Hey there!

As part of our first Lowlander webcam tournament, we would like one or several standby judges to be available for spectating and participants' rules questions. You will obviously receive a payment or other imbursement if you prefer for your service, the details of which we'll discuss personally! The set date is the 30th of November, the time zone is TBD but should be accessible to both residents of EU and NA, maybe even OCE.

If you are at all interested in the format in general, you would always be a welcome addition to our growing playerbase too as a resident judge on our Discord server.

Format details can be found here: https://lowlandermtg.com/; our Discord can be joined here: https://discord.com/invite/pK6s8nHa

If you are interested, please reply here and/or message me directly :))

Hi all, I recently was working through the MTG Judge Academy course but I can't seem to access the website anymore etc, I love the game of Magic and I love it's ruleset so I was very much enjoying refining my rules knowledge and learning the nuance of the system.

Are there any other websites / tools I can use to continue my studies?

The change is found in this article from Wizards.

From what I figure, there won't be much change, correct?

I was reading through the MTR and IPG and I noticed two sections that seemed to lead to an unintuitive conclusion. MTR 1.11 says:

If spectators believe they have observed a rules or policy violation, they are encouraged to alert a judge as soon as possible. At Regular or Competitive Rules Enforcement Level, spectators are permitted to ask the players to pause the match while they alert a judge.

IPG 2.1 defines a missed trigger as an infraction. Putting these two together, doesn't that mean it would be legal and beneficial to have a friend spectate your games and remind you of your triggers? Usually a judge won't intervene if you accidentally miss a beneficial trigger, but there's nothing stopping a spectator from intervening, since missing a trigger is technically a policy violation, albeit one with no penalty. Probably a minor benefit overall since it's usually not difficult to remember your triggers, but it would be strictly better nonetheless. There also doesn't seem to be anything stopping the spectator from only selectively reminding you of your triggers and letting your opponent miss theirs, since they have a right, but not an obligation, to alert a judge.

Do you have to use the double face helper cards for sanctioned events or can you use a proxy to represent delver of secrets as long as you have the card in your deck box?

Edit: Thank you for the quick responses. Appreciate the help.

Our store is hosting a Duskmourn Limited RCQ this October. We were planning on running 5 rounds of swiss as attendance will likely be between 16 and 24 players, however I saw some people in a twitch chat recently talking about how limited RCQs are only 4 rounds now. I could have definitely misunderstood what they were talking about but I figured I'd ask considering this would reduce the amount of time we would have to spend servicing the tournament. Thanks

I’ve judge a couple of events now (TO for local cEDH tournament with 20+ players) by firstly shadowing a more experienced judge but also head judged the last event.

I’ve mostly used the resources over at Judge Academy to help build up my knowledge to help me but with the website going down at the end of the month, is there an alternative?

I’d like to continue my studies and help others build up their confidence to also judge but there doesn’t seem to be any other resources out there that help!

TIA

There was a vintage tournament at my local game store which is a proxy friendly event and a fellow judge of mine was asked if it was OK that they used pen on token instead of sharpie since they were told at a different game store if they wrote on tokens for proxies they must use sharpie. My friend said yes and asked me today if they made the right call? I said I wasn't sure but I'm pretty sure it was ok since I have never heard of any problems. I know sometimes at higher level events judges will issue proxies (basic lands that are written on) for curled foils and was curious if there are rules/guidelines for proxies.

Hey everyone! I'm going to be judging my first RCQ that is being held at my lgs. The format will be modern. I was wondering if anyone had any tips for preparing for the RCQ. Also any common interactions or judge calls that I might experience. Thanks in advance!

Hi, I’m from the UK and interested in becoming an MTG Judge. Now that JudgeAcademy is dead, is there any replacement in the UK?? I know about Judge Foundry for the US & Canada, but can’t find any info on anything like that here. Does anyone know anything about how to start?

Howdy ya'll, new here!

I saw a post on the MTG Judge forums about how their copy of the rules is out of date, so I decided to try to be helpful and fix that.

I'm here to introduce mtg-html-rules; a piece of software that can take a copy of the .txt rules from the Wizards website and convert it into a nicer HTML document. Here is the source code for the generator for those that are interested.

Link to the current version of the rules

Features that you all might care about:

• Has HTML anchors for linking directly to a rule, like this
• Integrated search (I'd give it a 5/10 at the moment, it's on my list to improve, but slightly better than Ctrl+F)
• Mana symbols are converted to actual mana symbols, so it shows a red mana symbol instead of {R}
• Entirely self-contained in that one HTML file. You can right click -> Save As the page and all of the features will work, even if you don't have any internet. It's also easy to add to an existing website because of this (and you're more than welcome to re-host it if you'd like). You can also share them via Discord or whatever because of that.
• References to other rules get converted to links (generally, there are some bugs detecting them). If a rule says "see rule 601.3", then 601.3 should be a link to rule 601.3. Example
• Automatically updated; this will pull a copy of the latest rules and publish them each time I commit, so it should be basically always up to date. It's on my list to add some logic to detect when new rules are published and auto-update itself, but I haven't done it yet.

