Washington, DC
Time: Friday October 4th - Sunday October 6th, 2024
Main Event: Pioneer
Players: 1817


Friday - LCQ Floor Judge


A Qualifying Art
I think in the current era, no one has yet come up with a super solid way to run LCQs. If you run them as On-Demands that cap at 64 or 32, you end up having to launch a bunch simultaneously at the beginning of the day. If you run them at specific times, then your first few events are incredibly large, and it's hard to plan your space throughout the day, you may also need to frontload byes if the event is an awkward amount of people. If you run everything through melee your scorekeeper can easily get overloaded and it also means it's incredibly difficult for floor judges to enter penalties and time extensions (because they have to be in multiple different LCQ events). If you run them on paper it's much harder to keep track of time in the round, and knowing what is and isn't still out is a mess. SCG went for the strategy of "all LCQs are in melee and launch every half hour". Which I don't think is a terrible strategy, although it did have all the issues outlined above. The LCQ lead's flight was delayed so I think that contributed to some of the disorganized feeling. Pioneer LCQs were launching every half hour, with sealed launching every hour, and weren't capped. They were four rounds for sealed and five for pioneer, the pioneer LCQs ended up being pretty large, probably due to the fact that pioneer was also the format of the RC. Things ran alright in the first half of the day, but when the two large 16:00 ReCQs needed to launch, it was evident that the scorekeeper was incredibly overloaded. A few LCQ rounds got really delayed and there were some major issues with event condensation. I think in the future a second scorekeeper on the sealed/off format LCQs as well as the ReCQ would've been a good idea. I also think having just a registration/ops person at the desk counting rpize rix and dealing with promos and signing players up into mtgmelee would've been good, since the desk only had the scorekeeper and the tournament organizer, who obviously has better things to do than count out prize tix.

Say its Name
SCG didn't have custom nametags like Dreamhack, but did have custom metal badges, which are the same thing but metal and less practical, however they are significantly more cool. Other large events like PAX or Magiccon might mail badges or nametags, but this would obviously cost a lot of money, and is ultimately easier to just do at the event since these badges don't allow hall entry, so the bottleneck is a single large event where players will be seated alphabetically anyways. For SCG and probably any other Magic TO that wants to give a personalized item to each RC player, it really is best to just give them out at the RC. Dreamhack liked to wait until the players were all seated or the morning of the RC to distribute decklists and goodies, but luckily, SCG was fine with us doing all that the night before. SCG raised a good argument of "I don't think anyone is going to steal a namebadge with someone elses name on it, nor do I think they're going to steal someone elses decklist." We had to wait until LCQs were done, because the TO wanted all the players to be perfectly alphabetized for the player meeting. I think a better strategy is to instead seat the player meeting in MTGMelee without your last four or five LCQ winners, and begin printing decklists long before the last LCQ ends (because printing 2000 decklists takes nonzero amounts of time). Then when you put the LCQ players into the system, print their lists individually and put them at the end of the event. That way the judges can start placing decklists and nametags on the tables while the last few LCQs are still going, and it also means that a greater number of judge staff will still be in the hall and can make the task go by that much faster. As it stood there were small few of us who were on the PM shift that stayed until the end of nametag distribution.

A Bad Reflex
AP attacks with Inti, Seneschal of the Sun and discards a card, but doesn't mention that a creature gets +1/+1 and trample until after blockers are declared. I ruled missed trigger, since this part of the ability is a reflexive trigger. (CR 603.12) But when discussing the call with another judge later, found out it's actually a GRV and I should've rewound, silly me! Acknowledging the action that causes the reflexive trigger counts as acknowledging the reflexive trigger. (IPG 2.1)

Virtue of Rules
AP casts Locthwain Scorn, can Spell Queller exile it? Yes, because the mana value of the spell on the stack is 2. (CR 709.3b) When Spell Queller dies, AP can choose to cast Locthwain Scorn or Virtue of Persistence, because Spell Queller's second trigger doesn't check the mana value of the spell again.

Saturday - Comp REL Floor Judge


When a Ruling Doesn't Resonate
AP casts Burn Together and controls Leyline of Resonance, I initially ruled that this would be copied and that the second copy of the spell would use last known information to deal damage upon resolution. (CR 608.2h) However luckily, one of the players in the game mentioned they thought that Burn Together had two targets and was therefore ineligible to be copied by Leyline of Resonance. Ugh, how had I missed that? Feeling silly I reversed my answer, but was overall thankful the player spoke up.

A Slick Copy
AP controls Leyline of Resonance, Slickshot Show-Off and no other creatures. NAP casts Get Lost on Slickshot Show-Off and AP responds by casting Turn Inside Out, but doesn't acknowledge the copy being created. AP then says "resolve the stack?" and when Get Lost resolves they mention they should manifest dread twice, at which point a judge is called. It's perfectly legal for the copy to be created with the same target as the original, and AP wouldn't need to acknowledge the target of the copy, since they're not making a choice. Another point in favor of not missed is that policy specifically calls out that storm and cipher triggers as being invisible and resolving automatically. (IPG 2.1) +3/+0 is invisible and doesn't require acknowledgement either, so as far as I could tell the first time there was an impact on the visible game state, it was when AP went to Manifest Dread. I ruled as not missed and was upheld on the appeal.

