Dan Collins, L2, USA
We had a pretty good weekend at SCG Baltimore. A bunch of interesting rulings, including one where a certain Head Judge overturned himself on appeal, and another involving Angel’s Grace and Phyrexian Unlife, but it was also the first time SCG ran two events simultaneously on Sunday, so I figured I’d write some things about that. We have 31 judges, 23 of whom were working Sunday.
Going into the day, we knew the events were starting about an hour apart, so they would probably be turning over rounds in sync (5-10 minutes apart) all day. That means that deck checks and paper would be happening for both events at the same times. It also meant that the Modern player’s meeting was happening during the Legacy round turn-over. The relevance of this will shortly become clear.
Normally, an Open has 4 teams. Paper, Checks, Floor, Logistics. Floor and Logistics typically also handle Sides and Breaks, but the actual task assignments are dependent on the Head Judge. Coverage is a mini-team, and the off-duty coverage judge is assigned to help a team.
Sunday, we instead had 5 teams. Legacy and Modern each had a Paper team, which did all the usual paper stuff. Legacy and Modern each had a Deck Checks team. The deck checks teams operated more or less together, since one of them was actually one judge short, so it was a team of 4 and a team of 3. The fifth team was a Flex team, which wasn’t assigned to either event. I was assigned to this team, which was led by Josh Feingold, and also included Yoni Kamensky
, Joe Achille
, and some local judge named Jared Sylva
. We were intended to absorb the tasks of Logistics for both events, to cover the floor while the event-specific teams were doing their thing, and otherwise go where needed. Also, sides.
By the way, Saturday, we fired a lot of sides. We had an overflow room that was basically full all day. We fired three sides in round 1 and two more in round 2 on Saturday. Sunday we didn’t have quite as much of a running start, but it was still a constant task all day, and, frankly, Joe and Yoni did a amazing job keeping a handle on it for most of the day.
Legacy went off without too much of a hitch. Players’ meeting went long because we had a lot of no-shows. Probably around 10 people who unfortunately pre-registered but somehow didn’t know that the event was starting at 9 instead of 10. We also had a lot of people enter late because they walked in after 9. We paired 360 players round 1, and 368 players round 2. That round 1 count is actually off, because it includes the no-shows, because everyone was seated at their round 1 tables for the player’s meeting. This wound up making Deck Checks’ job a little harder, but they managed it pretty well. It also meant that while Checks was collecting decklists and Flex was distributing tokens, we had to be careful not to let the players see their opponent’s lists, which is fun. There was at least one re-pair because a player started counting out his deck face up, not realizing the person sitting across from him would soon be his opponent.
Going into the weekend, I don’t know what SCG’s projections were, but I was expecting a minimum of 300 Legacy/150 Modern. I would not have been surprised to see Legacy go over 450, or Modern go over 300, but probably not both at the same time. I was not expecting Modern to be larger than Legacy, but some people had speculated that it might. 400/200 was probably the number I would have said if I had had to guess. Final numbers were 372/205. That equates to 9 and 8 rounds, which was convenient, since it meant both events would end around the same time.
It was less convenient because the venue was laid out for 540. As you may be aware, 540 is less than 575. What this actually means, is that once Legacy had started, several of us independently worked out the numbers in our head and realized that even if no one else registered, we were going to need more chairs. Flex team’s first big job was to re-chair and re-number the last five rows of tables. The advantage of this change was space for sides. We had access to a second smaller room day 1 for sides, we did not have that day 2. What we did have initially was space for three draft pods off to the side of the judge area. Reorganizing those last rows turned out to be very lucky, because we were using that space for fire-on-demand sides pretty quickly.
So, now we’re at Legacy end-of-round 1 and also the Modern players’ meeting. Flex wound up stretched pretty thin here. We wanted to make sure that tokens were distributed before they started play, since there is the possibility that a match would be over before we got to them otherwise. Deck Checks was fully occupied, as was Paper, and Flex was going to have to help in case there were any re-pairs due to no-shows. We wanted to send people to help Legacy with end-of-round, and I saw a window of a few minutes while players finished quieting down and while Steven Zwanger gave his announcements, and got the OK from my TL to just do the tokens myself. The ideal situation is we pass out tokens only to players and not to empty chairs, and we only do so after we have their decklists in hand, but we simply couldn’t afford to do that. As far as I know, everyone who sat down for Modern got their Tom Ross poison counter, and maybe a few people got two if they were paired across from a no-show.
I have a note from Legacy round 1 that I issued someone a Warning for Looking at Extra Cards, but they didn’t have slips yet. I never did make it back to that table after getting sidetracked by the Modern event. You got off easy, guy from my notebook, next time you’ll get a real Warning.
Lists got collected, round 1 checks happened, round turnaround was pretty reasonable, and we started sending folks on breaks. Floor coverage was acceptable all day, for a staff of this size. It was always busy for round turnover, but calls got answered, time extensions were handled. A few events that I remember:
At one point, another judge asked me about Spreading Seas on an Urza’s land, and whether it affects how much mana the other parts of the Tron tap for. The answer? Urza’s lands have all been oracled to use types, not card names – that’s why “Urza’s”, “Mine”, “Tower”, and “Power-Plant” (can’t have spaces) are all land types. The 8th edition cards are clear about this, but for some reason no one plays with those. 😉 Accordingly, if Spreading Seas is cast on an Urza’s land, it no longer counts for the rest of the Tron.
