Los Angeles, California
Role: PM Scheduled Sides Lead
Time: Friday August 16th - Sunday August 18th, 2024
The Tix Conundrum
Long gone are the days of the prize tix station, in the current era most events prize out players at the table, by putting their tickets down at the start of the round. I think this is a good system in general, since it means that we avoid a prize tix station bottleneck. There are, however, a few issues with this system. Firstly, it means that you have to trust more hands on the prize tix than normal. Second, it means that prize tix payouts for each round must be an even or splittable amount to account for draws, and thirdly it makes handing out stuff like bonus tix a lot more awkward. The side events at this show were small enough that each round judges would just hunt out the 2-0 vs 2-0 matches and drop the bonus tix on the table (players that went 3-0 would get 16 extra tickets), and would babysit the downpairs. The bigger issue is that the common event prizing was 5 tix per win, which isn't a splittable amount. The TOs solution to this was.... nothing? We simply told the players they needed to figure out what to do with the extra ticket without running afoul of the MTR. This made me deeply uncomfortable, especially since the value of a ticket was around $1.30 USD, so simply giving draws an extra ticket (making the payout 3-3) would've been better. I understand this incentivises players to draw, however if you aren't super vocal about it, most players aren't going to take advantage of it. Regardless, the optimal solution is to simply make the common event prizing 6 tix per win, and adjust the event entry costs accordingly.
A Show For None
I spent the majority of my weekend in the Command Zone, which is unusual for me, and definitely reminded me of what being a newer player was like. Being engrossed in the community as I am it can be easy to get caught up in the value grinding and prize pool calculations of the enfranchised player. But at every Magic player's core is a desire to, well, play Magic. Nowhere on the event floor is this more evident than in the Command Zone. While to a seasoned veteran a bye means time to get lunch and a free win on the road to top 8, to the casual player, a bye means they are losing 1/3 of what they paid to do, which is play Magic. This is why it's more important than anywhere else to make sure that you are dropping no shows in casual side events.
Secretly Confusing
One of the things I really like about MXP is the amount of weird and fun side events that they offer. If I ever want to have a weird time, I'll go to an MXP. If I want to be a filthy PT grinder, I'll play a Face to Face or an SCG. One such 'weird thing' is the 'Secret Lair Sealed'. This is a format where players were given four packs of Bloomburrow and two random Secret Lairs to build their decks. There were a few issues with this, firstly four packs +10 cards is actually significantly smaller than a normal sealed pool. I actually have no idea why it wasn't 5 or 6 packs and two Secret Lairs. It's not like packs are terribly expensive, and an extra $5 or $10 on an already premium priced event isn't going to make a huge difference. Another thing that I think would've helped this event was the pack distribution being chaos. As it stood, I could easily see many pools where the Secret Lair cards are relegated to the sideboard in favor of in-set synergies. Additionally, Secret Lairs that don't align with the themes of Bloomburrow specifically would be markedly worse than ones that did. The second issue with this event was the fact that some Secret Lairs are just five basic lands, which is great if you're buying a Secret Lair for your 5-color commander deck that wants one of each basic, and less great if you're trying to build a sealed pool to win an event. Two that snuck in were Paradise Frost and Meditations on Nature. We only realized the basic land issue after the Secret Lairs had been handed out, and so we had to make an announcement for players to let us know if they had either Lair so we could exchange it for one that was less basic. The final issue with this event, is unfortunately one that can't be remedied, but luckily is also one that I don't think hurts the event enough to make it nonviable. That is the simple fact that Secret Lairs aren't designed to actually be played with. Many of the cards are unreadable, unrecognizable or are otherwise incomprehensible collector pieces that are actually quite problematic as actual game pieces. A few times players had confused questions about what their cards were or did.
A Logical Solution
We had a janky commander draft, that ended up having 13 players. We made a pod of six, and a pod of 7 for drafting, but when it came to organizing the pods for play, we were at a bit of a loss for what exactly to do. Usually commander pods are paired within pod as shown below.
This ensures, like with a normal draft, that you aren't playing the person you were sitting next to in the draft. But with the awkward pod sizes we couldn't productively do that and keep pairings within the pod. We dithered a bit on whether it was more important to play within pod, or not to play the person you sat next to. Eventually we decided that we wanted cross-pod pairings. It was a bit of a logistical challenge to ensure no one was in a pod with someone they sat next to, you can take a look at how we did it here.
