Edmonton, Alberta
Time: Friday June 16nd – Sunday June 18th 2023
Players: 205 | Format: Pioneer | Winner: Robert Anderson

Friday – LCQ Lead

Mana Unweaving
Let’s say for instance AP organizes their deck after a game of particularly bad mana screw by placing two nonland cards on top of one land for the entire deck, and then just does a few cuts of the library before presenting. Is it okay for NAP to, without looking at the cards, separate the deck by taking two cards and putting them in a pile, then putting a single card in another pile, then two cards into the original pile etc. before placing the two piles on top of each other? Personally, I think this is fine, since if AP didn’t shuffle correctly (which in this case, they certainly didn’t) it screws them over, and if they did shuffle correctly, it does nothing.

The Modern Man’s Jitte
AP overhears NAP registering Umezawa’s Jitte in their modern deck before the event starts. The IPG says one aspect of cheating is “a player notices an offense committed in their (or a teammate's) match and does not call attention to it.” Certainly having Jitte in modern is an offense, but was it actually committed in their match? Well, not yet. But what about if AP gets paired against NAP later in the event? By the most technical standards they’re aware of an offense in their match, namely NAP isn’t playing a legal deck. But when are they required to call attention to it? Do they need to call a judge as soon as they sit down, or can they wait until they’re losing to mention the issue. Personally I’m not sure were I land, I think cheating is both hard to prove and unlikely, since AP has to know that they’re required to call a judge as soon as they sit down, and if the judges aren’t even sure if that’s required, it’s unlikely the player knows that.

Revealed Card Error
AP casts Atraxa, Grand Unifier and reveals 12 cards but rearranges them as they do so. The policy on HCE says “This infraction only applies when a card whose identity is known to only one player is in a hidden set of cards both before and after the error.” but in this case the card’s identity was known to both players before and after the error. Oftentimes policy is not the technical document we think it is, and I feel there’s some wiggle room here. GRV has us take two random cards and put them back on top, which feels awkward. HCE has the opponent select two cards and we shuffle them in. I think HCE does a better job of offsetting advantage, for instance if my Atraxa pile isn’t looking too good I could grab a few extra cards, GRV makes it somewhat unlikely that those cards are going to go away, whereas HCE is going to obliterate any advantage I could gain from this.

Last Chance to Start Anew
I was told by some of my mentors that something that was holding me back was fear and a lack of desire to try new things. I’ve run mostly under the adage that I am not smarter than all the judges before me and shouldn’t be trying to reinvent the wheel. However it sounds like I need to start reinventing some wheels. So here we go. At Ottawa LCQs were a bit of a mess, and both judges working them seemed stressed all day. I think a reason for this was the immense amount of logistical work rolled into running LCQs, since they launch every 16 players there end up being anywhere from 8-12 of them, and launching along with distributing tix and flipping rounds and answering questions and dealing with breaks ends up being a lot of wheel-spinning for a very small number of players.
Additionally, all the events were run in EventLink at Ottawa which just adds an amount of base stress because you are constantly concerned that your event might just implode for no reason. For this event I decided to go completely old school and run LCQs on paper brackets instead, because you know what doesn’t crash, a paper bracket. I gave the brackets to the players and told them to self moderate. I also did away with time limits on rounds. This was by far the most nerve-wracking part of the new plan, but I decided to give it a shot because hey, no one likes sudden death anyways, and realistically, most matches probably won’t go to time. I let the players know that if something felt like it was taking a while to call me over and I’d monitor the situation and figure something out.
Players were entitled to prize tix if they won at least one match, so I had them call a judge over when they were eliminated, as long as they’d won round one. We’d then sign off on the bracket so we knew we’d prized them out.
Two issues arose from this.
One: we were signing by the players name at the point in the bracket where they were eliminated and not beside their name in the initial pairings, this made it difficult to determine whether all players in a bracket had been paid out. In the future I want to sign beside the names for the first round pairings.
Two: My judges didn’t have a consistent signature scheme and some of them were using cryptic marks to indicate whether players had been prized out. In the future I think I’d also want to make this consistent as well.
For penalties we recorded them on the back of the bracket, since they only really mattered if the player had three. Finally the last unique thing was the method of naming LCQs, usually they’re named after numbers (ie. LCQ 1, LCQ 2 etc.) this is annoying for a few reasons. One players have a hard time remembering what the number of their LCQ is. This becomes annoying when they want to do the list thing where they turn in a blank decklist that says “see LCQ3” when they sit down for LCQ 5. it also means they might not show up when their LCQ number is called over the microphone. I decided to change things up and named them after the letters in the phonetic alphabet (LCQ Alpha, LCQ Beta etc.). the only issue with this was the fact that I named the second one “Beta” instead of “Bravo” because I wasn’t sure if I was going to name the third one “Gamma”, “Charlie” or “Unlimited”. I ended up going with “Charlie”, partially because LCQ Arabian Nights starts getting a little weird.

