Head Judging the LAW Cerritos Planetary Qualifier at Krazy Nick's Games
2026/05/23: Had to issue three game losses :/
My TCGPlayer link to support: https://partner.tcgplayer.com/LumiMouse
Table of Contents
2026/05/23 - Krazy Nick’s Games
Format: Premier Bo3, 6 Swiss rounds, 58 players, Top Cut to 8 players;
https://melee.gg/Tournament/View/410155
Side Note of the Event Itself
This PQ was overall a great experience and ran smoothly after a slightly bumpy start.
We didn’t start until about 12:20PM iirc. The event lasted until ~10PM (the final game didn’t start until 9PM). Judging the top cut games was relatively straightforward.
Judging Staff
Head Judge (me) and one floor judge for the Swiss rounds (it was nice that the floor judge is someone who I’ve worked with in multiple PQs where they were the head judge, so there was some familiarity and trust with them).
Some behind-the-scenes info:
Initially, the store only wanted one judge, because they run their other 64 player cap events with just one judge as well. SWU’s general guideline is ~1 judge per ~32 players, so I was a bit taken back when I heard about that. I had a call with the store owner chatting about it. I advocated for another judge and they were willing to hire another one.
I contacted four L1/L2 judges and they were either playing in the event or unavailable. At that point, I wasn’t sure who else to ask. Luckily, one of them chose to judge instead of play, so it worked out at the end.
The store owner helped with Melee stuff and one of the staff members helped with the timers.
The Good Stuff:
The venue was decent, a lot of parking available.
The Not-So-Good Stuff:
The hectic start: I arrived there at like 11:30AM (event starts at 12PM) and the table numbers were already placed there by the staff (the store has run 64 player cap events for other TCG like Pokemon, MTG, Gundam, etc). But ~10min before the start of the event, the floor judge noticed two issues:
Some tables were missing their table numbers
All of the six seater tables had three table numbers (which means that one table had two different numbers assigned)
Solving both were easy:
Write the missing table numbers.
Push one of the table numbers to the wall so the extra table number is no longer visible.
There were two round timer displays, however, each display was connected to a separate computer. So, there was a slight <10 seconds discrepancy between the two timers. We referred to the timer with the most amount of time remaining.
There wasn’t much room between the rows of tables, so we couldn’t easily spectate the games closer to the wall on the 6 seater tables. I personally really like being able to walk between the rows to spot check games when judging.
Some of the Judge Calls
Player has their Thrawn leader deployed and has other friendly When Defeated unit(s). The opponent plays Single Reactor Ignition. Can the player utilize their Thrawn leader unit’s effect to double up on a When Defeated effect?
Resolution: No, it would miss the timing window, because the leader unit would already be defeated by the time the player would be resolving the When Defeated trigger.
Player asked if they can play Hotshot Maneuver on an exhausted friendly unit to deal damage.
Resolution: Yes.
Player A played LAW Galen Erso and giving control of it to their opponent. If the opponent plays Condemn, does it blank the unit’s effect?
Resolution: It would only blank the effect while it is attacking. It doesn’t work the way the opponent imagined it would.
Player A attacks with their Canyon Frontrunner, debuffing their opponent’s Spy token. If Player B attacks with the Spy token, what power would it have.
Resolution: 0. First do the additions, then do the subtractions: 0 base power + 2 (Raid 2) - 2 (Canyon Frontrunner’s debuff) = 0 power.
When playing Darth Nihilus, what happens if there are multiple units tied for lowest remaining health?
Resolution: The player can choose which unit to deal damage.
Player A controls LAW Rey. They play Double-Cross on their opponent’s Liberty. What happens?
Resolution: Player A keeps their Rey and takes their opponent’s Liberty.
Player A’s Cantwell Arrestor Cruiser has exhausted their opponent’s LAW Rey. If the Cantwell Arrestor Cruiser is captured (and then freed), what happens to the exhaust effect?
Resolution: Exhaust effect would be no more. A unit is considered to leave play if its captured. It being freed wouldn’t trigger its When Played effect.
[This issue occurred twice to two separate games]
Going into the resource five turn, a player noticed that they had six resources.