Master of Min
Coming from a Grand Prix background and not a convention one, I don't have a ton of experience with minimasters. Throughout the weekend I had to steer a few minimaster events, and only on the final day did a more seasoned convention judge note that it was odd we were doing three-game-matches instead of one-game-matches. Apparently at most other events minimasters is run at, they do single game matches. Huh. Weird. For those that might not know, minimasters is a super introductory format where players get two packs of jumpstart, shuffle them together and play one game against an opponent. If they win, they get a second pack to modify their deck, if they win this next game they get another pack and play one more round for one final pack. You can also do this with non jumpstart packs, open one pack and shuffle in three of each basic.
Dress Down: The Gift that Keeps On Giving
If there's anything that gives me a deep feeling of job security, it's Dress Down. Every time I'm worried that ChatGPT might take my job, I just remember Tishana's Tidebinder and Dress Down exist and feel less concerned that the reservoir of judge questions will dry up. This weekend's offering was NAP casts Dress Down while AP controls an Inkmoth Nexus, what happens if AP activates Inkmoth Nexus' ability? Inkmoth Nexus will become a 1/1 artifact creature with flying and infect. This is because Dress Down has an earlier timestamp than the resolution of Inkmoth's ability, therefore it's removing abilities clause is applied first, then Inkmoth's ability that adds abilities applies. (CR 613.7) Things get a little weirder, however if AP activates Inkmoth Nexus and NAP casts Dress Down afterwards. This will strip the abilities from Inkmoth and make AP unable to activate Inkmoth again. (though it will still be an artifact creature until the end of the turn).
A Curse in Disguise
Every size of event has its challenges. At this size of event, the primary challenge on sides, is how to handle awkwardly small numbers of players. At less than 8 players events start to feel kinda lame. At less than four they can't run, since three rounds would require that some people play the same opponent twice. At three it's the worst, because at two, you can just send the players away with some tix (if they don't want a refund) and they can play each other. At three you could have each player play the other two, but that would mean one player sitting out for an hour. Which sucks. MXP really doesn't want to have an event not launch, because that's mopey for everyone involved. So when we saw we had three players for the pioneer event on Saturday, registration did some legwork to find a fourth. The problem afterwords however, was the fact that 'player number three' never actually showed up, so after scrounging up a fourth player, we still ended up with an awkward three player event. I think probably, events should just be minimum 8 players and anything less just collapses. I also think you can head off this issue by offering less events. If you have one sealed event on Sunday, everyone is going to play that event. If you offer five sealed events, they're going to split themselves up among those five events and a bunch of them might end up too small to launch.
Cacophonous Communication
One of the biggest challenges with this event was the sound system. The speaker was inaudible in 90% of the room. To make this worse, the parts of the room where it was audible, it still made most speakers sound like they were underwater. To compound this issue, the ceiling was very low, and sightlines were peppered with columns, so we couldn't even simply tell people to go to a gathering point and await the start of their event. Luckily, we live in the technology era, and players get seat numbers beamed directly into their phones, so while getting events to start on time was a bit of a struggle, in a pre-MTGMelee era things in this room would've been significantly worse.
Companionable Reminder
AP has a token as visible here that reads 'don't forget Jegantha' in their deckbox. Is this outside assistance? I think it's definitely borderline, but things like 'don't forget your pact' or alters that put swords on Stoneforge Mystic are okay, and I think this falls under the minor strategical information, which is allowed by the IPG. (IPG 3.2)
Sufficiency Deficiency
AP fetched, and saw the land they wanted was on top of their library, they grabbed it and put it onto the battlefield, then put their library back down without shuffling. Then they cast Leyline Binding and drew a card off their Up the Beanstalk. The next turn they untapped and cast Forth Eorlingas for the win. Initially I didn't hear that the reason for the insufficient shuffling was due to the card being on top and was fairly concerned about it. After I got that piece of information I was less concerned. AP was up a game, however, so they wouldn't be terribly desperate to win this game. Still, it felt awkward, since there wasn't any remedy I could apply to mitigate the potential advantage.
Did You Catch Unearth?
Very often there are one or two interesting rules or policy questions that go around the staff at events such as this, and if there aren't then the event was obviously boring and WotC needs to print some new and interesting cards. The question at this event was as follows: NAP controls Grafdiffers Cage and AP activates the unearth ability on their Dregscape Zombie, will it be exiled at the end of the turn? It turns out there is a lot of disagreement about how this should be handled. I think that it should be exiled at the end of the turn. This is because while we have a rule that allows unearth to work at all (CR 400.7j) the existence of this rule implies that the word 'it' natively applies to the object before it moves zones, and only due to the good grace of this rule, can it apply to the new thing our object becomes on the battlefield. Thus I think that after activating Unearth, Dregscape will gain haste and be exiled at the end of the turn, even if Grafdigger's Cage prevents it from entering the battlefield.
