Vancouver, Canada
Role: Scheduled Sides Lead
Time: Friday May 17th - Sunday May 19th, 2024


A Plan Indeed
After reflecting upon my successes and failures at MXP Daly City and Dreamhack Atlanta, I decided to use the best parts of both these sides plans for CF Vancouver (and, consequently ignore the worst parts of both the plans). I gave each team member a personalized email with their break, and which events they'd be watching as well as who was covering that break. You can view the whole sides schedule here. I also incorporated the small event cover sheets that I made use of at MXP as well, since we were running a lot of confusing formats, which you can view here. Overall I think this plan worked very well. I had more time to proof my event sheets than I did for MXP, and also took a little extra care with my emails than for Dreamhack Atlanta, and thus managed to stamp out many small issues that I experienced at both those shows. Another thing I did was try to keep people on the same type of event from day to day. That meant if you did Emperor on Friday there was a high probability you'd be in charge of it the other few days as well. Because some of the formats were so weird, I thought it would be better to keep the amount of new rules each judge had to learn to a minimum to improve consistency and reduce the strain on each staff member. Also there's something to be said for Emperor running the same on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

Organizational Cacophany
Organizing scheduled sides is a lot of work before the event, and then somewhat boring on the day of the event. I also feel like these medium-sized large events (Face to Face and SCG) are in an awkward place with sides. Every event has like 10-20 people in it, which realistically doesn't require a full judge, but does require a small amount of attention, like to turn rounds and take the occasional judge call. So the system I see used a lot at these types of events is task teams instead of the "one judge per event" style I tend to like. The reason I'm not a fan of task teams is because the teams are usually "kickstart, turnover and float". Kickstart is a very reasonable team, you have some amount of event prep work every hour. That's fine and makes sense and is a reasonable amount of work and is unlikely to overload a small team. Then you have turnover, which can become very hairy during the middle of the day, keeping track of every event in the room is a lot for one person, and if you assign a second judge to this, it requires some strong coordination between those people and the kickstart team, which I think is often hard to achieve unless you're a fairly seasoned judge. With this model, it's much more likely that an event will get forgotten about and a round won't turn on time, and it's very embarrassing if the players have to ask a judge "hey, when is our round turning" only to have the judge say "oh uh, that should've happened ages ago!". Then there's float team, which is usually bored out of their minds since there are rarely enough judge calls to keep any judge busy for long on sides. Then to compound this, calls like "what's the time in my round" are often unanswerable by float judges. Finally, they also might get various format-specific questions like "how does x work in Emperor" or what happens when someone dies in Grand Melee? Both of which are incredibly awkward to be ambushed with if you're just a float judge. If the event had a dedicated judge, they've probably looked up the rules to emperor beforehand, and will be able to answer those weird questions that much more easily. The issue here is that one judge per event is often too many judges for the amount of players in each individual event, and makes planning breaks super awkward. So far I haven't found the optimal solution for this size of event, but I'll keep tweaking and fiddling with things.

Propane and Propane Accessories
We had a number of "King of the Hill events", which were basically three round single elimination events that awarded prize tix based on wins. Because of the nature of a Commandfest, a lot of players weren't super excited about paying for a single elimination event. Which meant that the event often didn't get enough players to fully function properly. In order to have four players in the final round for a pod, you need to start with 64 players, which leaves you with 16 in round two and four in round three. Needless to say, we never had 64 players in any of these events, so we had to do some fanangling. Eventually the scorekeepers collaborated and compiled a list of how to handle various numbers of players in these events, you can view that here.

I Wish This Worked!
If AP casts Burning Wish in Commander, what happens? Nothing. Well I guess they exile Burning Wish and lose two mana, but they certainly don't get to get anything from outside the game, there aren't any sideboards in Commander, so wishes don't really do anything. (Commander RC) Interestingly though, if you're playing limited this gets a little more ambiguous. There isn't a lot of official knowledge about how to handle limited sideboards. Because limited is continuous construction I have to assume the cards count as a sideboard, and therefore I think that wishes actually do work in limited Commander. (CR 903.11, CR 903.13f, CR100.4b, MTR 7.3)

Sideboard Woes
AP registered a sideboard in CanLander, which is a format that disallows the use of sideboards. This is awkward because at first glance it's unclear what the penalty should be, it helps to break it down a bit. In normal Magic, a legal amount of sideboard cards is 15, and if someone registers 16, well that's illegal. In this case the legal amount of sideboard cards is zero, and ten is a lot more than that. So this becomes a Decklist Problem – Game Loss. (IPG 3.4)

