Salt Lake City, Utah
Time: Thursday October 26th – Sunday October 29th 2023
Main Event: Sealed | 158 Players


Thursday – “Battles” Floor Judge

Raise the Flags
For a treat, read my report about MTG Summit last year. Let me begin with this: I had a great time at MTG Summit last year. I love being busy and that event was, well, very busy. If you ask most judges what the single biggest issue with MTG Summit 2022 was, many of them would say it was the TO developed tournament running app that was untested and hastily developed. As soon as the app was dumped, the event ran significantly more smoothly. Now, any judge would hopefully course-correct on this, and determine either to abandon the idea of an in-house app, or decide to instead develop an app but test it on a few store level events first, to ensure any glaring issues were worked out. This... is not what happened. I had reached out weeks in advance to see if the dark cloud of an app would rain once more on MTG Summit but was assured that the main event would be in MTGMelee.

So you can imagine my surprise when I went to the public discord and on Wednesday night the TO announced that the app was finally available for download. Less than 24 hours before the event, and probably even less time than that had passed between completion of development and the public announcement. I reached out to the Sides Lead to find out what was happening with this app but apparently in typical Summit fashion, the judges in charge were given precious little information, however they assured me that there was a plan in place for (when) the app inevitably failed.

It might be a little disingenuous to say this was the first red flag, that happened about a week earlier when I heard that judges were getting free entry into all events except the main(which sported a mox if you made it into top 4). This was... amended when people asked about sealed events. Judges were allowed one free sealed event entry. I thought this was pretty cool and seeing as I love magic I decided to see what was available. The website. It was horrendously unclear about what was being run and when. The on-demand events were also unclear in several ways. Drafts were advertised as both swiss and single elimination, which seemed like a bad idea for several reasons. As far as I could tell from the website there was no on-demand commander, and there were a cornucopia of constructed ODEs available, but the exact structure and formats of those was also somewhat ambiguous. There were also events called “Battles” which sounded a lot like a card type from March of Machine, and upon further inspection Last Chance Qualifiers/Trials since they were comp REL and granted byes into the main event. Except that it also mentioned Regular REL Battles??? Also it looked like they had an option for Legacy LCQs. Now I know that Legacy is no longer supported as an RCQ format, so in my mind, this means that it would be pretty weird to allow people to win byes into an event that awards RCQ invites. However, both for this and the Regular REL thing I reached out to a few TOs to find out what the actual restrictions on LCQs are. As it turns out, since Destination Events are already something that is negotiated with Dreamhack directly, the idea of LCQs is also on a case by case basis (since destination events are really the only events that would be worth earning a bye into). So, there really aren’t codified rules for LCQs. However, it’s unlikely Dreamhack would ever give the greenlight on a legacy or regular REL LCQ.

Show Me the Sides
I was scheduled to start around noon on Thursday, but as I had some... concerns, I decided to pop in two hours early just to orient myself and see if there were any immediate fires I could help with. The first thing I noticed was that there were no table numbers, something I’d poked both judge managers about a few times leading up to the event. I inquired about it and was told that it was “being worked on”. I... recall hearing similar things last year and also recall that the table numbers didn’t materialize until I made some. I shrugged and figured I’d start maydaying around 1pm, which was when doors opened for VIPs (Thursday was a VIP only day), but wouldn’t keep bothering people,

I asked what else needed to be done and was told to set up some land stations and move some banners around, so I did that. Then I spent some time speaking to one of the registration people to figure out what the registration system being used was, and also familiarized myself with the ODE system, which thankfully this year, was utilizing restaurant buzzers. The plan was to give three or four ODE judges a buzzer that were all keyed into the same number and call them all when a draft was launching. I recommended that we give only one person a buzzer since the with the current plan, two things could happen, either all the judges come each time you buzz and only one launches the ODE, or the judges learn to stop paying attention to the buzzer and then no one comes when you buzz them. Both aren’t great outcomes. I suggested giving out one buzzer to a judge and telling them that when it buzzed they should come, launch the ODE and give it to another judge and tell them those instructions. That way the buzzer would get passed around so many people could have an opportunity to launch ODEs. I don’t think this was implemented, but a single buzzer was given out. I also asked about the "swiss ODE drafts" and was told that those wouldn’t exist and players could only register for single elimination ones.