Cecile Movement
AP controls Rest in Peace and their commander dies. It'll go to exile and they'll have the option to move it to the Command Zone as a state-based action. They choose not to. Later they cast Riftsweeper, and attempt to move their commander to the graveyard, this moves it from exile, to, well, exile. However this counts as a zone change and thus gives AP another opportunity to choose whether or not to put their commander into the command zone. (CR 400.8, 704.6d)
Dressed to Cleanse
AP casts Suncleanser and the second triggered ability resolves. Afterwards NAP casts Dress Down, will NAP be able to gain counters afterwards? No, while Suncleanser currently has no abilities, the effect preventing AP from being able to gain counters is a continuous effect generated from the resolution of its triggered ability, which is unaffected by Dress Down, and as Dress Down doesn't cause Suncleanser to leave the battlefield, the termination condition for it's previously-resolved trigger, hasn't been met. (CR 611.2a)
Mob Nixilis
AP casts Ob Nixilis, the Adversary with Casualty, sacrificing a creature with one power, thus causing a non-legendary Ob to enter the battlefield with one starting loyalty. At the end of the turn, AP's Ocelot Pride triggers and AP chooses to copy the token Ob, what is its starting loyalty? Its one, because the starting loyalty was modified as part of the copy process, it becomes part of the copiable characteristics of the token. (CR 707.9b) Notably, this is currently handled incorrectly on MODO, where the copy created by Ocelot Pride comes in with zero loyalty.
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like LEC
AP controls Scavenger's Talent and their creature dies. They mistakenly mill two cards, forgetting that the trigger is not a dies trigger but a 'whenever you sacrifice a permanent' trigger. The judge on the call ruled GRV backup, which resulted in the two cards being shuffled into the random portion of AP's library. However upon further discussion we both agreed it should probably have been a looking at extra cards warning, since GRV is the catch-all 'miscellaneous' bucket where we put infractions that don't fit elsewhere. In this case, this very cleanly fits into LEC, regardless of the motivation for looking at the cards. That being said, the fix for both infractions is the same, so I didn't feel this was relevant enough to interrupt the judge on the call for. (IPG 2.5)
'Tob-nanza'
The very last event on Sunday evening was something called 'Prize Wall Bonanza'. The event was a one-round Commander event where each player got a precon and played in pods of three or four. The winner from each pod would get to 'draft' something cool from the prize wall, and each loser would get to also draft something from the prize wall, but the pool of things they got to choose from was slightly less cool than the winner pool. This is an awesome event. If I was a player, I'd play this event. I love precon commander and I love the prize wall. However there were a few issues. Firstly, if you got stuck in a slow pod, there was simply less stuff for you to choose from when you were done. This kind of can't be mitigated except by having a very deep pool of prize wall items. However with so many items being unique or one-ofs it's likely that some amount of players are going to walk away disappointed. The second major issue was in the logistics. There wasn't a good way to track winners. At the outset of the event we left a player list at the prize wall so that when players walked up, the prize wall could ask them their names, and verify they were actually in the event. However, there was no system to mark winners as winners, short of having a judge escort them to the prize wall. This seemed like a lot of work and a lot of wasted judge resources, so I just picked up some tokens that were discarded, initialled them and told the winners to bring the tokens up to the prize wall as I dropped one in the middle of each commander pod. Could a savvy player counterfeit these? Yes. However the probability of that happening is fairly low as long as this isn't something that MXP does at each show. In the future I recommend a custom printed token or voucher that can be dropped on the table at the beginning of the match and brought up to the prize wall at the end.
...In Conclusion
I've talked about burnout in the past few reports, and this event was a bit of me trying to rediscover what I love about working events. I don't love PM sides lead, but I did like that at this show I got to take some judge calls. I tried to keep track of what parts of the event I did enjoy. Mostly, the few Comp REL calls I got to take as well as the interesting rules discussions that went around the event. Overall while Saturday had me a bit in the dumps due to some confusion about how to tetris in the Minimasters and 2HG events, I enjoyed this event more than the past few events I've been at, and hopefully, over the next few events I can rediscover what I love about judging.
This ensures, like with a normal draft, that you aren't playing the person you were sitting next to in the draft. But with the awkward pod sizes we couldn't productively do that and keep pairings within the pod. We dithered a bit on whether it was more important to play within pod, or not to play the person you sat next to. Eventually we decided that we wanted cross-pod pairings. It was a bit of a logistical challenge to ensure no one was in a pod with someone they sat next to, you can take a look at how we did it here.
