Chilliwack, British Columbia
Players: 56 | Format: Modern
Time: Saturday August 3rd, 2024
Small Beginnings
It's been a while since I've done an RCQ that's its own standalone event, so I knew there were going to be some unexpected speedbumps. While this was maybe one standard deviation away from an in-store RCQ, it was still pretty similar. The first thing I did for this event was find out everything they were running, since I vaguely knew there'd be some side events and some rebound RCQs. It turns out they had a plan to run two rebound RCQs as well as a cEDH event. After that I organized breaks and assigned my staff tasks as you can see in this email. The staff itself was interesting, because it consisted of me, a prospective L3, a prospective L2 and a prospective L1, so we had a full range of skill on the event.
A Room Only a Mother Could Love
When I arrived on the day of, I made sure to come in a little earlier than the staff to get the lay of the land and to see if there was anything weird that I hadn't foreseen and would likely want to fix before other judges saw it. There was in fact, one such thing. The tables were numbered very strangely when I first walked in. I think it might be a fun exercise to take a look over this yourself and see if you can identify all of the potential issues before scrolling down and reading further!
I was quite confused by the decision and asked the TO why they'd done this, they replied by letting me know that they wanted the players to be able to crowd around table one. I softly let the TO know that this setup was likely going to make players confused and that we should change it. Luckily the TO was very accommodating and understanding, and fully supported my renumbering. I also addressed the issue that the numbers weren't snaked for some reason, imagine being a player and walking up to table 20 and not being able to see table 21! The final issue, which isn't terribly fixable, is the fact that there are two table 1s in the room. This is because the bottom tables are labelled for cEDH pods, but the TO didn't realize that some players might end up going to the wrong table 1, we didn't have enough standalone numbers to fix this, so we figured with the staffing levels and small number of players we'd be able to just redirect any players manually. Finally, the tables being offset from rows was an interesting idea, but ultimately just made the room awkward to navigate, so we cleaned that up as well.
RCQ, How Art Thou
As stated earlier, I don't run a lot of RCQs, and therefore it's likely no suprise I kept bumping my nose into random RCQ-related issues. Luckily, my aspiring L3 was there to catch me every step of the way so none of the issues ever bled over to the players, but it still felt a little goofy. To prevent this from being an issue in the future I've created a checklist of things that every RCQ judge should go over before leaving to judge an RCQ. I forgot about participation promos and top 8 promos, and also failed to find out if top 8 had unsplitable prizes, before seeing if top 8 wanted to split.
No Better Time Than Now
A recurring issue throughout the day was event start times. The main event was pushed back a half hour because of an accident holding up a significant portion of the players. I'm fine with this, I think if a bunch of players are risking a match loss due to traffic concerns, it's fine to delay a smaller event. This unfortunately pushed back every event of the day, which meant the previously posted start times turned into guidelines. I should've communicated better with the TO about this, since throughout the day, me and the TO ended up telling players conflicting information, which is not great. Another issue was that there was a four-slot RCQ slated to start at 6:30pm. I flagged the TO on why this was problematic when I was hired to do the event, but by that time they'd already done some advertising and didn't want to remove the event from the schedule or change the time. With the 30 minute pushback on all events, this event became a 7pm event which was even worse. We weren't allowed to cap it at 8 players per Face to Face rules, so this event definitely ran the risk of running until midnight and beyond. Luckily the players were getting sick of Magic by that time anyways, and so we only had 8 players sign up for the event and were saved an overnight judging experience.
