Krakow, the first European Calling. It wasn’t only heavily awaited by the players, I and many of my judge friends have dreamt of being back at a big event after the pandemic closed all opportunituies for over 2 years. I was so excited to finally get to do travel, play and judge that I couldn’t sleep properly for a few days before the event.
It was a long and big weekend, so to organize it a bit within this report I will write about it in 2 sections, section 1 will be all the details of what happened and section 2 will cover all the interesting Judge Calls that came up. Enjoy the read!
Thursday was finally the day to travel. 6:27 taking a train to a friends place, 11:00 the car to Munich Airport, 14:35 the flight to Krakow. It was great to see the first farmiliar faces on the plane and after dinner with another friend and too little sleep (because of my excitement) Friday was over already!
I was to help at 10am with setup, due to a change in the original setup plan 4 more people were needed to put tablecloth over tables, set up tablenumbers, move the chairs where they were supposed to be, build up hero pop ups and move the big art walls. I certainly love this kind of work. Around 12:30 I left the venue to get a shower before the mass called draft I was supposed to play. Why do I say supposed to? Well, the plan was setup, draft, blitz team trios.
The days before the event I left the notice to the HJ and the Tournament Organizers that I would love to help with Side Events as I enjoy the less competitive events more than the very competitive ones. I also made a mention that I would like to call the draft, personally refering to the draft of the Top 8 of the Battle Hardened CC Event (because I thought Friday was a Sealed event and not a Draft). When I was about to leave my apartment on my way to the Event Venue I got a call. “I heard you like to call drafts? Do you want to do this one?” Looking at the clock with around 30 minutes left to the start of the event and this being kind of out of the blue I denied. However, as soon as I was in the lane for signup of the draft seeing that there were much more players than expected for the judges on staff I changed my decision: yes, I want to judge the draft, and yes, I also want to call the draft. With 15 minutes preparation time (and not doing this in over 2,5 years) I was quite a bit nervous when the microphone was handed to me.
Besides talking too fast in the beginning and a small error in the last pack I think it worked out pretty well. I said “count 2 cards to your left”, when there should have been 3 cards to be counted to the left. I was quite far away from the tables and with so little time for the players to pick cards I didn’t mark it well on my setup which card number we currently had, so I looked at the closest table and it looked like 2 cards. Certainly the players very fast told me NO, 3 CARDS! And after fixing my mistake the draft was more or less finished. Later I have been told by one judge that the error was the only time the table they watched went from very serious to having a moment of laughter, so really it wasn’t that bad in my opinion.
The following blitz team trios I didn’t judge, I played together with my 2 friends who would have been very upsad if I didn’t and they had wooping 249 players total. And we lost that event 0-4. While I was the only one of us who didn’t win a single game we certainly had a lot of fun! My friends played Dash and Viserei, I played an akward Benji list.
Friday was Main Event day and I was Deck Check Team, Round 5 and 6 were my break and after my break I was put in charge of the first Welcome to Rathe Sealed event with 68 players (if I remember correctly). While the event was running there was an announcement that physical prize-tix ran out due to the significant higher than expected player count for side events. From then on those where digitally and didn’t need to be collected by the players, instead prizewall knew how many a player had + the physical tix they have from previous events + On Demand Events. That was not the only thing the players had a lot of questions for, the other 2 Sealed Sideevents that day got moved 1 hour in front due to the main event finishing faster than expected. The decision was supposed to not make players from the main event wait for an hour or two. However, for a handful of my Sealed players it created a time problem. We had an around 20 minute delay due to players not putting their game score into their gem account. After calling them out over microphone and a second time by me in the smaller tournament area we decided to give both players a double loss. Just at that moment the score was put in. The constant walking from one side of the venue to the other side wasted a lot of time. Because of that and the change in schedule some of my players had to drop after Round 3 to play in the Shapeshifter Sealed Event.
After my event was done I did realize that I hadn’t had a small break yet, and that I was very exhausted, so I searched for the person in charge of me and got onto my break. Unfortunatly I started it so late that mid break the other people from my original team were sent home, and with that a very tired me also went home. As I was the only judge on Side Events that day I assume that I got kind of forgotten, and I forgot to look after myself as well. If you are ever judging an event and you feel like you need to take a break, tell someone, your TL, your HJ, the TO. I made sure to get lots of sleep to not be a zombie on Sunday.
