Charlotte, North Carolina

Friday March 7th, 2025 – Sunday March 9th, 2025

Friday – Scheduled Sides

Alternative Resources

I was on scheduled sides doing the Mystery Booster 2 event. It’s been a while since I was on scheduled sides, so I got to answer some quirky questions about silly cards. AP asked me what the mana value of Boulder Jockey was. It’s three according to Gatherer Rulings. The “D” kind of weirded me out a bit, I think if this card was to be printed in blackborder, it would have to say “as an additional cost to cast [cardname] you can play one fewer land this turn. You can only cast [cardname] if you can still play a land this turn.”

Butt of the Rules

Pinchy McStingbutt is a card in Mystery Booster. This card is kind of awkward because conjure was (previously) an Arena-only mechanic, and for good reason. Creating copies of cards and then putting them into players hands, or decks, or basically anywhere that they might stay for a while is awkward. Additionally, this creates three rather obscure and wordy cards. For one player I created tokens of the cards by writing them out on blanks, but I wish there was a token that came in the packs that had the conjured cards on it.

You’re Not My Buddy, Pal

AP controlled Champion of the Hareish and wanted to know what would happen if they played a morph creature. I let them know that, unfortunately morph creatures have no creature types, so it wouldn’t contribute to the buddy list. (CR 702.37a) AP wanted to know whether turning the morph creature face up would cause it’s subtypes to get on the buddy list, and I let them know that even that wasn’t enough to make this creature their buddy.

Back of the Line

AP controlled Defender of the Queue with an incubate token. They wanted to know what would happen if they transformed the incubate token. I noted that it wouldn’t be entering the battlefield, nor would it be “coming under AP’s control” After the rules and scryfall rulings provided no further guidance, we decided to rule that AP would just choose where the newly transformed token would be in the queue after they transformed it.

All Hail the Institution

I think sometimes experienced judges might forget how much institutional knowledge there is, and how many things newer judges need to be taught about working large events. We had a newer judge running one of the side events, and we failed to communicate with him about how players could drop if they were 2-0 at the end of round 2 and get prized out as if they’d went 2-0-1, the judge was also unaware that there were bonus tix awarded to players that were 2-0-1 or better after round 3 that they would need to grab at the stage.

A Dog By Any Other Name

AP attacks with Phelia, Exuberant Shepherd and exiles their Ketramos, the New Dawn. Afterwards, AP casts Flickerwisp, targeting on Phelia. At the beginning of their end step, they order the triggers such that Phelia returns to the battlefield before Ketramos, will Phelia get a +1/+1 counter? No. Phelia’s ability refers to itself by name, but that simply means that particular instance of Phelia. (CR 201.5) When Phelia leaves the battlefield it becomes a new object and has no relation to the first object. (CR400.7)



Another interesting question here is whether or not Ketramos will trigger. It will, because Ketramos’ leaves the battlefield trigger looks back in time. (CR 603.10a)

I Thought Not

In an LCQ, AP draws 8 cards for their opening hand, and says they’re keeping. NAP plays a land and casts Thoughtsieze, AP puts their hand down and at that point realizes two cards had stuck together, and that they’d drawn eight cards for their opening hand. Then, they shuffled their hand into their library, mistakenly thinking the fix was to take a mulligan now. This is, of course bizarre, and the remedy is definitely not to take a mulligan now. Before AP shuffled their hand into their library, the fix would’ve been to reveal AP’s hand to NAP and have them shuffle a card of their choice into AP’s library. At this point, if both players remember the 8 cards, the hand can be rebuilt and we can apply the HCE fix described in the previous sentence. If not, the fix is to have NAP look through AP’s library and build them a seven card hand, then resolve Thoughtsieze. (IPG 2.3) However this is incredibly suspicious, and it is very hard for this player to prove they weren’t cheating in this scenario. 

