Gatineau, Quebec
Friday September 5th 2025 – Sunday September 7th 2025


Friday – Sides Lead


Logistically Challenging
As always I prepared an excel spreadsheet of breaks and sent out customized emails to all members of the team, detailing both breaks and what events each judge was responsible for. One thing I forgot was to include the event link or melee link with the events in the custom email, I usually do it, but forgot this time. This schedule was a challenge because we were starting an event every half hour, and I didn't have a ton of staff. This meant people were often watching 3-4 events concurrently. I knew that on the floor, there would be some shifting of responsibilities, since judges might be responsible for events that weren’t adjacent, or might need to flip a round at the same time an event started. I had the pm sides lead be de facto breaks manager while I played a little bit of the role of kickstart/product prep team. Something the TO did this time, which I had never really considered before, was check to ensure we had enough product for our sealed events. This time there were a few points where we needed to institute caps on events. This obviously needs to happen hours in advance to avoid mishaps, which it did, but it illuminated an aspect of events I don't usually think about, and gave me something to double check the morning-of in the future.

"Secret" Identity
AP controls a face down creature that's their commander, are they required to announce whether it has done commander damage when it connects? Yes, regardless of what continuous effects are currently applied to the commander, it's still a commander (similar to how a token is always a token) (CR 903.3) (MTGCommander)

Class Warfare
NAP controls Inkeeper's Talent and levels it up. They put a die with a "1" on it to represent that it's level one. AP chooses not to target it with Naturalize thinking it has a counter, and therefore has ward 1. AP realizes this after they play a different spell for the turn and call a judge. I think arguably this is a CPV since NAP did something unclear and it caused AP to make a decision based on it. (IPG 3.7) NAP would be given a warning and AP would be allowed to back up their spell and instead play Naturalize. This feels a bit extreme though, since players normally put a die on the classes to denote what level they're at. I feel like we may need clarification on this. (CR716.2a)

Communication Confusion
A lot of sides leading (and leadership in general) is about communication. There were several times when I asked someone to do something and then later discovered they'd done exactly what I asked, but not at all what I wanted! For example, when I asked someone to 'set up the pairings boards,' they didn’t put tape on them; they just arranged them throughout the room. Later on I asked someone else to 'use the purple gathering point' for their event, only to discover that instead of moving the gathering point to the pairings board near their event, they'd used the pairings board by the gathering point, which was quite far from their event. I learned more than a few times I need to be more clear when giving instructions.

Saturday – Side Events Lead


Flexibility is Key
Saturday is always the toughest day. You have the most players and often the fewest judges, since there are often larger comp REL events which are just more judge labour intensive. A Commandfest certainly has less of that issue, though there were more comp REL events on Saturday than any other day. Saturday consisted of judges launching events and then me finding someone reasonable to hand those events off to. This created an air chaos to the day which definitely knocked some people off-kilter. I'm not sure what a better method is when you have dramatically more events than judges and are also worried about crunching on space. The alternative method of a kickstart and turnover team is an option, but I've seen far too many rounds missed or hanging with this method, for me to be comfortable using it. For a few hours in the middle of the day I dismantled the deck checks team to help cover some breaks. Finally near the end of the day the large Mystery Booster 2 event was just barely too large to fit in the block I had set aside for it, due to some awkward event placement earlier in the day, so I had to borrow two rows from ODE land. This wasn't great and I think with a bit tighter planning I probably could've avoided this.

A Forceful Tap
AP casts Phlage, Titan of Fire's Fury, saying "I'm tapping Arena of Glory". NAP is at nine life. Before AP declares attackers, NAP kills Phlage. On AP's next turn they attempt to untap their Arena of Glory, saying they didn't exert it. I think it's pretty clear here that AP Exerted their Arena. I think it might be reasonable to ask AP how they communicated tapping lands in other situations, or if they'd exerted Arena previously and what the communication was like there. It's going to be pretty difficult for this player to convince me they didn't exert this land, though.

Grand Melee
I feel like Grand Melee is one of those things everyone wants to play... once. There always seems to be some kind of issue with it no matter what happens. This time we used Bread Friends(stuffed bread loaves that are available at the prize wall, image coming soon) as turn markers. I'm a big fan of highly visible turn markers (as you may recall from my MC Barcelona report). We said that if a player losing the game would remove the turn marker, that player got to keep the Bread Friend. The players seemed to like this. What they didn't like was two players in the game agreeing to split tickets and take out all the other players in the game. After some discussion this was ruled as Bribery and Wagering. This is classified as Generally Unwanted Behaviour according to the JAR and although neither player knew this was an issue, it had corrupted the game such that they were both issued a game loss. (MTR 5.2)

Sunday – PM Sides Lead


A Changing Landscape
One of the goals of the weekend was to train the PM sides lead. For this show I sent out the emails, set up and schedule and took point on being kickstart while my PM lead took care of breaks. For Sunday, I proposed that we swap roles. I let them know that if they didn’t want to, it was okay, but it might be a good way for me to observe them doing the thing. We needed to reorganize the schedule because someone dropped out at the last moment, so they put together a new schedule and led sides wonderfully.

Triumph of the Rules
AP controls NAP's Triumph of Saint Catherine and it dies, what happens? Triumph's trigger is a leaves the battlefield trigger, so it will check whether it triggers before it's put into the graveyard, not after. (CR 603.10a) In this case, that would be while AP controls it, because it’s not being put into AP’s graveyard; its ability won’t trigger at all.

...In Conclusion
Overall I had a good time at this event, but by Sunday I was starting to crash, I’m not sure whether I caught a bug or if the exhaustion of the weekend was just catching up to me. I've mentioned a few times I'm starting to feel a bit burnt out by judging, and I think this might be a byproduct of that. This season I'm scaling back my shows pretty significantly, also because crossing the border for any reason is becoming more perilous. I have Cubecon lined up, but it's unlikely that I'll be hitting many American shows in the near future.