Judge Worthy: Worldwake Pre-release
So I have never attended a Saturday Pre-release. Before Zendikar, I have never attended a pre-release before. For Zendikar, I attended a small Sunday Pre-release that was run at my local store, Adventure’s Guild of Riverside, but this past weekend, was my first Saturday Pre-release. I got there at about 11:00 and everything was pretty much set up. So with sealed being the format, I talked with the TO and we decided to give the players 45 minutes for deck building.
Registration went pretty smoothly with us having 44 players register. We ran out of promos at 36, but people still signed up anyways. Overall our event went smoothly. Everyone was excited and we had a lot of new players.
The question I got a lot was usually about the lands and things that affected them. The most confusing was a dread statuary, a zendikon, and spreading seas.
What happens if my opponent enchants my dread statuary with a spreading seas and I enchant it with a zendikon?
If spreading seas enchants the statuary, the statuary loses the ability to animate due to dependancy. Dependency is hard to explain, so I won’t try, but to sum it up, in order for statuary to animate, it must be Dread Statuary non-basic land. Spreading seas makes it an island which overrides all abilities it previously had and gives it tap add 1 blue mana to your mana pool. So what happens when I put a zendkion on it? The zendikon does not care about what type of land it is. So all it will do is animate it regardless of the type it now possesses.
What happens if my opponent uses devout lightcaster and exiles my land enchanted by corrupted zendikon, can he do that, and do I get the land back?
Yes he can and no you don’t. This was hard for people to understand for some reason. See the land is a black permanent as it is a land and the zendikon gives it a color, which fulfills the targeting requirements of the lightcaster. So when the Lightcaster’s enter’s the battlefield trigger goes onto the stack, the target is legal. When it resolves and sees that the target is still legal, it exiles the land which upon resolution is still a black permanent. Once we check state based actions, we see that the zendikon being an aura is no longer enchanting a land and as such is sent to the graveyard. The triggered ability never triggers as the land never went to the graveyard. This is the same behavior for cards like journey to nowhere.
I’m also going to take the time to explain a few confusing things about abyssal persecutor. While he is on the battlefield, you cannot win and your opponent can’t lose. If each player has one on the battlefield, then neither of you can win or lose until one of them dies. Lets say your opponent is at -10 and you are at 1 and you have a persecutor. Your opponent attacks you with a 6/6 and a 1/1 and you block with the persecutor which is assigned lethal damage. What happens? Interesting enough you lose. Here’s why. When damage has finished being dealt, we check state based actions. When we check them, we see that there is lethal damage on the persecutor and you are at 0 life. So the game simultaneously puts the persecutor into the graveyard and makes you lose the game. Now if we were to check state based effects again, the game would see your opponent at less than 0 and as such he/she would lose. But since you have already lost the game, the game stops and doesn’t check any remaining state based actions.
The next card that has surprising interactions is Death’s Shadow. Death’s shadow has a static ability that alters its power and toughness by giving it -X-X where X is your life total. Now it seems straight forward, but what happens id your life total is at -10? See normally this situation wouldn’t come up since you won’t generally be at negative life, but it is possible. This is where knowing some algebra comes in handy. See we insert whatever your life total into the X. If you are at -10, we insert it into the X and we get Death’s Shadow gets -(-10),-(-10). So we then distribute the negative into the parentheses and get +10,+10. So your Death’s Shadow would be a 23,23.
We also had an incident in the last round involving a time extension. Time had just been called and Player B asked me for a time extension because according to him, his opponent had taken too long sideboarding. My problem was that since this is not only after the fact, but near the end of the game, I had to investigate. My first thought was if he knew that his opponent was playing slow and hid this fact in order to gain an advantage, we had a case of Fraud on our hands. Now my investigation determined that he didn’t realize this until the end. So that was out. Now since I didn’t view this sideboarding process, I can’t determine how long the sideboarding actually took and whether it constituted slow play. Simply exceeding the time limit is grounds for slow play, but does not mean you will get one as it is based on the situation. Now again since I didn’t see this, I couldn’t make any determination on what was true and what was false and exactly how much time should be given if any time should be given at all. Now player B wasn’t happy about this, but continued to play the game through the extra turns. Once the game ended in a draw he continued to make fuss about the ruling. Now at this point he was toeing the line at a USC minor penalty, but the store owner intervened and talked with him and calmed him down.
I also issued one proxy as one player had opened a foil that upon opening was fairly bent. After several hours of play, it had a fairly defined bend to a point in which it was marked. I noticed this and decided that issuing a proxy was appropriate as it was a manufacturers defect and since this was a regular REL event I felt that this was appropriate.
After the event ended, I drafted for a bit before heading home. All in all I felt that this event went perfectly. Other than a slight hiccup in DCI event reporter round turnover was smooth and we had no major problems. I’ll be judging the Worldwake launch party Friday so if you’re in Riverside be sure to stop by Adventure’s Guild of Riverside. All participants will be entered to win an autographed FTV-exiled Balance print.
Thats all for now and remember, when in doubt give a shout.