Infinite Lives Glitch

AP controls Doubling Season and their Nine-Lives Familiar dies. Its triggered ability goes onto the stack. The event is now, return Nine-Lives Familiar to the battlefield with seven revival counters on it.” the game then checks for any replacement effects, finds Doubling Season, and applies it, modifying the event to now be /return Nine-Lives Familiar to the battlefield with fourteen revival counters on it.” (CR 614.1)

Saturday – cEDH Head Judge

A Second Time for Everything

I was grateful to be on the cEDH event at SCG Portland, so I felt well prepared for this event. I made sure the TV for pairings was set up in advance, and helped the person at registration check players in. Unfortunately we still ended up starting about 10 minutes late, mostly due to this arduous check-in process. Many of the players who checked in didn’t actually need to check in, and were just double checking whether or not they were in the event. I think a registered list of players might’ve helped cut down on this work, or at least some scrolling pairings in SpiceRack. I did submit a lot of feedback to the developer of Spicerack throughout the day. One of the bigger issues was that the top 4 was seated incorrectly. The player with the highest ranking in the swiss should’ve been the first seat, but they weren’t. It was easy enough to fix manually.

Running it at REL

The next piece of weirdness is that we were running this as a “Regular+” event. Which is something I feel like I’m seeing more and more of. When applied to 1v1 Magic this usually means, Comp REL fixes, but no infractions. When applied to cEDH I guess it means decklists, JAR fixes and no penalties. I added two changes to this model. The first was an idea I stole from the cEDH HJ in Portland, instead of having the judge choose whether or not to put the trigger onto the stack in the case of a missed trigger, the players would go around in turn order and choose whether or not to put the trigger onto the stack. The second thing I changed was the slow play policy, I said that I wanted players to get a nudge, once, and then the second time, they’d be told that if they didn’t make a play immediately they’d be getting a game loss. Then of course, the next one would be a game loss. This is because in cEDH more than anywhere else, slow play is a big problem. Luckily we never made it to the third step.

To Check, or Not to Check

When I was at SCG Portland we did deck checks on cEDH, so naturally I felt like I needed to do deck checks. The main issue is that deck checks on commander decks are kind of a nightmare. First off all, players don’t present at the same time, which isn’t as big a problem when you’re running at Regular REL. The second issue is that the decklist situation was sub-optimal at best. Players could sign up for the event in MTGMelee, which would accept their decklist. Then, on Friday evening, the scorekeeper would put all the players who’d registered on MTGMelee into Spicerack, which would also allow them to submit a decklist. We couldn’t require all the players to input their decklists into Spicerack because that would give them a very short window (Friday evening to Saturday morning) to do so, but SCG ultimately wanted the top 16 decklists in Spicerack. This meant that about half of the decklists were in MTGMelee, while the other half were in Spicerack. I think it would’ve been better to just disable decklist submission in Spicerack and have all the decklists in MTGMelee. Finally, a few players had to either email or submit a paper list. This all culminated in the decklist situation being kind of a mess. This decklist menagerie would further compound the second most problematic part of cEDH deck checks, the fact that they just take so long to do. Singleton 100-card decks are incredibly time consuming to check. Personally I don’t mind as much if the entire list doesn’t get checked, it isn’t really worth the time it might take, so I implemented something different. I gave my deck check judge 10 minutes to “do a check” and whatever they could get done in ten minutes was the check. I went in thinking perhaps they could check one deck against the list, and have their partner do a marked cards and counterfeits check on the other three decks. What ended up happening was instead the judges just did marked cards and counterfeits checks on all four decks, and ignored the lists entirely. This ended up turning up one case of counterfeits during the event.

Tribal Knowledge

During a deck check we found a player who’s Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy was in a slightly different color of cream sleeve from the rest of the deck. I don’t know cEDH as well as I know other formats so this investigation was a little clunky. AP’s commander was Atraxa, Grand Unifier, which doesn’t directly combo with Kinnan. I asked AP how important Kinnan was in the deck and what its purpose was, and they mentioned that yes, it was part of an infinite combo, but wasn’t significantly more relevant than other combo pieces. While Kinnan on the board early game is quite good, there are many other cards that in a similar tier of “goodness”. AP said that they just had lots of different kinds of sleeves and must’ve gotten the incorrect cream sleeve on this card by accident. It seemed like a plausible enough explanation, and we had them resleeve. Upon reflection if I wanted to dig deeper I could’ve asked previous round opponent’s whether AP had played Kinnan and at what points in the game they’d done so (opening hand, or after a shuffle).

