Vancouver, Canada
Friday February 20th, 2026 - Sunday February 22nd, 2026


Friday – Scheduled Sides Floor Judge


Pilfering the Warp
AP controls Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer and exiles NAP's Quantum Riddler, can AP cast it for its warp cost? No. Spells can only be Warped from the hand. (CR 702.185a)

Superior Copy
AP casts Superior Spider-Man choosing to copy NAP's Superior Spider-Man. What happens? AP will then choose something for NAP's Superior Spider-Man's copy effect, that creature will be exiled but NAP's Superior Spider-Man will not be. That's because the exile trigger is part of the copy effect from the first Superior Spider-Man and there's a rule that says if another copy effect is applied after the one with the triggered ability (AP's original Superior Spider-Man) then the ability won't trigger. This is a little confusing, but it does make sense. (CR707.9g)

Growing Seedlings
AP attacks with a Phyrexian Seedling with three +1/+1 counters on it, it's blocked by a 5/5 creature. While processing damage AP will also have the option to proliferate three times. If they choose to proliferate the Seedling, then it will be a 6/6 by the time state-based actions are checked, and won't die due to lethal damage. I've cited the rule for lifelink since it works very similarly. (CR 702.15b)

Legendary Spiders
AP casts Superior Spider-Man as a copy of Isamaru, Hound of Konda. If AP later casts Superior Spider-Man as a copy of Abigale, Eloquent First year, what happens? AP will control two legendary creatures named "Superior Spider-Man" and will need to put one in their graveyard due to state-based actions. (CR 704.5j)

Brutal Nights
AP casts Brutal Cathar in a game of Two-Headed Giant, how does it work? For it to become night, neither active player can cast any spells. (CR 730.2a) For it to become day either active player must cast two or more spells (but notably both aren't required to). (CR 730.2b)

Saturday – Regional Championship – Breaks Team Lead


Stolen Miracles
AP reveals Terminus for its miracle trigger, NAP casts Return the Favor, copying the Miracle trigger, what happens? When NAP's copy of the trigger resolves, NAP will be allowed to cast AP's Terminus. (CR 702.94a)

Order of Operations
AP controls five forests and a crewed Lumbering Worldwagon. They resolve Bulk Up targeting the Worldwagon. They play a sixth forest. How much power does the Lumbering Worldwagon have? 11, when Bulk Up resolves, it looks at the current power of the creature, and gives it +X where X is its current power. (CR 701.10b) Thus creating an effect in layer 7c that gives it +5/+0. (CR 613.4c) Later playing the sixth land simply changes the base power from five to six, resulting in it being an 11/6.

Usurper of Types
AP controls Ardyn, the Usurper and chooses to exile NAP's Superior Spider-Man. As the token enters AP chooses to make it a copy of Wistfulness, what are the characteristics of the token? It's an Elemental Incarnation Spider Human Hero named Superior Spider-Man that is a 4/4. The initial copy effect overwrites the creature types and power/toughness of Superior Spider-Man, such that if AP chose nothing to copy it would be a Legendary Demon that is a 5/5. But since AP is applying the second copy effect, the modifications from Ardyn are overwritten.

Anger Management
AP attacks with Polyraptor and NAP blocks with two 1/1 tokens, how many times does its enrage trigger go on the stack? Once, all combat damage is deal simultaneously as one event. (CR 510.2)

Talented Triggers
AP controls two Artist Talents and an Otter token. AP casts a noncreature spell and NAP allows them to resolve both Artist Talent triggers, after which, NAP says they wanted to Tishana's Tidebinder the prowess trigger if it's not missed. This one is a bit awkward. If we allow NAP to counter it, we're effectively allowing NAP to stack AP's triggers. Also this section from the IPG on missed triggers outlines this as sort-of NAP's responsibility "If an opponent requires information about the precise timing of a triggered ability or needs details about a game object that may be affected by a resolved triggered ability, that player may need to acknowledge that ability’s existence before its controller does". So ultimately, I think if NAP wants to counter it they need to say something before the Artist Talent triggers resolve.

Sunday – LTQ Head Judge


Different Tournament, Same Qualifier
I was the head judge of the Sunday LTQ, coming off working the LTQ at Toronto, I felt reasonably equipped to run this one as well. Instead of top 32 this one was top 16, so it would be run at swiss rounds minus 1 (meaning if we got 64 players it would normally be 6 rounds with a cut to top 8, but in this case it would be 5 rounds with a cut to top 16). We ended up with 178 players, which meant it was 7 rounds, and awarded two invites to the limited championship. I put together a brief team email that you can see here. Product distribution was a bit messy, we were using leftover pre-registered pools from the spotlight LTQ, many of which included the necessary promo for the event, which was cool because it cut down on distro. However, note that I said "many". There were a fair number that didn't include the promo for some reason, which caused a lot of confusion. Finally we also needed to hand out playmat vouchers to the event. With only four judges all this made for a rather slow product distribution. In the future I think I'd work a little harder to co-opt judges from other events to help with distro and push playmat vouchers to round one.

