Baltimore, Maryland | Team Constructed (Pioneer, Modern, Legacy)
Time: Friday, August 19th 2022 – Sunday August 21st 2022
Teams: 190ish | Winner: Chase Martin, Cameron Lantz, and Adam Sensenig


Friday - Scheduled Sides


Additionally, You Can Make Poor Decisions
If Bloodbraid Elf cascades into March of Otherworldly Light, can AP exile white cards? Yes! They can but X will still be considered 0.

A Bad Thing
AP controls A Good Thing but wants to sacrifice it to cast Final Payment. Initially I felt like this was okay, since it’s not the spell causing you to sacrifice it, it was paying for the spell that caused you to sacrifice it, which I didn’t think would be barred by A Good Thing’s ability. However I was not at all confident in this ruling so I decided to check with another judge. That judge said that I could sacrifice it because “cause” generally referred to something resolving, not a cost payment. I nodded and went on my way, telling everyone who would listen, about this cool ruling. However that evening, when I brought up the ruling another judge said that there was a gatherer ruling that implied that a cost to a spell was still the spell “causing” the thing to happen. In particular Firesong and Sunspeaker has a trigger that happens when an “instant or sorcery causes you to gain life”, the ruling said that if you paid life as part of the cost for an instant or sorcery, that would cause it to trigger. Extrapolating from this, it would seem that you actually can’t sacrifice A Good Thing to pay for Final Payment. I then went back to the first judge who effectively shrugged and said that the rules don’t conclusively cover this, so the ruling could really go either way. Personally I’m inclined to lean towards not being able to sacrifice it, based on Firesong and Sunspeaker’s ruling, but also agree that it’s really ambiguous and probably wouldn’t argue with a HJ that wanted to do things differently.

A Subtle Problem
AP illegally casts Omnath, Locus of Creation, before it resolves NAP casts Subtlety targeting it. Then both players notice that AP didn’t have the correct mana to cast Omnath. I think backing up here is fine, it’s unfortunate that AP now knows that NAP has a Subtlety, but the alternative, not backing up, seems worse for both players.

Seized By a Bluff
AP says “crack fetch, Thoughtsieze” while they’re searching, NAP reveals their hand, AP looks at the hand and then grabs a breeding pool and says “I don't actually run Thoughtsieze.” This, is most certainly awful, probably cheating and definitely not a bluff that is in any way okay.

The Day’s Status
Currently status information is called out in the MTR as a bunch of specific things and then “continuous effects with no defined expiration within the game that apply to that player”, which does include City’s Blessing, Monarch and Initiative, but doesn’t include Day/Night, and this is terrible.

What Actually is Colorless?
Colorless is a chronically confusing thing, but the CR defines it as something that doesn’t have a color. Seems simple enough. I was playing in a game of commander in the evening and one of the players was in the Undercity, and got to the room that causes them to goad a creature. One of the other players brought up that if the creature was given protection from colorless, it wouldn’t be goaded. I thought that was neat.

Saturday – Team Constructed – Deck Checks Lead


Three Rulings for the Price of One
While I personally basically took no judge calls on the main event, since I was wrapped up in deck check land the whole time, there were a few “team trios” specific rules that were announced at the beginning of the event. First, if a player sits in the wrong seat (ie. The modern player from team B sits across from Team A’s legacy player, and Team A’s player is in the right seat) that player will have to re-do pregame procedures, such as mulligans when they move. Also if teammates have finished their games but want to keep helping, they need to remain in their seats, or if they get up, a judge needs to ensure they don’t see the opposing team’s hands.

Conniving to Create Ambiguity
AP controlled two Ledger Shredders, one with a +1/+1 counter and one without a counter. AP cast their second spell for the turn. Before the connive triggers resolved, NAP killed the Ledger Shredder with a counter on it. Then AP resolved the triggers and discarded a nonland card for the second trigger. The players called me over because AP hadn’t announced which Ledger Shredder trigger was correlated with which creature, theoretically, if the creature that was dead was tied to the second trigger, then no +1/+1 counter would be awarded to the living Shredder. I thought about it for a moment, and decided that there really wasn’t any way to fix this, nor had an infraction occurred. I simply informed the players to be more clear next time, and let NAP know that they can always ask how the triggers are stacked in the future, before they cast their spell.

