I was the Local Liaison (a.k.a. Local Leader a.k.a. Executive Office) at Grand Prix: Houston. This job, in addition to being one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to spell, was an incredibly interesting position. In fact, LL at the GP is one of the coolest experiences I can imagine, second only to head of the DCI Ninja Assassin Team.
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What? We’re not admitting the existence of the Ninja Assassin Team? Okay, let me try again. Being Local Liaison at GP: Houston was such an incredible experience because it was an opportunity to see what it actually means to be the Head Judge at a large event. For me, it was an opportunity to sit at Head Judge Scott Marshall’s shoulder and second guess (I mean “ask questions in order to understand”) all his decisions. And it pretty much meant that I’d be involved in just about every interesting situation in the tournament. For Scott, it meant having someone around to help take some of the stress off him, and having another mind to bounce ideas off.
Head Judges at large events are supremely busy. According to the Infraction Procedure Guide (IPG), every Game Loss or higher penalty should go through the Head Judge. Also, the Head Judge is the only person able to back up a game state as a result of a Game Rule Violation. While we do our best to get everything right, it doesn’t always happen. Having a more experienced judge to say, “Yes, this severe penalty or potentially complicated fix is according to policy” makes sure that we don’t mess anything up too badly. For this event, the Head Judge Scott Marshall authorized the Team Leads, who were all L3 judges, to issue Game Losses and to back up from Game Rule Violations.
The other potential issue was appeals stacking up. Any player has the option to appeal to the Head Judge. There are many more players than they are Head Judges; regrettably, the DCI Cloning Pilot Program was a complete failure. The primary job of the Local Liaison is to help triage the appeals. It was my job to help intercept issues before they came to Scott and sort them out. If there are two appeals pending, one of which is a simple “Yes, the Floor Judge got the call correct,” and one of which is a long investigation, it makes a lot of sense to take care of the quick call first so they can get back to their match instead of waiting for the long investigation.
I also intercepted a lot of minor issues and was able to handle them without bothering the other, more significant folks up on stage. If a Floor Judge cannot find another judge to help them with their issue nearby, they’re going to go up to the stage and ask for help there. This is doubly true at GP: Houston with a Level 4 Head Judge and two Level 3 Scorekeepers. I was the least busy person on stage, and I fielded a lot of Oracle text requests and “let me double check this with somebody” scenarios.
I’m not going to lie. A large part of being up on stage for the weekend with Scott was getting to have some amazing conversations. Being the Head Judge of a Grand Prix is sometimes very difficult, and you have to do hard things like disqualify players. But sometimes, when the event is running smoothly and nothing has broken and everyone has eaten, you have time to sit down and talk. It’s fun to go to an event and get a chance to talk to the coverage guys, or pick the brains of some very smart judges. At one point Andy Heckt, judge program and community manager at the DCI, stopped by the event on his vacation. I didn’t really mean to interrupt his vacation, but I pulled him and about five high level judges into a discussion on judge levels.
I wanted to share some interesting stories from the GP. Appeals never really stacked up; the GP was incredibly calm for a nearly 700-person tournament. So I had plenty of time to take good notes about weird or interesting things that happened.
Near the end of round 1, I heard an interesting appeal: players wanted to appeal a ruling made a turn ago that they just realized was wrong. A player had assembled the Thopter Foundry plus’Sword of the Meek combo, and he sacrificed Sword of the Meek. The opponent called a judge and asked what would happen to the Sword if he destroyed the Thopter Foundry with the abilities still on the stack. The judge ruled Sword of the Meek would stay in the graveyard, so the opponent destroyed the Thopter Foundry. This is incorrect; Sword of the Meek’s trigger will still resolve. As the next turn progresses, a spectator points out to the table that this is incorrect and they should appeal to the Head Judge. We’re into the next turn by the time the match pauses and the Head Judge comes over. Scott apologizes for the mistake, but leaves the game state as is. There are no provisions for backing up the game state without an infraction, and players should not receive an infraction for listening to the judge. This is doubly true because Sword of the Meek’s trigger is optional, so the sequence of game actions were legal.
Apparently, twelve players at a local university got some sort of sponsorship for GP: Houston to play Magic. They showed up the night before, filled out a pre-registration slip, got the receipt and the playmat, and did not show up for the event. When we looked at the pre-registration slips, the names and DCI numbers they provided were fake. We assume the players used the receipt to prove they entered the event and used the rest of the sponsored time around the city of Houston. Personally, I would rather play Magic!
One of the most commonly appealed situations was Tardiness. At a Grand Prix event, you are expected to be in your seat when the round begins. If 500 players can make it to their seat on time, you should be able to do this too.
Player A lost game 1 and declared he would play first. He took a few mulligans and then said he would keep. Player B then proceeded to play a land and a creature, and pass. Player A played a land, and passed back. Player B then played another creature and declared an attack. At this point Player A calls the judge because he was supposed to play first and was in fact on the draw. Apparently Player A said he wanted to play first, and simply forgot until the game was already underway. The key thing to this scenario? Player A drew a card on his first turn. While Player A did choose to play, the game was entirely legal from Player B playing first instead. Because Player B took his entire turn and passed before remembering, neither the floor judge nor the Head Judge ruled that the game state should be changed. If you choose to play first in game 2, you actually have to do it.
