Roanoke, Virginia | Standard & Limited
Time: Friday June 7th – Sunday June 9th
Players: 357 Winner: Aaron Barich

Friday – Power 9 Series Deck Checks


This Complication is not Hidden Away
Hideaway is a static ability (this permanent enters tapped) and a triggered ability (when this permanent enters the battlefield, look at the top four cards of your library and exile one face down). This keyword appears on exactly one card in Modern Horizons, and the ETB tapped line of text is hidden away in the reminder text for the ability. Henceforth it's pretty easy to miss. A player came up and asked “if my opponent plays the Watcher for Tomorrow untapped and forgets to do the rest of the Hideaway ability, is it legal for me to wait until they attempt to take another action before reminding them that their creature is tapped, I understand that I have to ensure it's tapped, however the trigger is missable and if they forget I don't want to be responsible for reminding them about it.” The answer I've heard is that players virtually cannot miss the hideaway trigger, in a manner similar to sagas, if your opponent misses the ETB tapped portion of that ability, it's your responsibility to remind them, and at that point, it's also possible for them to “remember” their trigger.

Narset, Generator of Problematic Situations
Another judge brought an interesting scenerio to me, AP has a Narset, Parter of Veils, Notion Thief and Dack Fayden in play and targets NAP with Dack Fayden's ability. This results in AP drawing two cards and NAP discarding two cards. This happens because Narset, Parter of Veils states that you cannot draw any cards beyond your first each turn, so when NAP goes to draw their first Dack card, Notion Thief replaces it, with AP drawing a card, then when NAP goes to draw their second Dack card, Narset doesn't interact with it because NAP still hasn't drawn any cards this turn, so if they were to draw from Dack this would be their “first draw” and once again Notion Thief replaces it.

The Tutor Zone
A player calls me over to a table and says “Judge, I cast Vampiric Tutor set my card aside, then cast Brainstorm and grabbed three cards from the top of my library, not including the card I grabbed with Vampiric Tutor, what do I do?” I ruled HCE and had NAP “thoughtsieze” the Brainstorm set, then I added the Vampiric Tutor card to the Brainstorm set and had the players continue from there.

The Highest Tier of Deck Checks
I have to admit I was weirdly excited about getting to be on the Vintage deck check team, its not every day where you get to go through a list and ensure that all of power nine is present! One of the first things my team lead told me was that the major thing we were going to be looking for in this event was counterfeit and Collector's Edition cards, as well as rebacked Magic cards. At the beginning of the day I was given a jeweler's loupe as part of my equipment. It was kind of intimidating, since I've never really checked for counterfeits before. Another strange nuance of the format was that players often wanted to come with us (and their decks) to complete the checking process. This makes sense when you're effectively handing over a down payment on a house to someone you've never seen before. To prepare for this we had two tables that were reasonably far apart so that both myself and the judge lead could check decks with the owners present if need be. Because of the odd way breaks ended up occurring, we skipped deck checks for 3 or 4 rounds in the middle of the event, which left us in a weird place for ensuring that all top 8 candidates were checked. To compensate for this, between the end of the event and the beginning of top eight, we did a “courtesy deck check” where we checked the decks against lists simply to ensure the lists were alright. While this is nice for things like coverage (it's awkward to hand over a list that's only 59 cards) it's not really useful from tournament integrity standpoint, seeing as we won't be able to issue a game loss at that point even if we do encounter a problem.

USC Nothing at All
I've been accused of not appropriately issuing USC minor, or avoiding reprimanding players for inappropriate behavoir in the past, so it's something I'm on the lookout to improve. I was watching one of the matches to make top 8, a Grixis player slowly lost to a prison deck over the course of many tuns in game three with his opponent at 1 for the majority of the game. At the end of the match the Grixis player stood up and loudly banged the table after losing, I didn't do anything initially, but considered a retroactive USC minor, I discussed it with another judge, but we both agreed that since his time in the event was complete anyways, talking to him and potentially exacerbating the situation didn't seem super beneficial.