Very Important Products
Then my actual day started, I volunteered to sign in VIPs and help with product distribution. It was a little weird since MTGSummit staff people were doing this part and uhm... I’m happy to be wrong, but it looked like the people in the area didn’t have a lot of experience in event logistics. The system was clunky and some weird decisions were made. For instance, each VIP needed to be checked against a list, except initially I didn’t have a list, so I just took down names on a sheet of paper (which is what I was instructed to do) by hand. Another issue was that each VIP got a goodie bag, of which there were two kinds, in addition to a colored spindown die and a hoodie. They had one guy grabbing the bags, stuffing playmats in them AND picking out dice and like 3 people to deal with hoodies. The guy stuffing the bags was obviously the rate determining step, so I suggested putting the dice boxes on the table and letting players grab it instead of putting that on the one guy. They countered by saying that they were concerned about theft and made it pretty clear this was non-negotiable. I didn’t want to make too much of a fuss, especially since I wasn’t in a lead role this particular weekend, but realistically, these people were the VIPs who had paid $400-$700 for their package. If the TO lost 10 dice (which feels like a lot considering this demographic is less likely to steal a die than other demographics) that costs the TO what, like $3? and if it saves your premium customers like 10-20 minutes in line, I think that’s a super worthwhile tradeoff. Another thing that probably should’ve been streamlined was stuffing bags and organizing those bags. Before the doors opened a lot of people had a lot of time that could’ve been redirected to preparing. Half-way through taking players names I was given a list of VIPs so I could actually check whether the people should be getting a package or not, however whoever had printed it off hadn’t given it to me in alphabetical order, it was just... random names in no particular order. I sent it back and got an alphabetical one a few minutes later. Then after the line was exhausted I had to go through my handwritten list and cross reference all the names to ensure that there was one master list of VIPs who had picked up their stuff. I handed that off and returned to ODE land.

The Quest for Numeracy
When I returned some table numbers were created in some office program and I spent an amount of time cutting them up and folding them. Then I launched some drafts with pro players in them. I asked for EL access so I could set up swiss events, but was denied. It was ambiguous whether these were supposed to be swiss or not, initially I was told swiss but without EL access that begins to become unwieldy so I pivoted to single elimination with paper brackets. I inquired later about why I was denied EL access and the SK said it was very unusual for large events to grant that. I thought for a moment and then realized that outside of F2F and Laughing Dragon, that’s pretty accurate.

I’d Like to Order a Side
From what I could tell, there actually weren’t really scheduled sides, everything appeared to be an ODE except for the free VIP sealed event at like 2pm. A few battles launched, mostly sealed, which meant I had to dust off the old Comp REL sealed procedure. One annoying thing was the fact that everything was using prerelease kits, which is great up until the point you realize that players aren’t allowed to use their prerelease promo, since it’s not part of the recommended booster mix in the MTR. Luckily I didn’t encounter any issues with that, but I also remembered to tell my players several times not to use the darn thing.

Command Zone
When I got off shift on Thursday, unfortunately all the ODEs were closed down, so I didn’t get to take advantage of my free infinite events there, HOWEVER, the Command Zone was still alive and kicking, so I went over there. And wouldn’t you know, I think I answered more rules questions in the Command Zone as a player than I did all day as a judge, since when I went in there the judge for the area had been released and it was effectively free play.

Liberated From The Stack
AP controls Liberator, Urza’s Battlethopter and casts a spell for three mana, before the trigger resolves, AP casts Giant Growth on Liberator, will it still get a +1/+1 counter? No. The trigger has an “intervening if” meaning that it checks both before it goes on the stack and upon resolution.

Friday – Registration

From Card Savant to Customer Service
I arrived in the morning with the rest of my car intending to play in a sealed battle, since this would be my only chance to do so over the course of the weekend. Registration was supposed to open at 8 but was delayed for some reason. I sat down and waited for a bit, then I found another player who was also waiting and we played modern for four hours until the battle launched and I had just enough time to grab my sealed pool, register the person across from me’s pool and drop.

