MTG Magic The Gathering Ask A Judge - 「 R U B Y T U E S D A Y 」

Y'all know the drill!

I'm fairly certain I know the answer to this, but I'd like to ask anyway. What determines what placement effect takes priority? An example I can think of in standard is targeting Relentless Dead with Magma Spray. It's my understanding that since Magma Spray resolves and replaces the effect before Relentless Dead can 'see' the dies trigger, it ends up being exiled. How wrong am I?

Zero wrong. Magma Spray sets up a replacement effect of "if the targeted creature would die this t urn, exile it instead" as it resolves. SBAs see a 2/2 with 2 damage on it, and say "Hey, you gotta die". It's destroyed, and that sends it to the graveyard, but Magma Spray's replacement effect kicks in and shunts it over to exile instead. It didn't "die" (because it never touched a graveyard), so neither of its effects trigger.

If a creature is turned into a Samurai by Sensei Golden Tail putting a Training Counter on it, does Oathkeep return it to the battlefield?

Sorry, if it dies, I mean.

nope because Oathkeep checks whether it's a Samurai in the yard instead of when it dies.

No dice. It triggers on death, but it asks "is the card in your graveyard CURRENTLY a Samurai?" rather than "Was this a Samurai when it died?".

>If that creature would die this turn, exile it instead
What happens if a creature that survived a magma spray is turned into a non creature permanent (for example, with Imprisoned in the moon) and THEN destroyed?

Still exiled! When things refer to 'that creature' or 'that artifact' or 'that permanent' or whatever, it just means "The specific object we're already talking about". It's not contingent on it staying a creature; Magma Spray will set up a replacement effect for the thing it targeted, even if that thing stops being a creature later in the turn.

Is this as cancerous as it sounds?

The actual situation? Eh, because I can't say it's ever really happened.

I'm not super happy about that comic in general, because it came across as a "fuck you" to some Judges who raised concerns about the previous day's comic.

Bummer. My Isamaru Samurai Pupper EDH deck will be a little less cool.

Ashes of the Fallen, bro.

Does the CMC of Lili Defiant Necromancer match that of the Heretical Healer side? Primarily asking for the BB1 part and if it plays into Devotion mechanics at all.

CMC yes, mana cost, no.

They updated the DFC rules to make it so a back-side-up DFC has the same CMC as the front, but it still has no mana cost. So Defiant Necromancer has a CMC of 3 for anything that cares, but no mana cost for Devotion.

When I'm judging a small store event, 20 or so people, I can pretty easily keep vague track of who's playing what deck where in the room.
I can confidently state that I'd know if the "heads I win tails I scoop" came from the area of the room with the coinflip deck in it.

And since I do the deck checks, I"d know for a fact that somebody'd brought coin flip cards.


That said, even in a larger event it wouldn't go down like that. The judge would hear "coin flip for game", and head over to ask what was happening instead of running over screaming dairy queen.

Does Anointed Procession work with Elspeth, Sun's Champion?

It does. Elspeth's +1 is an effect creating tokens under your control, so Procession will replace "Create three" with "Create six".

Another question.

If I have Eldrazi Displacer (or another flicker effect like Displacer's) and, lets say Mon's Goblin Raiders, in play, and someone targets Mon's Goblin Raiders with Doomblade, can I use Displacer's flicker to essentially counter the Doomblade, or does that not work because the creature comes back into play immediately?

nah, it works. While you're moving the same physical piece of cardstock from the field to exile and then right back, the GAME sees all three of those as wholly different objects. The Mons's Goblin Raiders on the field right now is not the same object as the Mons's Goblin Raiders that was targeted by Doom Blade, even though they look exactly the same and are represented by the same physical card. To the game, they're unrelated objects. So the Doom Blade will try to resolve and fail because its only target no longer exists.

I'm not a certified judge, but I know the rules better than anybody in town so have been nominated "local rule-guy". We just recently got an FLGS opening up, and the owner has stated he'll be running MTG events.
I've started the process of getting formal judge-ship, but will it cause any issues if I do judge-things for this FLGS before I get certified?

Not at all! In fact, "judging two events" is a PREREQUISITE to taking the L1 exam- so that you understand what the Judge side of a tournament looks like before you're certified.

Every event has a Judge- by default, it's the Tournament Organizer. Not every event has a CERTIFIED Judge, though. It's absolutely fine for you to work store-level events as a Candidate/L0 while you're getting ready for your L1. Not only will not not cause issues, it'll help prep you.

