeal, but in this circumstance, it being a simple black and white rules question I think giving the appeal is fine, since it’s going to take two seconds. I think with a contentious policy call it might be worthwhile to put your foot down since you are the HJ of the event and so your take on policy should override another judge’s take. The worst part about all this, was that this exact advice was something I’d given to a peer of mine a few months earlier at another event as a way to enhance customer experience.

I considered USC minor and intended to cycle back around to the player after I had cooled off a bit, both to talk to them about their constant interruptions, and to see if there was anything that I did that contributed to the issue and apologize for it. Unfortunately, AP lost immediately after casting Dress Down because their opponent had a second Not Dead After All, and AP promptly dropped from the event, so I couldn’t find him afterwards to talk to him.

No Time Like Hammertime
AP controls Sigarda’s Aid and attacked with their Ornithopter. After NAP declared no blocks AP cast two Colossus Hammers and a Shadowspear, stacking all the cards on top of the Ornithopter. NAP wanted to cast Solitude responding to all the triggered abilities targeting the Ornithopter. The FJ brought up the relevant tournament shortcut that states “If a player adds a group of objects to the stack without explicitly retaining priority, they are assumed to be adding them to the stack individually and allowing each to resolve before adding the next. If another player wishes to take an action at a point in the middle of this sequence, the actions should be reversed to that point.” This wording is a little weird but I think how it applies to this scenario is that AP is casting each hammer and assumed to have it resolve and equip before casting the next one. Which is what I ended up ruling, so effectively NAP has the ability to choose which equipment their responding to.

Levels Are Just An Idea, Man
A FJ took a call where a player disagreed with the ruling and asked for an L3 judge. While slightly obnoxious it’s clear the player is asking for an appeal. The FJ replied with something along the lines of “I could be L3 and you wouldn’t know” which also isn’t great. The appeal was taken and sorted out, but I spent some time talking with both the FJ and the player to ensure things were smoothed out. The player realized that their choice of language was a little off-putting and the FJ realized that their response wasn’t great and approached the player later to apologize, and I’ve been told they had a fairly productive discussion about the whole thing.

A Totally Reasonable Keep
AP had some nicks on the back of their sleeves which looked like a reasonable opening hand (Forest, Urza’s Saga, Wurmcoil Engine, Urza’s Tower, Urza’s Mine, Expedition Map) which were found during a deck check. The deck check judge was more experienced than me, but as I was the HJ (and for training purposes) asked if I’d like to do the investigation. I said I would like to, and asked the player what a reasonable opening hand looked like in Tron, and also asked him to shuffle for me to see if he was looking at the cards while he was shuffling, as the marks were mostly visual, and I felt like picking them out of the deck without looking at it would be somewhat difficult. Then the more experienced judge cut in while I was thinking about my third question and asked a bunch of questions, then we spoke away from the table, I kinda shrugged and said that initially I had wanted to ask perhaps how they sleeved their cards, but at the current moment the investigation had been going on for a long time and there wasn’t enough here for me to want to bother with it more.

The hand is a snap-keep for Tron, but not a godhand, which, sure if the player is trying to avoid detection, marking an okayish hand is not unreasonable, but it also makes this less advantageous overall. Additionally, marked cards are usually used to help the player identify what card they have on top of their library, to key them in to whether they should shuffle or not. Marked cards to try and fanangle an opening hand is not unreasonable but much more challenging, especially with the type of markings we saw, since I believe it would be very hard to identify the cards while shuffling.

I also spoke with the deck check lead afterwards, because I felt he’d stolen my investigation, and we determined that I should’ve potentially been more assertive in taking it back over

A Rift in the Game
AP casts the The One Ring, then passes to NAP. NAP has two Rift Bolts on suspend while there are no other targets on the board. During NAP’s upkeep, will they be required to target themselves with the Rift Bolts? Yep. Unfortunately the game doesn’t give NAP the choice to of whether or not they want to cast the suspended spell.