I was supposed to be working on launching battles but it was clear that battles couldn’t launch if players couldn’t be registered, and registration was an absolute madhouse. I hadn’t interfaced very much with registration on Thursday, and also the amount of players registering for events wasn’t very large since it was VIPs only, so I didn’t really see what was going on there. Friday was a whole different story, the amount of players was magnitudes greater. The lead asked for volunteers to do registration and seeing as it was the busiest area, I jumped in. I was thankful for the crash course I’d been given the day before on the system and picked up the workflow quickly, though I ended up screwing a few things up. The app was used to handle vouchers which the players could then use to sign up for events. To take a voucher we needed to scan the QR code on the players phone with our own app which needed to be granted admin privileges (until Thursday evening only one registration person had those privileges on their phone.) Loading the app was slow and awkward. The other main issue was the fact that registration didn’t have square readers so all credit cards needed to be punched in manually, this was, of course, very time consuming. Then finally, we needed to get those players into EventLink. When I arrived the judges were transcribing player emails and giving those to the scorekeeper, this was very slow and I suggested instead we have a paper with a bunch of eventlink codes on it and after players had paid they could enter the codes and then we would tell the SK to move them from the lobby into the event. This was a little faster but not ideal. I think a better system would have the EL codes displayed on a screen at the station and players would be able to type those in, and then when they paid they’d already be in EL and we could just yell at the SK to move them into the event.

Upon reflection a few things could’ve been done differently before the event. First I think like 3 dedicated registration folks would’ve been good instead of seemingly having no one pre-assigned to registration. Next I think that while the app dropping Wednesday night obviously caused issues, using some of the spare time on Thursday to train a few people would’ve been correct. I’m also not sure why someone didn’t just drive to Staples on Thursday evening and grab Square readers and sort out the lack of available laptops.

An App-musing Reflection
The app itself was rife with issues but the core idea wasn’t terrible. The actual workflow of scanning a QR code and being able to easily modify a player’s digital wallet was nice. A lot of the issues with the voucher system occured because there was some kind of disconnect between the actual structure of the events advertised and what we’d actually be running. “Swiss ODE” vouchers, or battle vouchers that would be effectively useless after Friday were both pain points for players. I understand why Summit wants to utilize a voucher and package system, that is a great way to make money at events and obfuscate how much people are paying, in addition to giving people an easy “I want to play magic” bundle. I think in the future things to think about would be: how much are vouchers worth if players just want to cash them in for prize tix, and maybe more “generic” vouchers like a “limited voucher”, a “regular draft voucher” and a “constructed voucher” and clear instructions on what events players could use each voucher for on the website. As it was, oftentimes I found myself just treating the vouchers like cash, the “battle vouchers” could get a player into an event that was $30, so a few times I just applied $30 towards whatever the player was actually trying to do. In the CFBE days, players would have physical vouchers that they’d throw into baskets for events, and then they would be scanned into WER before the event started. I think Summit might want to examine a system like this going forward, seeing as I’ve yet to see a physical voucher “crash”.

Format Buffet
A classic new TO mistake is to just “offer everything” they’ll have a pioneer event, a standard event, a regular draft, a collectors draft a 2HG draft etc. etc. While this seems like a good idea in theory, in actuality, unless your event is huge, what’s going to happen is you’re going to have 3 people registered for each type of draft pod and nothing is going to launch. This is annoying. Players want to play magic, not wait to play magic. I think knowing the size of your event and what you should offer is a bit of an art. On Friday we had WOE drafts, Chaos drafts, LOTR drafts, Unfinity and 2HG drafts. A few 2HG drafts launched, a few WOE drafts launched but the other types just sat mostly fallow with players waiting for hours to play. On Friday evening I heard the event offerings were being overhauled, I saw a list of the proposed events and let the registration lead know that perhaps some drafts should be axed. WOE, 2HG and chaos were probably fine, but LOTR and Unfinity unpopular and were probably just siphoning people off WOE drafts. Standard as a format was also axed, and everything was actually turned into an ODE (meaning there were no longer any scheduled events). Overall I think this was a reasonable change.