Choose a True Name Now
If AP casts True-Name Nemesis but fails to name a player and it isn't noticed until their next turn, what happens? This is a Game Rule Violation - Warning for AP and a failure to maintain for NAP. AP chooses the name of a player now. (IPG 2.5)
I Do Nadu Like this Dress
The new hot rules thing everyone was talking about was Nadu, Winged Wisdom and Dress Down. Or more specifically what happens if AP controls Nadu and triggers its ability twice, then NAP casts Dress Down. After Dress Down goes away at the end of the turn, can AP trigger Nadu a third time? A few players asked me about this, and even a few judges. This is likely because popular Youtube channel, JudgingFTW did a whole video on this interaction before the event. The frustrating part of this interaction is that it doesn't have a defined answer within the CR (if this is your first time bumping into this kind of scenario, I have some bad news for you as you continue to dive deeper into the rules). I think there are two ways of looking at this issue. If it was something like Basking Rootwalla, I think we all agree that if we activate the ability, play Dress Down we can't activate the ability again after Dress Down leaves. Just because we mask the existence of the ability, it doesn't mean it goes away and comes back. The awkward thing about Nadu is that its ability isn't just chilling on the card, it's a continuous effect that grants abilities to other things. And when you remove that continuous effect, it stops granting those abilities. When Dress Down goes away, it will grant the abilities to the other permanents again. I think because of this, you should be able to trigger Nadu a third time after Dress Down goes away. On the day of the event however, I was thinking about the scenario more like Basking Rootwalla and said that it wouldn't trigger a third time, which I want to reiterate, is the opposite of how I think it should work now after more consideration to the problem.
Altered Nadu
AP controls Nadu, Winged Wisdom and triggers its ability twice, then casts Metamorphic Alteration on it, choosing to have it copy itself. Will it gain a new instance of its ability, allowing it to be triggered a third time? I think so, since this is effectively the same issue as above.
Spring to the Heart of the Problem
Near the end of the day we ran into a scenario where AP had enchanted NAP's Psychic Frog with their Springheart Nantuko and had made multiple copies of NAP's frog, by paying {1}{G}. This is problematic because AP can't pay that cost and make those copies if they don't control the creature Springheart Nantuko is bestowed upon. Since it had been a few turns, I issued a GRV - warning to AP and a failure to maintain to NAP, but didn't do a backup. The players were obviously dissatisfied with this outcome, and if I recall correctly, opted to draw the game and start a new game, which is a perfectly legal course of action. (IPG 2.5)
...In Conclusion
This event was also a bit of a slog for me, I constantly felt like I was just a little behind on everything. I was somehow busy all day but also ended the day without really knowing what exactly it was that I had been doing all day, which is frustrating and leaves me without any sense of accomplishment. When top 8 came around for the main event, I missed a bunch of small things. The other events seemed to creep up on me, and by the end of the day I felt like I could've probably gotten my judges out earlier if I had just been a little more on-the-ball. I'm not totally sure why this event was such a struggle for me when nothing in particular was really all that challenging. Again, like I stated in my last report, I think it's just a bit of burnout from too many consecutive events with not nearly enough breathing room in between them. Luckily, I had a few weeks in between Bastion and my next event to recenter myself and re calibrate my judge-senses, and since I'm writing this report in the past sense, I can definitely say it helped a lot.
I was quite confused by the decision and asked the TO why they'd done this, they replied by letting me know that they wanted the players to be able to crowd around table one. I softly let the TO know that this setup was likely going to make players confused and that we should change it. Luckily the TO was very accommodating and understanding, and fully supported my renumbering. I also addressed the issue that the numbers weren't snaked for some reason, imagine being a player and walking up to table 20 and not being able to see table 21! The final issue, which isn't terribly fixable, is the fact that there are two table 1s in the room. This is because the bottom tables are labelled for cEDH pods, but the TO didn't realize that some players might end up going to the wrong table 1, we didn't have enough standalone numbers to fix this, so we figured with the staffing levels and small number of players we'd be able to just redirect any players manually. Finally, the tables being offset from rows was an interesting idea, but ultimately just made the room awkward to navigate, so we cleaned that up as well.
RCQ, How Art Thou
As stated earlier, I don't run a lot of RCQs, and therefore it's likely no suprise I kept bumping my nose into random RCQ-related issues. Luckily, my aspiring L3 was there to catch me every step of the way so none of the issues ever bled over to the players, but it still felt a little goofy. To prevent this from being an issue in the future I've created a checklist of things that every RCQ judge should go over before leaving to judge an RCQ. I forgot about participation promos and top 8 promos, and also failed to find out if top 8 had unsplitable prizes, before seeing if top 8 wanted to split.
