In a Comp REL event, Adrian is playing against Neil. Adrian is currently resolving Anticipate. He puts his current hand of 2 cards (excluding the Anticipate) onto the table face down. He picks up the top 3 cards of his library and holds them in his hand as he looks at them. He chooses a card from among the 3 and places it face down. He places it such that the very corner of the card he chose touches his face-down hand of 2 cards.

Then, literally half a second after he placed that card down, he picks it up again and puts it together with the other 2 cards he was holding in his hand. He takes a different card from the 3 that he is currently holding and puts THAT card near the face-down pile of 2 cards that is his hand.

You, as a judge, are standing at the table and watching them play. Immediately when that happens, a spectator cries out to you: “Guys, that's wrong. Judge, isn't that a game loss?”

Was there an infraction? If so, was it Drawing Extra Cards?

An extension of this: If the spectator did not interject, would you have? If Adrian paused a little longer than he did, would your thoughts change?

Edited Kin Yen Lee (April 14, 2015 08:45:50 AM)

Just to be clear, the physical object states and movements are:

1) Held: 3 cards, H1/H2/H3 (With one of them being Anticipate itself). On Table: 0 cards. This is before Anticipate is cast and is obviously ignoring other physical game state objects as they are irrelevant.

2) Held: 2 cards, H1/H2. Table: 0 cards. Anticipate being cast.

3) Held: 3 cards, A1/A2/A3. Table: 2 cards facedown, H1/H2. Resolving Anticipate.

4) Held: 2 cards, A2/A3. Table: 3 cards facedown, H1/H2/A1. Adrian chooses a card.

5) Held: 3 cards, A1/A2/A3. Table: 2 cards facedown, H1/H2. Adrian puts his initial choice back with virtually no pause in between the two actions.

6) Held: 2 cards, A1/A3. Table: 3 cards facedown, H1/H2/A2. Adrian chooses a different card.

Is this correct?

I don't see a problem with this. The fact that the corner of the card just so happens to be touching his hand doesn't mean he actually put it into his hand. It's just like when a player scries one card, looks at it and sets it face down on the table while thinking. If the corner touches his hand, that doesn't mean he's drawn an extra card, it is still technically in the deck, and the scry is still resolving.

Just because a card touches a player's hand doesn't always necessarily mean DEC.

I think this would be a different story if he had put the card fully into his hand and put the other two on the bottom of his library, then retrieved the two and swapped out the cards. Even then, I don't think it would be DEC, because he wouldn't have an extra card that he wasn't entitled to have.

If anything I would rule GRV, as nothing was telling him he could re-resolve the spell, but I think it happened fast enough in this scenario that it wouldn't be a problem. The whole finger-still-on-the-pawn chess rule thing.

To Nathaniel, yes, that is the gist of it. Except that at step 6, it isn't strictly A2 that was put onto the table. It could have been any among A1/A2/A3 at that point, seeing that the cards' identities are unknown.

Also, it seems that the both of you take note of the speed at which Adrian took the card back. Therefore I added a new extension to the question: If that pause he took was a little longer, maybe 3 seconds long, would it have changed anything?

I'm in agreement with Sal. From what I understand a small portion of the card in question was touching Adrian hand so it would have been very easy to determine which cards were in his hand and which was from Anticipate. As long as Neil can say without doubt that the card Adrian picked up was in fact the one he put on the table from Anticipate then I would tell Adrian to be more careful in the future as the situation could get dicey if Neil was unable to confirm which card was from Anticipate. No Infraction.

The time the card from Anticipate was on the table doesn't seem too relevant unless Adrian's decision takes so long that it becomes Slow Play (seems like I'm getting off topic).

It would likely be a different story if Neil was unable to identify the card that Adrian picked up off the table and put into the group with the remaining cards from Anticipate. for this I'm not 100% so personally I would Consult with the head judge because I feel there may be some other variables to take into consideration in order to tell what infraction, if any, has been committed. Again I feel I'm looking to far into this.

Interesting, we've just had almost the exact same discussion on the UK board.

My opinion is that if the card touches the hand, no matter how briefly, it is considered drawn, and thus unidentifiable with the rest of the hand. The act of putting a card back from his hand is a GRV, which happens before any potential DEC.