Assisted Apocalypse
Myself and a floor judge were watching one of the last matches out in a round. I must’ve spaced out for a moment because I noticed AP say “you can’t do that, go away” to a spectator. I snapped back to attention and looked at my FJ, who was looking back at me, I pulled them away from the table and asked the FJ what had happened. The FJ mentioned that the spectator had reminded AP of their Sheoldred, the Apocalypse trigger after they’d clearly missed it. I said “well isn’t this outside assistance?” the FJ said “yeah, but you weren’t doing anything so I didn’t do anything!” Gah! Anyways, after we both clearly agreed OA had happened the FJ agreed to go and issue the infraction to the spectator.

Stern Mentor
I shadowed a call where a relatively newer FJ seemed to be doing some kind of backup on their own. While my team meeting was messy in the morning, I had somewhat expressed that I wanted complex calls to be double checked. I arrived part-way through so I watched until the end where it appeared that NAP had illegally cast a Leyline Binding through their opponent’s Teferi, Time Raveler and drawn a card from their Up the Beanstalk before AP had a chance to tell them that they had a Teferi. So you can understand my surprise when after executing a pretty smooth backup the FJ then informed NAP that they’d be getting a warning for “looking at extra cards”. I didn’t think this was important enough to interrupt the ruling, but did want to talk to the FJ anyways.

I... did not handle this great. I think I opened this conversation with a rather stern “what were you doing” or something equally not good. I had no idea what had sparked the backup or whether things had actually been executed correctly, and was very concerned that something had been done incorrectly. I asked the FJ several questions and it was very clear that I wasn’t thrilled about the fact that the penalty was incorrect and that a backup was done without a double check. Realistically, the FJ had fixed the players game correctly, and both players were happy. Sure it should’ve been GRV instead of LEC, but that is a pretty minor error in the grand scheme of things. I spent some time with the FJ going over various policy things to hopefully preclude any weirdness. And by the end everything felt okay.

.... except it wasn’t. Later on in the day the same FJ took a ruling about The One Ring, AP cast The One Ring then said pass without acknowledging the trigger. NAP said “so you don’t have protection, right?” in AP’s end step, and AP called a judge. The FJ ruled the trigger as missed and neither player appealed. However AP spoke to some friends about it after and word got around. I ended up speaking to the players about the call and while I couldn’t actually do anything to fix it at this point, at least they now had the correct ruling and the knowledge that appeals existed. Unfortunately, because word of the call got around, the FJ ended up overhearing a lot about how this call had been screwed up, and as a newer judge trying to get into large events, this isn’t a good feeling. The judge ended up imploding a bit and their TL spent some time calming them down.

According to their TL the interaction I had with them was perceived as me “yelling at them”. While I never raised my voice I can imagine my sharp tone and stern demeanour being taken as such, and this was no doubt a compounding factor in stressing my FJ purposelessly. I felt really bad about all this at the end of the day. I remember being a newer judge and punting some calls and feeling horrible about it. Back then I’d felt bad enough before someone had gotten mad at me. I circled back around to the judge before top 8 started and assured them that I didn’t think they were a terrible judge and told them some of the good things they did that day (they were super reliable with the pairings, and their rules knowledge was reasonably good) but you kinda can’t undo ruining someone’s day.

A Seizure of Tournament Integrity
In round five or so, “Nate” got deck checked, he was playing the Yawgmoth, Thran Physician combo deck and the deck check team discovered a Hapatra, Vizier of Poisons in it that wasn’t on the decklist. In the current match Hapatra was quite strong. I was on break so the judge that was covering me did a brief investigation. Nate’s story was that he had made a last minute change and hadn’t updated his decklist to reflect that. When I returned from lunch I was briefed on this and didn’t think much of it as the judge on the investigation determined there was no cheating.