The Nature of Mana Abilities

AP controls Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy, Deathrite Shaman, Radiant Lotus and Heritage Druid. Which of these will Kinnan add additional mana for? None of them. Deathrite Shaman and Radiant Lotus both target, and therefore aren’t mana abilities. (CR605.1a) Heritage Druid is a mana ability, but a permanent is only considered to have “tapped for mana” if the ability includes a tap symbol, which Heritage Druid’s does not. (CR106.12)

Negating Advantage

AP missed their Pact of Negation trigger, as per the missed trigger policy I was operating under, I asked the other players whether it would go on the stack now, and they all agreed it should. However, this was a little suspicious. Because the format is so blitzy, having five mana available could mean the difference between winning and losing at any given point in the game. I asked the other players in the game and also talked to AP about what was in their hand and what their game plan was. It became pretty apparent pretty quickly that they weren’t doing much this turn, their hand was mostly empty, and their plan was to cast Urza, Lord High Artificer, and hopefully do something cool next turn. They had unwinding clock, so they were going to have plenty of untapped mana on their opponent’s turns as well.

Trigger Mastery

AP controlled Orcish Bowmasters and cast a Wheel of Fortune, putting 21 Bowmaster triggers onto the stack. Before AP had declared any specific targets for any of the triggers, NAP cast Veil of Summer. This is super awkward, because if we simply ask AP to choose targets now, they just won’t choose NAP or any of their things. This happened while I was on break and the resolution ended up being that we assumed AP had targeted NAP with all the triggers. I’m not sure if I’m thrilled about this, but can’t think of a better way to fix the problem.

The Problem With Pretend Checks

We deck checked a player and when we returned their deck they were missing three cards. They claimed to have been counting their deck every round, including this round, before they’d given the deck to the deck check team. Because we hadn’t done a full check on it, we couldn’t confirm this was true. We did a full check on AP now to determine which cards were missing, and discovered that in addition to being 3 cards short, their list was also incorrect, listing two cards that weren’t present in their deck. This made it even more difficult to determine which cards were missing. In the end AP adjusted their deck so that it was 100 legal cards, and we updated the decklist. We were lucky the missing cards were all rather cheap, none of them being worth over $5, otherwise we might’ve had a very upset player on our hands. I think in the future, if my team is doing “security theater” checks, I’d probably have them incorporate a count for each deck as part of that. In this situation I’m confident that the cards were missing before the judge staff took the decks, and that AP perhaps overstated their ability to count.

Alternatives and Additions

In between rounds AP had a cavalcade of questions about alternative casting costs. First AP wanted to know how paying the Buyback cost on Capsize would interact with Lier, Disciple of the Drowned granting it Flashback. Buyback creates a replacement effect that causes the spell with Buyback to be returned to its owners hand instead of going into its owners graveyard. (CR702.27a) However, Flashback creates a replacement effect that exiles the spell anytime it would go anywhere from the stack. (CR702.34a) So as the spell resolves both replacement effects apply, flashback and buyback. (CR616.1) If we apply buyback first, we would then still have to apply flashback, and instead of going to AP’s hand, the spell would be exiled. If we apply flashback first, buyback no longer applies because the spell isn’t going into AP’s graveyard.