All that being said there were a few issues with the plan, mostly, the fact that I didn’t communicate it to registration until 10 minutes before the doors opened, which was unfortunately the point at which many other people were trying to communicate things to registration. Luckily I literally had no jobs until the first LCQ launched, so I just worked registration and taught the judge there my LCQ system.
The other big failing was the fact that there were multiple times where I felt a little overwhelmed especially during break rounds. The rest of the event was super, duper dead and I could’ve easily stolen some people from...literally anywhere else but I didn’t think to ask for some reason. I think I have gotten into the habit of working events where everyone is tapped out and you just kind of have to make do with the staff that you have.
Overall though, other than some poor communication LCQs ran very smoothly.

The Legendary Infraction
AP channeled Eiganjo, Seat of the Empire for {2}{W} but didn’t notice that they had two legendary creatures in play, meaning they should’ve only paid {W}. A spectator noticed the issue, and there was some concern about outside assistance. I think this is very much not outside assistance, though to the players it’s gonna kinda feel that way, so I’d prefer if the spectator had paused the game and called for a judge. It’s not CPV unless NAP did something based on the fact that AP didn’t announce floating mana. I think this is a GRV, and potentially instruct AP to announce floating mana now or rewind because AP paid too much for an activated ability. I prefer rewinding because perhaps AP would like to use this mana.

Saturday – Regional Championship Head Judge

Bitty Bits
I was also told to work on my logistics, so for this event my AJ suggested that I organize the product distribution plan. Now, to be honest, for a 200 player event, you don’t really need to have a hugely in-depth plan, but I did want to enact a system that scaled for the future. The items that needed to be distributed were Snapcaster Mage promos, player’s decklists and a privacy waiver that essentially said “you can’t deny being on coverage” so that coverage wouldn’t be sad if someone in top 8 didn’t want to be streamed.
I got all the stuff organized into piles that corresponded to the number of players in a row, and then had judges hand out the stuff to the rows. The decklists and waivers were actually put on the tables before the players sat down, since someone taking a decklist or looking at a list isn’t a big deal in an open decklist event. If someone steals a privacy waiver, well, who cares? The Snapcaster Mages were the only thing that was handed out after players actually sat down since losing one of those is a bit more detrimental than the other things

It’s My Tournament and I Can Cry I Want To
In the vein of “trying new stuff” I decided to do something different from Dreamhack and have a 52 minute timer instead of a 2 minute decklist review timer and a 50 minute playing magic timer. I like the 52 minute timer because that way players spend less time waiting to play magic, since the vast majority of them don’t need two whole minutes to read a decklist. Also, it gives them extra time to review the list during sideboarding, which a separate two minute timer doesn’t do.