Fast forward to the finals. Nate negotiates a prize split where the payouts remain the same, but the opponent gets the trophy and he gets the RC invite. So he’s playing for 800USD. He’s on stream and is against the cascade variant of the four color control deck, it’s deep into game 1. He draws 11 cards from Yawgmoth in at the end of his opponent’s turn in response to a Leyline Binding. He takes his turn and casts a few Wall of Roots and Strangleroot Geist to burn some cards out of his hand, but is still left with two he needs to discard. He passes while making the decision. His opponent plays a Lorien Revealed, draws some cards and passes. Nate untaps and casts Thoughtsieze, his opponent’s hand is four lands, a Teferi, Time Raveler and a second Up the Beanstalk. Nate, seeing the coast is clear, plays Agatha’s Soul Cauldron, exiles Yawgmoth and begins comboing. His opponent correctly ascertains that it’s over for him and concedes. It was quite late and the entire hall was packed up, I was preparing for a quick finals match and stepped away for a moment to use the washroom.

When I returned the Legacy 5k HJ (the same person who had covered my break earlier, and who was also still trapped in the hall due to the finals of the Legacy 5k going on) said there was an investigation on my event. Nate was standing to the side looking nervous. The legacy HJ let me know that Nate had approached him and let him know that Thoughtsieze was a sideboard card and that he’d had it in for game 1. In addition to this he also had a second Thoughtsieze and two Elven Chorus’. This was... certainly odd. I took the player aside and began to ask questions. He said when he’d went to start sideboarding he realized that he shouldn’t have had those cards in for game 1. I grabbed his sideboard guide, which he’d left on the table, and looked over it, seeing that the sideboard plan for the four color cascade deck calls for two Thoughtsiezes and two Elven Chorus. At first Nate mentioned this might be failure to desideboard, which seemed plausible until I remember that his previous match was burn. He was confused but mentioned that earlier in the event he’d had a run in with some broken sleeves and therefore half his sideboard was unsleeved and also there were some SCG promo cards in the box as well, and perhaps he’d made some weird mistake while sleeving and unsleeving cards, and perhaps he’d just not had enough time in between games to properly check his deck and sideboard. I asked Nate what he thought the penalty for a sideboard card in the main was and he said it he felt it was a warning.

After looking over the stream (which can be found here) you can see that Nate very deliberately de-sideboards from the burn matchup, removing two Haywire Mites before the game, and checking his sideboard clearly afterwards.

As with all cheating investigations there are two possibilities

Nate was cheating (One of the following must be true):
Intentionally pre-sideboarding and calling a judge in between games to both benefit from the error and get a softer penalty
OR
Accidentally having sideboard cards and not calling attention to it immediately and calling a judge in between games to both benefit from the error and get a softer penalty

Nate was not cheating (all of the following must be true):
Sideboard cards good in the matchup ended up in Nate’s deck (and ones not good in the deck did not)
Nate drew them and did not notice
Nate called a judge as soon as he realized the error during sideboarding

Both options are awkward but fewer things need to be true in order for cheating to have occurred here. The fact that the deck was clearly gone through before the game also points me in a cheating direction (thought I didn’t have that information at the time.)

I explained everything to the player and while he was quite sad, he was also very understanding of the whole thing. As always with investigations I won’t ever really know what actually happened, I can only act on what I think was most likely to have happened. Personally, as always, I hope that I made a mistake and that the player wasn’t cheating. I would prefer to live in a universe where I’m just terrible at my job and players aren’t cheating.

...In Conclusion
This event was kind of a disaster, On Sunday I made a member of my team sad, burdened my team leads by making a ton of mistakes and got into a pointless argument with a player. This event was a bit of a harsh reminder of the things that I need to work on. I think sometimes you need to get your butt kicked to force you to improve and maybe that’s what happened here. While I don’t feel great about the whole thing now, I hope to ultimately learn some lessons from this event and use them to become a better judge in the future.