Face to Face Open Langley
Langley, BC
Friday March 22nd, 2025

Saturday – Standard Super Qualifier+ Head Judge

A Mockery of Copy Effects
AP controls a Mockingbird that’s a copy of Enduring Innocence, which they have block NAP’s attacking Restless Reef, what happens? Mockingbird will die, then the triggered ability of Enduring Innocence/Mockingbird will go onto the stack, and Mockingbird will return to the battlefield (as an enchantment). AP will have the opportunity to choose another creature for it to become a copy of, and if they choose Restless Reef, it enters tapped and unanimated. (CR613.1a, 613.1d) It’ll still be an enchantment but if AP chooses to activate its second ability, it will become a creature-enchantment. (CR 205.1b)

Solitude and Six
AP controls Six and would like to cast Solitude for its Evoke cost in addition to retracing it, can they? Yes. Retrace is an additional cost and Solitude’s Evoke cost is an alternative cost, so they can combine them. (CR 702.74a, 702.81a, 118.8, 118.9)

Calculated Victory
AP controls Essence of Antiquity and NAP casts Nowhere to Run targeting it. Afterwards, can NAP cast Cut Down on it? Yes, Essence of Antiquity’s statline during calculations is -2/7, which combined, is 5 or less, which makes it an eligible target for Cut Down. (CR107.1b)

Mathematical Scourge
In a game of commander, all players life totals are 40 and AP has a Scourge of the Skyclaves, Gigantosaurus, Ghoultree and Metalwork Collossus in their graveyard. If AP mutates Nethroi, Apex of Death, and chooses to return Scourge of the Skyclaves as one of the creatures, can they return any other creatures? Yes, if they choose Scourge of the Skyclaves, they can return the other three creatures as well. While calculating the total power of the creatures, -20 is used as the value of Scourge’s power, and thus will allow AP to return 30 total power of other creautres. (CR107.1b)

Pipe Down
AP controls a creature equipped with Lead Pipe. NAP enchants Lead Pipe with In Too Deep, will it remain attached to AP’s creature? No, only Auras, Fortifications and Equipment can be attached to other permanents. (CR 701.3a)

Cheated Out of Top 8
A few events ago I DQ’d someone’s opponent and they were wondering how it would affect their tiebreakers, since the offending player had beaten AP the previous round. I just got around to investigating this on MTGMelee and as it turns out, DQ’d players are the same as dropped players for tiebreaker purposes. Their game and match win percentages will remain the same throughout the rest of the event, as they aren’t playing any more games.

A Replacement Swan Song
AP controls Swans of Bryn Argoll and attacks, NAP blocks with a Storm Crow and casts Fog, what happens? Because Swans of Bryn Argoll is the affected object, AP chooses which order to apply the replacement effects in, and effectively chooses whether or not NAP draws cards. (CR 616.1)

Partially Missed
AP casts Emrakul, the Promised End, doesn’t mention the triggered ability and passes the turn. NAP goes to their upkeep, waits for AP to say something and when they don’t, NAP takes their turn as normal. At the end of the turn NAP says “okay, I’ll take my extra turn now”. NAP’s argument is that AP didn’t give them any direction on what actions to take, but also hadn’t stopped them, and thus they were taking actions AP wanted them to take. This is somewhat interesting, AP hasn’t missed their trigger by not mentioning it, because if a trigger specifies “target opponent”, we simply assume they’ve chosen their only opponent in a 1v1 game. (IPG 2.1) I think I’d rule that this trigger has been missed, since under the rules for controlling another player, it specifies that AP should be making all decisions for NAP and that AP should be able to see all information NAP can see, both of which didn’t happen here. (CR 720.4, 720.5)

Powered Pairings
Initially the MTGMelee event was set up for seven rounds, but there ended up only being enough players for six rounds. The vestigial round was deleted sometime after the start of the event. However, a consequence of this is that MTGMelee didn’t treat round 6 as the final round, and didn’t power pair the players. To fix this, we had two judges take a list of standings by rank over to the event, and manually pair players against the person adjacent to them in the rankings, after ensuring that those two players hadn’t already played against each other, then afterwards the scorekeeper manually paired the entire event in MTGMelee. One thing that’s often overlooked when the software dies is that fixing the software isn’t the priority, it’s getting the players playing. As soon as all the matches are started, the judge effectively has 50 minutes to fix any technical issues (as long as they remind players not to report on their phones).

Suspicious Assistance
AP sat down for their match and NAP’s brother, who had played against AP previously in the event, told NAP what AP was playing. Is AP required to call a judge for outside assistance? Noticing an offence committed in your, or a teammate’s match, and not calling attention to it is classified as cheating, but the interesting thing here is that the outside assistance is an offence committed in another match, that impacts the current match. So calling attention to it isn’t AP’s responsibility. (IPG 4.8, 3.2)

…In Conclusion
I had a good time at this event. I got to answer judge calls, and manage a small tournament alongside the main. It was also only one day, which meant I wasn’t completely drained by the end of the weekend. I also got to discuss a lot of cool rules questions with the other judges on staff, which was pretty fun.