Gatineau, Quebec
Time: Friday January 24th - Sunday January 26th, 2025


Friday - Double Qualifier+ HJ


Legal Angel
During the Innistrad Remastered Sealed Qualifier AP asked me for the oracle text on Archangel Avacyn because, AP thought NAP was playing as if he had Archangel Avacyn in his hand, even though NAP had yet to play it this match. I showed them the oracle text, but then wondered whether Archangel Avacyn was even in Innistrad Remastered, (it turns out it is). This made me think of another scenario where it potentially wasn't in the set. Would it be overstepping my bounds as a judge to say "Don't worry, that card it isn't in this set"? I think it would be, but if AP instead asked me "is Archangel Avacyn in this set?" I feel like I'm allowed to tell them yes or no. I mean just showing AP the oracle text on scryfall would give them that information anyways.

Reasonably Accommodating
What is and isn't a reasonable accommodation for a player is a rabbit hole that is easy to fall into when talking about theoretical scenarios. Luckily this happened at Ottawa, so we don't need to worry about theoretical what ifs. AP mentioned he had a hand brace and that he might not be very fast at registering his deck. We gave him a fixed seat at the end of a row to ensure he'd be easy to access if he needed help, and I let him know to call a judge if he felt that he needed assistance. I also checked in on him several times during the registration, just in case. Luckily he did fine and didn't end up needing the extra help after all.

Scheduling Confusion
At the beginning of the day I came in and thought I was running the Modern Qualifier at 2pm. Thus you can imagine how shocked I was when I discovered I was actually in charge of the 1:15pm Sealed Qualifier. I had somehow read the schedule on the website wrong in an exciting way. Luckily I had about an hour of prep time. I used that time to ensure deck registration sheets were printed, and that there was a basic land station adjacent to the event. I also went over the sealed procedure in my head before we started. The event launched smoothly, and for registration I decided to have the players write the basic lands they opened on their deck registration sheet under "foil", even if they weren't foil. This is a little weird, but with current pack composition constantly putting something else in the basic land slot, it's very difficult, if not often impossible to do a pool count if you don't have players register their basic lands. Unfortunately, as with any non-standard tournament procedures many players were confused by this, and a few wandering judges told players that they didn't need to register nonfoil basic lands. And so by the end of it the entire experiment was moot anyways, since half the tournament got different instructions. Ah well.

Saturday - Super Qualifier HJ


Improper Channelling
AP draws a card for their turn and ticks up their Urza's Saga from two lore counters to three. NAP says "In response to the trigger that puts a counter on Urza's Saga, I want to channel Boseiju, Who Endures to destroy it." I think this is a really interesting question and there are three potential reasonable answers that can be given here.
1. GRV - warning for NAP for activating Boseiju when they didn't have priority. Rewind to before NAP Channeled Boseiju. The counter is on Urza's Saga, and we are in AP's first main phase.
2. No infraction. It's obvious NAP wanted to do this at the end of AP's draw step, tick the counter back down, we're in the end of AP's draw step.
3. No fix, no infraction. NAP is Chanelling Boseiju in AP's main phase after the counter is on Urza's Saga.


This was on the main event, when I got the call I knew this was going to vary from judge to judge, I tried to find the HJs of the event. Unfortunately at the time they were MIA, so instead I grabbed one of the TLs for their ruling instead. They ended up ruling 3. I think personally I'm more on 2, but honestly I've heard all three rulings from reasonable judges. Overall, this was the most interesting question over the weekend.

Destined to Trigger
Both AP and NAP reveal Devourer of Destinies from their opening hands. AP resolves their trigger, draws a card and plays a land. NAP draws a card and then realizes they forgot their trigger. My floor judge ruled missed trigger. (MTR 2.1) I got a little in my head and misread Devourer of Destinies (in a few exciting ways actually) and thought both that it was supposed to happen during the first upkeep of the game (not the controller's first upkeep) and that it fell under the "Abilities consisting of an action followed by "when you do"..." clause of the missed trigger section in the IPG. I was about to rule not missed when another judge caught my error and steered me in the correct direction of just "uphold the floor judge's ruling, because it's correct actually". Whoops.