Master of Min
Coming from a Grand Prix background and not a convention one, I don't have a ton of experience with minimasters. Throughout the weekend I had to steer a few minimaster events, and only on the final day did a more seasoned convention judge note that it was odd we were doing three-game-matches instead of one-game-matches. Apparently at most other events minimasters is run at, they do single game matches. Huh. Weird. For those that might not know, minimasters is a super introductory format where players get two packs of jumpstart, shuffle them together and play one game against an opponent. If they win, they get a second pack to modify their deck, if they win this next game they get another pack and play one more round for one final pack. You can also do this with non jumpstart packs, open one pack and shuffle in three of each basic.
Dress Down: The Gift that Keeps On Giving
If there's anything that gives me a deep feeling of job security, it's Dress Down. Every time I'm worried that ChatGPT might take my job, I just remember Tishana's Tidebinder and Dress Down exist and feel less concerned that the reservoir of judge questions will dry up. This weekend's offering was NAP casts Dress Down while AP controls an Inkmoth Nexus, what happens if AP activates Inkmoth Nexus' ability? Inkmoth Nexus will become a 1/1 artifact creature with flying and infect. This is because Dress Down has an earlier timestamp than the resolution of Inkmoth's ability, therefore it's removing abilities clause is applied first, then Inkmoth's ability that adds abilities applies. (CR 613.7) Things get a little weirder, however if AP activates Inkmoth Nexus and NAP casts Dress Down afterwards. This will strip the abilities from Inkmoth and make AP unable to activate Inkmoth again. (though it will still be an artifact creature until the end of the turn).
A Curse in Disguise
Every size of event has its challenges. At this size of event, the primary challenge on sides, is how to handle awkwardly small numbers of players. At less than 8 players events start to feel kinda lame. At less than four they can't run, since three rounds would require that some people play the same opponent twice. At three it's the worst, because at two, you can just send the players away with some tix (if they don't want a refund) and they can play each other. At three you could have each player play the other two, but that would mean one player sitting out for an hour. Which sucks. MXP really doesn't want to have an event not launch, because that's mopey for everyone involved. So when we saw we had three players for the pioneer event on Saturday, registration did some legwork to find a fourth. The problem afterwords however, was the fact that 'player number three' never actually showed up, so after scrounging up a fourth player, we still ended up with an awkward three player event. I think probably, events should just be minimum 8 players and anything less just collapses. I also think you can head off this issue by offering less events. If you have one sealed event on Sunday, everyone is going to play that event. If you offer five sealed events, they're going to split themselves up among those five events and a bunch of them might end up too small to launch.
Cacophonous Communication
One of the biggest challenges with this event was the sound system. The speaker was inaudible in 90% of the room. To make this worse, the parts of the room where it was audible, it still made most speakers sound like they were underwater. To compound this issue, the ceiling was very low, and sightlines were peppered with columns, so we couldn't even simply tell people to go to a gathering point and await the start of their event. Luckily, we live in the technology era, and players get seat numbers beamed directly into their phones, so while getting events to start on time was a bit of a struggle, in a pre-MTGMelee era things in this room would've been significantly worse.
Companionable Reminder
AP has a token as visible here that reads 'don't forget Jegantha' in their deckbox. Is this outside assistance? I think it's definitely borderline, but things like 'don't forget your pact' or alters that put swords on Stoneforge Mystic are okay, and I think this falls under the minor strategical information, which is allowed by the IPG. (IPG 3.2)
Sufficiency Deficiency
AP fetched, and saw the land they wanted was on top of their library, they grabbed it and put it onto the battlefield, then put their library back down without shuffling. Then they cast Leyline Binding and drew a card off their Up the Beanstalk. The next turn they untapped and cast Forth Eorlingas for the win. Initially I didn't hear that the reason for the insufficient shuffling was due to the card being on top and was fairly concerned about it. After I got that piece of information I was less concerned. AP was up a game, however, so they wouldn't be terribly desperate to win this game. Still, it felt awkward, since there wasn't any remedy I could apply to mitigate the potential advantage.
Did You Catch Unearth?