Any feedback or bug reports would be much appreciated! I do know that the Glossary portion of the rules is missing. I do plan to add that, it just needs some parser work. They should be there sometime in the next week or two.

Preface: I run events at my store, but I am honestly newer to magic (2ish years). I am no official judge; I am simply the best we have on-hand. We run our events casually.

I have run many drafts, and generally they are pretty smooth sailing. This week, I had a particularly troubled pod. I send this message hoping you all might have seen a few more of these issues and have some hypotheses on what could have happened. Any opinions are welcome. Info below.

My trouble pod had multiple passing issues. The first was one mispass spotted in pack one. I was called over, I warned the table to be more careful of how they passed cards. I was called again as two more mispasses had occurred. From then until the end of the draft, we enforced each player must count their pack to ensure nothing else strange could happen. The players all agreed to run things as-is, so I did not force cards to be rolled back or redistribututed. Here is how the cards fell at the end of the draft. If there is no note, there was nothing remarkable about their draft. All drafters are semiregulars with no bad record until now, except one noted:

Player 1 (Legally Blind): Down 1 Card / Player 2 (New Drafter): Down 2 Cards / Player 3 / Player 4 / Player 5 / Player 6: Up 2 Cards / Player 7 / Player 8: Up 1 Card /

Is there a standard to find what solutions are likely? Has anyone seen this sort of thing before? If so, what did you do? And, so I know, for reported mispasses, what is the official rule, if there is any? Thanks again, all.

-Lucas.

Edited because I wasn't used to reddit formatting.

Hello I'm a young magic player who has been considering becoming a judge for a while now and am wondering, will I be taken seriously if I try to become a judge? Is there an age restriction?

Crosspost from r/magicTCG -

I have been an L1 since October of 2022 - Judge Academy ended their partnership with WOTC in October of 2023. I have tried several times to get my credentials linked with Judge Foundry (I understand they are also not officially recognized by WOTC) through their support form that they have linked on thier home page, but have recieved zero response.

Has anyone had better luck, or is there another method that might actually get a human response to my request?

Hi, I was playing a modern tournament in my LSG. First time with the deck, a jeskai control. It happens that I was using Subtlety the wrong way.

I thought it put target creature or planeswalker on the top or the bottom, not the target creature or pw spell on the top.

So, I played all the matches with that in mind and won. At the end, another person told me I was playing it wrong.

What should have happened? Should I be declassified or what?

Hi all,

Last Friday I accidentally shuffled my graveyard into my deck accidentally (it was past 1am) while playing at my local CEDH league and I immediately called a judge.

The judge asked if we knew which cards were in my graveyard, which was easy as I had only 6 cards in there. He then picked up my deck, took out the cards that were in my graveyard and asked us to resume the game, which I ended winning (had already a strong position with Magda).

One of the other players got really salty afterwards and has been pestering the judge about how I should have gotten a game loss and that he decided in my favour unfairly.

I want to ask if I should have lost the game, and if our judge did act properly. Thanks in advance.

At a cEDH event a while back, someone tried to make infinite mana with Devoted Druid and Melira. I informed them that this didn't work, but they were adamant that I was wrong, telling me that everyone knows about this combo because it was a popular modern deck for years.

This is not true of course, but it's remarkably similar to true things. Modern for most of its life has had a high tier creature toolbox deck in the format. Early versions of this deck used Melira along with Murderous Redcap to create an infinite combo and win. Then after Amonkhet came out, the deck switched to using Vizier of Remedies with Devoted Druid to infinite combo and win.

So both Melira and Devoted Druid were part of an infinite combo that uses -1/-1 counters in what was basically the same deck; just at different times.

I like this anecdote for two reasons. First, it demonstrates just how easy it is to misremember a wrong but plausible-sounding justification. I'm sure this player wasn't malicious; my guess would be that they probably played a bit of modern but weren't a hardcore grinder, and so many years later when they were building a cEDH deck and came across these cards, they just had a memory of "oh yeah, these are both combo cards from the same deck", and then their mind unconsciously filled in the gap with "therefore they are part of the *same* combo".

This is an important thing to understand whenever one is trying to figure out whether someone is being honest or not. People tend to remember details that they found important *at the time*, but if something only becomes important later, it's easy to take a hazy recollection and try to give it more detail, only for those details to be wrong. (Rather similar to the AI "image enhancers" you see nowdays, come to think of it.)

The second reason I like it is that it shows the importance of *solidly* knowing the rules. The player in this case wasn't belligerent or obviously wrong in any way. He just politely and confidently told me that I was mistaken, citing his experience with modern and implying that any sufficiently experienced Magic player would also know this. This of course comes along with the implication that I'm *not* such an experienced player/judge myself, but in a tactful way, not one that's likely to make me defensive.

