This happened at a PPTQ I was playing in today. I was not the judge, and I did not directly witness the event, but one of the players asked for my opinion in between rounds. Here goes:

It is turn 1 of game 2. Alfred is on the play. He plays a fetchland and says “tap, sac, bolt myself, play Noble Hierarch”, slams down said Hierarch. He then puts his hand down on the table (5 cards in-hand), fanned out with no particular organization, picks up his library, searches up the shockland, plays it tapped, and starts to shuffle. Then, because the sleeves were brand new, the cards shoot out of his hands and fall onto the table, all landing face down… but also landing over the cards that comprised his hand. In such a way that it is not visibly clear which cards were his hand. Ug.

The HJ ended up shuffling all the cards together and Alfred received 5 of them at random. I agreed that this was what I could envision myself doing had I been confronted with the same solution. The downside was that I couldn't find any justification why it should be so, other than “it feels right”.

After thinking about it a bit longer, I told Alfred that the solution I felt was in concert with the rules was this:
- take a number of cards from the bottom of the pile such that it was reasonably certain that the original 5 in-hand were in that set. Alfred now has 5+n cards in-hand.
- treat this as a single DEC violation and apply the Thoughtseize-eqsue remedy n times.
- potentially downgrade the infraction to a non-warning.

What say you?

-G

Originally posted by Gordon Lugauer:

Then, because the sleeves were brand new, the cards shoot out of his hands and fall onto the table, all landing face down… but also landing over the cards that comprised his hand. In such a way that it is not visibly clear which cards were his hand. Ug.

How is this different than a player accidentally shuffling their hand into their library?

I don't think we want to get into the idea that the hand wasn't shuffled into the library, but instead the library was shuffled into the hand and perform DEC 47 times in that case. I'm curious why this case would be different?

Originally posted by Marc DeArmond:

I don't think we want to get into the idea that the hand wasn't shuffled into the library, but instead the library was shuffled into the hand and perform DEC 47 times in that case. I'm curious why this case would be different?

I can see an argument being made for both a) the player shuffled their hand in to their library, and b) the player drew n cards, and I can see judges ruling this either way. This is not a clear-cut infraction and probably will depend a lot of your own judgement when you see the board state as it currently stands. Given that this is pretty unclear, I would likely take the fix for the situation in to consideration when making my ruling, and the fix for a is far more punitive that the fix for situation b.

If we want to say that by dropping cards from their library on to the cards that made up the player's hand they have shuffled their hand in to their library, we give the player a Warning for GPE-GRV and they now have no hand. Easy to do, but totally sucks for Alfred. The fix that Gordon has presented, which is correct with the new DEC rules, also sucks in that the opponent has the ability to sculpt Alfred's hand, but is much less punitive.

Again, I can see arguments for ruling either way, but I am much more inclined to lean towards Gordon's proposed solution.

Is there not the potential to ask the player what there hand was, carefully pick up the deck and look for them. There is a chance that a card might have slipped between two of them but for the most part you should find the majority of the named cards together close to if not at the bottom of the library.

Originally posted by Gareth Tanner:

Is there not the potential to ask the player what there hand was, carefully pick up the deck and look for them.

That certainly is kind to Alfred, but I don't see where that fix is prescribed.

I had not considered viewing this as hand-shuffled-into-library. Ok.

Thanks, everyone!

-G

I'm taking influence for this from recent rulings made where a player scry's from Serum Visions (or Dig's Through Time) and there opponent random cuts thinking it was a shuffle for some reason. We can back up by asking what the cards were and where they were put and fix the library by finding them.

While in the previous rulings an opponent has caused the mix up and here it's an error in dexterity I see both as being non-infractions and the main reason we don't reconstruct normally in a case of player shuffles hand into library is due to the next to impossible nature of verifying what the player said to be their hand. Here we have a potential solution that can verify that.

I'd also say that if we can reasonably safe restore the game state without much potential for abuse we should do so independently of whose fault it actually was. And asking away from the table for his hands content and checking whether the bottom 5 cards actually are these 5 sounds way safer to than giving him a random 5…

If the cards was fanned out on the table I think it would be possible to “undig” them carefully. I think I would go in this direction, leaving player without any infraction (assuming, there are no face up cards in that mess).

Originally posted by Gareth Tanner:

We can back up by asking what the cards were and where they were put and fix the library by finding them.

Christian Genz
…safe restore the game state without much potential for abuse …

These proposed fixes seem to be a VERY slippery slope. How do we know the player is telling the truth? How do we know the player has perfect memory of his hand?

I think the last three posts leave a lot of room for abuse - without a clear way for us to know what is and what was. The fix should be a fair application of the rules in a given situation, and I really think that the idea of treating it as shuffling a hand into the library is much closer to what is happening here.

- The cards are unmarked from the back.
- They have had the entire library fall on them, in a way that covers/obscures the original hand.

I don't think there is another solution here. I'm trying to apply IPG to this, so I think it's a GPE-GRV. No way to rewind, so the player who receives the warning would need to continue to play the game with no hand from that point.


(EDIT) - I'm basing part of my argument on a philosophy from another TE, DEC. ‘…the disruption caused by moving a card into a hidden zone mandates a higher level of scrutiny…’. While not the approved fix, I think the statement here is important to keep in mind. It's what I was thinking of when I wrote my response.

Edited Charles Featherer (Aug. 11, 2015 09:32:13 AM)

In the example the player has a five card hand, after carefully picking up the deck we ask them to name that hand. If those five cards are together at the bottom of the deck then that was the hand otherwise we don't try and fix it, I suppose the player could hope the previous bottom card if know could slip into the hand but they'd need to remember the exact order of the hand to know which card to “forget”

Originally posted by Charles Featherer:

No way to rewind

and this is where we disagree. It always depends on the specific situation, sure but the fix was meant for the optimal case (player remembers his hand and 5 bottom most cards are the named ones). If not we can still go for the “shuffle in” but beforehand we should aways TRY to fix the situation by rewinding and often in these situations it is actually possible.
We can easily check whether he tells the truth by looking at what is actually on the table. Sure the player can try to lie to us but chances that a random selection of 5 cards from his library can be guessed is really close to zero. The only way he can know the 5 bottommost cards on the table is that they were actually in his hand before (thus the mentioned Anticipate ruling where the opponent did cut afterwards. It happened at a GP and the L5 was able to rewind the cut simply by asking AP away from the table what he put on top and what on bottom of library and checking whether these two cards were together somewhere in the library after the cut. Chances for it to randomly happen are really small so the potential for abuse is not existent at all).

Gareth, I'm trying to find that as an acceptable fix in the IPG and I'm not finding it. I understand deviations are allowed, and I'm trying to understand this situation clearly. Is this a situation where a deviation is warranted? Or am I missing something in the IPG?

Thanks!

Charles what you are missing is a normal rewind.
IPG 2.5 GPE:GRV Additional remedy: If the error was discovered within a time frame in which a player could reasonably be expected to notice the error and the situation is simple enough to safely back up without too much disruption to the course of the game, the judge may get permission from the Head Judge to back up the game to the point of the error.

In this case the error was dropping the cards on the table and if the bottom 5 cards are the named ones it is safe to back up.

Christian & Gareth-

Thanks for taking the time to explain this further to me.

“In such a way that it is not visibly clear which cards were his hand.”

I'm looking in pretty focused on this line. If it is somewhat obvious where the 5 cards were I could see taking this as DEC with n+x cards. But I'm not comfortable with asking which 5 cards were there if it isn't readily obvious.