Non rules questions.

What's your favorite card?

What's your most hated card?

My favorite card is probably Profane Command. It's not an amazing card, but it did a lot of work for me at the last PTQ I ever PLAYED in instead of Judging, it does a lot of good stuff in my EDH decks, and I've always loved the story about it.

My most hated card is Life and Limb.

Ey Jee Ey.

Something funny happened at my game day. My brother's boyfriend was playing well and made it past the swiss and into the top 8. At the finals, he won his first game and then went into game two. At the beginning of game 2, his opponent had something go a little wrong. This is how it went down.

*draw 7* "down to six"
*shuffle, cut, shuffle, draw 6*
*SCRY*
"Mulligan"
*shuffles hand back into deck*

My friend asks him to stop and calls the "judge," who is just an informed employee, who thinks real hard before issuing a "game loss."

I took the employee aside and had a short conversation about RELs and showed him the JAR. We talked about the situation, but we ended up coming to the conclusion that there was no way to repair the game in a way that was fair to both players, and that shuffling your hand into your deck for no reason with no way to repair it is functionally conceding the game. It was still a sort of shitty thing to happen for everybody. How would you have ruled this situation?

Bonus question: Have you ever encountered a player with a "judge destroyer" deck, or a game rule violation trap deck, like the dakra mystic+spirit of the labyrinth trap?

So, if it wasn't caught until after Player B had shuffled in, that's a little fucky. Even though Game Day is Regular REL, I'd lean on the IPG a bit because we actually have something called a Mulligan Procedure Violation in the IPG. The 'fix' is that if the player has too many cards (for example, they mulled from 7 to 7), they get the option of revealing their hand to the opponent and the opponent picking which card(s) shouldn't be there, and shuffling the "excess" cards in.

If no cards are removed (either because they elected not to reveal the hand, or the error didn't cause that- for example, taking a mull after scrying), then the fix is "mulligan again". Basically, what I'd say is for them to just skip "5" and mull to 4, since we're mid shuffle. Finish shuffling, draw 4 cards.

>Bonus Question
Only once or twice. I've had assholes set up to play EDH during a prerelease (not asshole-ish in and of itself) and intentionally create stupid board states to 'trick' me, but that's easily fixed with "Sorry, I'm being paid to run that tournament, and I don't have time to help you with this complicated board state".

Also, in my experience, most of the "Judge Destroyer" decks are things that might rattle a fresh L1, but that's about it. Usually those types of people have way too high an opinion of themselves.

Is it all a concern that allowing the game to continue is unfair to player A because it effectively gives player B the tactical option to mulligan to 4 after scrying?

What if this sort of thing happened in the middle of a game? Let's say a player shuffles their hand in for no reason, and we have no impartial information on the contents of the hand?

I mean, Player B is scrying from 6 to 4. That's not really very "tactical". Yeah, clearly what they saw made them think "oh, better mull, that's awful", but being forced to skip down to 4 pretty much negates that advantage.

If I think Player B was trying to be a sneaky piece of shit (IE, they knew they shouldn't be able to mull after the scry, but were trying to get away with it), then the penalty is Dairy Queen.

If it happened in the middle of a game, and there's no way to reconstruct it, it's pretty much "Tough luck". An argument could be made for "Have your opponent search your library and pick your new hand", but generally I'd just leave it as-is, especially at Regular.

Can I get a complete listing of all the alternate ways to say "Disqualification" that judges use?

Disqualified, DQed, Asked to Leave, Shown the Door, Pennsylvania Thank You, "get the fuck out", Dilly Bar, Blizzard.

I made almost all of those up. It's pretty much entirely "DQ" and a few Dairy Queen/Ice Cream puns.

Can you tap Staff of Domination for the activated ability of Clock of Omens, pay to untap it, and tap it again to complete the cost?

No dice. You can pay costs in any order, but you don't get priority during that time. You need two different artifacts to tap. You could just tap the Clock itself, though.

I feel bad that I legitimately forgot this, but do enchantments target? I was playing with the heroes and monsters decks with someone yesterday and could not remember if enchantments trigger heroic or not.

If you mean auras when they are casted, yes they do.

Reading up on some of the rulings of cards, could you explain how Insult portion works and where they are getting the 4 from in the wording:

" If a creature with trample you control would deal combat damage to a blocking creature this turn, you must assign its unmodified damage. For example, a 3/3 creature with trample blocked by a 2/2 creature can only have 1 damage assigned to the defending player. It will then deal 4 damage to the blocking creature and 2 to the defending player."

