Portland, Oregon

Friday February 7th – Sunday February 9th, 2025

Friday – LCQ Floor Judge

Qualifying Organization

LCQs are always some variety of disorganized, I’m starting to feel like LCQs are an issue that isn’t easily solvable. This time SCG was launching a constructed LCQ every half hour and a sealed LCQ every hour. There were also three ReCQs throughout the day, that launched at 10am, 1pm and 4pm. The fact that LCQs were launching every half hour meant that there wouldn’t be full brackets, which then meant that byes would need to be frontloaded into the events. This isn’t a huge deal, but is difficult for someone who’s never done it before. Our scorekeeper was a little new to Comp REL events and so this process was a little rough at times. This was compounded by the fact that we only had one scorekeeper and they were the only one that could launch events or turn rounds. I think it might’ve been better if some of the scorekeeper responsibilities had been parceled out to others. Another difference from the previous time I worked LCQs was the fact that there was a designated kickstart team. This team appeared to be in charge of launching and consolidation, but the fact that they often didn’t have a great idea of where events were in the field meant that they were having trouble developing an effective consolidation plan. That and the fact that every hour they were launching four events kind of stretched their resources a bit. Halfway through the day the consolidation task was passed off to the area leads.

Limited Resources

It was prerelease weekend, and because of this fact, the only sealed product we had available for players were the prerelease kits, but because it was competitive, players weren’t allowed to play with their prerelease promo, which certainly felt a little odd. Another issue we encountered was that players didn’t seem all that interested in the sealed LCQs, which resulted in some very tiny LCQs. Right as one of my sealed LCQs was starting, the scorekeeper was slammed, and they accidentally paired my event without loading any byes. After it became apparent that the wait was upwards of ten minutes, I manually paired the single match that constituted my first round and cycled back to the scorekeeper later in order to get the matches and byes input correctly into MTGMelee. A similar issue of “scorekeeper was slammed” happened when I was flipping into round 2, so I got another member of the reg staff to pair the second round, which meant I didn’t have paper pairings. This normally would’ve been an issue, but since the event was 8 players, I felt like just reading out the pairings was going to be the best solution. The issue here is that my event had two Erics and two Brandons, so when I read out the pairings to the players something got lost in translation, and people ended up playing the wrong opponents, which once again necessitated the need for scorekeeper attention later on. Oops. I think I probably should’ve just delayed the event a bit more and had everything go through the scorekeeper, while it’s often tempting to go off the grid to try and fix a problem, it always comes with the very real possibility of making things worse, and in this scenario, that’s exactly what it did.

A Sus Guy

In the middle of the day on Friday AP walked up to me and mentioned that in his last round NAP had done a few suspicious things. While the match was well and truly over at this point, with AP being the victor, he felt that his opponent may have been cheating, and wanted us to potentially check in on the player the next day during the RC for suspicious behavior. The situation in the game had been as follows: NAP was playing the Underworld Breach combo deck. He was comboing off and ran out of colored mana. He first claimed he had a colored mana floating, but after investigation by AP, this was incorrect. Then NAP tried to play an extra land, which AP also mentioned was incorrect. Then finally, NAP did some weird sequence that ended up with him illegally untapping his Mox Opal, which AP also caught. The extra mana was very relevant to NAP winning this turn, and they were unable to win without it. AP was also playing Breach combo and ended up winning the game two turns later. Outside of this and one other missed Mishra’s Bauble trigger, NAP had been a fairly tight player. The fact that AP had taken the match definitely reduced the probability this was a player who was salty after a bad beat. I let the player know that it would’ve been more helpful if he’d called a judge at the time, since we could’ve investigated the game state a bit more, but that I was still happy he brought it up at all. I passed the info along to the main event HJs, letting them know that if they had extra judges, this was potentially a player to watch.

