Langley, Canada
Saturday July 4th, 2026
Team Trios RCQ HJ



Triple The Trouble
I don't run team trios events a lot, I imagine this is mostly because it's difficult for Magic players to wrangle together two other people that can stand being in the same vicinity as them for more than 2 hours. Luckily one of my floor judges had a reasonable amount of experience running trios events and was a huge help. Many folks might not know that Team Trios cuts to top 4 and do swiss + 1 rounds. This is something that isn't documented… well anywhere. Which is why it bamboozled me at first. After poking around I learned that this is mostly to avoid another untimed round. Trios events tend to run longer, since oftentimes the last match at the table turns into an awkward game of three-headed giant.

Hello Eventlink, My Old Friend
Eventlink doesn't really have good support for team events, the way most people handle them is having one player per team register in the software, since teams are effectively single players for most intents and purposes. I don't do a lot on the scorekeeping end of things, and I certainly don't work with Eventlink a lot, so when I saw early on in the event that my tournament had the wrong number of rounds, I knew an event rebuild might be on the horizon. I canvassed the TO and my floor judges who all seemed to believe that Eventlink would give me the option to simply add an additional round at the end of the swiss once we got there.

You may know enough about Eventlink to know where this story is going. No, Eventlink did not in fact graciously offer me the option to add an additional round at the end of the swiss. For the same reasons, I imagine, that it does not allow organizers to alter the event structure when setting up the RCQ. This meant that I needed to do a full rebuild of the event, or calculate the last round of pairings manually. I wasn't comfortable with the latter method, so I announced to the players that they were all getting a lunch break courtesy of Eventlink and to come back in 20 minutes. This garnered some laughter and overall players were quite patient and understanding with the process. It was a small enough event that the rebuild was done well within target and we launched the last round when we said we would.

Also, Tiebreakers
Another byproduct of our hacky solution for team events is the fact that reporting is also a bit scuffed. In team events, you simply report as if there was a single game, so if your team wins, you report 1-0, even if you won two matches and lost one. This is because it's rather depressing for your two teammates to have lost their matches, but the last player feels they need to keep playing for some minor tiebreaker percentage points. It would be like if every match was required to play all three games in 1v1.

Decay and Roomination
AP controls a Dollmaker's Shop and activates its unlock ability. Before it resolves NAP would like to cast Abrupt Decay on the Shop, can they? Yes, before the unlock ability resolves the mana value of Dollmaker's Shop is 2, after it resolves it will be the combined mana value, which is 8. (CR 709.5, CR709.4b)

Binding the Day
AP casts Graveyard Tresspasser and NAP would like to cast Tidebinder Mage and counter the Daybound ability, can they? They cannot, Daybound isn't an activated or triggered ability, it's simply a static ability that alters the designation of the game, making it either day or night. (CR 731.1, CR 702.145d)

...In Conclusion
I enjoyed this event, I'm not often in the scorekeeper's seat, so it was an interesting experience to have to rebuild the event. I liked the small-town cozy atmosphere and got to learn a few things about team trios and Eventlink in the process!