It’s a Good Day to Make it Night
Day/Night is the current policy hot topic, and for this event I decided to have all floor judges report all day/night calls to me so I could keep track of them. If the call was at all more substantial than “flip this token now because it literally affects nothing” I would take care of it. After consulting with some other judges and my AJ, I decided to rule GRV for the player that screwed up the game (usually by having a werewolf on the wrong side) and then a rewind to whenever incorrect information was acted upon (like, potentially casting Brutal Cathar because you thought it was day and having it resolve and exile a creature) or any incorrect impacts on the game, (for example a werewolf dealing more or less damage than it should). If, for instance the incorrect information was acted upon by a player that didn’t bring day/night into the game, potentially a control player taking their turn as if it was night and then suddenly finding out it was day, we would rewind, but give a GRV to the player that brought day/night into the game in the first place. Over the course of the event, I had the following reports
2: players noticed it immediately, the token was fixed and no infraction was issued
1: players did a few things that weren’t dependent on day/night then noticed it. The token was fixed and no infraction was issued.
1: AP attacked with Reckless Stormseeker, however half way through combat we discovered it was actually supposed to be night. I rewound to before the trigger was put onto the stack, we made it night, flipped the Stormseeker and resumed the game. I gave a GRV to AP and while I don’t think I issued it at the time, I think NAP should’ve gotten an FTMGS

Level the Playing Field
In round 1 AP was down a game. They cast Storm the Festival, seeing three lands, Oath of Nissa and Cityscape Leveler. They thought for a moment and selected Oath and Leveler. They were at that point tapped out and their only other permanents were Kiora, Behemoth Beckoner (which they drew a card off of) and a Skyship Sovereign. The opponent controlled a Thalia, Guardian of Thraben, a Brutal Cathar which had exiled a Cavalier of Thorns that had been cast the previous turn, and another aggressive creature. They were at 14 or 15 life (I can’t recall) so they weren’t dead on the next turn, but were going to about half health. Their hand was two lands. The other notable land they had was Lair of the Hydra, but it was tapped so it couldn’t crew the Skyship. If they crewed this turn, they could kill the Brutal Cathar, and would probably end up winning the game. If not they are quite behind and had a very good chance of losing. NAP noticed the error as AP was going to crew the Skyship Sovereign.
I spoke to both players for a while. The opponent brought up the fact that in the list of 75 the only permanent card that Storm the Festival can’t get is Cityscape Leveler, which is a sideboard card.
I felt like given the circumstances and the fact that they thought about the selection before actually making it, this was more likely intentional than not. At first I didn’t think this was enough to DQ so instead I did a janky deviation where I shuffled the Cityscape Leveler back into the other Storm cards on the bottom of AP’s library and called it a day. However after consulting with some other judges I decided that this really did feel like cheating, so in round 2 I removed the player from the event.

Trigger Harvest
AP casts Claim the Firstborn on NAP’s Bloodtithe Harvester and asks “Can I activate it’s ability without a target?” The judge on the call says “no.” and leaves it at that. This is interesting because it feels similar to the Spellskite question, however in that case you can ask the player “what are you trying to do” and get a meaningful question out of them. For this one you’re just going to get something flaccid like “well I want this Harvester to die, how do I make that happen” which you certainly can’t answer. I argued that on Arena Harvester would be highlighted, indicating that you could in fact, activate the ability. Now there are many good reasons why we shouldn’t make rulings based on how MTG Arena works, but I do think some of the coded in functionality gives us insight into how WotC would like their game to be played in an ideal world. And this shows that WotC would like players to not require such a deep understanding of the rules to be successful at playing the game.

Mayhem Ensues!
AP has gained control of NAP’s Mayhem Devil with The Akroan War. After the third chapter, what happens? Mayhem Devil deals damage to itself equal to its power. Then SBA’s are checked and The Akroan War is sacrificed, and Mayhem Devil dies. Then its triggered ability will go on the stack, controlled by AP. The reason the triggered ability goes on the stack, is because with sacrifice and a few other leave the battlefield triggered abilities, the game checks the state before the event happened, not afterwards to see if any abilities triggered, if the game checked afterwards, Blood Artist would never trigger off itself because it would always be in the graveyard and would have no business triggering from there.