One Car, Two Speeds

AP1 and AP2 are on a team and AP1 casts Howlsquad Heavy and attacks, what happens when the opposing team takes damage? AP1’s speed will increase but AP2 will continue to have no speed. (CR 702.179d)

Saturday – cEDH 5k Floor Judge

Spicy Choices

Interestingly, SCG opted to use Spice Rack to run the cEDH event instead of Topdeck’s more prolific Command Tower. When I asked why, I learned that this was because of some recent issues with Topdeck’s leadership. I’ve never used Spice Rack before so it was a bit of a learning curve, luckily it was easy enough to use. Another odd thing was the fact that we also wouldn’t be using the Topdeck IPG. Instead we’d be using the JAR, but with a few adjustments. For missed triggers we were still asking the other players at the table if they’d like to put it onto the stack, and if any player said yes, the trigger would go on the stack now. This is the same as Topdeck’s missed trigger policy. The next bit of weirdness was how we’d be handling no shows and byes. We would give no more than two byes each round, prioritizing pods of three over a third bye. Finally we timed the top 4 to ensure the event didn’t drag on forever.

Feathered Fanangling

AP controls Aven Interrupter and NAP casts Bloobraid Elf, revealing Llanowar Elves. Will NAP have to pay an extra {2} to cast Llanowar Elves off Cascade? Yes, Aven Interrupter’s ability applies to all spells cast from exile. (CR 702.85a)

Pairings, Please

While in the Command Zone I also learned a lot about the admin of the area. There are scheduled events that launch in the Command Zone, and the single judge assigned to the Command Zone would be entirely in charge of these events. The flow would be something like this: players would come up to the front desk of the Command Zone to sign up for the 2pm Casual Commander event with their event vouchers, they would then be told to wait by the banner in the back of the area around 2pm. Then when the event was beginning the Command Zone judge would find the cluster of players by the banner and manually assign them to pods. Then after all the players were seated, they would be given some participation tickets. All the scheduled Commander events were a single, untimed round, and players were welcome to play as many games as they wanted.

A Pool in Passing

Near the end of the day I was assigned to ODEs and I was called over to a table where AP had passed their pool during the draft. This is… kind of every judge’s worst nightmare, it was unclear at what point the pool had been passed and none of the players had a great recollection of what cards they’d taken from what pack. I thought about a few ways to fix this. Putting an extra pack into the draft wouldn’t fix AP’s pool, and just giving AP a pack to inject some cards into their pool set an awkward precedent. In the end we discovered the remains of AP’s pool 5 players downwind of them, and awkwardly rewound the picks from that pack. This fix ended up being so confusing and messy that one of the drafters just got up and left during the ordeal, out of what was likely frustration. I’m actually a little bewildered on how I possibly could’ve handled that better, and would love to hear from anyone who’s fixed a similar problem.

Sunday – RC Deck Checks Lead

Trigger Bank

AP activates their Mishra’s Bauble, and says “Pass turn, in your upkeep I draw for bauble”. NAP says “Hold on, I have effects in your end step”. NAP casts a few spells, then says “okay, my turn”, then waits for a moment, AP doesn’t say anything. NAP says “draw?” and AP says “sure”. NAP then draws for turn, plays a land and a creature, at which point AP says “oh wait, my trigger!” and calls for a judge. I feel this is squarely missed. AP proposed a shortcut to when their trigger was on the stack, NAP interrupted the shortcut to do some other stuff, meaning that AP once again has to call attention to their trigger when it would have a visible effect on the game. (IPG 2.1) Otherwise players could just play Sheoldred, the Apocalypse and boldly announce all their triggers for the rest of the game. (I had a similar joke while taking my driving test, we’re required to do a “shoulder check” while turning, and I used to say I’d just get all the shoulder checks out of the way while in the parking lot by doing 5 or ten before I started driving.)

Seeing Red

At the end of their five turns, AP said “if this card on top is red I’ll concede to you”. I immediately stopped them before they revealed any cards off the top of their library and let them know this was not an okay thing to do, but didn’t immediately issue Improperly Determining a Winner. The players then entered a draw and I went to get a HJ or AJ, since match losses or higher needed to be run through an authority. The AJ let me know that while we could technically infract here for IDAW, it was probably fine not to, as long as the player was aware that what they were about to do was highly problematic. While the IDAW rules are strict on paper, in reality, I think a lot of judges aren’t as concerned if the match result hasn’t actually been compromised. In this case, it wasn’t since I was able to stop AP before they actually revealed any cards.