Sunday started pretty good, I helped out in the first On Demand Event of the day before the Sealed Battle Hardened started, where I prepared some product, gave out deck registration sheets and product, gave out and collected tokens, collected decklists and fixed mistakes by the players on the pool registration sheets. Players needed to open and verify each others pools to make deck checks possible and make sure that nobody did cheat some cards in.
We floor judges, as the players, were told, that the players do not keep the cards they open. Planned was a player opening a card pool and ticking down every card they opened, then another player verifying that pool, and then another player playing with that pool. This used to be the case on big Magic Events in the past. Players were also told they could take their boosters and drop before opening them. As one would expect this created quite some frustration in the players. I saw a heart of Fyendal and a Spring Tunic being opened and understandably this did irritate some of those players, as they now were not allowed to drop anymore. After the verification of the pools it was announced that players in fact do get to keep the cards they opened and there where quite some screams of happiness to be heard around. My personal opinion on this is very mixed, while it did ensure that the incentive to put cardpool foreign cards in the deck was reduced by a lot I can understand that some players did feel tricked. Certainly I was very suprised at the change of plan too and wished that we judges were involved.
After my lunch break I happily took over the Blitz Berserker Side Event and kept the On Demand Events going next to it! And then my personal highlight of the whole weekend happened! I got to call the top 8 Battle Hardened Welcome to Rathe Alpa draft. On rather short notice too but it is needless to say that the preparation of the “practice” I did on Friday was very helpful to ensure I know where I am likely to make mistakes and fix my strategy accordingly. I am very happy that the calling of the draft from my side went without an issue, I didn’t make a mistake and my voice stayed with me until the end! While I am a rather non-technical judge I really enjoy the technicality and the time limits of those drafts, so I hope I get to do more in the future! With this done I my shift ended and overall I had a very great experience. It felt great to be back at events.
Now, to the second part of this article, all the interesting judgecalls that I came across during this weekend:
You get called to a Kano vs. Kano matchup. The active player has played “Nurishing Emptiness”, which has hit, in their turn. They place a “Tome of Fyendal” in their arsenal zone and draw 5 cards. Then, in their opponents turn, they pitch a card and play their “Tome of Fyendal”, drawing 2 cards. This is when the opponent stops the player. “Judge, my opponent has skipped my turn?”
What we have here is a Hidden Card Error, which a Warning, the usual fix and a small backup would be sufficient to fix the situation as best as possible.
Tricky in this call was figuring out where we were turnwise. The players spoke very differently about it. One said their turn was skipped and that they didn’t get to draw up to their heroes intellect. The other player said they forgot their “Tome of Fyendal” was not an instant. Once we figured out that the issue indeed was them playing their Tome of Fyendal at instant speed I could consider how to fix the situation. With the help of another judge I came to the conclusion that we have a Hidden Card Error happening. We let the player reveal their hand, which had 6 cards, so the opponent could choose 2 cards to go on top or bottom of the deck, then we made a small backup to return the pitched card to the hand and the “Tome of Fyendal” to the Arsenal Zone. It took us 10 Minutes to figure out what happened, to decide what to do and to explain and do the fix with the players.
The non-turn player has a “Channel Lake Frigid” on their side, the turn player has attacked the opponent and in their attack reaction step wants to play a “Razor Reflex”. They call a judge and ask you once you arrive: “Can I play this with the resource of my tunic?”, having 3 counters on their “Fyendal’s Spring Tunic” and 1 resource left over from a previous pitch.
The answer is no. Getting the Resource from the “Fyendal’s Spring Tunic” is an activated ability, so with the Effect of “Channel Lake Frigid” 1 resource would be needed to activate the Tunic and 2 to play the “Razor Reflex”.
You walk past the tables when you notice a single face down card on the floor. The sleeve matches the sleeves of a player next to the dropped card with their back towards you. What would you do?