If Only Players Would List-en
When the ReCQ started we didn't have decklists for about 20 players. The HJ and myself had a discussion about what we should do. Since it was single elimination I argued to simply have the players play and write out a decklist after round one if they won, statistically half of them would lose, so their lists wouldn't matter anymore. The HJ felt this was enough of a breach of tournament integrity that they would rather delay those specific matches while each player wrote out a decklist. We opted to do the typical LCQ "deviation" of not giving a game loss for lack of decklist because a) it was single elimination, and a game loss in a single elimination event sucks, and b) many of the players tried to submit on MTGMelee, but were cut off as registration closed ten minutes before the event's start time.

Sunday - Pioneer 10K Floor Judge


Emerging Suspicion
AP casts Emergent Ultimatum and NAP asks how much they have floating, AP says "two, no wait three" a spectator calls me over as AP is resolving Emergent Ultimatum and says he thinks AP only has one floating mana. It's game three and both players are undefeated in round four or five in the ten round 10k. I counted the mana and determined that the spectator was correct. If AP didn't win this turn he died on NAP's turn to creatures on the board. NAP was was playing an Arclight Phoenix deck, and had a spell pierce in hand. I'm not sure if AP knew about the Spell Pierce in NAP's hand. (Phoenix also typically run Mystical Dispute as well.)

AP kept track of the mana on a notepad and was very precise, except on one spell in particular where he did a "shortcut" which is where the error occurred. We did a long investigation but ended up not disqualifying the player. However they were issued a game loss by the HJ, which ultimately would've been the resolution if we executed a CPV-backup.

No Spells at Noon
NAP controls High Noon, and AP is comboing off, they execute many actions, starting with Spelunking, doing a bunch of activated and triggered abilities, and completing the combo by casting Lumra, Bellow of the Woods. NAP asks "you did all that with only one spell?" AP says "yes" then NAP scoops up their cards and then realizes that AP cast two spells that turn, and mentions the High Noon. AP says "Well you scooped," NAP then goes up to a judge to asks what to do, while the judge is pondering how to address this, NAP goes back to the table and AP suddenly agrees to change the match result to be in NAP's favor. This kind of rang some alarm bells for me, I flagged the HJ about it, but the ultimate result of the investigation was no cheating.

A Life Well Lost
I was called over for a life total discrepancy where AP, who was playing Arclight Phoenix had NAP at 7 and NAP had themselves at 10. NAP was on UW Control, and neither player really had control of the board. After speaking with both players and analyzing their life pads, it was determined that AP thought they'd attacked with a Brazen Borrower, but NAP thought it had been killed before dealing damage. Neither player could really confirm the events of the game with any conviction, and so I ruled in NAP's favor, as AP's lifepad had some strange messy tracking that could've been the source of the confusion. While odd, and slightly suspicious, the play didn't seem critical enough to make me terribly concerned about cheating.

Cards From Where?
I was called in on an HCE where AP had an extra card but no one knew why. NAP mentioned that they thought they saw AP draw a card, and then asked whether AP had drawn for turn and AP had said "no" and drew another card. It was turn two for AP, they were on the draw and they controlled Bandit's Talent, two lands, they had 5 cards in their hand and had mulliganed once, and had one Thoughtsieze in their graveyard. NAP hadn't cast anything this game. This was really weird, and AP just couldn't give me an explanation as to how the extra card got there, or even what it was. I passed it up to the HJ but there wasn't much to investigate here. It was also game one, and early at that, so going for the cheat here feels pretty brazen. Both players agreed on what the most recent card drawn was, so I ruled GRV and put that card on top.

It Goes Round and Round.. and Round...
On Sunday I was on the Pioneer 10k, which is a swiss event with a top 8. It ended up (predictably) getting around 600 players, which per the MTR necessitates 10 rounds. This meant that the event was basically running until the heat death of the universe. It started at 10am and while the hall closed around four or five, at that point this event was still going strong. Luckily it was a "casual player close" not a "you need to be out of the hall" close time. I think for this event asking the HJ to stay for the 13+ hours this event is going to run is a bit much and a pm shift should've been scheduled to take the reins in the evening. Alternatively, if instead it was two or three 5ks capped at 226 players and 8 rounds, this would've been a lot more manageable.

...In Conclusion
There are very few events in the current era that remind me of Grand Prixs, but this was one of them. The main event was a roughly 2000 player highly competitive event, the staff was robust and the event was for the most part, cleanly organized. I enjoyed taking judge calls near the beginning of my shift on the RC on Saturday morning, and very much enjoyed all the investigations I got to do on Sunday. I felt like in general, I did a pretty good job of answering calls correctly and fixing player issues, and came out of the weekend feeling.... good? It's nice to be a floor judge on a large event where I can just take judge calls. Obviously too much of this can be exhausting, and while I had a great time working the event, by the time Sunday evening rolled around I was pretty ready to fall asleep on the spot. That being said, I'm excited for the future of Regional Championships and am excited to see what SCG has in store for us regarding the Spotlight Series as well.