What is OA?
During build AP was looking at cards on their phone. I asked them what they were doing, and they mentioned that because they didn't know the set very well, they wanted to look at the visual spoilers. This raises an interesting question, technically looking up oracle text is allowed, however if AP wanted to look up the oracle text of all white instants in the set, I feel like that's a different story. In this case I felt like it was closer to the second case than the first. It was difficult to ascertain whether AP knew this was not okay or not, so I issued the match loss for outside assistance. (IPG 3.2) Notably we still paired AP for round one instead of just issuing them a loss. There was an idea of issuing a bye to a player instead of pairing them against our match lossed player, but a bye awards better tiebreakers than an actual opponent. I brought up the idea that if we had an odd number of players match lossing this player actually results in us losing a bye, which seems better for tournament integrity, but this isn't the kind of thing that is addressed on a case-by-case basis, instead we simply have a blanket policy that the player is always paired.

Basically Unambiguous
AP had registered 9 mountains and 8 forests, when they were actually playing a black-red deck. I ruled that if they were playing 8 mountains 9 swamps they would be able to avoid a penalty since it could be reasonably assumed that they had simply transposed their basics down a line. (IPG 3.4)

Foiled Again
In sealed a huge issue is bent foils. If the HJ had to make a proxy for every bent foil they'd have time to do nothing else. There are a few ways around this. Oftentimes foils are pointed out in build, I usually let the player know to call a judge again for a proxy if they ultimately decide to play the card (or if it ends up in a maybeboard) making proxies for cards that are never going to be cast is a huge waste of time. Another good strategy is to have access to a box of jank from ODEland. Floor judges can simply swap out problematic cards with nonfoil versions without grabbing a head judge.

Negative Reinforcement
AP casts Spry and Mighty targeting their Gristle Glutton which has two -1/-1 counters on it, and their Lys Alana Informant, how many cards will AP draw? Four. While most of the time the game of Magic doesn't deal in negative numbers, it does use them for calculations, so 3-(-1)=4. (CR 107.1b)

Champion From Exile and Beyond
AP controls Champion of the Clachan exiling Goldmeadow Nomad. They tap Champion and the Goldmeadow Nomad for their Unexpected Assistance and draw three cards, then discard a card. This was certainly a little weird, but AP called it on themselves, and while they were slightly behind on board, they weren't dead if they didn't draw three cards right then. They also had other reasonable plays that turn if they didn't cast Unexpected Assistance. We ended up issuing a GRV and rewinding the game. We accomplished this by returning the discarded card to their hand, putting three random cards from AP's hand on top of their library, and untapping the creatures used to cast Unexpected Assistance. (IPG 2.5)

Counter Confusion
AP cast Abigale, Eloquent First-Year, and chose to target NAP's Dawnhand Eulogist. NAP controlled Dawnhand Dissident, but because AP only put a die with a "one" on it on top of Dawnhand Eulogist, NAP didn't realize it had three counters they could remove for Dawnhand Dissident. They only realized this after the match and came to speak with me about what the requirements were for communication from AP. I noted that simply putting a die with a "one" on it, while unclear, wouldn't be grounds for an infraction, however if NAP asked AP to clarify, it would be AP's responsibility to do so. That being said, AP is not allowed to intentionally create ambiguity to generate advantage.

A Minor Slip-Up
I opted to not use time extension slips on this event. I often feel like they cause more problems than they solve. A judge may put a slip but forget to put the extension in purple fox, whereas if it's just in purple fox it's less likely they forget to document it entirely. A judge may put mismatching information in purple fox and on the slip, which will eventually cause confusion with players. Finally they're just small pieces of trash we need to pick up at the end of the round. However near the end of the roubd one of my floor judges noted that some players were unaware that they had a time extension due to the fact that they had no slip. This is a real concern, and after some discussion we decided that it might be best that if we're not using slips to at least note the time extension on the player's lifepad or boogie board.

...In Conclusion
I had a good time at this show, while the LTQ was stressful I enjoyed not having a huge amount of responsibility on the main event. I felt like I learned something and got to do some interesting investigations. I really felt like I got to move my skills forward this event, and think that maybe, rather than just hitting as many events as possible, I'm going to move to a model of doing fewer events, and just making those events count more.