What happens when a creature declares a block against another creature with trample but gets removed before damage step? Does trample damage still pass through like the defending creature wasn't there in the first place?

Also, does Winding Constrictor's ability triggers on a Walking Ballista that's entering the battlefield?

Seems clear, the 3/3 assigned 2 unmodified damage to the 2/2, insult doubles it to 4 damage.

If a blocker isn't there to soak damage, all the trample damage would go through.

Winding constrictor does indeed give walking ballistas an extra +1/+1 counter when you cast it and/or pump it with it's ability.

>rules lawyer dude always at my LGS
>he's playing a literal KID
>kid knocks over top card of his library, face gets red, quickly flips the card over back on top
>rules lawyer starts telling him he can't do that and makes the kid feel bad
>kid starts crying
>Judge yells "hey, don't be such a fuckface"
>rules lawyer gets mad and flips his chair
>store owner kicks him out and bans him
>I give the kid my top8 promo later
>Judge talks to the kid and explains to him that most people are good but that one guy was a dick


Unfortunately, that Judge moved away from us ;-;

Auras, when cast as spells, target and will trigger Heroic.

Auras when cheated directly onto the battlefield (such as via Silent Sentinel) do not target; they just enter the battlefield attached to something of your choice they could legally enchant.

The game can't "tell" that assigning 1 damage to the blocker will kill it; it needs you to assign 'lethal', which is 'equal to or greater than toughness'. So you assign 2 to the blocker, and 1 to the defending player. Then the damage happens, and is doubled; the 2/2 takes 4 (since 2 was assigned, and that's doubled to 4), and 2 to the player (1 doubled to 2). Savvy?

There is now Zero Ass between the trampler and your face, so it assigns full damage to your face. With a non-trampler, it just wouldn't do any damage.

Winding Constrictor doesn't trigger ever; it has a REPLACEMENT effect. And yes; it'll replace "Enter with X +1/+1 counters" with "Enters with X(+1) +1/+1 counters". Ditto on the activated ability; you'll get 2 instead of 1.

Aw man, that's rough.

Who was in the wrong here?

Should i let him win the game? i honestly feel dirty after it but at the same time im sure it was due to the terrid interface mtgo has

You have no way to confirm his story, nor any responsibility to let him win because he claims MTGO screwed him.

If he's telling the truth and MTGO fucked him for no reason, MTGO is to blame and not you. Take the win and know that MTGO will screw you too later.
If he's lying (maybe he thinks he'll draw his wincon or answer on his next turn), then you won fair and square. Take the win and feel good about it.

You have no way of confirming that he had Convergence. That's basically his "out" there, and it's entirely likely that he's just trying to lie his way into a pity concession.

MTGO bugs out. It happens. If it cost him a win, he can file a bug report and get his entry fee back, at least.

How do you get judge promo cards? Are they just mailed out to you every so often for being a judge, or do you have to judge specific events to get them?

They've only done 2 "to every Judge" mailings in recent history. In the old days, there were two ways: the first was to judge large events (GPs and Pro Tours), or attend Judge Conferences. Then there was a hullaballoo, and they got rid of the foils at GPs. You can still get them from Conferences, but the primary way to get them is the Exemplar Program.

Basically, every L2 and L3 judge has some number of recognition "slots" (some for L1, some for L2, some for 'any level') each 'wave' (roughly like, 3 months long). They can recognize other judges for doing Exemplary, above-and-beyond work. At the end of each wave, one of the Projects looks over all of them, makes sure they're for something GOOD (As in, no tit-for-tat or "thanks for lunch" bullshit), then they all get published, and everyone that got Exemplar recs receives a letter in the mail a couple weeks later with some promos.

>Pennsylvania Thank You
Now I need the story behind this.

Been looking through the cr during my spare time at work. I found a piece somewhere in replacement effects that said something along the lines of "if an effect tries to increase the amount of damage done, but 0 damage is being done, it does not increase it."

So does this mean if I control pyromancer's gauntlet and my opponent controls that r/w angel that halves damage, if i gut shot their face, am i able to apply replacement effects so the angel makes it zero, then the gauntlet tries to increase it but cant?

Also holy shit word of command is wonky

I'll be honest, they sound like they're skimping on you.

What's the story behind profane command?