So I would give a Warning for GPE:GRV to Adrian for sure. Depending on how long Neil had to stop Adrian before he attempted to put a different card into his hand, I would give Neil a Warning for GPE:FtMGS. No other fix, no backup.

I think Huw Morris has the right direction on this.

We need a clear dividing line for when a card is said to be in your hand, something very crisp and simple that you can't really weasel around, and doesn't require players to be masters of sleight of hand, etc… And as bad as it can sometimes feel, “touches another card in your hand” is very clear and very simple.

As soon as the card touched, we consider it indistinguishable, so it's in his hand.

My first instinct would be to say “It depends on how much it was touching his hand” - but then realized that if I weren't observing the match, I couldn't make that call and would have to stick with the usual line: If it touched his hand, it's now in his hand. So it shouldn't matter whether I observed “how much” it was touching, that's just the line I take.

I'm also with Huw Morris, that this is a GRV for taking an illegal action. It feels a bit odd since there are plenty of cases where as long as players aren't fishing for information, we allow them to redact their own actions - but drawing cards is one of those times where that gets really squirrely, so I don't think we can afford that same level of flexibility.

After all, this is Competitive REL - players are expected to know how their cards work and understand the rules, and are held to a reasonably high standard of play.

Edited Rebecca Lawrence (April 14, 2015 11:47:20 PM)

So it can be accepted that the card touched his hand and therefore was considered to be drawn. But this is closer to a GRV than a DEC?

I think I'd tell the spectator - fairly firmly - not to try and do my job for me.

It sounds like the players were fine with it, there was no confusion about what was happening - Adrian was thinking about picking one card, then changed his mind, and the coincidence of a corner touching something else is irrelevant. That's like saying that, if that same corner had touched one of the lands on the battlefield, he was obviously playing it as a face-down Morph…

Ask yourself this: if it was just these two players, no judge, no spectators - would there have been a judge call? The answer is clear: only if Neil is a “rules lawyer”, angling for a free win.

Calling this a GRV, or - worse - DEC, because of that incidental touching, is - in my opinion, at least - in direct conflict with this:

A judge shouldn’t intervene in a game unless he or she believes a rules violation has occurred, a player with a concern or question requests assistance, or the judge wishes to prevent a situation from escalating.

In this case, a spectator has a concern, and we can respond to that - but no rules violation has occurred.

d:^D

So if we take the spectator out of the question and Neil calls for a judge, claiming that Adrian should not be able to do that, does anything change? Is there a GRV?

There is also the question of what constitutes a DEC in the physical and practical sense. If Adrian placed the card directly on top of his face-down hand? If Adrian slotted the card he picked in between the two other cards in his hand? I think many of us judges (including myself) have been conditioned to see a card touching the hand to be considered drawn, at least for Comp REL.

I missed that a spectator was the one objecting. If Neil was the objector here, Scott, would your ruling be the same? This feels uncomfortable paired up against any other case where we draw the line at “the card(s) touched your hand, so we can no longer distinguish them from your hand” for DEC or GRV upgrades for failures to reveal.

(Which is not to say I'm arguing it's DEC - this should be a GRV at worst.)

I'd ask Neil “is there any doubt that ~this~ was the card that he set aside? was it ever actually difficult to distinguish it from the cards in hand?”

Neil might convince me there really was a problem (i.e., it was more than just a corner overlapping), or he might back off on his rules lawyering, or he might lie himself into a real predicament. From the original scenario's description, there was an accidental touching of a corner of a card to another - i.e., not even the slightest hint of doubt about it being in the hand.

d:^D

Scott, may I ask where you would draw the line as ruling that the card has been moved from the library to the hand? (This is really the crux of whether there has been an infraction or not.) For instance, if Adrian's hand was in a pile face down, and Aaron dropped a card squarely on top, would you say the card is in his hand now, even though everybody knows where the card is? Is it the case that there is no infringement until Adrian picks up his hand and starts shuffling it?

It seems to me that in the interests of consistency and clarity, players have a right to know exactly where they stand. A ruling of “it touches your hand, it's in your hand” can produce the occasional unfortunate situation such as this, but players know exactly what the policy is, and know exactly where the line is.

Huw:

Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

was it ever actually difficult to distinguish it from the cards in hand?