Vancouver, BC
Time: Saturday March 16th 2024
Role: Floor Judge | Team Trios (Standard/Pioneer/Modern) | Teams: 36


Triple The Trouble
While MTGMelee is the golden standard for anything competitive and modestly large in the states, here in Canada we're still a little adrift. MTGMelee's fees are worse for Canadians, so a lot of TOs are loathe to use the software, that coupled with the fact that our events rarely break 100 players means we're often in the awkward "a little too large for EventLink but not large enough to justify using MTGMelee" space.

For this event the TO opted to use EventLink, however it doesn't currently support team trios, so the workaround was that a single player on each team (the team captain, if you will) was input into EL, and would take care of all reporting etc. This brings up a subsequent issue, matches for trios events are reported as either 1-0, 0-1 or 0-0-1, this reporting scheme is mostly to prevent people from forcing their last guy to keep playing even though the team had already won the match, but because EL thought this was a single player event, it meant that there wasn't anything stopping players from entering bogus scores like 2-1, this would affect second or third tiebreakers if done incorrectly, so we made sure to continuously remind players how to enter their scores correctly.

Note Your Notes
AP called me over and asked whether their teammate could take notes on their game, and if so, would they be allowed to look at notes taken during their game one, during game 2. I wasn't totally clear on notes policy and thought that you weren't able to reference notes taken during G1 in G2 of your current match, so I imagined it would be the same for trios, I quickly checked the team trios section of the MTR but didn't see anything that said it would be different from normal notes policy, so that's the ruling I gave. Which is uh, incorrect, I really should've double-checked the MTR rules on regular notes first. This is actually allowed, if I take down some cards in my opponent's deck during G1 I'm allowed to reference those notes in G2, thus it would be the same if my teammate took down some cards in my opponent's deck for me. (MTR2.11)

Another thing that you always have to go over regarding team trios communication is the fact that players aren't allowed to stand up during matches, or rather, they are, but if they do they can't come back and help their teammates. This is because it's highly likely they will be able to see their opponent's hands while they're up, which would obviously give their team an unfair advantage. You can organize some workarounds for this, like ensuring the opposing team hides their hands or by having a judge escort a team member to wherever they need to go. Above all else though, if you're at a team event, consult with your HJ about what their specific guidelines are involving team communication and leaving the table.

Case of the Missed Trigger
During their precombat main phase, AP controls three detectives and announces that they've solved their Case of the Pilfered Proof. They attack, then end their turn. On NAP's turn they cast Drag the Canal, and only put a 2/2 Detective token into play. What happens? Well, cases only become solved as part of a trigger that goes on the stack at the beginning of the end step, so announcing it in advance won't prevent AP from missing it later (otherwise players would be like "I would like to announce all my Sheoldred, the Apocalypse triggers for the rest of the game, now" to avoid missing them). The ruling here is either missed trigger or GRV, I'm leaning towards missed trigger, since this is AP's first opportunity to demonstrate awareness of their trigger having resolved. (IPG2.1) and they very much demonstrated that it didn't resolve by not applying the replacement effect.

A different but similar question, if AP instead met the solve condition for Case of the Ransacked Lab, but failed to draw a card when casting Drag the Canal, would this be a missed draw trigger or a missed solve trigger? This one is interesting because both interpretations are valid. After discussing it with some other judges it seems like missed draw trigger is the prevailing opinion. It's being somewhat shunted in with the philosophically similar "triggered abilities that create delayed triggers" and assumed to have resolved automatically. It is notable that policy isn't super clear on this.

Express Panic
AP had two cards left in their library and cast Expressive Iteration, what happens? AP will put one card in their hand, then put one on the bottom and won't be left with anything to put into exile.

The Old and the New
Sometimes you get so used to some IPG things that you don't really think about them very much. Deck Problem – failure to de-sideboard discovered during a deck check is kind of like that for me. It's so rote at this point I barely think about it anymore. Luckily, one of my judgelings had been reading over the IPG and asked me whether the cards we were taking out and putting into the deck (to make the deck the correct G1 configuration) would be revealed to the opponent or not. I paused for a moment and replied, "yes they should be revealed", but then recalled that I myself hadn't been doing that! Sometimes the best way to learn something is to help others learn it!

Can You Derive the Card?
AP controls a Courser of Kruphix and reveals a Forest on the top of their library. NAP then kills the Courser of Kruphix at the end of AP's turn. After NAP has drawn their card for the turn, they ask AP what the top card of their library was, is AP allowed to lie about it? Yes. As soon as it stops being revealed, it's considered hidden information and AP is allowed to now lie about it!