What happens if AP reveals a card, let’s say Capsize, for Cascade, can they pay the buyback? Because Buyback is an additional cost, if AP chose to cast Capsize off Cascade, they could choose to pay the buyback ability, if they did, Capsize would return to their hand upon resolution. (CR118.8, 725.85a)



AP then asked what would happen if instead it was Cyclonic Rift that was revealed to Cascade, would they be able to pay the overload cost? Unfortunately not, unlike Buyback, Overload is an alternative cost, and only one alternative cost may be applied to each spell. (CR118.9a, 702.96a) Cascade already imposes an alternative cost onto Cyclonic Rift, AP can’t choose another alternative cost instead.



AP then asked what the interaction would be with Cyclonic Rift and Lier, Disciple of the Drowned, and whether they’d be able to pay the overload in that scenario. (CR702.34a) Like Cascade, Flashback imposes an alternative cost onto Cyclonic Rift, (granting it Flashback 1U) and thus would disallow AP from casting it for its Overload cost.



Finally AP asked whether they could cast Cyclonic Rift off Yawgmoth’s Will with Overload. At long last, we have finally found a scenario that allows them to Overload it! Yawgmoth’s Will doesn’t impose any alternative costs, it merely allows AP to cast spells out of a zone they normally wouldn’t be able to cast them out of (their graveyard), but allows them to cast the spells however they wish.

Cloned Covenant

AP casts Fire Covenant by paying five life, if NAP casts Twincast, what is the value of X for the copy of Fire Covenant? Five, the value of X and additional and alternative costs are copied. In this case, paying life is an additional cost, and is remembered by the copying process. (CR 707.10)

Sunday – Regional Championship Features Floor Judge

Featuring: Incompetence

I was somewhat happy to be a floor judge on Sunday. At the beginning of the day my team lead said that me and the other floor judge would be trading off throughout the day for being in the feature match area. I was to take the first round in features, and then be on the floor for the second one. The issue arose when we went into the third round, I was merrily helping with calls on the 10k as the beginning of round 3 of the RC blew past. After about fifteen minutes into the round someone told me my team lead was looking for me. My team lead had expected me to be in the feature match area, but I had thought that since I hadn’t had a chance to touch base with them, they would’ve just asked the other judge to be in features this round, as I had viewed the morning’s instructions to be more of a guideline than a requirement. Regardless of how I’d interpreted those instructions, I should’ve made a concerted effort to find my TL before round 3 was underway, and because I didn’t do this, it caused some issues, since the other member of the team had been sent on break in round 3, as breaks had been worked out in round 2, but again I had disappeared into the annals of the 10k and hadn’t touched base to get an update on the plan.

Changing Time

AP controls Willbender and a Dress Down, can AP activate the Morph ability of Willbender? No. To morph a creature, its controller must reveal it to all players and pay what its morph cost would be, if it were face up. In this case, if it were face up it wouldn’t have a morph cost, because it wouldn’t have any abilities, because Dress Down would be suppressing them. (702.37e)

A Triggering Dawn

AP controls Ketramos, the New Dawn which is currently a creature, and NAP casts Tishana’s Tidebinder, targeting Ketramos’ triggered ability. After Tidebinder’s triggered ability resolves, AP casts Solitude targeting Tishana’s Tidebinder. Will Ketramos trigger? No. While most triggered abilities check immediately after an event has occurred to see if they would trigger, Ketramos’ zone-change trigger looks back before the event to see if the event would trigger anything, and at that point in time, Ketramos has no abilities. (CR 603.10a)

Liberator of the Rules

AP activates the “restart the game” ability of Karn Liberated, on turn 3 of turns. What happens? There are a few elements at play here. First, we have the MTR, which tells us that after time in the round is called, no new games are started. (MTR 2.4) The second thing we want to look at is what it means to “restart the game”, in this case, it means to end the current game and begin a new game. (CR 724.1) These two rules imply that activating Karn’s ability would simply end the current game, but wouldn’t begin any new ones. However, according to some of the more veteran judges on the RC, a long time ago there was some intense debate over whether this was the intended solution, and a consensus was never reached. I feel like if I ever have to make this call I’m just going to rule by the rules as written.

