Indianapolis, Indiana
Time: Saturday May 11th - Sunday May 12th, 2024


Saturday – 10k Modern HJ

Introducing...
It should be evident that in a charisma competition between me and a literal potato, the potato probably wins (what can I say, potatoes have many endearing qualities). As a byproduct of this, I've learned that being the center of attention is not something I'm very comfortable with. Early on in my judge career announcements were a huge challenge because of this, and I've already talked about how me and called drafts have some unresolved feelings. Anyways, all this is to say that for about two minutes at the beginning of a tournament, NRG decides to make the HJ the absolute center of the universe. The judge manager reads out some fun facts about the HJ (he asks beforehand for the facts) and then plays some walk-on music as the HJ comes up to take the microphone. For me the entire thing was honestly the most stressful part of the weekend. This was compounded by the fact that last time I worked for NRG the TO let me know that my announcements were too stoic for NRG's vibe (conversely he said they were great for a Grand Prix main event). So I also had to make sure I was mindful about how "fun" I sounded on the mic. Most HJs pick their walk-on music but I just let NRG choose for me. While I personally dislike all this fanfare and ceremony, I can imagine some judges that would absolutely love it, and honestly, the players seem to reflect the TO's exuberance and excitement.

Abundantly Marked
AP has four Abundant Growths that are distinguishable from the top of the deck because they’re borderless and the sleeves are short, what do we do? This is just a slightly different flavor of "you have marked foils", and should be a game loss for marked cards, even though it might not feel like that at first glance. (IPG 3.8)

Undoing the End Step
AP casts Dress Down, then casts Days Undoing, when do they sacrifice the Dress Down? Not this turn, since we skip straight to cleanup. They'll sacrifice it on their opponent's end step! (CR 721.1d)

You Can Count on Elementals!
AP had two cards in the middle of the table that she thought she was drawing off The One Ring, her opponent felt like the two in the center weren't part of her hand, but were cards that had previously been on the bottom of her library, and when AP had picked up her library after presenting to cut, she'd failed to grab the bottom two cards. I realized this was going to be a card count fairly quickly and jumped right into it. AP said she'd missed two land drops, she had seven lands on the table, so that would mean it was turn nine. She was on the play and mulliganed to six. She had two cards in her hand currently, three fetches in the bin, three cards off previous The One Rings, a Teferi, Time Raveler which had drawn a card, and a Wrenn and Six which had recurred a fetch. 8+6+3+3+2 = 22 so she should have 22 cards total, however the number of cards on her side of the table was closer to 30. This was a bit concerning, but there was some ambiguity about what had been done with a surveil land, as well as how many times Wrenn and Six had been activated, and even ultimately, what turn it was. I ruled that since were were already quite over the estimated number of cards, the two in the middle should be part of the library. I was kind of suspicious, but AP already had a pretty commanding presence of the board and it seemed unlikely she was trying to grab two extra cards, the more likely scenario was that AP had gotten a bit lost in the cavalcade of actions on her turn and mistakenly thought she'd failed to pick up some cards from her One Ring.

Only Melee Things
There are always a few new things I learn about MTGMelee each event. This time I learned that giving a player fixed seating in MTGMelee does a weird thing where it takes the seat they would've been at and swaps it with whoever's supposed to be in the fixed seat. For example, our fixed seat was doing quite well in round five, which meant they would've been at table five if their seat wasn't fixed, but because the physical location of their seat was table seventy. So the software put the people that would've normally been sitting at table seventy, at table five instead. This resulted in some very confused players who were seated at table five but whose record was 2-3.

Sunday – Trios "Not Checks" Team Lead

Dregs of the Event
Because the finals of the Modern 10k were slated to start at 8am on Sunday and the Team Trios was slated to start at 9am, the finals of the Modern 10k were still running as the team trios event began. both finalist's teams got a bye for round one of the trios event, so that one team member doing well in modern wouldn't screw your entire team on Sunday. This also lead to another issue, wherein I was both supposed to be watching the finals of my event and also attending a team meeting and getting my team members ready for the day. I thought about it briefly, and decided that any experienced judge would be good at watching the finals of the 10k, but only the team lead could really effectively, so I assigned one of my more autonomous team members to watch the end of the 10k and ran my team meeting.

Legally Transparent
AP had semi-transparent sleeves with double faced cards, and was given a game loss during a deck check. However they appealed, mentioning that they were legally blind and couldn't actually see the DFCs. The HJ downgraded the penalty but still had the player change the sleeves. I think this is probably correct, though someone did mention that the shuffler (as this person had an assistant shuffler) would be able to see the markings. But I think this doesn't matter if the shuffler isn't cheating, and the amount of steps between AP can see through their sleeves and is cheating, and AP's shuffler can see through the sleeves and is helping AP cheat is slightly greater, and starting to approach some very big brain premeditated cheating that is not all that likely.

Rulings Flipped Asunder
AP casts Sundering Titan, are they allowed to choose the same land multiple times for different types? For example, if NAP has a Hallowed Fountain and AP has an Island and a Plains, can they choose Hallowed Fountain twice instead of any of their own lands? Yes. Because it doesn't target, Sundering Titan can choose the same land multiple times!

