Baltimore, New Jersey | Team Trios
Time: Saturday February 2nd – Sunday February 3rd
Players: 855 (285 Teams) Winners: Liz Lynn, Ryan Overturf, and Jacob Hagen

Saturday – Main Event - Slips


Now I Know My S-C-Gs
I've never been on an SCG event before, so I was pretty excited to see what it was like! The first thing I noticed was how aggressively branded everything was. I do really like SCG's aesthetic and branding. But seeing their logo on almost every piece of tournament material was just so shocking, it was on the stage tablecloths, it was on the pairings boards, the pairings themselves, the gathering point, even the match slips said “starcitygames” on them! However, branding aside, the event felt really similar to a GP, there were 900 players in the main event, and for the most part, it ran pretty similarly. The biggest difference I noticed was the lack of the use of Purple Fox. While purple fox isn’t mandatory on an event of this size, I think it would’ve made EOR run a little more smoothly.

Death’s Vague Indeterminate Outline
I took a call involving a player at 11 in a combat with a Death’s Shadow blocking a 3/3, and a 2/1 being unblocked in combat. The player asked if the shadow would “grow” and not die to the 3/3. I instinctively shook my head but then thought better of it and read over all the cards involved and determined that the player was correct, I ruled in favor of the shadow player but the opponent was uneasy, probably because of my initial reaction, and he appealed. I think the major lesson here is that optics are very important in judging, and making any kind of inclination towards either side before properly assessing all the involved cards can really cause a lack of confidence in your ruling.

Cabal Wellness Awareness Program
I heard about this call from another judge, but felt like it was an interesting situation to think about. AP says “therapy”, NAP decides to Brainstorm in response, and then casts Snapcaster Mage, flashing back Surgical Extraction on AP’s Grave Titans, which were the only creature’s in AP’s graveyard (AP was on reanimator). AP then says “therapy myself”.
This situation kind of made me uncomfortable because I feel like the initial decision to cast Cabal Therapy was with the intent to target NAP, but then AP changed his mind after losing all the reanimateable targets in his graveyard. However, I wasn’t really sure how to go about calling this ‘cheating’. Another judge framed it as ‘illegally casting a spell (not declaring targets) to create ambiguity and gain advantage,’ I felt like this was a good way of categorizing this.

No Note-Taking Allowed
Team events are always going to have a lot of odd rules about communication. As I may have discussed in a previous report, a teammate taking a move back for another teammate is pretty contentious, the official policy on this is that it’s not allowed. However, I don’t have a big problem with this because I feel like it falls under the MTR backup rule, and for a lot of communication stuff we consider the team a single unit. It’s also pretty well known that touching your teammates cards, or otherwise “playing for them” is also not okay, so when a player asked me if it was okay to take notes for his teammate, I was a little uncertain as to what policy allowed. Inherently I felt like it was okay because it really only speeds up the event. I’d rather not force players to take their own notes if it slows things down. I decided to double check with the HJ who confirmed that he felt it was okay as well.

Sunday – Main Event – Coverage & Top 8


How to be Twitter Famous
I seldom do ‘coverage-related’ tasks, the closest I’ve come is being the FJ in the coverage area, which has only happened once or twice. So when I was asked to be a “spotter” on Sunday I was pretty nervous. The designation includes remitting life totals and relaying ‘invisible’ information such named cards for Cavern of Souls or Dauntless Bodyguard. Bundled into this was the task of ensuring the correct tokens were distributed to the players, I was a little worried about seeing a card in a player’s hand and pulling out tokens preemptively. If I was too obvious about it, it might give the opponent information they shouldn’t have.

Another thing SCG did was hold matches sometimes, so if the third match in a set was going to game 3 sometimes SCG would hold it to ensure that the team match wasn’t won off screen. For example, if they were streaming a game of modern, but standard and legacy both lost, the game of modern might just scoop up in the middle of the game, which I imagine is pretty awful for anyone watching the stream. Once, we ended up holding two teams for about 7 minutes because the stream game ended very early, we even moved modern in the middle of a game, only to have the modern and legacy games both wrap up in 2-3 quick turns.

...In Conclusion
I had a lot of fun at SCG Baltimore, but it was, in a way, disappointingly similar to a lot of my other GP experiences. I know beforehand a lot of SCG regulars spoke with me and seemed very excited to see my reaction to working an SCG event, and I think that caused me to believe the event would have a dramatically different feel to it, but in the end, it was just players playing magic, and judges running events. which honestly, is all I ever really want out of an event in the end.