Vegas, Nevada
Time: Friday June 7th - Sunday June 9th, 2024


Friday - Floor Judge - Not Checks Team

A Valid Issue
When starting an event, MTGMelee will often show you how many players are registered and how many decklists have been submitted. This won't however, account for players that have input a decklist, but not formally submitted it. When you start the event MTGMelee will go through all the decklists that haven't been formally submitted, and if they're legal, will accept those as the player's canonical decklist. I never realized this before, though I often noticed that the number of decklists would rise sharply after the tournament began. If you want to force-validate all lists before the event, you can select "validate all lists" and this will validate any pending decklists and will give you a more accurate count of outstanding lists, however, this will also autosubmit any lists players are in the middle of working on, so I'd recommend against using this feature.

Saturday - Floor Judge - Not Checks Team

Ready, Set: Register!
Being a judge for limited has never been more annoying. I'm never entirely confident on whether the basic land should or shouldn't stay in the pack, and what the actual number of cards in a complete pool should be. Realistically, because of the current confusing product mix, I think it's actually incredibly easy for players to add cards to their pool, simply due to the fact that counting a pool is something that's no longer viable. Let me expand, so in Modern Horizons 3, the basic land slot can also contain a common card, so theoretically, a player could add some commons to their decklist and we would never know, since you don't register the basics you open. Since it's a variable number of basics it's not like we can check by counting the pool either. Though I suppose this is a rather low EV cheat, and there are likely better ways to cheat in limited, like just adding stuff to your pool and hoping to dodge the deck check.

Another reason limited kind of sucks now is because of deck registration. For this event, one of the players in the Saturday event, was also in the finals of Friday's 5k, which was taking place on Saturday morning. Luckily SCG has a policy where finalists in a Friday 5k get a first round bye in Saturday's "main event" which in this case, was just another 5k. This works well enough for constructed, but in limited we have to deal with registering their pool somehow. After a little bit of discussion I ended up registering the pool, as I wasn't tied down to any other specific tasks. And I have to tell you, it was it the most miserable experience of my life. Modern Horizons 3 is horrendous to register, this is almost entirely due to the absolutely unhinged registration sheet. First off, there are the regular set cards, which are organized into the five colors, artifacts, multicolor and land. Then there are the devoid cards, which are technically colorless, but are sorted by their color identity instead. Unless it's Wastescape Battlemage, which is filed under colorless. Then, while there is a separate artifact section, the colored artifacts are in with their associated color. The modal double-faced cards are sorted into the color of their front face, except they aren't alphabetical, so they're at the bottom of their color section. Then we've got the new-to-modern reprints, which have their own column and are organized by color then alphabetically, which ends up very unintuitive when you have 3-6 of them per pool. After that is a separate section for the commander cards as well as "special guest" cards. Finally if you thought that sorting by collector number would save you, you are sorely mistaken, as the sheet is most definitely not organized by collector number. All this shakes out to a very frustrating and convoluted registration process, with players constantly confused as to where to find specific cards on the sheet.

The Source of the Tide
AP controls Agatha's Soul Cauldron and uses its activated ability to exile a creature from their graveyard. Then the reflexive trigger goes onto the stack and NAP casts Tishana's Tidebinder to counter it, will the Soul Cauldron's abilities be removed? Yes, the Soul Cauldron is still the source of the triggered ability. (CR 603.7e)

Roaming Answers
AP controls Roaming Throne, and casts Itzquinth, Firstborn of Gishath, and would like to pay {2} for its ability? What is the maximum amount of times AP can have a dinosaur they control deal damage to another target creature? 2 and they'll need to pay {4} to do it. This feels very strange because the source of all the triggers is Itzquinth, Firstborn of Gishath, however there's a rule to catch us here in CR 603.2e

If You Say "If" One More Time...
AP attacks with Battle Cry Goblin and a 4/4 Bird token. NAP kills the bird token while the Goblin's triggered ability is on the stack, what happens? The ability will resolve as normal. Unlike most abilities that contain an "intervening if" clause like this, this ability only checks as it goes on the stack, and not as it resolves. (CR 608.2a) That's because this "intervening if" asks about a past event, which either happened or didn't (whether or not you attacked with 6 power of creatures doesn't change if one dies later on in the turn).

