Vancouver, BC
Time: Saturday January 20th 2024
Players: 95 | Format: Modern
Role: Head Judge


Time to Wait
The trend continues where I actually write notes before my team meeting and then use them and then the team meeting is good. That's it. That's the entire team meeting story. The other thing that happened at this show was the fact that I brought judges in at 8am, even though main event didn't start until 10am. Last Vancouver I also did this, but it was incredibly necessary. Setup had been done the morning of and by "done" I mean "not done" so the extra hour of judgepower was super helpful in picking up some pieces. This time, however, setup was done like a reasonable person would do it, the night before, leaving my judges with 30+ minutes of nothing to do at all. I recommended to the TO that in the future, customer service staff come in two hours before main event (and one hour before the hall opens) and everyone else just come in when the hall opens with the players.

The Decklists of Olde
So, at most large American events, all decklists are in MTGMelee, which is great because MTGMelee counts the lists and ensures no illegal cards are there, and it's also digital therefore it's readable. Unfortunately, in Canada we don't want players to pay through MTGMelee and register for events directly, because that would raise the price by like $5 for each player, so instead they pay Face to Face, which then pays MTGMelee. This all means that they can't input paper decklists until we manually put them in the event, which sometimes is a fair amount of time after they've paid. Therefore, we still have paper decklists. I did my opening announcements, and instructed players to write the table number on their decklist, however, in classic Tobi fashion, my announcements were super short and by the time I was done and told the players to start playing, decklist collection still wasn't complete. This was something both my deck check judges did not fail to tell me about, multiple times during the day. After pondering it, I think I should've just told the players to hold their lists in the air for collection. This both ensures that the decklists are ready for collection and are easy to grab, but also gives me a visual identifier on how many lists are remaining.

The Breakdown
I prepared the break schedule in advance so that I had something to work from day-of in case things got busy (which they did), however I'd planned to have my ODE judges cover for my main event judges in the morning. This didn't happen because ODEs were positively hoppin'. So I ended up having to change a bunch of stuff midday and pushed some breaks further back than initially planned. While it caused a few weird miscommunications (some rounds we probably shouldn't have had deck checks but did anyways because I communicated bad), we were never critically low on floor coverage, and everyone got their break at a reasonable time. After talking things over with the TO, we determined that 1-2 more judges would've solved a lot of these issues.

Prime Removal
AP gives Primeval Titan Vigilance with Slayer's Stronghold. NAP says "ok", then AP says "I attack with Primeval Titan", NAP says "after damage, I want to kill it" AP then says "okay, but I still get to search" and AP picks up their library. NAP then says "I meant to say 'before attacks'"I spoke to both players but couldn't see any reason to rule in NAP's favor here.

Shadowy Board State
AP goes to equip Shadowspear to their creature. NAP casts Tishana's Tidebinder to counter the equip ability, and mentions that the Shadowspear has no abilities. However, the spear remained underneath the creature. AP attacks at which point NAP notices that AP thinks the spear is equipped, this didn't cause any real issues in the game, since neither player said or did anything strictly illegal based on the spear being equipped, however in the event that AP controlled a creature like, say, Halvar, God of Battle, what would the ruling be? If AP attacked and attempted to deal doublestrike damage I think there's a reasonable argument for double GRV, one for AP not resolving their Tidebinder ability correctly and one for NAP for not resolving the ability correctly.

Bouncy Deviation
AP Dashed Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, but forgot to return it to their hand at the end of the turn. NAP took their turn, did some attacking and passed back, AP channelled Sokenzan, Crucible of Defiance during their main phase for {2}{R}, at which point they both noticed the Ragavan shouldn't be on the board. The FJ ruled missed trigger, NAP can put the trigger on the stack now, which isn't correct since it's been too long, the actual infraction should've been missed trigger, warning - no fix. I spoke to both players who said that they'd feel better if the Ragavan went back to hand and we rewound the Sokenzan activation. I shrugged and let them do this.

The One Ruling
AP was at 1 life and controlled The One Ring with zero counters on it. NAP controlled a Roiling Vortex. AP wanted to know how the triggers went on the stack, because they wanted to activate The One Ring to draw a card after it's trigger had resolved, to draw a Tishana's Tidebinder to counter the Roiling Vortex trigger and save themselves. Unfortunately, it doesn't work this way, and AP's triggers go on the stack, then NAP's triggers, meaning the Vortex trigger would resolve before the One Ring trigger. And as we know, The One Ring's triggered ability goes on the stack, even if there aren't any counters on it, and counts the counters on it as part of the resolution of the ability.

Sideboard Shenanigans
A player asked me if they could sideboard out mainboard cards, ie. If they registered a 65 card mainboard, but only a 10 card sideboard, could they sideboard to 60/15. They actually can, which is interesting.

Loopy Numerals
AP submitted this decklist. I was called over by my deck check team because they couldn't tell what was a one and what was a two. After spending some time looking at it myself, I determined that this was unreadable and should probably be a game loss. I called the player over and spoke with them for a little while and let them know that three of us judges couldn't read it, and even if the player could read it, it was too unclear to not give a game loss. The player then mentioned that they had written it very fast because after registration put them into MTGMelee they had thought they were supposed to submit their decklist through there, so they had, then someone else had told them that no, in fact they needed a paper list. So they rushed through the paper list and that's how we ended up where we are now. I asked them whether the list in MTGMelee would be correct, and they said it should be. I shrugged and pulled it up. After giving the player his stuff back and getting him back on track the deck check judge asked me what I'd done about the other discrepancies. I paused and asked "what discrepancies?" the judge mentioned that some of the cards that were registered in the main were actually in the side and vice versa. I asked if these were also issues on the MTGMelee list, and a few minutes later he let me know they weren't, however this did make both of us a little uneasy, because submitting two decklists and just picking the one that works effectively gives players the ability to change their decklist mid-event with no penalty. I don't think that's what happened here, but I do think the player should've been at least made aware of the issues, if not given a game loss for them (as typically the most recently submitted list is the one that's taken to be correct).

...In Conclusion
I always like working this event, it reminds me of my origins as a judge, and also lets me see all the players that used to play a long time ago. It also shows me that even smaller events have something to teach me, and that just because an event isn't big or important, it doesn't mean that it's not valuable. To most players, 5 rounds of magic is 5 rounds of magic, regardless of how many other people are in the room. I'm so happy with the opportunity that Face to Face has given me here, and look forward to working with them more in the future :)