A Vestige-ial Ruling
AP plays Crumbling Vestige while they control a Spelunking, does the land enter tapped or untapped? AP can choose! Both objects have a replacement effect, so AP can choose which order to apply them in. (CR 616.1)

Destined to be Marked
We had a case of severely marked foils - all four of AP's Devourer of Destinies and three of AP's four Ugin's Labyrinth were fairly warped. It flagged as a little weird, since both cards are pretty good to have in your opening hand. This unfortunately didn't flag for me at the time and so I didn't press that line of inquiry. I should've asked AP what an ideal opening hand looked like. I instead asked a few other questions, and discovered that AP was just getting back into the game and had just finished assembling the deck for this tournament. He mentioned picking the cards up from Wizard's Tower (an LGS in Ontario) just recently. This all seemed reasonable enough, especially considering both cards are from Modern Horizon's 3. Notably his Kozilek's Commands weren't foil. But again, I feel this investigation could've been executed better. Instead I simply issued the marked cards - game loss and gave AP 10 minutes to find replacements. The deck check lead had the insight to mention this was a mid-round and asked AP whether or not they'd won game one. It turns out they hadn't so we were able to let AP's opponent take the rest of the round off while AP sorted out their deck issues.

Let Sleeping Ghosts Lie
All my events over the course of the weekend were sub 100 players and none of them merited using the microphone for anything other than the initial announcement of the event. Usually the plan for ghosts seems to be to announce all the irresponsible players over the microphone. Of course, this is unreasonable for a smallish side event. My strategy was as follows: if I noticed a ghost after time in the round, I'd poke around the table, maybe ask some adjacent players if they were, in fact the ghost. Then, if the ghost remained after the last match result had been submitted, I'd just put in a random result (2-0 or 0-2) for one of the players and pair the next round. I'd take note of the two players and follow up with one of them to ensure the result was correct. If it wasn't, I could swap the two players and adjust the result easily. I only had to do this once, and the match result I guessed was correct.

Abhorrent Backup
AP casts Abhorrent Oculus Afterwards, NAP casts Shoot the Sheriff but doesn't have enough mana. AP casts Force of Negation, countering Shoot the Sheriff. AP then Manifested Dread and passed the turn. NAP drew a card and then realized AP hadn't had enough mana for Force of Negation on their previous turn. We issued the GRV/FTMGS and decided to backup. We put a random card from NAP's hand on top of their library, then took the manifested creature and the card in the graveyard and shuffled them into AP's library, then returned the Force of Negation to AP's hand, then returned Shoot the Sheriff to the stack.

Announcement Addendum
Something my floor judge mentioned to me is that when you're running an event without a giant round clock, it can be helpful to the players for the head judge to announce the clock time (ie: 3:30pm) when the round ends. As someone who doesn't run a lot of RCQs I never really thought about this, but it's a good idea.

Sunday - Super Qualifier HJ


Altered Policy
In the cEDH event AP wanted to play with a Rhystic Study with blacked out artwork because they didn't support the artist. By policy this is just not allowed due to it making the artwork unrecognizable. (MTR 3.3) That being said, I'm generally more loose on altered cards than many other people. And especially in the environment of cEDH, I would probably allow it. That being said, I probably would disallow something like this in standard or modern where cards are generally easier to come by, cheaper, and have many similarly priced variations.

Flamin' Triggers
AP controls Pyrogoyf with a land and a sorcery in the graveyard. While it's enter the battlefield trigger is on the stack, NAP casts Kozilek's Command on it, what happens when it resolves? Pyrogoyf will be exiled and the game will use last known information as the trigger resolves, and will deal damage to NAP based on what Pyrogoyf's power was when it was last on the battlefield, which was two. (CR 113.7a)

Sneaky Ninjas
AP attacks with two creatures, NAP casts Cut Down on one of them. Before it resolves, AP tries to activate the Ninjutsu ability of Kaito, Bane of Nightmares, returning the creature targeted by Cut Down to their hand. NAP seems surprised and mentions they didn't think that they were in declare blockers yet. After speaking to both players, I felt like in this situation, in lieu of other information, NAP is the one who basically gets to choose the phase they want to cast Cut Down in.