Commander Corner
AP controls a Cursed Mirror that isn’t currently copying anything, and is using Mishra, Eminent One’s triggered ability to create a copy of it. As the copy enters the battlefield, what happens? AP may choose a creature for it to copy, and if they do it won’t be a 4/4, since the token was created with that characteristic it was as if it’s written on the card, and is one of the token’s copiable attributes. It gaining haste however, isn’t part of the copy process and is a continuous effect that applies to the token, and therefore it will have that regardless of what it copies.

Saturday – Main Event - Team Lead – Pairings/Clock

Ye Olde Judge
So you may recall earlier I told you that MTGSummit’s main event was being run through MTGMelee. I told you that because that’s what I was told, and that’s what I believed up until Saturday morning when I was told it was actually being run on WLTR instead. This is... a bit of a swerve. I hadn’t really thought about letter ranges or slips in the context of having zero online pairings. I haven’t done a “no online pairings” event since the last summit. We also didn’t know how many players were going to be in the main event, all we knew is that it would be somewhere in the range of 150-600. This was a little awkward, since the amount of pairings boards and letter ranges you want for 150 players is very different than the amount you want for 600. Initially I was told two letter ranges, so I posted those. But then when the player list came out (so players could verify who was and wasn't in the event) it was only on one page. I then thought that meant we were only going to have one page of pairings so I discarded the letter ranges. This made the SK really confused when pairings came out and there were no letter ranges. Because of all this fustercluckery I also forgot to take down the player list before pairings were posted.

Ikea Clocktower
On the schedule it said that I was supposed to take care of the round clock, but uh, when I arrived on Saturday morning there was no round clock in sight. I asked the HJ and he shrugged and said there wasn’t one. I mentally crossed that off my list of responsibilities. About halfway through build I noticed two judges carting in a large TV. A few moments later, a round clock appeared on it. I assigned a judge to it and added it back into my list of tasks. Afterwards I took a few calls from players where they asked the time remaining in the round, mentioning that while they were happy a round clock existed, because it was just sitting on top of a table, it was hard to see. I decided to see what I could do about moving the clock up. I speculated using some boxes to raise it, but that seemed unstable. Another judge mentioned we could potentially put a table on top of another table, we did this and it seemed significantly more stable. After a few tests to make sure a particularly aggressive breeze wasn’t going to send the TV crashing to the ground, we finalized this as the TV’s resting place.

Row Reorganization
Because the event was planned to have 600-800 players, the space was organized in a manner that would support that many people. Because we most certainly didn’t have that many people, someone decided that it might be nice to space the players out, as they were quite sardined in as it was. This involved a coordinated multi-round effort that had floor judges removing chairs, scooching tables and renumbering the room. It was a bunch of work but due to the high judge to player ratio I think it was a good use of judge resources and made the event significantly more comfortable for the players.

Must’ve Been a Mirage
In R1 or R2 AP was playing unsleeved with super old lands, like from Mirage or something. Notably, the land boxes didn’t contain anything older than Jumpstart, so the player must’ve brought them from home. Now, anyone that’s handled cards for a while knows that a lot of the cards pre-8th edition have a different texture than current cards, and if a player is playing unsleeved, the older cards are easy enough to pick out by feel, and even easier to pick out visually. The deck check team lead marked the player down for a targeted check the next round, however when they went to swoop, AP was playing a sleeved deck. In fact, the deck he was playing was entirely different than the previous, unsleeved deck. The deck check lead figured it was possible AP had a “post-board” deck that he had been playing when he’d been spotted earlier. However, the deck check lead checked in on AP several times throughout the event and never saw the unsleeved deck again....