No Better Time Than Now
A recurring issue throughout the day was event start times. The main event was pushed back a half hour because of an accident holding up a significant portion of the players. I'm fine with this, I think if a bunch of players are risking a match loss due to traffic concerns, it's fine to delay a smaller event. This unfortunately pushed back every event of the day, which meant the previously posted start times turned into guidelines. I should've communicated better with the TO about this, since throughout the day, me and the TO ended up telling players conflicting information, which is not great. Another issue was that there was a four-slot RCQ slated to start at 6:30pm. I flagged the TO on why this was problematic when I was hired to do the event, but by that time they'd already done some advertising and didn't want to remove the event from the schedule or change the time. With the 30 minute pushback on all events, this event became a 7pm event which was even worse. We weren't allowed to cap it at 8 players per Face to Face rules, so this event definitely ran the risk of running until midnight and beyond. Luckily the players were getting sick of Magic by that time anyways, and so we only had 8 players sign up for the event and were saved an overnight judging experience.
Choose a True Name Now
If AP casts True-Name Nemesis but fails to name a player and it isn't noticed until their next turn, what happens? This is a Game Rule Violation - Warning for AP and a failure to maintain for NAP. AP chooses the name of a player now. (IPG 2.5)
I Do Nadu Like this Dress
The new hot rules thing everyone was talking about was Nadu, Winged Wisdom and Dress Down. Or more specifically what happens if AP controls Nadu and triggers its ability twice, then NAP casts Dress Down. After Dress Down goes away at the end of the turn, can AP trigger Nadu a third time? A few players asked me about this, and even a few judges. This is likely because popular Youtube channel, JudgingFTW did a whole video on this interaction before the event. The frustrating part of this interaction is that it doesn't have a defined answer within the CR (if this is your first time bumping into this kind of scenario, I have some bad news for you as you continue to dive deeper into the rules). I think there are two ways of looking at this issue. If it was something like Basking Rootwalla, I think we all agree that if we activate the ability, play Dress Down we can't activate the ability again after Dress Down leaves. Just because we mask the existence of the ability, it doesn't mean it goes away and comes back. The awkward thing about Nadu is that its ability isn't just chilling on the card, it's a continuous effect that grants abilities to other things. And when you remove that continuous effect, it stops granting those abilities. When Dress Down goes away, it will grant the abilities to the other permanents again. I think because of this, you should be able to trigger Nadu a third time after Dress Down goes away. On the day of the event however, I was thinking about the scenario more like Basking Rootwalla and said that it wouldn't trigger a third time, which I want to reiterate, is the opposite of how I think it should work now after more consideration to the problem.
Altered Nadu
AP controls Nadu, Winged Wisdom and triggers its ability twice, then casts Metamorphic Alteration on it, choosing to have it copy itself. Will it gain a new instance of its ability, allowing it to be triggered a third time? I think so, since this is effectively the same issue as above.
Spring to the Heart of the Problem
Near the end of the day we ran into a scenario where AP had enchanted NAP's Psychic Frog with their Springheart Nantuko and had made multiple copies of NAP's frog, by paying {1}{G}. This is problematic because AP can't pay that cost and make those copies if they don't control the creature Springheart Nantuko is bestowed upon. Since it had been a few turns, I issued a GRV - warning to AP and a failure to maintain to NAP, but didn't do a backup. The players were obviously dissatisfied with this outcome, and if I recall correctly, opted to draw the game and start a new game, which is a perfectly legal course of action. (IPG 2.5)
...In Conclusion
This event was also a bit of a slog for me, I constantly felt like I was just a little behind on everything. I was somehow busy all day but also ended the day without really knowing what exactly it was that I had been doing all day, which is frustrating and leaves me without any sense of accomplishment. When top 8 came around for the main event, I missed a bunch of small things. The other events seemed to creep up on me, and by the end of the day I felt like I could've probably gotten my judges out earlier if I had just been a little more on-the-ball. I'm not totally sure why this event was such a struggle for me when nothing in particular was really all that challenging. Again, like I stated in my last report, I think it's just a bit of burnout from too many consecutive events with not nearly enough breathing room in between them. Luckily, I had a few weeks in between Bastion and my next event to recenter myself and re calibrate my judge-senses, and since I'm writing this report in the past sense, I can definitely say it helped a lot.