A Caged Dryad
AP cracks a fetchland and chooses Dryad Arbor while NAP has a Grafdigger’s Cage in play. I spoke to many judges and most of them said that the selection of Dryad Arbor was legal, but putting it on the battlefield was not, and therefore the infraction would be GRV rewind to the selection of Dryad Arbor. But don’t let AP search and find another land. I really don’t like this, because it feels aggressive, but I definitely understand the reasoning behind it. A similar scenario is if AP casts Teferi, Hero of Dominaria, and NAP responds by casting Spell Queller, choosing to counter it. I thought I remembered this discussion ending up with most judges rewinding the entire Spell Queller, but I could be wrong. Most of the judges I asked at SCG Baltimore also wanted to only rewind the trigger, but leave the Spell Queller in play.

A Revealing Result
AP and NAP agreed to draw the match, then before the match result was reported, NAP revealed the top card of their library to see what they would’ve drawn. I spoke to NAP and let them know why this is sometimes a problem, but not a problem here because they had already agreed to a match result.

Paying for Spells is Hard
If AP casts a spell with Convoke, Delve or Improvise do they still need to pay for Trinisphere? Nope! Because all these are activated in the “paying costs” part of casting a spell, which is after the total cost of the spell has been determined. Alternatively Phyrexian mana works differently and is determined before the “total cost” of the spell, thus it doesn’t circumvent Trinisphere.

Leadership Woes
I haven’t done deck checks in a while, and uh, I think it kinda showed. The general term that hung over Saturday was “unprepared”. I didn’t have a table at the beginning of the day to do deck checks, I didn’t brief the team members great, especially since some of them were very new to large events, and I also didn’t have a strategy to track which people we had checked and which ones we hadn’t. I also didn’t realize we had a set break on the schedule and planned to organize breaks internally with the team. Then throughout the day there were a host of other small issues, I didn’t communicate very much with the HJ about what decks were being checked or if he wanted us to do any specific checks, and only found out near the end of the day what to do with the remaining decklists. Also a lot of the checks ended up taking 13-20 minutes. This is way too long. The reason this happened was both because my team lacked experience, so the speed simply wasn’t there, and also because I wasn’t aggressive enough on cutting people off. Frequently my team members would bring questionable things to me and I’d want to hear out their reasoning, and usually both people on the check would want to give input. Unfortunately all this takes time, and if the check has already taken 13 minutes, both people telling me a thing is another 4-5 minutes then I actually have to look for the thing, and then it’s been 20 minutes. In the future I need to be firmer at cutting people off and keeping a tighter ship regarding time. Another thing that I learned is that apparently it’s common practice to stop doing checks at 35 minutes into the round. I’d heard a long time ago that 25 minutes into the round was the cutoff. I’m not sure why, or where but it’s time to update since most of the people I talked to seemed to think 25 minutes was WAY too late.

Sunday - Legacy HJ - 115 players


Grist Confusion Strikes Again
NAP controls Grafdigger’s Cage and AP casts Green Sun’s Zenith and finds Grist, the Hunger Tide, it won’t be able to enter the battlefield, because it’s a creature card in AP’s library, however if NAP instead controls Containment Priest, Grist will be able to enter the battlefield, because on the battlefield it won’t be a creature, so Containment Priest’s replacement effect won’t apply to it.

LEC or Nothing
AP accidentally grabs the top two cards of their library, but they’re stuck together, so AP only sees the second card down. The judge on the call spoke with both players and determined that AP hadn’t seen the top card of their library, so he ruled that the card AP would draw for the turn was the second card down and issued no infraction. I think in a world with perfect information this fix is totally fine, after all, AP is supposed to draw a random card from their library and as long as the top two cards are random, it really doesn’t matter which one they draw. Unfortunately this is not a world with perfect information, in this world we can’t be sure AP didn’t see the top card, and therefore I think LEC is the safer fix here.