Sunday – Modern RCQ – Deck Check Floor Judge

Reaching for Higher Rocks
My job on Sunday was to mentor and support an up and coming judge in one of their first team lead positions. When doing judge staffing there are two terms that come up a lot, “Rocks” and “Reaches”. Rocks are people that are comfortable in the role you’re putting them in and will do a good job. They’re the kind of people you assign to a task and can probably forget about that task. Reaches on the other hand are people that might be in a job that they aren’t as experienced with or haven’t done before. They’re someone who is in more of a training role and probably will need a fair amount of support. It’s important to note that a person isn’t a “rock” or a “reach”, the terms describe the relationship between any given person and the role they’re in. For example, I have worked a lot of large magic tournaments and would likely be a rock in most floor judge positions, but have never lead registration, so I’d be a reach in a role like registration lead. Typically if you have a reach in a leadership position, you want to have a bunch of rocks on their team, and if you have a rock in a leadership position you can afford to put some reaches on their team. Anyways, so my team lead was the reach and I was the rock. I knew the HJ fairly well, and the HJ was working closely with them on an L2 rec. I tossed out the idea of being slightly negligent as a test, to see how they would do. The HJ gave me a sidelong look and reminded me that this person wasn’t being evaluated to be a team lead at a 1000+ player event, they were being evaluated to run 30 player RCQs on their own. I sobered up a bit and agreed that it wouldn’t provide useful data if I was constantly throwing snares in what would probably be an already stressful day for our mutual mentee.

I did however give her a lot of “rope” in that, as long as a mistake wasn’t going to derail the event, I’d probably let it happen. This meant that we missed midround checks, and I let a marked cards warning slip thought that probably should’ve been a “go change your sleeves in the next week or whatever”. Overall my mentee did well and we had a fun day.

Filthy Thieving Hobbit!
AP casts The One Ring and NAP casts Commandeer, will NAP gain protection from everything when The One Ring resolves? No. The game will check to see if NAP cast it, and in fact, they really didn’t.

Adventurous Diary
AP controls River Song’s Diary and casts Stomp, what happens? AP chooses which replacement effect to apply. If they choose River Song’s Diary, they may be given the option later to cast it at random. If this happens, they can choose either the creature or the spell half, and put it back on the diary as it resolves.

Cursed Hydration
A few rounds into the event a judge noticed that one of the players just.... had a beer on the table and was just drinking it. Upon further investigation the player had an entire case under his chair, which was empty save for two cans. We were all a little confused as to what to do. The MTR doesn’t forbid alcohol consumption during sanctioned events (or other substance use, if you recall the famous story about a player winning an SCG while on shrooms), but at the same time it doesn’t come up often as most game stores don’t have an alcohol license, and things probably get weird with local laws. We bounced it off the tournament organizer and they said they didn’t particularly care, but would rather the player not be actively drinking it during the match and not have it on the table. We let the player know and he was fairly amicable about the entire thing.

...In Conclusion
While this MTG Summit wasn’t as chaotic as last year, it still had enough chaotic energy to keep me on my toes, at least for Thursday and Friday. I had a great time in the chaos of registration and enjoyed checking in the VIP players as well. One of the particularly memorable parts of the weekend was the fact that there was still Magic to play after my shift was over. As a Circuit Judge there are two things that I dearly miss: the first is a consistent local playgroup. Some of the fondest memories of my 20s were playing with the same 10 people at FNM every week, or, early in my judge career, seeing the same 10 grinders come out to every single PPTQ. While I’ve never really had a Magic crew to call my own, holding the “acquaintance” rank in many different social circles allowed me to have an amiable familiarity with the local players. The circuit is 600+ faces that I likely won’t see again for a year or more. Sure there are the odd players that I see at a few events a year but the probability of me having a meaningful interaction with them is so much lower than at a local RCQ. The second thing I miss most is actually getting to play magic. Most judges become judges because they deeply love this game, but also like actually having money and have a healthy ability to calculate EV. Nothing has hampered my ability to play so much as being a Magic judge. And I would argue, nothing hampers being a successful judge as not being able to play. Its an awkward paradigm. Most SCG or F2F events send me off shift when there are less than 20 players still in the building. However, MTGSummit had a Command Zone that was open until 11pm, which was a really awesome experience.