Kamloops, Canada
Time: Sunday December 3rd 2023
Modern | Players: 44
Role: Head Judge and Prizewall Manager


What's in a Chillerpillar
So some background on this event, this is a small local event created by players to support and help one of the local players who has cancer. Last year it was just a single tournament with 30 players and some donations for the prize pool (as all entry fees go to the player for medical costs etc.). This year things got a lot bigger, WAY more people donated stuff, three stores were invited out to vend, and we even ran some side events!

My part in all this was being a judge.... kinda. I also made a custom playmat for the winner (because I live to make things) and suggested that with all the prizes, it might be easier to just give out prize tix to all players and let them buy the things they wanted. (I also made some cute prize tix). This was well received by the primary organizer, however it didn't really get communicated to the store that was running the main event, OR the store that was running ODEs. Thus when I reached out a few days before just to confirm a few things the stores were a little blindsided. To be fair I probably should've reached out a little further in advance since the main organizer for the event is a busy guy and these sorts of things have a lot of moving parts. It's better to bother someone about something they have heard before than to blindside them shortly before the event. Luckily I knew there were going to be two other judges there and only about 30 players so nothing was going to blow up in our faces. I took point on setting up the prize wall the day of, and it went fairly smoothly.

Logistically Steadfast
A common issue for me is my announcements are either great or terrible, and it's highly correlated to whether I took some notes about what I planned to say beforehand. This time they went fairly well because, well I took some notes!

There were some rumors about the Legacy event starting at 4pm and having five rounds. I sharply vetoed that as we only had the room until 9pm. An hour of wiggle room seemed reasonable. 0 minutes of wiggle room did not. There was some discussion about changing the start time but I said it would be best if we didn't deviate too far from whatever had been previously posted online, especially since we were working in Eventlink, which is not forgiving to late entrants.

Bad Backups
AP played Memnite in his head but not in reality, then equipped Colossus Hammer for zero using Puresteel Paladin’s ability without actually having metalcraft. NAP cast Fatal Push on the Paladin and AP responded by casting Surge of Salvation, after all the cards are on the stack, AP realized he didn't have Metalcraft. My FJ came to ask me whether a backup was okay or not, I pondered for a moment, mentioned that since both players had gotten some info, the backup wouldn't horribly imbalance the game. Later my FJ came to me and let me know he felt the backup was no good, and it should've been left as is. We discussed it for a bit and eventually came to the conclusion that, yeah, I probably should've left it as is. The game would probably not progress naturally after this backup, as both players could now play around the others' trick, and realistically, the "organic" game state would be that AP simply played the Memnite in their hand before attacking, and NAP would've cast the push, AP would've cast the surge, and then NAP would've taken 12.

It's Not a Partial if We Rule it My Way
AP casts Orcish Bowmasters to kill NAP's Inkmoth Nexus, NAP responds by drawing a card. Once the draw resolves AP targets something else with with the Orcish Bowmaster and adds some counters to his Army. NAP casts Surge of Salvation with all the triggers on the stack. AP shrugs and allows Surge to resolve, incorrectly thinking that he'd still get counters on his army. At this point a judge stepped in and mentioned that actually no counters would be added to the army. The player asked if they could then backup to when Surge was on the stack. The FJ asked me this and I said "no, AP illegally put some +1/+1 counters on their army for no reason, which we will be removing now, but other than that nothing else has gone wrong".

Reporting Results
When entering the intentional draws for the last round of swiss I mentioned to another judge that it should be entered 0-0-3 instead of 0-0-1. They asked me why it mattered and I kinda paused for a moment, sure, it did affect like, the game win percentage tiebreaker (0-0-1 is better), but realistically, that didn't super matter in a tournament where record was going to put you into top 8. I hadn't really ever thought about it too much, I'd always just heard that's what we were supposed to do and had never really thought too hard about it before I was asked.

Gleeful Communication
AP cast Gleeful Demolition saying "Sacrifice Mishra's Bauble". NAP tried to argue that AP had sacrificed their Bauble to draw a card in response to the casting of Gleeful Demolition. This felt pretty angly, and after speaking with both players it was clear that they both understood what AP was attempting to do, even if it wasn't communicated well. I ruled against the angle shot, and spoke with NAP afterwards and asked them to tone down the angling.

Timely Rounds
For the third round of Legacy someone forgot to set the round timer, and it was about 20 minutes in. Every previous round had finished before the timer had run out, so I figured we'd just run this round untimed and it would probably be fine. It's a bit of a risky gambit, and could definitely have come back to haunt us. I felt like the probability that I put a time too short was fairly high and would not be good for the players. In retrospect, I probably should've just picked a reasonably high number, like 40 minutes, because it would've certainly been safer to have a timer than to not.

Unreal Fetchlands
We deck checked a player who had five counterfeit cards in his deck. When I sat him down to talk about the different paths this could take (one being, you presented an illegal deck) he cut me off and said "no I didn't! It was 60 cards", I was knocked a little off kilter as it was a weird point to argue. I took a moment and checked the decklist noted that he had registered a 65 card deck. I rethought what I was going to say and corrected myself, letting him know that while not all the cards in the deck were legal, the deck itself was still a legal size. After some investigation, the player received a DQ.

...In Conclusion
Overall this event was a blast, I had a ton of fun, and while I made a few mistakes, none of them caused any catastrophic issues. I think the major issues (which weren't even that major) stemmed from lack of delegation. Someone should be in charge of booking the room, someone should be in charge of organizing donations and prizewall. Someone should be wrangling TOs and organizing tournaments. And these should probably not be all the same person, and it should be clear who is in charge of each thing. Another thing that was more me-related was the main event payout, I think it would've been nice if it was a little flatter, it ended up quite top heavy. Additionally, at the beginning of the day I was instructed to give out a set of dice to each player, but instead I think the dice should've just been mushed into the prize wall and everyone should've just gotten 10tix. Other than that things ran surprisingly smoothly, and people are looking to grow the event next year!