This sort of approach is highly effective at convincing people who are uncertain of the topic at hand. Indeed, he had me doubting my own memories of modern decks from my time as a frequent competitive player many years ago. What saved me was knowing how costs work in Magic, meaning that what he was saying could not possibly be true just based on what the cards said.

This is why whenever I'm working with someone on rules knowledge, I don't accept halfhearted guesses just because they happen to be correct, and I'll ask follow-up questions to try to make them second-guess themselves. I've gotten some pushback on this approach under the justification that it isn't "fair" or that the judge tests don't do that, but those are besides the point. The point is that real players at real events will attempt to lead judges to wrong answers (sometimes on purpose, but more often unintentionally), and we need to be able to figure out the difference between a player who is confidently incorrect and one who is confidently correct.

(I failed on that last point in a different ruling at the same cEDH event, when I made an incorrect ruling on Opposition Agent. Another player at a different table looked up from their game and said "that's not how it works". I told them to hang on for a moment, assuming they were probably wrong, and finished issuing the first ruling. Then I had to go backpedal on that ruling. I should have asked the player who had spoken up for their reasoning *first*.)

Hello, we are throwing a small event for our playgroup with approx. 15 players. I would like recommendation for some management system (i.e. mainly capable of producing pairings for swiss-rounds and results). I have researched various SW, but majority is for chess tournaments which have different point system.
We have really bad experience with the Companion (lost results, people being unable to reconnect to the event etc. also the "commonfolk" version does not let you correct results from previous turn), so I am looking for something more reliable. It can be online, or run on windows laptop.
Thank you very much in advance.

Hello there,

I have signed up for my first non local edh tournament at MagicCon in Las Vegas this upcoming October. The deck I am using is completely proxy free and expensive. Over the years, I have invested thousands of dollars more than normal value to “bling” it out.

My question is, in a tournament setting, if someone takes control of a permanent of mine, “exiles” a spell/card of mine under something, etc… do I have to give them actual possession of my card ? Or can I have a dry erase token card I can give them instead as a replacement for my card? If not, is there any form of formal responsibility to the player who takes possession of my card to treat it respectfully as to not damage it? Repercussions for damaging cards?

I ask this because I was at an LGS recently for a CEDH night and a guy took possession of a card of mine. He kept flicking it and he eventually bent my card. It was worth about $500 before the damage. The LGS helped me out, he was held responsible and the other people at the table backed me up. But now I’m paranoid.

A friend owns a shop that is hosting an RCQ. I’m currently training and studying to be a level 1 judge. Could I judge the RCQ event? If so, how would we report that I did judge that event? Would I be able to do it or would my friend have to report that I judged it somehow?

This was to my knowledge the last consumer-accessible explanation of the full rules before the Sixth Edition changes, and it would be cool for the world to be able to read it for comparison.

(You'd think Fifth Edition would supercede it, but I have seen a scan of the 5ED book (here, linked by /u/stsully01 and /u/GodzillaVsTomServo), and it looks significantly less complete, notably not having any description of the rules for phasing. And I'm quite sure the version in Mirage Tournament Packs was significantly more complete, because those were the first MtG cards I ever bought, and I read that whole thing down to the rules for bands-with-others.)

It looks like these are available on eBay but my scanner sucks and I don't have anywhere to host it even if I get one.

Asking here not because this is actually relevant to modern judging in any way, but because there isn't a subreddit for Magic rules nerds who aren't judges.

Unless you want to count as relevant the CR Glossary for 'Phased-in and phased-out', which mentions:

(“Phased-out” was a zone in older versions of the rules.)

And as far as I've been able to determine this refers to pre-6th rules.

I understand that Judge Academy isn't officially endorsed any more, and that Judge Foundry exists, but it's not clear to me if either of them provide an actual certification that is acknowledged by Wizards. Also, I'm not sure if either of these organisations apply to Australia where I am, as opposed to the US. Any ideas?

Hi !

With MH3 prerelease coming up and it being more complex than usual, I'm expecting more judge calls, what unusual judge calls do you think I can expect ? Especially since it's regular REL so it's less clear what you should do

One I have is with necro, that skips your draw, It's bound to happen someone will draw for turn, how do you "fix" that at regular REL? cause the competitive fix seems harsh for a prerelease

Thanks for your help !

So, I'm at an RCQ. There were some crazy goings on and the deck list I hand in lists 59 cards in the main. I also didn't write in my sideboard. I realize this at the end of round 1 and go find a judge to talk to them about it. I don't have any other sleeved cards on my person and I consented to a search.

How would you guys handle this situation?

So I've been interested in becoming a judge recently. However, I've been having difficulty learning all the more intricate rules. Then I learned about the Judge academy, but they shut down shortly after.

How can I go about learning the rules/becoming certified if the judge program is currently up in the air? What would you recommend?

Thanks for the help

(Charles) This is the 'I wasn't there so it's not my fault episode, #320: Policy and Odds and Ends.'

Or maybe it is my fault for not being there.

Y'all decide in the comments.

https://judgecast.com/archives/1831