You're Playing Competitive What?
In addition to the team trios event, there was a cEDH side event, which was a bit of a challenge in and of itself. It was everyone's first brush with the "Command Tower"software, which, other than some players being paired against previous opponents in round 4 or 5 actually performed pretty well. It was decided before the event that the Eminence ruleset was being used, however there were two different versions of the documents floating around, I brushed up on the one online, but was later told that there was a more recent version elsewhere. I'm still not 100% sure what the most recent version is. In addition to this, the actual documents themselves are a little ambiguous sometimes. There is an addendum to Deck Problem that states that if a player would get a game loss instead they get a turn skip. It's listed under Deck Problem, but after confirming with a member of the rules team, it's actually supposed to apply to all game losses.

Another thing we needed to address was the fact that we were under a fairly significant time crunch for this event, start time was 10:30, but it actually ended up starting closer to 11. It was five rounds and cut to top 16, which would then fold into a top 4. Each round was 75 minutes, which meant that the runtime of the swiss was about 6 hours, meaning they'd ideally be done around 5pm, the hall closed at 7pmish, which meant that the finals was already running up against the clock. The HJ opted to go for an extremely strict EOR procedure, which was "as soon as time is called, if you are still playing, the game is a draw", none of this active player finishes their turn nonsense. Initially, it rubbed me the wrong way, but having heard multiple horror stories about 40 minute turns, I didn't feel the need to argue with the HJ about this for very long. For the single elimination rounds, the HJ opted to go for the 75 minute rounds but as we couldn't have draws, active player would finish their turn, and then we would enter sudden death. This was fine, though we were risking top 16 having lengthy post-time turns. Luckily this didn't end up being an issue as top four split prizes.

Displaced Policy
I noticed that just as main event top 8 was starting there was some kind of kerfuffle happening in the cEDH event, and the judge on the call was starting to look a little flustered. I wandered over to see if they needed any help. They happily flipped the call over to me. AP controlled Displacer Kitten, and during a convoluted counter-war had targeted their Atraxa, Grand Unifier three times with the blink trigger, then they'd resolved all three triggers when they should've only resolved the first one. This caused them to add a bunch of additional cards to their hand. Afterwards they blinked Atraxa a bunch more times and drew even more cards. Then a spectator noticed the error. It was time in the round when I came over. Technically this is a GRV and I should either rewind or not, rewinding through like, 10 Atraxa triggers is pretty unreasonable, as none of the players could remember what the specific cards added to AP's hand were. A cleaner fix would be HCE, even if that's not really, how would you say, correct. I think a few things factored in my decision to "go rougue" with policy. In regular Comp REL, policy functions super cleanly and deviating is usually a bad idea because the tested and true formula is consistently the best solution. But for cEDH the policy just doesn't have that much testing and iteration, and doesn't really account for all the additional challenges the format brings to the table. In this situation, doing nothing clearly would be unsatisfactory to all parties involved, even the offending player, yet that was the only solution that traditional policy was offering us. So instead I did this weird HCE. I had the player furthest in turn order from AP remove two cards of each type from AP's hand, since we also couldn't recall how many of each card had been acquired from the illegal flickers. Then when we went to put them on the bottom AP mentioned they'd already cycled through their entire library with Atraxa. I felt like putting them on top would be bad, so we just put the new set on the bottom. NAP was quite dissatisfied with this solution, as the illegal Atraxa triggers had kickstarted AP's combo, and had taken 10 minutes off their time. NAP felt that AP wouldn't have won without them, whereas in this situation AP was definitely going to win, even after the HCE fix, because they had generated so much advantage already. The situation was certainly awkward, and by the time we had muddled out the HCE fix, the ruling had already been going on for 10+ minutes. Afterwards the dissenting player spoke with me about the ruling and explained the situation more clearly to me (I hadn't initially realized that the erroneous triggers had kick-started AP's combo). And after some thought on it, I think a turn skip might've been more appropriate. The fixes outlined in policy are designed to discincentivise cheating and offset advantage, the fix here did neither.

...In Conclusion
I kind of like being a floor judge sometimes, it's nice to not have a ton of responsibility and just to be able to answer judge calls and follow instructions. I can never really turn off "lead brain" though, and often find myself double checking things anyways, and I have to be careful not to trample my actual leads, which I felt like I managed to avoid doing on this event. While there were a few tasks I took on that were out of my scope, I first brought them up to the appropriate person and gave them a chance to address the task before doing it myself, and only resorted to doing it myself if things looked like they were going to actively go off the rails if I didn't.