Judging the SEC Northridge Planetary Qualifier at Fire & Dice Games
2025/12/13: Floor judge 1 from 10AM-end of Swiss.
My TCGPlayer link to support: https://partner.tcgplayer.com/LumiMouse
Table of Contents
Thanks to FAD for letting me record gameplays and this timelapse footage.
2025/12/13 - Fire & Dice Games
Format: Bo3, 7 Swiss rounds, 99 players, Top Cut to 8 players;
https://melee.gg/tournament/view/376751
Alyssa went 4-3, placing 37th.
Side Note of the Event Itself
This PQ event experience was overall great and went pretty smoothly.
The Good Stuff:
The same good stuff as last time.
The Not-So-Good Stuff:
[Nitpicky] I know it’s the norm, but a dedicated lunch time may be good. But realistically, no not-so-good stuff at this event. The schedule was known ahead of time via the Melee page.
Judging Staff
Head Judge (HJ): Georges (the one in the FAD jersey)
Floor Judge 1 (FJ1): Me (GC shirt)
Floor Judge 2 (FJ2): Daniel (Francisco from the previous two FAD PQs couldn’t make it)
Some of the Judge Calls
Simple/straightforward:
Scenario: Player A’s GNK Power Droid has Player B’s Bounty Hunter’s Quarry. If Player A plays SOR Bright Hope bouncing the GNK Power Droid back to hand, what happens to the bounty?
Answer: The bounty upgrade would fall off and go to the discard zone, and Player B can’t claim the bounty.
Player A’s Regional Governor called out Home One. Player B plays Traitorous on Regional Governor. Does Regional Governor still affect Player B?
Answer: Yes, as long the Regional Governor is in play the effect is still active, regardless of who is controlling it.
If Player A’s HK-47 were to trade with another unit where both would be defeated, would HK-47’s effect trigger to deal 1 damage?
Answer: Yes.
Player A had three units. Player B plays IG-2000 choosing to damage two specific units. Can they do that or does it have to be three units?
Answer: It’s “up to 3 units,” so Player B is allowed to do that.
Player A plays Traitorous on the opponent’s Cobb Vanth. Cobb Vanth later gets defeated. Who gets the effect?
Answer: Player A as they were the last one who controlled it.
Player A plays Bazine Netal and discards a card. Player B has an empty deck. Do they still “draw” and take 3 damage?
Answer: Yes.
Does Open Fire damage JTL Chewbacca?
Answer: Yes.
Player A accidentally drew seven cards for their starting hand and saw them.
Answer: Player A does a forced mulligan. Mulligan error, warning issued.
More Complicated:
During the regroup phase, Player A accidentally knocked down a few cards to the floor. Player A went to pick them up, but their hand cards also went below the table. Player A claimed to not have seen the dropped cards.
Player B was unable to confirm what hand size Player A had going into the regroup phase.
Player B was unable to confirm how many cards were knocked off the deck onto the floor.
Player B was worried about the possibility that cards may have been swapped when Player A went down to pick up the dropped cards.
Resolution: After confirming how many draw effects have happened to each player, we were able to figure out the expected cards Player A should have in total (field + resource row + discard zone + hand). It was two cards that had fallen. Because the cards between the three cards in hand and the two fallen cards couldn’t be distinguished, all five cards were revealed. Player B selected two of them to be shuffled back into the deck.
Hidden card manipulation error, warning issued to Player A.
Player A misheard Player B saying “scoop” when in reality they said “shoot” (in the context of Tarkintown afaik). So, Player A started putting their card hand and discard pile face down ontop of the resource row.
Player B is unable to confirm what cards belonged to the hand, resource row, discard zone.
Resolution:
After some discussion, both players were able to agree to the contents of the discard pile.
Both players agreed to the number of resources, because Player A had just played SEC Bo-Katan Kryze using all of their resources (nine).
Both players agreed that Player A’s hand contained at least one SOR Home One due to it being Waylay’d.
The only unknown is the distribution between the resources and the card hand. So, all of Player A’s face down cards are revealed. An SOR Home One is set aside designated for the hand. Player B chose nine cards to be the resource row and the remaining cards + the SOR Home One will be Player A’s new hand.
Hidden card manipulation error, warning issued to Player A.
Games I Was Watching:
A player’s partner was massaging them during the game. I alerted the HJ about it and they asked the partner to stop the hand contact during game.
Owen Lars’ missed trigger.
Wrong amount of resources paid for Timely Intervention + LOF Darth Vader (underpaid by one, but the player did still have enough resources available).
Missed 1 damage ping from Cad Bane leader’s triggered effect.
Missing two experience tokens for Blue Leader’s “When Played” effect.
Miscellaneous Judge Stuff
A player had a shadow boxed 30HP base. The HJ made an exception.
A player asked if intentional draws were still allowed. I said yes.
No players in prior PQs have ever approached me about these issues:
Two players came up to me to fix their misreported match records. I wasn’t sure if the employees behind the counter knew how to work Melee, so I just did it for them (I have judge access to the Melee event starting the morning of).
One player came up to me to drop. I told them that they can drop themselves via their player controller.
Conclusion
I had the most amount of judge calls (15 judge calls, 4 event-related questions/situations) recorded in my notebook this event compared to any of my prior PQ judging experiences. Just to clarify, this doesn’t mean that I was the one to give the rulings, but I was at least involved in it.
One good thing that I’ve noticed is that players were more consistently keeping their arms raised. There was no judge call where I had trouble finding who called for it.
Basically, a copy paste of my previous PQ judging Substack posts:
Overall, I appreciate given the privilege of judging a PQ and the store allowing me to record both the gameplays as well as the 360° footage.
It was quite tiring on my feet (as expected).
Answering card ruling questions is easy, but questions regarding policies are a bit harder.
Anyways, pretty fun experience, I learned a lot, would do it again.