Montreal, Quebec | Limited
Time: Friday October 3rd, 2019 – Sunday October 6th 2019
Players: 825 Winner: Alexander Hayne

Friday – MCQ Head Judge – Modern [88 Players]


Proud Mentor
Typically I'm very used to being relatively isolated while working, however lately I've been working on shadowing calls and interacting with my floor judges. I feel like this is something I need to focus on even more when in leadership positions. In doing this with one of my team members I discovered that he had ruled a Prized Amalgam trigger under the previous missed triggers policy (where it was considered a delayed zone change and therefore effectively never expires) and got to use this as a teaching opportunity, not just for that judge, but I also brought the question to my other team members as well.

Robber of Value
Adventures are pretty exciting, in that they often work differently than you'd expect. An interesting limited interaction that was discussed was Robber of the Rich exiling a card with adventure. How this ends up playing out is that the controller of Robber of the Rich can cast the Adventure half of the card, then when it gets exiled, the controller of Robber of the Rich is the only one that has the ability to cast the creature half. However, you can only use mana of any color to cast the spell (creature or adventure) from exile the first time. If you choose to cast the adventure half, when you choose to cast the creature half, you must pay the actual mana cost. Covetous Urge also works with adventures in the same way.

Reveal Your Sideboards!
AP asked me if they could look at their opponent's sideboard and grab a card after activating Karn, the Great Creator's -2 ability while controlling their opponent with Emrakul, the Promised End. I actually screwed this call up and said yes they could (when they can't) and had to go back later, apologize and explain the correct ruling. The player can't legally look at the sideboard, and therefore can't grab anything. An interesting proposal from another judge to allow this action to be completed was to have AP pick a card at random from the sideboard and reveal it to the opponent or a judge and ask them if it was a legal target for Karn, the Great Creator. While this does solve a weird problem, it also feels incredibly janky.

Deck Checks with a Heart
We often talk about tardiness being 0 with a heart (or at least we did until they changed tardiness policy). On Friday, my deck check lead decided to extend this to a decklist problem. We had a very stock burn list, but instead of Lightning Bolt, the player had registered Lightning Strike. My deck check lead suggested that we deviate and downgrade. While the situation isn't extraordinary or exceptional, I feel like game lossing the player here is a little insane, philosophically.

Narset at Regular
I ended up walking through Scheduled Sides and taking a call on a regular REL legacy event. AP drew three cards for his Sylvan Library at the start of the turn, rearranged them, and put two back before both players realized that his opponent had a Narset, Parter of Veils in play. At Comp REL the infraction is GPE-GRV warning and the fix is to take a card at random from the players hand and effectively shuffle it into the top two cards of the library and then have the player draw a card. This is... kind of a weird fix. Since we were at regular, I asked the player if he already knew the top cards of his library from a previous Sylvan Library activation, and he replied that yes, the one in his hand was the one he left on top, and he identified the other card he had known previously. I then took the third card, the one he shouldn't know and shuffled it into the unknown portion of the library and let the players know to be more careful. Upon reflection I'm not sure how I feel about this one, and perhaps feel that the comp REL fix might've actually been better here.

Barrier of Language
I'm not a native french speaker, so it was a bit of a challenge, but I got some of the francophone judges to help me construct some announcement cheat sheets I could use each round. I'm sure my pronunciation wasn't great, but it was fun learning just a little bit of french during my stay there!

Legally Adventurous
Adventures work strangely, there are two specific cases I'd like to talk about, adventures with Retrace, and casting adventures with Kess, Dissident Mage, in both cases, you are allowed to cast them from the graveyard. This is because of the way the game checks for spell legality. When you go to cast a spell, you take into account it's alternative characteristics before moving it to the stack, as opposed to it's current characteristics.

Saturday – Main Event – Sleep in Specials


An Inopportune Situation
AP controls Opportunistic Dragon, which has taken control of NAP's Queen of Ice, AP then used Oko, Thief of Crowns to make it a 3/3 with no abilities, AP wanted to know if the Queen of Ice could now attack, and if Opportunistic Dragon were to die, if his opponent would regain control of Queen of Ice. The answer is that it still can't attack (but it totally, has absolutely no abilities) and if the dragon dies it will still go back to NAP. Unfortunately this is one I screwed up on the floor and ruled that it could attack. For some reason I thought Opportunistic Dragon conferred the 'can't attack/cant's block' ability to the creature. Opportunistic Dragon doesn't confer an ability to the creature that says it can't attack or block, it merely states something about the game that is true. I unfortunately didn't realize my mistake quickly enough to fix the game, or even let the players know I had misinformed them.