A bit later, I helped out with my only deck check of the day because the judge who was supposed to help got stuck on a call. This is evidence that you should never let me do checks at your event – the first time was at Somerset, where I initiated the only DQ of the day, and this time I made the Head Judge of the modern event overturn himself on an appeal. I noticed that a player had a foil playset of a specific card in his mostly foil deck, and this one playset was highly warped. It stood out when the deck was sorted out and when it was stacked, and even after shuffling it was noticeable enough that I could cut to it regularly, or identify where they were in a library. The floor judge performing the check showed the head judge and got approval for a TE-MC game loss, which was appealed, and the head judge then spoke with the player and overturned on appeal.
Based on the rate that we were firing sides, it would have been useful to have an additional judge or staff member assigned to sides. With 8-mans firing back to back, it would be nice to have one judge firing events and another judge taking results. Alternatetively, it would be great if we could somehow leave the brackets with the players – SCG has a legitimate concern that the brackets may go missing, but given that possession of a completed bracket with your name on it is a player’s ticket to receive a box of product, that seems like it shouldn’t be too much of a problem. If not, it may be valuable to add a 6th team – leave Logistics in the hands of the Flex team, we handle firing main events, helping with tokens and decklists, and we bounce back and forth to cover floor, breaks, and end-of-round. A sixth team rotates between scheduled side events, firing 8-mans, taking results from 8-mans, and floor coverage.
Ok, so how about the stuff I screwed up. Well, I’ve certainly got a few of those.
On the Legacy side, I took a call where a player cast a Vendilion Clique with a Lodestone Golem in play. This actually happened a few times, so I’m not sure if I’m conflating two calls, but I think I have all the salient details right. They cast the Clique, the opponent said OK, the opponent went to reveal their hand, then they both realized that the Clique was illegal.
I explained that AP was receiving a warning for GRV for failing to pay the correct cost, and NAP was receiving a warning for FtMGS because, by pausing and revealing his hand, he allowed this illegal action to occur. Before I was able to finish explaining FtMGS, AP interrupted and asked if he could appeal on his opponent’s behalf. Both players stated that NAP should not receive a warning because revealing his hand is an action that he is legally allowed to take. I explained that NAP’s warning was not because revealing his hand was illegal, but because doing so implies that Clique’s trigger is resolving, and NAP is responsible for preventing AP from making illegal plays. That didn’t manage to defuse the situation, and I got appealed. The appeal was upheld, but I still think we could have avoided the situation. Luckily, shadowing me was Josh Feingold, of Personal Tutor fame. He observed that my explanation may have still been too technical, and it may have been better to simply state “you’re not receiving a penalty for doing something illegal, you’re receiving a penalty because you allowed your opponent to do so”.
I also took a call from a player who had just cast a Green Sun’s Zenith and while searching his library, was surprised to find that the card he was looking for wasn’t there! In fact, he had completely failed to desideboard. I thought “Hey, I know how to fix this, Game Loss for Tardiness and D/DLP are OK!” After issuing the GL and having the players start game 2, I figured I’d let the head judge know about the call, which is when I discovered that for this event, that only applied to D/DLPs issued by the Deck Checks team.
A few other other unusual situations came up. Near the end of round 7 or 8, a player comes up to me while I’m delivering slips and hands me his slip, telling me that he won his match, but his opponent filled out the slip 2-0 in favor of the wrong player. The opponent was also somewhat salty at the end of the match, so this player doesn’t want to go back and talk to him, for fear of escalating the situation. Luckily, a brief investigation reveals that nothing Unsporting was done, both players just wanted to get away from each other and didn’t look too closely at the slip. Keeping the players separated turned out to be the right call, not because their stories were conflicted, but simply because they probably wouldn’t have been very nice to each other. The player who called me also had a friend who watched the last part of the match, which turned out to be helpful – everyone agreed that it the mishap with the slip was simply an accident and not malicious. Head Judge agreed that no further investigation was needed, so we thanked the players for their honesty and moved on.
Just one more scenario, I promise. Phyrexian Unlife is in play, and AP has -2 life. AP would be dealt 3 damage, and in response he casts Angel’s Grace. What are the effects of the 3 damage, once it resolves? We have two potential effects that might want to modify this damage, plus we have two continuous effects that say we can’t lose the game, so what is going to happen here? Well, it turns out that Unlife and Grace are a non-bo in this situation. It might appear that we can choose to apply Angel’s Grace first and end up at 1 life, but that’s impossible. First, Unlife isn’t a replacement effect, it’s a continuous effect – this damage is being dealt as if it has infect. Second, this damage wouldn’t reduce our life to less than 1, for two different reasons – it’s not reducing our life at all, and our life is already less than 1. All that happens here is that we get 3 new poison counters. If that brings us to 10 poison, Angel’s Grace will keep us alive until the end of the turn, but in the cleanup step we will promptly lose the game. This situation was the only other appeal that was overturned on Sunday.