Hey there folks, it's time once again to take a dip in the Knowledge Pool! This scenario is Silver level, so L2+ judges should please wait until Saturday to give their thoughts.

The blog post for this scenario is here.

Agnes and Ned are playing in a Standard PPTQ this coming weekend. Agnes casts Titan's Strength, choosing to leave the card on top. She then attacks and passes the turn to Ned. During his pre-combat main phase, Ned casts Talent of the Telepath. In response, Agnes cracks a Bloodstained Mire, puts a Mountain onto the battlefield, then shuffles and immediately reveals the top 7 cards without presenting her deck.

Ned responds, “Uhh, I needed to cut that first… judge?”

What do you do?

Edited Patrick Vorbroker (Oct. 2, 2015 06:29:40 AM)

Apologies everyone, I forgot to add the intro! I edited the original post, and it's also quoted in this message for your convenience.

Hey there folks, it's time once again to take a dip in the Knowledge Pool! This scenario is Silver level, so L2+ judges should please wait until Saturday to give their thoughts.

I would do nothing.
I don't see how cutting/shuffling is going to affect anything that matters.

TE- Insufficient Shuffling for Agnes. As defined by the IPG:

A player unintentionally fails to sufficiently shuffle his or her deck or portion of his or her deck before presenting it to his or her opponent or fails to present it to his or her opponent for further randomization.

It seems harsh to assign a penalty here, but the MTR specifically says:

At Competitive and Professional REL tournaments, players are required to shuffle their opponents’ decks after their owners have shuffled them.

The revealed cards and the rest of the library are shuffled. Both players are instructed to play more carefully in the future.

Edited Dylan Rippe (Oct. 2, 2015 07:24:07 AM)

Insufficient Shuffling for Agnes–the relevant portion of the IPG describes TE-IS as a failure to present a shuffled deck to their opponent for further randomization. The revealed cards will be shuffled back into the deck, and presented again to be cut. Warning for Agnes, no penalty for Ned.

Why is it harsh? Present in your deck is important it reduces the possibility of cheating.

I agree with penalty TE-IS for Agnes

However while the standard fix is shuffle the unrandomised portion neither player is contesting the shuffling. I am also concerned by the wording “ugh,” it implies there's a pause furthermore revealing seven takes time could he not have stopped his opponent at two or three. I think I would like to investigate whether ned looked at the revealed cards didn't like what was available and so called a judge to get a different set of cards this might come under USC.

I think in this instance deviating from the standard fix and maintaining the board state might be preferable

Edited David Hughman (Oct. 2, 2015 07:54:40 AM)

TE-IS for Agnes. I would shuffle away the revealed cards and have the deck presented properly.

I do think David's concerns are valid but I also believe it's very possible to flip seven cards before the opponent reacts. I wouldn't go in assuming cheating because of the number of cards, but I might ask a question to make sure USC didn't apply.

Originally posted by David Hughman:

“ugh,”

It's “uhh,” not “ugh.” Quite a difference one letter makes :-)

Originally posted by Patrick Vorbroker:

Hey there folks, it's time once again to take a dip in the Knowledge Pool! This scenario is Silver level, so L2+ judges should please wait until Saturday to give their thoughts.

The blog post for this scenario is here.

Agnes and Ned are playing in a Standard PPTQ this coming weekend. Agnes casts Titan's Strength, choosing to leave the card on top. She then attacks and passes the turn to Ned. During his pre-combat main phase, Ned casts Talent of the Telepath. In response, Agnes cracks a Bloodstained Mire, puts a Mountain onto the battlefield, then shuffles and immediately reveals the top 7 cards without presenting her deck.

Ned responds, “Uhh, I needed to cut that first… judge?”

What do you do?

I would not issue a penalty. I would tell the player that they need to present their deck for additional randomization per tournament rules. I've actually seen this exact situation happen and the player be given Insufficient Shuffling. Although this is a rule in the MTR, the IPG does not list this action as insufficient shuffling and the explanation of the situation does not say that they only did a few riffles or any hint towards them not manually shuffling enough. We can give a direct instruction, however, and if it happens again we now have recourse to issue a penalty.


After reading:
Huh. Just reread TE-IS and it looks like they added not presenting to the first sentence in the most recent iteration of the IPG. TIL.

Edited Brandon Salaz (Oct. 3, 2015 07:36:21 AM)

Before reading: TE - IS, Warning for Agnes, and go ahead and shuffle those seven cards back in (they're a revealed part of the library, but still technically the library, not exile). Let NAP cut/shuffle, then resolve Talent of the Telepath.

After reading: No change.

Edit: Changed AP to Agnes. I'm used to calling Player A “AP” and Player N “NAP,” though that wasn't the case here.

Edited Taylor Wyatt (Oct. 6, 2015 12:51:39 AM)

Alright everyone, let's wrap this up!