A Macabre Situation
If AP casts Veil of Summer, will that prevent NAP from using Faerie Macabre’s ability on cards in AP's graveyard? No. Cards in graveyards aren't permanents, and Faerie Macabre only targets the cards, not the opponent in any way. (CR 110.1)

Promises Kept
NAP then casts Summoner's Pact. Afterwards AP casts Emraukul, the Promised End and gains control of NAP's next turn. During NAP's upkeep, is AP forced to pay for NAP's pact? No! Weirdly enough, while paying for pact isn't optional, activating mana abilities is, so unless NAP has {2}{G}{G} already floating in their mana pool during their upkeep, AP won't need to pay for the pact. (CR 118.3c)

Bound Battles
Can AP use Tishana’s Tidebinder to prevent the back face of a battle being cast as a result of the battle losing all its defense counters? Yes. Sieges have a triggered ability that says "when the last defense counter is removed, exile this and cast it transformed" which can be countered. If this happens, the state-based action that says "if a battle has 0 defense counters and isn't the source of a trigger currently on the stack, put it into its owners graveyard. (CR 310.7, CR 310.11b)

Three-Headed Giant
Team communication is always a little weird, someone brought up an interesting theoretical situation of where AP attacks and then their teammate is like “No, you should do this instead”, untaps the attacking creature and instead taps their teammate's lands to cast a spell. I think personally I'd treat it like one person doing that, I attack, no wait I want to cast this spell instead. And as long as other reversing decisions stipulations were met I'd allow it. Now if the players got into an argument about what to do I'd say that AP has final say and would threaten to issue slow play if negotiations took too long. (MTR 4.8, MTR 8.3, MTR4.6)

Just Like Night & Day
AP casts The Celestus and a few turns later, mistakenly thinks that day changes to night, so they draw a card and gain a life. By the book this is GRV rewind, but if AP had forgotten to gain the life it’s definitely an HCE. This obviously feels completely strange. Thought it does kind of make sense that if AP screws up two separate things the infraction becomes more severe. But it does feel odd that in both situations AP is drawing a card for the same reason, but is getting a different penalty.

Battles and Taxes
AP exiles March of Otherworldly light with Invasion of Gobakhan. Can NAP exile cards to pay the Gobakhan tax? Yes. Invasion of Gobakhan is an additional cost, and so is March's exiling white cards, which results in a cost reduction. So the game applies the additional cost, then the cost reduction from AP's intent to exile cards to determine what the total cost of the spell is. (CR 601.2f)

Power Problems
In round 7, the final round of swiss, players thought that they'd be power paired, which is usually how the final round of swiss is paired. Now you might be wondering what "power pairing" is, as I was wondering at the time as well. Normally, players are paired at random against other players with similar records to them, however in the final round of swiss, players are paired based on rank in the event, so first plays second (unless they've already played), third plays fourth and so on. However in this event, when pairings for the final round went up, players immediately noticed that this wasn't the case and began asking judges questions. There was a lot of confusion at first, about what was wrong and whether there was actually a problem. I, personally knew very little about power pairing or scorekeeping in this aspect. So I stood by the SK station but kept my mouth shut. In situations like this it's good to be around in case people need a gopher, but you want to avoid a "too many cooks" situation. After a few moments the TO told me and the other judges to leave to clear the air a bit and that they didn't need gophers. I wandered back over to the players and told them all to stop playing because we were still knee-deep in the thick of whatever this was. Later I found out that this all happened because MTGMelee doesn't natively support team trios. The workaround to this is to register one player (the team captain) in MTGMelee and have that player submit all three decklists, however having a player submit multiple decklists for different formats is super strange, and also not natively allowed by MTGMelee. The workaround for this is to create the event so that it has three different phases, one of each different format. This event in particular had 7 rounds of Swiss (Standard), then a single elimination round 8 (Pioneer) and then a cut to top 4 (Modern). However the single elimination round meant that the software didn’t think that round 7 was the final round before the cut, and thus didn’t power pair. To fix this, the single elimination round was deleted, and the cut to T4 was changed to a cut to top 8, then the round was repaired. This unfortunately meant that the pioneer decklists no longer appeared in the decklist tab, nor did they appear in the player profiles, as they were associated with a phase that no longer existed. For a while, we felt like the lists were just lost, but then after some noodling around the SK managed to recover them.

...In Conclusion
Overall, the event ran fine, I think my biggest failings here were not devoting a little more time to it pre-event. I got my team email out the Saturday before, and was alerted to a potential issue with the breaks plan pretty soon after, but didn't update it until the night before the event. This was kinda dumb since it really doesn't take that long to update and publish a new breaks plan. The other big logistical issue was the fact that there were four unique team leads throughout the weekend. Let me expand on this, normally the Saturday HJ is a team lead on Sunday and vice versa. Then there are only two other team lead slots (NRG tends to go for "checks team" and "not checks team") which were two separate people, and were supposed to be team leading on specific days. I got them mixed up and had the person that was supposed to be leading on Sunday leading on Saturday. This caused some confusion and general frustration among the team leads. Other than that I had an overall pretty good time at NRG and am looking forward to my next one. :)