Derive That Info
AP puts a second counter on their Urza's saga and NAP asks "what abilities does that have." AP responds with "it taps for colorless." I'm not sure if this came up on the floor or was just a fun theoretical that came up, but I thought it was interesting enough to mention here. I think technically what AP has done is legal, because the trigger could still be on the stack, however it is quite scummy.

Consignment Rulings
NAP controls Chalice of the Void with one counter on it, and AP casts Phyrexian Dreadnought. After NAP points out their Chalice trigger, AP casts Consign to Memory, replicating twice, choosing to counter the Chalice trigger targeting Phyrexian Dreadnought as well as Phyrexian Dreadnought's enter-the-battlefield trigger, allowing the original Consign to Memory to be countered. NAP was confused about the interaction and asked if it was legal. I uhm said it was. Which was incorrect, as Phyrexian Dreadnought has yet to enter the battlefield and trigger at all. I later found out about the issue and located both players, I asked them if the ruling had caused NAP to lose that game. If it had, I intended to break the match and award both players a win, since judge mistakes shouldn't damage player's match results negatively. Luckily, NAP had somehow won that match, so no tournament warping needed to occur.

A Nantuko Mantle
AP casts Springheart Nantuko with bestow targeting their creature. NAP casts Hydroelectric Specimen targeting AP's bestowed Springheart Nantuko, choosing to redirect the target of Springheart to Hydroelectric Specimen, AP then kills the specimen. What happens when Springheart Nantuko resolves? Well first the players here were confused about whether or not Bestow could even target an opponent's creature, turns out it can. (CR702.103a) Next if the Hydroelectric Specimen is removed before its trigger resolves, NAP can't choose to change the target of Springheart Nantuko to something that isn't there anymore, so the original target will remain unchanged. (CR 115.7a) Finally Hydroelectric Specimen can't even target Springheart Nantuko, so the entire call was moot.

Poor Timing
AP casts Ill-Timed Explosion, and NAP says, "Ok, resolves" AP draws some cards then NAP says "Wait I misunderstood what Ill-Timed Explosion does, I want to bounce my creature before it resolves". AP was tapped out, and this was in standard, where there currently aren't any free spells. I decided to allow NAP to reverse their decision here as they hadn't gained any information, and while technically the reversal involved putting random cards back on top of AP's library neither player was going to take any actions that would interfere with AP subsequently drawing those same two cards. (IPG 4.8)

The Unsplittables
The one thing you don't want to hear as the head judge of a tournament, is that there is a playmat or a trophy or an oversized card for the first place winner. What this means is that your top 8 might split the other prizes but will still stick around for another three hours playing for whatever dumb unsplittable thing the TO has put into the prize pool. The one thing I have learned over the past few Face to Face events is that players love plastic trophies. Do the trophies even have the player's name on them? No. Of course not. But players love them all the same. Luckily for the Super Qualifier there was no plastic trophy, nor was there a playmat or a big card. Huzzah! The split dream was real. That is, it was real until I was told that the winner would have their photo taken for the website. But players wouldn't care about that, would they?

So anyways I watched players play for two more hours after splitting top 4 so that they could be in the photo. This happened twice by the way in two different tournaments.

...In Conclusion
I was... not great at this event. I punted a lot of calls and was just generally a little mediocre at everything I did. My investigations were a little flaccid and while I did manage to shake two reviews out, I feel like neither of them was terribly well fleshed out. I wish I'd spent more time with the two floor judges I'd been paired up with. I'm not entirely sure why I was so incredibly mediocre this weekend. When I returned home I became full-on sick, so perhaps that's at least a partial explanation of why I felt so tired and foggy the entire weekend. That being said, I think if I had worked with me at Ottawa I'd have been disappointed in my performance. I'm going to try to do a better job at my next event.