Animated Calls
Another judge actually came to confirm this ruling with me, this isn't something I'm used to so it was kind of a nice experience. AP cast Bring to Life on Enchanted Carriage, then activated its Crew ability, what is the Enchanted Carriage? In this scenario it would still be a 4/4, there is a continuous effect from Bring to Life that is making the Enchanted Carriage a 0/0, and Crewing it doesn't actually set it's power or toughness, it just changes it's supertype. If instead the ability was similar to Inkmoth Nexus, where it set its power/toughness, then it would overwrite the 0/0 p/t granted by Bring to Life, and end up as a 5/5 so long as the ability resolved after Bring to Life.

Appealing Rider
AP cast Swift End with Lucky Clover in play pointing to two of NAP's creatures. NAP casts Mesmeric Glare, after a little confusion NAP realizes that there are two spells on the stack, he then declares he wants to save his Piper of the Swarm. AP then realized that neither player knew which creature the copy was targeting and which creature the original was targeting. This is a problem because if the original gets countered, AP cannot cast the creature half. I ruled that AP should clarify which spell was targeting what and then that NAP can make countering decisions with that information. Neither player seemed thrilled with this resolution, so I brought in the HJ, who ruled that the creature AP had mentioned first was the one that had been targeted first, and by the original spell.

One Players Trash is Another Players... Trash
A judge noticed that a player had sleeves that were different sizes. The judge asked the player, “Why are your sleeves different sizes? Where did you get these sleeves?”
The player replied, “Oh, I found them!”

Sunday – PTQ Head Judge – Modern [100 Players]


Commanding the Stack
AP cast Primal Command and declared he wanted to gain 7 life, NAP also thinks that AP said he wanted to search his library for a creature. Then NAP cast Lightning Bolt, and AP mentions that he has a Chalice of the Void trigger on the bolt. After that resolves the players begin arguing about what modes have or haven't been declared for Primal Command. One of my FJs took the call and decided to confer with one of the more senior members of the team. I stood a little off to the side listening to the conversation. The senior member of the team seemed to be trying to lead the FJ to the correct answer, which is great, but I noticed the call had been dragging on for quite some time. Eventually the senior member of the team realized this as well and encouraged the FJ to go make a ruling. The ruling that was made was to back up and allow AP to declare modes. The players appealed. I didn't want to spend too much longer on this call, as it had already taken far too much time. I went over, asked AP a few questions, he mentioned that earlier in this game and in the last game, he had chosen the the modes “gain 7 life” and “tutor for a creature” so it was likely that his opponent thought he would do the same here, however he mentioned that he already had a creature lined up for next turn and wanted to lock the burn players draw by putting a land on top of their library. The impression I got was the burn player interrupted AP while he was still determining modes. I let the players know that AP would be declaring modes now and that I wasn't going to infract anyone for communicating weirdly. By the end of it all, the time extension was 15 minutes. I spoke with my senior judge about this, but upon reflection perhaps I should've stepped in sooner and let them both know that a ruling really needed to be made.

Musical Pairings
A player came up to the scorekeeper claiming he had won his last round 2-1. The scorekeeper fished up the slip and saw that the player who had claimed he had won was marked as a no show. The player was pretty sure he played magic, and signed a match slip. I got the player to write down his signature on a blank piece of paper, and asked the scorekeeper to fish out the slips of the adjacent tables, as I suspected it appeared that the player had sat in the wrong spot the previous round, and signed under another players name. It was the second to last round and none of the players in any of these seats were in contention for any kind of prizes. I decided to simply modify the previous round's pairings to reflect what magic had actually been played, and to re-insert the player into the slot of the player that had actually dropped. Upon reflection I'm not really sure what I was thinking here, while I agree that the player experience here is superior to following policy, I think simply informing the player they were getting a match loss for the previous round and then pairing them for this round would also be fine, and not be some weird deviation for no reason.

...In Conclusion
Overall, I had a great time at MF Montreal. PTQ/MCQ HJ was an awesome designation, and I hope I get to do it again for more players in the future! I had a great time trying to dredge up the small amount of french I learned in high school, and was pleasantly surprised by how fun the rules interactions in Throne of Eldraine were!