Very often there are one or two interesting rules or policy questions that go around the staff at events such as this, and if there aren't then the event was obviously boring and WotC needs to print some new and interesting cards. The question at this event was as follows: NAP controls Grafdiffers Cage and AP activates the unearth ability on their Dregscape Zombie, will it be exiled at the end of the turn? It turns out there is a lot of disagreement about how this should be handled. I think that it should be exiled at the end of the turn. This is because while we have a rule that allows unearth to work at all (CR 400.7j) the existence of this rule implies that the word 'it' natively applies to the object before it moves zones, and only due to the good grace of this rule, can it apply to the new thing our object becomes on the battlefield. Thus I think that after activating Unearth, Dregscape will gain haste and be exiled at the end of the turn, even if Grafdigger's Cage prevents it from entering the battlefield.
Cecile Movement
AP controls Rest in Peace and their commander dies. It'll go to exile and they'll have the option to move it to the Command Zone as a state-based action. They choose not to. Later they cast Riftsweeper, and attempt to move their commander to the graveyard, this moves it from exile, to, well, exile. However this counts as a zone change and thus gives AP another opportunity to choose whether or not to put their commander into the command zone. (CR 400.8, 704.6d)
Dressed to Cleanse
AP casts Suncleanser and the second triggered ability resolves. Afterwards NAP casts Dress Down, will NAP be able to gain counters afterwards? No, while Suncleanser currently has no abilities, the effect preventing AP from being able to gain counters is a continuous effect generated from the resolution of its triggered ability, which is unaffected by Dress Down, and as Dress Down doesn't cause Suncleanser to leave the battlefield, the termination condition for it's previously-resolved trigger, hasn't been met. (CR 611.2a)
Mob Nixilis
AP casts Ob Nixilis, the Adversary with Casualty, sacrificing a creature with one power, thus causing a non-legendary Ob to enter the battlefield with one starting loyalty. At the end of the turn, AP's Ocelot Pride triggers and AP chooses to copy the token Ob, what is its starting loyalty? Its one, because the starting loyalty was modified as part of the copy process, it becomes part of the copiable characteristics of the token. (CR 707.9b) Notably, this is currently handled incorrectly on MODO, where the copy created by Ocelot Pride comes in with zero loyalty.
It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like LEC
AP controls Scavenger's Talent and their creature dies. They mistakenly mill two cards, forgetting that the trigger is not a dies trigger but a 'whenever you sacrifice a permanent' trigger. The judge on the call ruled GRV backup, which resulted in the two cards being shuffled into the random portion of AP's library. However upon further discussion we both agreed it should probably have been a looking at extra cards warning, since GRV is the catch-all 'miscellaneous' bucket where we put infractions that don't fit elsewhere. In this case, this very cleanly fits into LEC, regardless of the motivation for looking at the cards. That being said, the fix for both infractions is the same, so I didn't feel this was relevant enough to interrupt the judge on the call for. (IPG 2.5)
'Tob-nanza'
The very last event on Sunday evening was something called 'Prize Wall Bonanza'. The event was a one-round Commander event where each player got a precon and played in pods of three or four. The winner from each pod would get to 'draft' something cool from the prize wall, and each loser would get to also draft something from the prize wall, but the pool of things they got to choose from was slightly less cool than the winner pool. This is an awesome event. If I was a player, I'd play this event. I love precon commander and I love the prize wall. However there were a few issues. Firstly, if you got stuck in a slow pod, there was simply less stuff for you to choose from when you were done. This kind of can't be mitigated except by having a very deep pool of prize wall items. However with so many items being unique or one-ofs it's likely that some amount of players are going to walk away disappointed. The second major issue was in the logistics. There wasn't a good way to track winners. At the outset of the event we left a player list at the prize wall so that when players walked up, the prize wall could ask them their names, and verify they were actually in the event. However, there was no system to mark winners as winners, short of having a judge escort them to the prize wall. This seemed like a lot of work and a lot of wasted judge resources, so I just picked up some tokens that were discarded, initialled them and told the winners to bring the tokens up to the prize wall as I dropped one in the middle of each commander pod. Could a savvy player counterfeit these? Yes. However the probability of that happening is fairly low as long as this isn't something that MXP does at each show. In the future I recommend a custom printed token or voucher that can be dropped on the table at the beginning of the match and brought up to the prize wall at the end.
...In Conclusion
I've talked about burnout in the past few reports, and this event was a bit of me trying to rediscover what I love about working events. I don't love PM sides lead, but I did like that at this show I got to take some judge calls. I tried to keep track of what parts of the event I did enjoy. Mostly, the few Comp REL calls I got to take as well as the interesting rules discussions that went around the event. Overall while Saturday had me a bit in the dumps due to some confusion about how to tetris in the Minimasters and 2HG events, I enjoyed this event more than the past few events I've been at, and hopefully, over the next few events I can rediscover what I love about judging.