A Dangerous Prize Distribution
After the conclusion of Vintage I covered some breaks on side events. One of which was an foil hunting type event. Every round 20 Tix and a promo were up for grabs for the winner. The prizes were dropped in the middle of the table and whoever won took the spoils. But what happens in the event of a draw? Well I was told that no one gets the promo and the tix get split. This is... awkward to say the least, I for one, and not very excited to come by and take away a previously distributed promo from players that had the unfortunate circumstance of running into the clock. I think this implementation and prize structure really incentivises some sketchy behavior. Both times I ended up watching draws, I let the players know about the draw policy. One time an external player donated a promo to the match so that both players got the card, and the next time it happened one player said “you can just take the promo, I don't really care about it”. Perhaps if the promos were distributed from the stage based on match points (which could essentially equate to 1 promo per win) would feel less awkward. As it stands the judge is forced to take away prizes that are perceived to already have been distributed.

Saturday –Invitational End of Round/Stage Team Lead


Leader of the End
I opted against using Purple Fox as Day 2 of the invitational was only 200 players and it would've felt excessive. I had two super veteran members of the circuit on my team, so there wasn't too much to go over, each round I assigned a different member of the team to a different EOR task, such as being the clipboard person or resetting the round timers. One of the pieces of feedback I received was to lay out the day beforehand so that people knew what to expect. I'm not a huge fan of assigning everyone to tasks at the beginning of the day because this might result in my clipboard person for one round getting sucked into a long call near time in the round and knocking my plan off kilter. But I do understand that while I may not mind being told what my responsibilities are a few seconds before they're my responsibilities, some people might, an even if a plan falls apart, knowing that there was a plan to begin with is probably not a bad thing, and something I'll implement in the future.

A Standing Responsibility
Another problem that came up was one of the rounds I was clipboard person. There were only two matches out and there were L3s on both of them, I had nothing else to assign and began to wander over to the matches, however on my way I was stopped by the HJ who expressed concern that I had left my post and not notified him of what was going on. He let me know that while it might not have felt like I was really doing all that much, it was still important for me to remain at my post since I had the tournament critical information at that point. This was something I hadn't really thought about before.

The Difference Between 1 and 0
I took a call where players couldn't agree on whether NAP was at 1 or was at dead after the current combat. It was a complex board state with the past few turns being relevant to the current life totals. There was a Saheeli, Sublime Artificer generating servo tokens, and two Goblin Chainwhirlers that had been cast to wipe them all away, there were also some Niv-Mizzet, Parun triggers that factored into life totals as well. It was fairly difficult to reconstruct previous turns, however NAP seemed to have a clearerer view of the past than AP, and seemed to be able to track damage clearly and without contention. I ruled in his favor because his story simply seemed to add up more accurately than APs. However the entire ruling made me uncomfortable, I dislike making a ruling like this when I can't get a perfect idea of the game state. One of the HJs mentioned to me that when I'd finally decided I'd presented it to the players as me making a choice as to what had happened, because that's kind of how I felt, but he said that a better way to market it would've been to say that AP had insufficient evidence to support his claims, and therefore I was ruling in favor of NAP.

I'm Not Conceding But....
This didn't come up in the event, but another judge had an interesting interaction that they shared with me. If you cast Emrakul, the Promised End and take your opponents turn, you can elect to not pay for their Summoner's Pact, and choose to lose the game. So while the rules don't allow you to formally concede when you take an opponent's turn, this situation offers you the next best thing.

Wayward Events
SCG runs side events a little differently than CFBE, they don't have dedicated HJs for each event, instead they have a launch and turnover team as well as a bunch of FJs, I covered breaks during side events and also played in one over the course of the weekend, and both times it felt like it was really easy for events to fall through the cracks, for time in the round to be missed, or to otherwise leave players sitting there wondering if their event had been forgotten about. I think having FJs solely responsible for individual events really helps alleviate this problem. Also I really like being able to register for events online, and SCG doesn't seem to have this set up yet, I think it would be a really great boon for them to investigate this.

...In Conclusion
I really enjoyed working SCG Con, and every time I work with SCG I feel like there is a lot to learn! I think SCG has some really unique and awesome practices and it's always interesting to see how their tournament circuit differs from CFBE. I also really enjoyed being on the Vintage event, I was really surprised at the turnout, 90 players is a lot for such a cost prohibitive format! I had a lot of fun working SCG Con, and I'm really excited to work for them in the future, I feel like while they're really similar to MagicFests, there are just enough things that are different to keep me on my toes!