Depending on what happened in the game we could be facing a “Looking at Extra Cards” or a “Presenting an Illegal Deck” Penalty, but we certainly need to investigate more to figure out what happened.
With the quick response from the opponent who said: “Look at the card, if it is a Sonata Arcanix it might be the one my opponent played last turn?”, and after it being indeed a “Sonata Arcanix” (which banishes itself during its resolution) it was easy to establish what happened since the banish zone is below the deck often very near the table edge. After reminding the player to be more mindful of their cards there were no penalties to be issued.
A player gets your attention. They are done playing their match already and ask a question of something that happened in their game: “I have 10 Runechant Token and play a “Dread Triptych”, do I get a Runechant token?”
The answer is yes, as long as at least 1 of the 10 arcane damage came trough. The Runechant Token resolve in the Layer Step of Combat, the Attack resolves in the Attack Step, therefore the player did arcane damage to trigger “Dread Triptych”.
Now the player has a correct answer but they tell you: “The judge that answered this question during my match got it wrong then, they said I don’t get a Runechant. But me and my friends believe I should get one so that is why I asked again.”
This is always a very akward and tricky situation because you don’t know how the judgecall went wrong and you don’t want to make another judge look bad.
I asked the players who the judge was and after knowing who took the call I went to talk with them. Turns out that there was a major communication problem happening. The judge explained that they understood and answered the call as if the question was: “Does the Runechant Token I create also trigger and deal arcane damage?” For that question the answer was indeed no. Since the Judge was busy with a task I went back to the players and apologized for the miscommunication that happened. They weren’t mad or upsad but happy to know that they have received a correct answer and a clear view on the situation.
In one of the On Demand Events a player calls you over: “Judge? I just realized I can’t play this card in my deck”. The player is playing Oldhim and is pointing at a Lightning card in their Pitch Zone.
What we have here is a classic “Presenting an Illegal Deck” Penalty. Therefore the player gets a Warning (at Casual) and we fix the deck as good as possible. In this particular case the player was playing 33 cards in their deck so I removed the 1 lightning card (checking if there are other lightning cards in the deck too) and let the player draw 1 card from their library. I made a small backup to take back the card the player was attempting to play as their choice of action might change.
Due to confusing Turn Player and Non Turn Player Thorsten will be the current Turn player and Nicolai the Non Turn Player
In the Previous Turn Nicolai attacked Thorsten with “Alpha Rampage”, Intimidating 1 card. After their turn finished Thorsten piched 1 card to attack with their “Anothos”. At the end of their turn they drew 4 cards. At the beginning of Nicolais turn the players realize Thorsten still has 1 card in the banished zone which should be in their hand instead.
This is a Games Rule Violation, we have a card that is in the wrong zone.
Since it is generally asked to get a L2 Judge or a Team Lead to help with backups and Hidden Card Errors I grabbed my Team Lead to watch over this. For this backup we first shuffled the hand and put all those cards on top of the deck. Then we undid combat damage from Anothos and got the card the player pitched from under the deck back to the hand of the player. We now added the intimidated card back to the hand, and with that the backup was complete. We also gave Nicolai a Warning for Games Rule Violation and Thorsten a Warning for Failure to maintain Game State.
Backups are a great desicion if the game progresses more or less the same as it did before just with the correct game state. In this situation that was the case, the player pitched the same card to attack and now had 1 card to put into their arsenal.
During a Deck Check, as you count count the cards, you come across Sleeves that look like this
Do you see the white dots that are on some of the sleeves (besides the bents in the corners of the sleeves)? This is a very easy Marked Cards that happened due to a long use of those sleeves. In this case there was no pattern visible so we gave the player a Warning (Professional Rules Enforcement Level) and instructed the player to change their sleeves after the current round as the time of the deck check and reesleeving immediatly would have exceeded what is reasonable.
So, that’s this Tournament Report done. I hope you had a good read.
Thanks as always to my proofreader Sebastian Braune.
Check out Valera N. cosplay who did the great Ira! (Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/valeran5/ and Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/ValeraNCosplay )
And of course many thanks to the amazing Judge Team, Tournament Organizers and Players who all made it possible to have lots of great experiences!
Eser talks 