Star City Games Open - Pittsburgh

= Star City Games Open - Pittsburgh

(part 1 - event report)
Saturday, July 30th I had the awesome opportunity to participate in the Star City Games standard open in Pittsburgh, as a member of the judge staff. Overall I had a great day, enjoyed myself while keeping a close eye on decklists as part of the deck-checks team. I'm going to review a few of the things I learned throughout the day.

In this (shorter) first part, I'm going to cover some general tournament related items. In part 2, I'll cover, hopefully in depth, everything that goes into a deck check.

= Get your information in order.

I was called to the table where a player had 2 Vampire Lacerator's on the table. The question at hand was concerning the creature's triggered ability. At first the ability threw me off a bit because of it's wording. To clarify that here now. The ability triggers "At the beginning of your upkeep" period. Also, the ability only causes life loss if your opponent is at 11 or more when it resolves. The opponent also told me that he was at 12, so I ruled that the controller of the Lacerator was going to lose some life.

This ruling would have been correct, if I had all my ducks in a row. There were some questions about if the ability triggers, is the controller going to loose life that I didn't answer perfectly. Causing confusion which led to an appeal. On appeal HJ Eric Shukan overturned my ruling. I'm still not 100% certain, but I believe that the missing piece may have been a lightning bolt that was on the stack, which I believed to have already been resolved.

Vampire Lacerator

= Be careful how you answer questions.

I was called to a table, and the players were in the middle of combat. A 3/6 with vigilance and death touch (equipment involved) was attacking, and the defending player was blocking it with 7 1/2 plant tokens. The question in this situation was, how can the attacker assign combat damage?

Now before you answer any rules question, it's always a good idea to ask questions of the players concerning the game state. Even if the information that your looking for has already been given to you. So your attacking with this? (yes), and your blocking with all your plant tokens? (yes) How big is this? (3/6), and those? (1/2).

It's also important that you don't reveal any strategic information as you are answering the question though, so my next question (to the attacker) was, "How would you like to assign combat damage?" When they replied that they would like to assign one damage to each of three different plants, I nodded and informed both players that this was a legal assignment. Deathtouch makes 1 damage "lethal" for the purposes of assigning damage to multiple blockers.

= How do we report unfinished games?

I have to admit I've made my fair share of mistakes. This one will change tournament and match results that I will enter. When a game goes into extra turns and is not completed, how do we enter that into the tournament report? What is the score?

I had been under the impression that unfinished games are not reported. However, I watched an unfinished game be reported as a tie. Sure enough the Magic Tournament rules (section 2.5), indicates that if a game goes into extra turns, and no player has won, the game is reported as a tie.

I'm not sure if this was a change to the tournament rules, or if I misread something, or misinterpreted something, but it should be relatively easy to report accurate and correct tournament results going forward.

= No opponent.

I was called to a table where a player's opponent was absent. Upon checking the clock I noticed that we were 10 minutes into the round. Our tardiness policy for the day was 0/10, meaning that if players weren't in their seat when the round clock started, they got a game loss. When we were 10 minutes in, and they still weren't there, we issue a match loss.

It just so happened that HJ Eric Shukan was nearby on the other side of the isle as I took this call, so my immediate reaction was to do a quick double-check with him (hey, it IS a match loss, right?).

He gave me a pretty solid process for filling out the match slip in cases like this. As a judge you write "no show" in the score column, check off the drop area for the missing player, and put "Judge - " where the absent player would have to sign the slip.

Despite the fact that this was the only match slip I filled out like this during the day, it does seem like a rock-solid procedure, and I will do my best to use it in the future.

That's it for part 1, stay tuned for part 2 - Deck Checks!