As you've collectively and correctly concluded, after the most recent IPG update this is now a case of Tournament Error - Insufficient Shuffling, which is accompanied by a warning. Agnes is expected to present her deck to her opponent to allow for further randomization. Not doing so opens up the possibility for manipulating the deck to her advantage, especially in situations like this where the top of the library will be immediately interacted with.

As far as the fix is concerned, the IPG tells us to shuffle the random portion of the library. As Agnes just used a Bloodstained Mire, this is the entire deck. Instruct her to re-shuffle the deck (including the seven cards she revealed), present it to Ned for his opportunity for randomization, and then proceed to correctly resolving the Talent of the Telepath.

Thanks for your participation this week, be sure to check back tomorrow for another go with the new IPG!

Hello,

I feel weird about the official answer. As David, letting revealing 7 cards and not acting looks a bit suspicious to me, it is hard not to stop your opponent before this entire action.
For me, as soon as the 7 cards are revealed, they are no longer part of the random part of the library, as it implies we are resolving the spell and have revealed the top 7. We should not shuffle those cards.
If the official ruling is to shuffle all, when their opponent did not ask directly to cut (even by just putting the deck on the table closer, wait, and then resolve believing the player did not want to cut) players will have the willingness to wait their opponent to make an action before calling a judge, if they can get an advantage (like here, reshuffle because he did not hit the right spell and want a second chance).

I have a problem with the definition of the random portion. Is it the random portion when the library was shuffled, or the random portion after actions happened? I launched a discussion of what to do if, instead of resolving a spell, Agnes draws her card for the turn.

This is an Insufficient Shuffling issue. The first infraction committed was not presenting the deck for shuffling, which is indeed enough to warrant the IS penalty. From the IPG:

A player unintentionally fails to sufficiently shuffle his or her deck or portion of his or her deck before presenting it to his or her opponent or fails to present it to his or her opponent for further randomization.

As for why this isn't Drawing Extra Cards, there's two reasons:

1. By default, we always assess whatever infraction was committed first and largely ignore any infractions that occurred as a result of that. There's an exception for this with Drawing Extra Cards though:
   

   If a prior Game Rule Violation or Communication Policy Violation directly led to drawing the extra cards, it is
   treated as Drawing Extra Cards.

   The problem here is this is IS, not GRV or CPV, so this clause doesn't apply.
   
2. None of the clauses for DEC apply here. No cards were put into the hand, there's no excess of cards in either player's hand. As for the “too many cards in the set of cards from the top of the library” clause, that doesn't apply here either - the player is trying to resolve Talent after shuffling incorrectly, but they did reveal the correct number of cards for Talent (7), so there's no problem with that.
   

Therefore, DEC doesn't apply, we properly shuffle the random portion of the library, and issue the Warning.

If we don't shuffle the revealed cards in here, we're setting a dangerous precedent. If the player managed to stack the deck in their favor*, the reveal would be in favor of the shuffling player guaranteed. This would lead to players trying to “angle shoot” by quickly stacking their deck, then revealing cards, safe in the knowledge that even after they get their Warning they'll be able to keep the revealed cards.

If we do shuffle the revealed cards in, the potential for abuse goes WAY down. The non-shuffling player does gain a slight advantage here if they don't stop the shuffling player from revealing the cards early… but honestly, it's the shuffling player's responsibility to present their deck to the opponent for randomization. We're giving the IS penalty to the shuffling player for a reason - the onus is on them to make sure their opponent shuffles. Any advantage that could be gained by the non-shuffling player is a “natural consequence” - not to mention, if a judge witnesses the fact that the opponent decided not to challenge their lack of deck presentation when the shuffling player flipped up a Dig Through Time, they would not only issue the penalty but probably do a brief investigation into why the opponent didn't say something sooner.

Hopefully that helps!

P.S. Just to note, the scenario you made in the other thread is a good bit different from this one, and quite possibly will have a different answer.

*yes they're cheating but we aren't going to always catch this

I discussed a lot on this scenario on French Forum. Finally, I agree to shuffle all cards. Even if I believe that stacking 7 cards would be really hard for Agnes (thing you can look for during an investigation, depending on how long the shuffle lasted for example), the argument permitted to convince me:
If we are in a case where we need to reveal one or two cards (for example, Mind's Desire for 1), the possibility of uncaught cheating is higher. We need to treat those two cases the same way, and in this second case, I do not want to give the revealed card if NAP did not shuffle before.

Let me add that, regardless of abuse, we should reshuffle because we don't know that Agnes did a thorough shuffle.

For instance, supposing that Agnes had resolved two Dig Through Time this game. The means there are ten cards on the bottom that are all less good than the four cards Agnes picked out. In the scenario above, Ned has not had a chance to ensure the deck is sufficiently randomized. If Agnes has shuffled poorly, even unintentionally, there is a chance that those seven cards are from the “clump” of ten cards with all the good cards picked out.