Report

Competitive REL | 44 players

I served as the sole judge and Head Judge for Piece of Cake, a 44-player cEDH tournament with five Swiss rounds and a Top 16 cut. One player dropped before the Top Cut, and Ervin Kuč won the event playing RogSi. With 36 Czech and eight German-speaking players, all tournament announcements and judge communication were conducted in English. We used TopDeck for Swiss pod pairings and adjusted round timers for the Top Cut. The tournament finished on schedule at 22:00. Only two Swiss rounds required the full additional 15 minutes, and judge-issued time extensions did not affect the schedule.

I performed five post-match deck checks on winning players, all of whom eventually reached the Top 16. I identified one proxy-quality discrepancy and investigated potentially marked cards due to bent corners. After reviewing the cards and interviewing opponents, I issued no penalty for the latter and recommended replacing the sleeves. Another unusual situation involved a sleeve tearing during mulligans. Since the available replacement sleeves were visibly different, I supervised a temporary workaround involving a randomly selected, unknown card placed at the bottom of the library, allowing the damaged sleeve to be transferred to a land on the battlefield later, avoiding approximately 20 minutes of re-sleeving.

The most notable policy ruling involved a player incorrectly resolving a draw-and-discard trigger twice, which generated an additional Treasure for another player that had already been spent. The error was discovered on the following turn. I issued a Game Rule Violation Warning to the responsible player and Failure to Maintain Game State Warnings to the other three players, leaving the game state unchanged ("IPG 2.5" (IPG-2.5), "Multiplayer IPG Addendum 2.5A–B" (MA-IPG)). I also investigated suspected Spite Play, concluding that the action was merely a suboptimal strategic decision, with no infraction ("Multiplayer MTR Addendum 5.4" (MA-MTR)). I handled occasional slow play and player conduct concerns through direct intervention. My main takeaways were the importance of clear priority communication in multiplayer games and providing more detailed explanations of proxy requirements and permissible political agreements during the opening announcements.