Contrary to Popular Belief, There Are Stupid Questions
There are a few questions that come up every now and again that make me question whether being an elementary school teacher would increase the amount of maturity in my vicinity. This was one of them. A judge on my event came to me and let me know that two players were arguing about what the correct method to determine who would go first was. One player didn’t want to use a die because he thought his opponent was doing something shady with the die and the other player wanted to use Rock/Paper/Scissors cards but the first player didn’t like those either. I rolled my eyes and told the FJ to get two basic lands and use those to randomly determine who was going first. Oddly enough this isn’t the first time I’ve had to deal with something like this, and usually the solution is to simply roll a die for the players. In this case, based on what I was told, the player had some kind of die-phobia, which is why I swerved to basic lands instead.

Shady Shuffler
The AJ thought there was some shuffle cheating potentially happening with AP and instructed a FJ to watch them during the last round of swiss on Day 1. The FJ saw AP mulligan to six, put a card on the bottom, draw an extra card then put another one on the bottom while their opponent wasn’t looking. The FJ brought this to me, and I sighed and took the player aside. I let them know the situation and asked them what was in their hand, and they told me a hand that sounded fairly mediocre, which would benefit from a rummage. I believe I asked them about the matchup but can’t recall what they said. I then asked them if there was anything that they could tell me that might make this not a DQ. They thought for a moment and then mentioned that while they were in fact on a win and in for day 2, they could no longer make top 8 (they were 4-3 currently, and 5-3 makes day 2) so they’d already booked a plane ticket home for that night so they could see their girlfriend instead. I paused for a moment. This was pretty compelling evidence. Not that people don’t cheat for no value, but this dramatically reduced the incentive. I verified the plane ticket’s date and purchase time and let the match continue.
I’m still not super sure about this one, obviously if a FJ tells you they literally saw cheating occur it’s not a good look to just….. not believe them. That being said I’ve seen enough things in my life to know that if you’re looking for something, like card manipulation, it’s very easy for your mind to see something ambiguous and misinterpret it into what you want to see. I also think that if this player was cheating, they were already effectively taking themselves out of the event at the end of this round, so while they could potentially corrupt the tournament integrity for one more round, that was much less of an issue than if they were potentially going to ruin day 2 with their cheating wiles.

Sunday – Regional Championship Head Judge

You Get a Turn! And You Get a Turn!
While this never came up, I did end up having a theoretical conversation about Slow Play. Apparently if both AP and NAP get slow play warning, the match will end up with 9 extra turns instead of the normal five. This is a little odd to me, but it’s enough of a corner case that it will likely never come up. More interestingly I got to have a discussion about why there are an odd number of extra turns. With an odd number of turns, this means that the player who was playing when time got called won’t get the last turn of the game, which incentivises them to play quickly. If it was an even number of turns, that player would have a good reason to stall.

An Attempt At Professionalism
Somehow day 2 of the Regional Championship had 69 players. I’m not going to announce that we have 69 players at one of the most prestigious tournaments in Canada to an entire event hall. Instead I opted for “Good morning, today we have just under 70 players..”. Another interesting nuance of the event was that prize payout was to top 64, so only five players on day 2 went home empty handed.

Zero-Faced Land
AP plays a helper card on turn one for Hengegate Pathway, but doesn’t get the real land out of their box and doesn’t cast anything. A few turns later, NAP asks what the land is. AP hasn’t cast anything that requires specific enough colors for us to determine that this land should be white or blue. I feel like some kind of warning should be issued here, but I’m not really sure for what, I guess GRV – you didn’t choose a mode for this modal double-faced card. The intuitive fix is to simply choose a land now similar to a GRV partial fix (even though it’s not quite covered under that part of policy). If it hadn’t been too long there’s the option for a backup but the main issue here is that AP now knows their draws and can choose a color for their land more favorably, so a backup actually seems like it would make the game worse.