Dynastic Complications
In a game of Emperor, if a general (let's call him Shawn) plays a Standstill, how does it work? It's a little weird, but the players that can cast a spell and have it crack are the general across from Shawn, Shawn, and his Emperor. If Shawn or his emperor cast a spell, the general across from Shawn will draw three cards. If that General instead, is the one that casts a spell into it, only Shawn will draw three cards. Even more odd is if Shawn's Emperor casts Standstill and the opposing general breaks it, in that case, Shawn will be the only one to draw cards, even though it was his Emperor that cast the Standstill in the first place! Basically, Standstill is bad in Emperor. (CR 801.2, CR 809.3a)

Confusing Acts
AP casts Act of Treason on NAP's creature, then attacks with it while they control Teferi's Veil. What happens? The relevant rule in the CR is 702.26f, which says that if the duration of, in this case, Act of Treason expires while the creature is phased out, then it won't affect the creature when that creature phases back in. My best understanding of this is that it will phase in under AP's control and then after its fully phased in, it will return to NAP's control.

Heavy is the Head that Wears the Crown
in Two-Headed Giant, how is monarch determined? For instance, if NAP1 is currently the monarch, and AP1 and AP2 both deal combat damage to them, what happens? The trigger to transfer the monarch will trigger twice, (or once for however many creatures hit them) and NAP1 will choose the order the triggers go onto the stack, so they would actually be the one to choose their successor. (CR 722.2)

The Great Library of Water Bottles
At the end of any large event, there are usually a veritable cornucopia of water bottles that have been abandoned by their owners, these things clog up the lost and found and many are usually stranded with the TO at the end of a large event. One of the stage staff mentioned that at another show they'd been to recently, instead of hoarding them all away in the lost and found, they just left them on a table by the door. This meant that players would have to walk by the table to leave, and their lost water bottle might catch their eye. Also, water bottles are one of those things that most people aren't going to want to take unless it belongs to them, so the threat of theft is fairly low. This seems like such a great idea, and I feel like more large events should try it.

A Problematic Landmass
Mystery Booster is probably one of my favourite weird things WotC has released to date. It's just so odd and fun at the same time. It also spawns some excellent sounding rules questions, such as "Judge, which side of the Problematic Volcano does my Unicycle enter on?" Luckily the gatherer rulings cover us here and declare that if it's not a creature as it enters, it goes on neither side and is completely unaffected by the troublesome tectonic byproduct.

Grand Disaster
On the schedule I noticed that there was a Grand Melee on both Saturday and Sunday. I noticed that the prizes for Grand Melee were very top heavy, 1000tix and an oversized card to the winner and 100 tix to everyone else for sitting down. I was concerned that this would attract degenerate combo decks, since it was as bring your own deck kind of thing, and this could lead to some very unfun experiences. In the first Grand Melee this did end up happening, a fiddly combo resulted in one person mulching through a large number of players before someone with some disruption managed to halt the combo. Afterwards, another person took so long to execute their combo that half the table got bored and scooped. There were definitely some very unhappy players at the end of it, and so for Sunday a rule was instituted that if you "went infinite" you could kill the people in your range of influence but then afterwards any cards involved in the combo would be exiled. This is unorthodox, but interesting, I think the rule scared off any combo players because the game was a lot more low-powered on Sunday, and consequently players seemed to enjoy it a lot more. My suggestion was to prize out any combo players as if they'd won and have them leave the game, but this both results in the TO giving out a lot of prize tix, and also turns the game into a race to combo, which is awkward. I think the better solution is to run Grand Melee as a precon or sealed event, which effectively eliminates the potential from problematic combo decks, additionally, having tix "per kill" incentivises people to actually attack others, rather than just assembling a fortress. I don't think tix per kill works in a format where you can bring your own deck, but for limited or precon it's pretty great.

...In Conclusion
Overall, I had a great time at Vancouver, first it's my old stomping ground and familiar faces always make the event more pleasant. Additionally, we had four uncertified judges work the event. This sounds wild, but I need you to understand that Vancouver is a wasteland when it comes to judges. In the days of yore there used to be a vibrant judge community, but at this point it's completely died out, many of us having moved away or left judging entirely. This left the area's numerous game stores all leaning on 1-2 judges for their RCQs. This also has the byproduct of making west coast Face to Face events horrendously hard to staff. So recently I've been doing a big push for recruitment, in the hopes of getting some RCQ judges trained up. My current bar for L1 is – work an event with me, and as long as there are no significant social issues, I'm willing to put a test in front of you. The test is difficult enough that my more strict JAC-era interview on rules and policy is no longer necessary, which is kind of nice, as it was a bigger strain on my resources. Unfortunately, the overall pass rate was super low, and I was worried that some of the candidates wouldn't want to take it again, but those that failed seemed very motivated to stick with it, which I was really excited about. I'm really hoping to see more of the new folks that came on for CF Vancouver!