One player cascaded into Living End and put many creatures onto the battlefield, including a Sphinx of Lost Truths. The player drew three cards from its trigger and forgot to discard. At the end of a complicated turn involving multiple other triggers, the players remembered that the Sphinx player forgot to discard. This certainly is too complicated to back up; do we leave it as is? The answer happens to be no! While judges like to talk about Game Rule Violation as a “back up or leave it as-is” all-or-nothing infraction, there are actually a handful of exceptions. Fans of the old “Failure to Discard” Infraction (there have to be others besides me, right?) may have been sad to see it disappear, but they will also be quick to point out this sentence in the GRV remedy: “If a player forgot to discard or return cards from their hand to another zone, that player does so.” If you forget to discard from your Sphinx of Lost Truths, we can simply force the discard when it’s noticed. It’s not as good as resolving the ability properly at the correct time, but it is better than letting players get free card draw.
A contentious situation erupted in a Dredge versus Hexmage Depths matchup. On the Dredge player’s turn, the opponent sacrifices Vampire Hexmage to exile the Dredge player’s Bridge from Belows. In response, the Dredge player calls a judge and verifies that he can sacrifice creatures to Drowned Rusalka to make more creatures in response. When the judge leaves, the player does sacrifice creatures to Drowned Rusalka. Then the Dredge player goes to attack; as the Hexmage player goes to block he discovers that they forgot to exile Bridge from Below. They call a judge who rules, correctly, that the Bridge from Below trigger is missed and should be put on the stack immediately. Consequently, the Dredge player can respond by sacrificing more creatures. The call is appealed to the Head Judge; both players feel that the Bridge triggers should resolve immediately. The Head Judge debates the situation for a while; it’s unusual for a judge’s intervention to be the cause of player missing triggers, but he eventually upholds the ruling. The thing I found interesting about the call was that both players wanted the trigger to resolve immediately. If you think because you can respond to the trigger, you get an unfair advantage over your opponent, why not just not respond to the trigger? You’re still resolving things according to the judge’s ruling, but maybe both players are happier.
A player arrives to his match and starts shuffling. At this point he realizes he didn’t de-sideboard from his previous match and mentions it. A spectator says that failing to de-sideboard is a Game Loss infraction. The spectator is half-right; failing to desideboard will earn you a Game Loss, but only if you present your deck. You’re allowed and even encouraged to catch this sort of mistake during shuffling! At this point, the shuffling is taking four minutes, past the Slow Play Warning for not presenting, and the opponent starts to complain. The player then says, “Oh well, I’ll concede game 1 for not de-sideboarding.” When the judge comes over to give the Slow Play Warning for not presenting his deck, the opponent says that the player conceded. The Floor Judge and the Head Judge agreed that the player didn’t really concede; he may have said the words “I concede,” but that’s equivalent to saying, “I guess I lose because of your Lightning Bolt” until it’s noticed that the other player has no Red mana. The player didn’t concede; he just thought he had lost the game.
A player cast Peer Through Depths and revealed a Search For Tomorrow. This player, looking at card in front of him that shuffles his deck and not having gotten much sleep since he arrived that morning, accidentally started shuffling his deck. His opponent called a judge, and he stopped shuffling immediately. The opponent wanted the deck to be fully shuffled to avoid any sort of issue stemming from the mistake. While it makes a certain intuitive sense to shuffle the deck instead of leave it half-randomized, we are limited in our remedies we can apply to Game Rules Violations. A large part of being a judge and being a Head Judge especially is being able to say, “Yes, it kind of makes sense to do it that way, but as judges we have specific remedies we can apply for issues, and in this case since we can’t unshuffle the library, we have to leave it as-is.”
I wrote earlier that appeals didn’t stack up. And while that’s correct, we had a rather hectic final ten minutes in Round 8. Three different players decided it would be a good idea to offer to roll a die to determine who would win because they were in danger of drawing the match. And three different players decided it would be a good idea to do this with judges standing nearby, waiting for their matches to complete. I hadn’t gotten to sit in on a Disqualification investigation at a major event, and at Houston I watched three players get disqualified in about 5 minutes. You’re there to play Magic, not D&D. Let the spells do the talking.
I actually missed the most infamous call from the weekend. A player cast Congregation at Dawn to stack the top of his library. After that resolved, his opponent cast Path to Exile to remove one of that player’s creatures. The question came up: “Do you still shuffle?” Unfortunately, we got this one wrong; searching for a land and shuffling are part of the same optional action. If you choose not to do one, you don’t do the other.
Since I’ve just booked my plane tickets to Grand Prix: DC, I wanted to give a quick bit of advice to anyone attending their first major event as a player or a judge: get some sleep. I think I got maybe ten hours total. I arrived to the hotel site at about 11pm on Friday night with honorary Texas judge Hector Fuentes, and immediately got drafted to drive a crew of judges to IHOP. There we gorged and played EDH until about 2am until the game was called on account of “Oh no, we have to be at the site at 8am.” Saturday night we played EDH until about 1 or 2am as well, hanging on with Simon Cooper downstairs as others succumbed to fatigue. And Sunday night I had the brilliant idea to go to dinner with Nick and Karen Fang, Riki Hayashi, Scott Marshall, Hector Fuentes, and Jared Sylva after the event ended, and then hop into a draft with the Fangs, Jared Sylva, Rashad Miller, and BDM. My draft ended at something like 4am (in defeat, no less), I ran upstairs to sleep for an hour, and then drove Jared and Riki to the airport. Then I turned around and got on the highway and rushed the three-hour drive back to my office to make a nine o’clock meeting with my boss. He apparently decided he wanted jury duty instead, but I toughed out the day at work.
So yeah, sleep well the week before, because it’s hard to say “No” to each cool opportunity that comes up.
Kevin Binswanger
“Anusien”