Landless Library
AP casts Planar Genesis and sees Disciple of Freyalise, can they put its back face onto the battlefield? No, in the library Disciple isn't a land, it only has the characteristics of the front face. (CR 712.8a)

Friends Forever (Even if You Never Said Anything)
AP called a judge during game two when they realized they had shuffled their companion, Yorion, Sky Nomad, into their library. AP noticed after they presented their deck to their opponent. This, in and of itself, isn't a big deal, with the new MTR clause, AP is considered to be using Yorion as their companion unless they specifically rescind it. (MTR 2.3) Accidentally shuffling it into their library doesn't county as an official rescinding of the companion. So there's a few ways we could fix this, we could also easily shuffle this under reversing decisions, and allow the player to simply change their mind about their sideboarding, so long as the other reversing decisions stipulations apply. If you can't issue reversing decisions, you could also issue a deck problem - warning and pull the Yorion out of the deck. But this one gets weirder, it turns out that the deck was actually 79 cards. This is a little awkward, but if the extra cards are in the sideboard, we can still file it under deck problem, and it's highly likely this gets upgraded to a game loss for the SB containing too many cards. (IPG 3.5) Unfortunately that wasn't the case here, the missing cards weren't in the sideboard, they were off to the side under AP's playmat. After some humming and hawing the floor judge ruled that this was a deck problem - warning and used the companion remedy to fix it, meaning they first removed the Yorion from the library, then went through the sideboard and found any cards that fulfilled the companion restriction (protip, for Yorion the only requirement is ‘be a Magic card' so all of them qualified) then selected two at random and revealed them to the opponent before shuffling them into the library, bringing the count back up to 80 cards. Notably this is incorrect, what should've happened, is that the sideboard should've been revealed to the opponentn and they should've chosen which cards went in. I think this is a little convoluted, and that it might be cleaner to just issue deck problem warning and shuffle the extra cards in, or call reversing decisions and let AP change their stuff to be more legal.

Modded Tokens
AP controls Ondu Knotmaster and they equip their Batterskull to it, causing the previously equipped Germ token to die. Will the Knotmaster trigger? No. Dies triggers check the characteristics of the permanent as it last appeared on the battlefield. First the equipment moves onto the Knotmaster, then state-based actions are checked and the Germ dies. Right before it died it wasn't modified, so it won't trigger the Knotmaster. (CR 603.10a)

That Sure is a Nice Standings You Have There...
If a judge enters the last result of a round, MTGMelee won't properly calculate standings until a scorekeeper clicks the "calculate standings" button. However if a player enters the last result, it will trigger a recalculation. This is particularly problematic in the last round before the cut, because if that recalculation isn't done, a bunch of players might make the decision to draw based on incorrect standings!

Toucan Nadu's Froot Loops
The new hotness this weekend was the Nadu Froot Loops Combo deck. This deck goes infinite with the Modern Horizons 3 card, Nadu, Winged Wisdom, Shuko and Springheart Nantuko. The Nantuko in particular is difficult to read, but basically, if it's not bestowed, you just make an insect every time landfall happens (if it is bestowed, you can pay {1}{G} to make a copy of whatever its on, but that's less relevant to the combo). The critical thing to understand here is that Nadu grants an ability to all other creatures that possibly puts a land onto the battlefield when they're targeted. Shuko targets things for free, and creatures come into play from Springheart Nantuko whenever lands enter the battlefield, those creatures will then gain the ability from Nadu, and so on and so forth. Notably you can add Sylvan Safekeeper and Endurance into the mix to sacrifice all your lands and then shuffle them back into your library, causing you to be able to generate infinite mana and creatures.

The Creation of Conundrums
AP controls The Creation of Avacyn, and in response to the second chapter ability triggering they proliferate the Saga, causing the third triggered ability to go onto the stack, however the conundrum here is that the card isn't revealed yet, so it has no characteristics, which means it's not a creature card, and won't be put onto the battlefield. (CR 406.3a) The other interesting ruling regarding this card is that if you manage to exile two cards with its first ability (with something like Vantress Visions or whatever) you'll lose the combined CMC for the second chapter ability (CR 607.3) and if any of them are creature cards, you can put all permanents onto the battlefield and the rest into your hand. (Gatherer ruling)

Sunday - Scheduled Sides Floor Judge

Skip Together
What happens if AP controls Necrodominance in two-headed giant? Their entire team will skip the draw step. Consequently, if AP plays something like Time Warp on their team, the team will get an extra turn. (CR 805.8)

Two Heads, One Life
AP controls Platinum Emperion and their partner wants to crack a fetchland, can they? No, if a player's life total can't change, that team's life total can't change. (CR 810.9h)

Quantum Mind Control
One ruling I can never remember is whether or not Mindslaver is really good in 2HG or really bad. As it turns out, it's really good, you simply control the entire team. (CR 805.8)

...In Conclusion
I enjoyed going as a floor judge to this one, but by Sunday I was starting to get a bit bored. While I generally love floor judging, the combination of the event being a little under-attended and me lacking any real responsibilities ended up making the weekend a little lackluster. That being said I still overall had a good time and got to interact with a lot more rules questions than I normally do on events!