Double Decks All the Way
AP had one of those stupid deckboxes that has two decks in it, a modern and a pioneer deck. Usually if any of the modern cards were playable in the pioneer deck this would be a fairly standard game loss. However because it was an open decklist event I felt that a game loss that already felt kinda dumb, was even dumber, seeing as it would be fairly easy for the opponent to verify whether AP had added additional cards to their deck, so I opted for a warning instead.

Approaching HCE
Another interesting corner case that was brought up as a thought experiment was the following: AP cast Approach of the Second Sun, but neither player can recall whether it was three or four cards down in their library. Then they cast Brainstorm and accidentally grab four cards. The infraction is HCE but what is the fix? I think we reveal the set to NAP, if they choose Approach, it goes on top of the library, if any other card is chosen it gets shuffled in.

Did You Pay {1}?
The most annoying thing about Fable of the Mirror Breaker other than the fact that its a saga and causes saga issues, and the fact that it’s also a DFC and causes DFC issues. The third issue with this card is that everyone is playing it because it’s causing power balance issues, and finally the backside is just close enough to Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker that it’s easy to think the activated ability is the same. There was a player who forgot to pay {1} twice in a row on Saturday and a judge observed their opponent reminding them of this. The judge issued a GRV for the second mis-activation, and that was that. The next day, during the last round of swiss the judge once again saw this player fail to pay {1} for their reflection. This, unlike before, was actually quite critical to the game. It allowed AP to cast Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and Stomp, which would put her opponent at 1, which would mean that if NAP didn’t remove Sheoldred before drawing a card, AP would win. The difference between winning and losing wasn’t top 8,but was $200. I spoke to both players, NAP was on creativity, so while it was possible for them to still steal a win, with Sheoldred on board it would be a steep climb, and it was unlikely they’d be able to untap and win. I spoke to another judge who mentioned that they’d seen the player play a lot and make a lot of minor errors both in and not in their favor and chalked the whole thing up to general sloppy play. This was certainly not a ton of evidence, but after observing the match afterwards, I somewhat agreed with the other judge’s assessment.

Checking the Deck Checkers
The tournament was well staffed on day 2 and I wanted to see both how the deck check lead was doing and how one of the members on the deck check team was doing, since when we had staffed them we'd never seen either of them in a Comp REL role before. I went and asked if I could do a deck check. We had a good time and the check happened quickly and everything appeared to be in order. Until top 8 when the player I had checked made top 8 and it became apparent during courtesy checks (this is where you check all the top 8 player’s decks for issues before sending them off to play top 8) that the players sleeves were semi-transparent and I had simply…. Failed to notice. I felt a little goofy since I had been focusing so much on other stuff I had failed to do the check properly. But either way, we got the player some checklist cards and that was that. (since decks aren’t presented for a game there’s no game loss here for marked cards).