Mighty Morphin’ Rulings
I haven’t had to make a ruling on morph in a while, so this one caught me off guard, a face down Birchlore Rangers was returned to its owners hand, and that player asked if he needed to reveal it. I paused for a moment and then nodded. Yes, you do in fact need to reveal morphs, basically any time they change zones (unless it’s from the stack to the battlefield, obviously) to prove that they actually have morph.

This Triggers an Investigation
AP controls a Ledger Shredder and casts Lightning Bolt, announcing the trigger. NAP casts Pact of Negation and before it resolves, AP resolves their Ledger Shredder trigger. AP was at 1 life and was dead on board the next turn, it was very relevant that the Lightning Bolt resolved on my initial sweep of the board state, since if it resolved, AP would have just enough damage to kill NAP this turn. I took each player aside and asked them about the game. Upon interviewing AP they let me know that they didn’t need to dig for an answer since they had Wishclaw Talisman and could just grab a Counterspell or another Bolt from their library if they really needed to. It took a little while to get to that, so while there is the potential that the player cheated and then found the correct line to victory, I felt it was unlikely so I stopped investigating. I ruled GRV no backup because the backup would involve putting a random card from AP’s hand back on top of their library and then they had the option of shuffling it away with Wishclaw Talisman.

Logistical Punt
I made a fair amount of mistakes on this event. One round I didn’t find out about four tables who had wandered away from their table without reporting their match results until after time in the round was called. Also in round 3 half my team was on break, meaning the only judges were me, and my two deck checks judges. For about 100 players. I made my opening announcements, and wandered back to my event just in time to see my deck checks judges grabbing a deck check and leaving me alone on the floor. I shrugged and decided to talk to them after the check. In retrospect this was really dumb, I’m not sure why I didn’t just talk to them immediately and say “hey look, this is not really a great time to be doing deck checks.” I also missed calling time in the round while I was trapped in an investigation. Finally in top 8, one of my players asked me who they were playing next round. I told them a match and they looked at me confused, I showed them the bracket, and they said they thought it worked differently. I decided it was probably worth double-checking my bracket at that point. Aaaaand after asking my remaining floor judge, I realized that I have been doing top 8 brackets wrong for who knows how long. It’s possible I was doing them right back in my PPTQ days and forgot but it’s also possible I’ve just been doing them wrong forever. Below is a top 8 bracket



I think some of my confusion might’ve arisen from the fact that we also have a draft bracket based on seating, that also uses the numbers 1-8 that I use more frequently.



It was a little embarrassing, since a top 8 bracket is a pretty basic thing in general.

Winter (Orb) is Coming
AP controls a Delver of Secrets, Winter Orb and two tapped lands, Volcanic Island and Tundra. When their turn begins, they untap both lands and pick up the top card of their library for their Delver trigger, then realize their mistake and call for a judge. I was wary of a Delver player “rerolling” their Delver trigger, and checked out the top card, it was a sorcery, so I was able to rule out cheating pretty quickly. I ruled GRV backup, which involved shuffling away the top card of the library since it was seen illegally. Afterwards however, I consulted with another judge and they said that it would be better to preserve the location of the top card since it was a “known card”. This sounded quite convincing, so I agreed that I had made a mistake. Then later at the staff party I was talking about the ruling with some other judges and they said “No, Tobi, the other judge was wrong, your initial fix was right”. So what I learned from this is that sometimes other judges are wrong, and also I am very deferential when it comes to rulings.

It’s Never IDaW
In the finals after some chatter, both players agreed to split the cash prize, however there was a trophy to play for. The players chatted about how to determine who got it. One player suggested playing for it, but the other player mentioned that it had already been a long day, and asked if they could just play game 3 for it. The other player said this was fine if the player going first was randomly determined and if they could use sideboards. The first player agreed and so that’s what they did, after consulting with me. After making the ruling though, just like the previous one, I began to worry it might’ve been an incorrect ruling and discussed it with a few other judges, overall we all agreed that while it felt weird, nothing illegal was actually happening.

...In Conclusion
I had a good time at SCG Baltimore, both deck check lead and 5k HJ offered unique challenges and really highlighted the areas I’m weak in, which gives me some really clear areas to work on and improve. As always I’m honored to be given responsibilities like this by SCG and I’d love to work for them in the same capacity in the future.