Seasonal Triggers

AP cast Seasoned Pyromancer and resolved its triggered ability by discarded two cards, drawing two cards and making two tokens. Afterwards AP cast and attacked with Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer. NAP then said “Wait, in response to the lifegain trigger I wanted to kill your Guide of Souls”. NAP was a little difficult to get information out of, as he kept sharing irrelevant details and talking over AP. It turned out he wanted to respond to Seasoned Pyromancer’s triggered ability, to kill the Guide of Souls before the resulting tokens entered the battlefield and AP gained life. I ruled that NAP had missed their opportunity to cast their kill spell before the tokens entered the battlefield, as it didn’t appear that AP had rushed and NAP had plenty of time to demonstrate a desire to take this action.



NAP was obviously dissatisfied with the ruling and I roped in an AJ, the entire appeal took a while and NAP grew increasingly more agitated. A little while through the appeal one of the players in an adjacent match mentioned that NAP was being a little loud and it was hard to concentrate on their own match. I apologized and immediately brought NAP away from the table to continue the call. Eventually the call was upheld and NAP was given a USC-minor for some derogatory name-calling and a snarky comment made to AP after the conclusion of the ruling. Afterwards I assigned a judge to monitor the table and ensure the situation didn’t escalate further.

Appeal for Any Reason

An interesting theoretical came up: what if AP called a judge for a ruling, simply so they had longer to think about their lines of play?

This feels very similar to the older scenario of AP calling a judge to ask if they can name Birds of Paradise with Pithing Needle in order to bluff their opponent into thinking that they don’t know how to properly use Pithing Needle (and potentially causing it to resolve instead of be countered). The Pithing Needle call doesn’t work as well now because of the paradigm shift in how judges answer questions. In the current era a judge would probably say “yes, but it won’t do anything if you name Birds of Paradise”. I think my only issue with this is logistical, if the event is understaffed, then this meaningless call takes judge resources away from other, potentially more tournament relevant tasks. But if the event is quiet, I don’t mind this at all.



So with that background, I want to take another look at the initial scenario, AP either calling a judge or appealing for the sole sake of buying some time to think through lines of play. I feel like this has the potential to be slightly more disruptive since the Pithing Needle trick is really only usable once per opponent, but this is pretty repeatable. That being said, I feel like the amount of times a player would want to do this per event is also pretty low, and I think I’m fine with it happening like, twice per event. Any more than that and it’s become a problem.

Very Good Idea: Personal Judge

I thought of a potentially better way to sell judge services. You see, players don’t want to pay extra for a tournament that staffs more judges, but they would pay extra for incremental advantage. Introducing: The Personal Judge package. For 250USD per day a judge will watch all your opponents for infractions and cheating. They will make sure to do at least one card count per game to make sure your opponent hasn’t drawn any extra cards illegally. For an additional 25USD per day they will also do all your shuffling for you, and will double check your decklist.

…In Conclusion

I had an overall good time at RC Portland, while I feel like I screwed up a lot on Friday, on Saturday I had some new experiences and on Sunday there were some tough calls. Something important I want to mention was that on Sunday evening I pulled the staffing manager aside because I was curious about where he felt I was at, skill-wise. I’ve been applying for Appeals Judge for the RCs and Spotlight Series and wanted to know if this was just totally out of my scope and my application was being laughed out of the room, and if so, what I needed to work on. What really impressed me was the honesty that the staffing manager responded with. He let me know that appeals judge was a bit out of range for me and that one of my major roadblocks was the length of time it took me to make critical decisions. I really appreciated that he was willing to tell me that, and even more than that, the fact that he was able to give me something to work on. I feel like in a lot of areas (not just in the judge world) we often find ourselves not getting what we want and running into an informational black box when we try to find out why. I think if you’re unwilling to tell someone the reason that they aren’t being considered for a particular role, there’s a good chance that reason isn’t sound (not always of course, some people respond very poorly to critical feedback). The transperancy and honesty from SCG was a breath of fresh air.