A Debate As Old as the IPG
The big story of my weekend ended up being a call on coverage. The judge on coverage was instructed to be more diligent when double checking rulings because the last thing we wanted was a bad ruling on coverage. AP cast Pore Over the Pages and drew four cards, then called a judge on themselves. The judge on coverage came to me and said they had an HCE. I wanted to confirm a few things before issuing the HCE, I spoke to both players who agreed the cards had been drawn one at a time and that the order of them hadn’t changed, additionally both players agreed that AP hadn’t even seen the cards. If the order hadn’t changed then it was very solidly LEC in my mind, and if AP hadn’t seen the cards it was very much a nothing. I set about beginning to rule LEC and shuffle the card both players identified as extra away when the FJ pulled me away and said this should be HCE because they, as the judge saw the cards, and the player must’ve also seen the cards. I mentioned that seeing the cards didn’t make something an HCE, the critical distinction was whether the order had changed or not. I also could imagine a world where the judge saw a flash of the cards from their angle, but the player actually hadn’t seen them. The judge insisted that if the player had seen them it was HCE and not LEC, regardless of whether the order changed.
I could feel a long philosophical argument coming on. While I certainly have been known to enjoy philosophical arguments about policy from time to time, the players and coverage staff probably weren’t interested in waiting 20 minutes for us to debate LEC vs HCE. I issued the LEC and moved on. The FJ seemed pretty annoyed about the whole thing and tagged me later to talk about the ruling. They seemed upset and I felt like waiting until they cooled off would be best. The last thing I wanted was an argument on the floor, and either of us going on tilt. I was, however a little concerned about the LEC/HCE distinction and asked the AJ if they could talk to the FJ about it. Perhaps if the FJ was annoyed at me for effectively overturning them, they would be less annoyed talking to another judge about it. Unfortunately the AJ didn’t have much luck with the discussion either.
I shrugged and decided this didn’t need to be addressed immediately, the FJ would confirm any future HCEs, so it was unlikely a weird ruling would be issued. Apparently, during the course of the event and after they got off shift the FJ went to a cavalcade of different judges to talk about this interaction. As I was starting top 8 the FJ came up to me with the video of the stream and asked, in a somewhat aggressive tone, whether I wanted to watch the stream, I let them know that I was starting top 8 and now was not a good time. The FJ walked off. Then the TO came up to me and let me know that apparently on stream the player had not only very visibly looked at the cards but had also rearranged them. The FJ had brought the video up to multiple people to verify this was HCE and not LEC, but when the FJ brought it up to the TO (who is also a pretty decent judge in their own right) the TO was like “yeah that’s HCE but hold on I think we have a bigger problem, did this player lie to our HJ?” and immediately came to me. The player in question wasn’t in top 8 but I felt like further investigation needed to happen regardless. I let my AJ watch the top 8 while I found the player wandering around the hall. I sat them down and asked a few questions. They insisted to me that they didn’t see the cards at all. They said they had Emergent Ultimatum in their hand and needed to cast Pore Over the Pages to untap their lands. I went to the FJ to confirm the player had Emergent Ultimatum in hand and they confirmed it. Later on I watched the stream and noticed that the player’s sequence had been Pore-another untap spell-Dark Petition-Emeregent. Which is a weird line if you already have Emergent Ultimatum in hand. I circled back around to the FJ at the staff party who said that actually, it could’ve been either Dark Petition or Emergent Ultimatum, but they weren’t sure which. The final question I asked the player was what they thought the penalty for this infraction was, and they said they thought it might be a game loss.
So I had a player who was likely locked to win the game, drew an extra card, very clearly saw it but claimed they didn’t and called a judge on themselves all on coverage. I think it’s unlikely the player intentionally drew an extra card, otherwise they wouldn’t have called a judge on themselves. Upon reviewing the stream, it was apparent that the opponent was paying approximately zero attention to AP. To be honest I’m not sure why they agreed that AP hadn’t seen the cards, and that the cards didn’t change order. I think what is more likely is that AP drew an extra card and called a judge, then lied about whether they’d seen the cards in an effort to get a lesser penalty.
Given that the player was no longer in the event and that the most likely scenario was lying to a judge I opted to not DQ this player.

...In Conclusion
Overall I think this event went well. I did a ton of investigations and really got to work on digging deeper into suspicious calls and practicing which questions to ask, which is great because I don’t often get this kind of experience, usually if a call smells weird, I just flip it up the chain immediately to expedite things. On the other hand I did almost no mentoring and barely communicated with my AJ or team leads all event, so it felt less like I was the head judge of a team and more like I was the investigations judge for the event. I still had a great time, and was honored that Face to Face chose me for such a prestigious position, I’d love to do more jobs like this in the future, but also recognize I have a lot to learn in roles like this.