Burnaby, British Columbia
Saturday April 26th, 2025 - Sunday April 27th, 2025


Saturday - Events Lead

Last Minute Spellslinging
I ended up getting more reponsibility on this event than I had initially anticipated, so I didn't have much time to get things together. With all that being said, the previous year was quite slow so I wasn't expecting a huge turnout. I prepared a list of tasks and a break schedule here. Another thing I did was take a look over the website to both ensure I knew what was going on, and what player expectations would be, as well to check to see if there was anything that I'd need to be responsible for that I wasn't initially expecting. One such thing was prize structures for events. I don't usually find myself making the prize structure so this caught me a little off guard. All events were posted as a prize structure of "X tickets in the pool + X tickets per player", which meant that for every event I had to work out what the prize payout looked like after we had final player counts. The most important thing to remember is that your 3-4 and 5-8 prize payouts all need to be the same if you're running a top cut. This might seem like non-information to some folks, but it seems to be a oft-overlooked thing when crafting a prize payout.

Sealed Expectations
I expected the modern RCQ to be the biggest of the day, but it was actually the sealed rebound RCQ that started at 2pm. This was a problem because it meant that it would run way too late, as we only had the hall until about 10pm or 11pm. Initially I was told there wouldn't be a top 8 draft, but then somewhere in the annals of the website a player found something that said there would be a draft, so we were locked into this draft. After all of top 8 had drawn in, I spoke with them about what our options would be, by default we'd draft and play the first round of top 8 tonight, and then top four would come in an hour before the main event the next day. However, if everyone in the top 8 wanted to just do all of it tomorrow morning, we could do that instead. The players elected to keep the structure the same, afterwards the top 4 split, and since there was a playmat for "first" the players that actually wanted the mat came in the next morning to play for it, luckily it was only two of them. One of the top 8 players simply couldn't stay late, so I them the tickets for 8th and the packs for the draft and let them leave. Notably this was a little interesting because the MTR says if a player drops before the cut is made you're supposed to advance someone else, but this was after they'd drawn into top 8. Because it was draft which is seated randomly, it was easy to set it up so the highest ranked player got the bye. (MTR 2.10)

Casually Commander
Another event that we ran was a "casual commander" event that gave each participant a pack and a promo and had no entry fee, but was advertised as "3 rounds". This is super weird and awkward, since multi-round commander is rife with issues. There was some discussion about registering the players in the software, but I felt that would be a giant waste of time, people would be trying to enter mid-event and dropping willy nilly, causing us to constantly be rebuilding pods that were missing players. Instead we simply told the players to wait in a specific spot in the room around the scheduled start time. Then, at that time I went over and manually podded them by pointing at four random players and a spot to sit down. I handed out the promos and told the players I'd be back in 80 minutes. When I returned anyone that was still playing had the option to continue their current game or be podded for the "next round". This ended up working out really well, and the event ran pretty smoothly. In the future I'd have this thing be one round with the promos and whatnot, and then advertise that if people wanted to be podded by a judge, they could sign up for the ODE commander pods for $5.

Sunday - Events Lead

Tersa Handshatter
AP cast Tersa Lightshatter and drew two cards before discarding. I was a little caught off guard initially, but eventually ruled hidden card error and had AP return the two discarded cards to their hand, and had NAP choose two cards that AP wouldn't be allowed to discard for the ability. (IPG 2.3)

Pokemania
Along with a few sparsely attended One Piece and Star Wars tournaments we were running a Pokemon tournament. Based on the other non-Magic events, I had expected the Pokemon event to be small as well. (Un)fortunately I was wrong, and it was the biggest event of the weekend, with around 60 players. A Pokemon Professor came in about a half hour before the event, but they seemed a little overwhelmed with the scope of the job. I hadn't known whether or not for sure we'd have a Pokemon Professor before the day of, so I'd also assigned a Magic judge to help out with the event. Pokemon is interesting, its tournament software looks a lot like WER used to, except inputting match results is a horribly inefficient process of either double clicking the winner's name or right clicking and selecting the winner. Oh and in case it didn't quite register, this event requires a scorekeeper to input results and has match slips. The other interesting thing about Pokemon is that the event is split up by age, so the large Pokemon event was actually a largeish event and two very small ones, which made organizing other events around it kind of a challenge.

Strategic Concession
AP was casting Snap on NAP1's creature, this would start a chain reaction that would likely allow AP to win the game. NAP1 didn't want this to happen, so they wanted to concede while Snap was on the stack, causing it to lose its target and preventing AP from untapping two lands. NAP1 wanted to know what would happen if the other three players drew the game for some reason afterwards. Specifically, they wanted to know if they would begin the new game with the rest of the table, even after conceding? This is very odd and there isn't a lot of guidance for this in any of the rules documents. The Topdeck cEDH rules discourage conceding mid-game and mention that the player should be dropped. Which implies that they wouldn't get to rejoin. The rules in the CR for restarting the game also imply that if a player loses the game and then it's restarted, the losing player won't get to rejoin. (CR 725.1) However, in cEDH if a player loses the game but then the table draws afterwards, the player that lost still gets one match point. Which implies that maybe losing in cEDH is a little different than normal. To put another spanner in the works the cEDH rules state that matches are only one game, full stop. This implies that in the event of a draw, no new games should be started, even if there's still time on the clock. Eventually we ruled that if NAP1 conceded and the remaining players drew, NAP1 wouldn't get to enter the new game.

Culling the Uninformed
AP cast Finale of Promise targeting Culling the Weak and Reanimate. They didn't sacrifice a creature for Culling the Weak and the table passed priority on resolving Reanimate. After AP resolved reanimate and put the creature onto the battlefield they then tried to sacrifice it for Culling the Weak, at which point an opponent pointed out the error. This one is a bit odd since the exact communication was a bit unclear. I ruled that they'd chosen not to cast Culling the Weak, since they hadn't sacrificed a creature when they put it onto the stack, and no infraction. Upon reflection, I think this is kind of incorrect. I should've issued a Game Rule Violation - warning, and either left the game as-is, with Culling the Weak on the stack, or rewound to the resolution of Finale, allowing AP to choose different spells. (IPG 2.5)

Eventominoes
A lot of Sunday was dominated by trying to make the most of the limited seats we had. At one point we were told we were allowed to put tables for players in the entryway, then about an hour later we were told that was unacceptable, and they needed to be removed. The Pokemon event was very big and the Chaos Sealed event also ended up being quite large, resulting in me having to move the Standard qualifier in the last round to free up the space for the sealed event, and even then we had to cap it at 28 seats to keep from overfilling it. Luckily we managed to avoid any weird disasters of overselling events or seating players on top of other players.

...In Conclusion
The event was a success, in spite of the short planning window. The players seemed to have had a good time, and I hope I get a chance to work this event again next year :)