Sideboarding Shenanigans

After a mid-round deck check is performed, the judges return the paper lists to the players, and as the players are reviewing each other’s lists, NAP notices that AP’s sideboard has a bunch of tally marks in pencil on it from the judge that performed the deck check, presumably counting the cards that AP had sideboarded in. AP is understandably quite frustrated. There aren’t a lot of good ways to fix this, one suggestion was to have NAP reveal their sideboard to AP, which is awkward, because some sideboard plans are significantly impeded by this. My suggestion was to break the match and award two match wins, since judge intervention had corrupted the match result. I believe the final conclusion was that AP would be given a chance to change their sideboard plan after the check. I’m not a huge fan of this either because perhaps AP only has one sideboard plan, and any changes would likely make it worse. However, a double match win is pretty detrimental, especially in the later rounds of an event.

Counterable Indeed

AP controls Harbinger of the Seas and taps Cavern of Souls for a Lord of Atlantis, mentioning that it’s uncounterable. Afterwards AP casts Aether Vial, NAP mentions that they might as well counter this, since they can’t counter anything else, and casts Counterspell. At this point, both players realize that Cavern of Souls can’t tap for uncounterable mana because of Harbinger of the Seas. After a brief investigation that finds both players ignorant and innocent, CPV is ruled and a backup is performed to when Lord of Atlantis was on the stack, allowing NAP to cast Counterspell targeting Lord of Atlantis. (IPG 3.7)

Ability to Fail

AP controls Manifold Mouse and targets Emberheart Challenger with its ability, but doesn’t specify whether its getting Trample or Double Strike, and attacks. NAP blocks with Ragavan, Nimble Pilferer, and both players put their creatures into the graveyard. Another judge asked me if we should potentially step in, because if Emberheart had Double Strike, it wouldn’t have died, and if it had trample NAP should be taking one damage. I let them know that it is legal for AP to over-assign damage to Ragavan and deal no damage to NAP, and thus we could assume it had trample and there was no need for us to intervene. (CR 702.19b)

Malevolence is in the Air

NAP controls Dress Down and AP sacrifices their Eldrazi Spawn token to cast Malevolent Rumble, they reveal the top four cards of their library and put a Forest into their hand before noticing the error. This is quite easy to fix, even though it might not appear so at first. AP gets a warning for Game Rule Violation, and we perform a backup, uncasting the Rumble, returning the Scion to play and taking the forest from AP’s hand, along with the other three revealed cards and shuffle them into the random portion of AP’s library.

Impending Abilities

AP casts Overlord of the Hauntwoods and NAP casts Tishana’s Tidebinder, targeting it’s enter-the-battlefield trigger. Will it lose its other abilities? No. As Tidebinder’s triggered ability resolves, it checks the Overlord to see if it is a Creature, Artifact or Planeswalker, since it’s an enchantment, it won’t remove its abilities. (CR 702.176a)

…In Conclusion

RC Charlotte was very busy, from what I’ve heard, but I feel like I ended up mostly insulated from the chaos of the event. On Friday LCQs were where the action was, but I was safely tucked away in Regular REL land (though I did wander over and take some calls on LCQs while my area was boring). On Saturday the RC was hoppin’ but I was sequestered on cEDH island. Finally, on Sunday the 10k was rife with calls, but my designation was features and main (Though I did answer my fair share of calls on the 10k as well). This all resulted in me having a weirdly placid weekend in lieu of a rather frantic event. I was still a little worn out by the end of Sunday, but for the first time in a while I felt like the “important job”, that is, the cEDH 5k, I was given didn’t have any huge issues. Sure, there were things that could’ve been better, but I felt like it was a solidly run event. I had a DQ that I’m confident in, my event was very quick and there weren’t any huge delays that impacted round turnover. I didn’t give any catastrophically incorrect rulings on the floor and even got some mentoring done. I don’t think I was stellar, but I’m not sure if I ever will feel that way, and maybe I just need to be okay with that. I think the constant pressure to perform is causing me all kinds of issues, and perhaps I need to just be okay with being fine sometimes.