Saskatoon, Saskatchewan
Saturday August 23 2025 - Sunday August 24 2025


Small Shows
It was a small staff and a small show, but I still sent out a team email detailing breaks for everyone. Organizing breaks was a bit finicky and people ended up moving around a lot to cover holes and stuff.

Stationary Statblock
AP controls a Tezzeret, Cruel Captain emblem and targets their Galvanizing Sawship with no counters on it. If they later station it, and it becomes a creature, what will its power be? Still base zero (so a 3/3 when you account for the +1\+1 counters), Tezzeret's ability creates a continuous effect in layer 7 (CR613.1g) that will overwrite the power and toughness of the creature, which has the same timestamp as when the Sawship entered the battlefield (which will be earlier than Tezzeret's ability). (CR613.7)

A Commanding Zone Change
NAP's commander is in their graveyard and AP deals combat damage with Tinybones, the Pickpocket. If AP chooses to cast NAP's commander, does NAP have an opportunity to move it to the command zone before it resolves? No. If NAP's commander was put into their graveyard or exile since the last time state-based actions were checked, NAP has the option to move it to the command zone as a state-based action. This rule doesn't specify anything about any other zones, such as the stack, notably there's another rule that refers to hands and graveyards but that also doesn't interface with the stack. (CR903.9a, CR903.9a)

Crafted from Metal
AP casts Commandeer on NAP's Galvanic Blast. NAP controls three artifacts but AP controls none, how much damage will Galvanic Blast do? Two damage, Galvanic Blast checks how many artifacts the controller of the spell has as it resolves. (CR608.2h)

Communication Confusion
AP Exerts Arena of Glory and taps three other lands and casts Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury for its escape cost. NAP thinks AP says something about moving to combat afterwards, so NAP casts Solitude for its Evoke cost, exiling Phlage. NAP then casts Ephemerate on their Solitude to keep it on the battlefield but the second exile trigger doesn't have anything to target. AP then casts Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer with the floating Arena of Glory mana that was never mentioned. NAP says they wouldn't have cast Solitude until AP was in declare attackers. This one was interesting because technically AP needed to announce their floating mana as status information at some point. (MTR4.1) So this could fall under CPV, and the game would be rewound to when NAP cast Solitude. (IPG 3.7) Notably this doesn't really fix the issue, because now AP has a lot of information about NAP's hand, and can simply choose not to cast the Ragavan.

A-Round We Go
MTGMelee requires that the organizer set the number of rounds when creating the event. These can be changed after the event starts, but it does mean that you kind of have to guess how many players your event will have. I suppose this is a Canada-only issue, since most other destination events using MTGMelee don't often suffer from low enough player counts to have to adjust the number of rounds. Saskatoon, however, is a commander city, and the comp REL events all had incredibly low attendance. I didn't initially notice that my event had the wrong number of rounds on Saturday, but luckily the TO noticed before the last round. On Sunday we had a similar issue except the event had a cut to top 4 instead of top 8 because of attendance, which wasn't noticed until after the cut. Luckily MTGMelee is pretty malleable tournament software, so we were able to fix it without any issues.

Sunday


Objects that Should Not be Copied
AP controls Deadpool, Trading Card and creates a token copy of it with Heat Shimmer. The copy enters and exchanges its textbox with Storm Crow. Notably, Storm Crow will have haste and "at the beginning of the end step, exile this permanent". This is because those two abilities become part of Deadpool's copiable values, and are considered part of the token's base text. When the text exchange happens later in the text layer, it will exchange those modifications as well. (CR 707.9a, CR 613.1a, CR613.1c)

Notably, this is different if Deadpool is instead copied with Flameshadow Conjuring. In this instance, because the abilities are gained and not given as an exception in the copying process, those abilities apply in the ability layer, not the copy layer, and thus haste won't be exchanged. The copy will also be exiled at the beginning of the next end step because that is part of the resolving triggered ability, not an ability granted to the copy itself. (CR 613.1f)

...In Conclusion
Saskatoon was an interesting show, the "main events" were so small it felt more like a few RCQs than a proper destination event. However ODEs launched so many commander pods that I guess it just didn't matter to the TO? This paradigm of ODEs kind of taking over is still a bit odd to me, and I'm not sure how I feel about it. Event logistics are interesting, but the thing I love about judging is mediating disputes and working out fiddly rules things, both of which come up a lot less in ODEland. Overall I'm still glad I went, and still had a good time.