Resolution: Using the opponent as reference, we counted how many cards a player should have (units, resource row, discard pile, and hand), while accounting for any deck discard effects (e.g. LAW Lando) and card draws. Luckily, in both judge calls, the player had the correct amount of cards, which meant that they had accidentally resourced an extra card at some point.
This meant that one of the resources should’ve been part of their hand. So, we revealed the player’s resources and allowed the opponent to select one to return to the player’s hand.
[No judge were called, I was spectating.]
Apparently, a LAW Lando leader unit was defeated that turn. The player forgot about it and used its ability to discard a card from their opponent’s deck. They didn’t realize until after the opponent had discarded. Both players agreed to just shuffle the card back into the deck.
I was spectating this when I happened to walk by. I was aware that an error had occurred, but I said “if both players agree, then no need to call a judge” to the table. The other aspect is that both players were notable in the community, so I wouldn’t suspect any foul play in the first place.
Questions Outside of Games
If opponent’s SEC Galen Erso names Topple the Summit, can the player deploys their JTL Boba leader, kill the SEC Galen Erso, and then plot out Topple the Summit?
Resolution: No, because the JTL Boba player would miss timing window to show the plot card.
The proper plot sequencing is: deploy leader, show plot card(s), then resolve them accordingly. The moment the player starts resolving either their leader or a plot card, no more plot cards can be shown.
A player came up and said that in an earlier round, they and their opponent (Sabé) didn’t realize until game 3 that the player was supposed to draw a card after a card is discard from their hand. The player was curious on what penalty this incur if it was caught.
Resolution: This would fall under inaccurate mandator ability, so it’d be a warning.
Three Game Losses Issued
During round 1, a player appeared to be playing a modified LOF Darth Maul Spotlight deck. Unfortunately, their deck still had some illegal cards (2x Force Choke and 1x Fallen Lighsaber). The error was noticed when the player tried playing Force Choke and judge was called.
Resolution: Game loss issued due to deck/decklist error. We checked their entire deck and their sideboard. Coincidentally, they were running a 53 card main deck, so we just removed the three illegal cards.
We felt a little bad. But the odd thing was that later in the event, I asked the player if they were newish to the game, and they said that they started playing during LOF. Internally, I was thinking that they weren’t that new then, so did they just not know about rotation?
During a deck check for round 5, some of the cards of one of the decks were double sleeved with inner sleeves. The extra sleeved cards were noticeably marked when viewing the deck from the side. We determined that the commonality of the extra sleeved cards was that they were expensive. Because this was a control deck, the extra sleeved cards were basically the deck’s top end/bombs (think capital ships).
Resolution: Game 1 loss issued due to marked cards. We talked to the player and we didn’t think they did this to be malicious/cheat. The extra inner sleeves were removed.
During the courtesy top cut deck checks, one of the decks didn’t match their submitted decklist. It was still the same shell for the leader/base pairing, but had some big differences (e.g. one list had 3x SEC Captain Typho, the other list doesn’t have any).
Resolution: Game 1 loss issued due to decklist error. We talked to the player about it. They were surprised on how the error could’ve occurred and showed us their SWUDB link that was created on the same day of the event that matched their irl deck. We fixed their deck on Melee.
Miscellaneous Judge Stuff
I saw a proxy 30 HP base, but I was fine with it.
We did deck checks every Swiss round, except for the first round and last round.
I lowkey forgot about deck checks after round 1 had started (floor judged reminded me), so we decided to skip it for that round.
We skipped round 6 due to how we were already at 10%+ deck coverage without including the top cut deck checks.
I did the prizing out.
Conclusion + Thoughts on Head Judging
This was my first time head judging a PQ and also first time judging a PQ where we had to issue three game losses (one game loss is probably the most at a PQ I’ve judged at).
HJ Thoughts:
I think the hardest part was actually getting the players’ attention when needing to make announcements. I would yell, but to no effect :/. The floor judge helped in that aspect by getting the players’ attention and directing it toward me.
For two of the game loss errors situation, I had to think if something warranted a cheating investigation.
Judging the top cut matches was pretty chill.
I liked being able to control the content of the announcements.
Overall, it felt similar to floor judging, with the main difference of the HJ staying for the top cut rounds.
My pre-event announcement notes:
Fun read as always, thanks for all you do for the community!