Anafenza has 12 life and controls Phyrexian Unlife. On her turn, she plays Death's Shadow and Sylvan Library, leaving three cards in hand. On the following turn Nin, who has 20 life, plays Volcanic Dragon before making an alpha strike with that plus her Striking Sliver and Shipbreaker Kraken. Anafenza looks at the board for a minute and smirks, choosing not to block anything and going to 1 life (which also grows Death's Shadow to 12/12). So far, so good.

The trouble comes on Anafenza's next turn. She points out the Sylvan Library and draws three cards, making no effort to keep them separate, and flicking the cards around a bit in hand. Then she says “Hmmm…I choose not to put any cards back, lose 8 life to go to -7, and Death's Shadow is now 20/20.” Nin knows that Sylvan Library says “pay”, and that it's not possible to pay 4 life when a player only has 1, so this line of reasoning throws her off and prompts a judge call. Anafenza says she thought it was possible to pay life regardless. Nin was not paying attention to the manipulation going on with the cards in Anafenza's hand.

What now?

Edited Russell Jones (Dec. 17, 2015 12:21:45 AM)

Issue Anafenza with a GRV for paying life she was unable to, the game state is in a state that it can't be rewound so leave it as it is.

Well, I thought about fitting in DEC, but:

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 GRV is not previous. The GRV is for taking an impossible action during the resolution of an otherwise legal trigger, AFTER drawing the cards. But I think it's reasonable to back this up, if you get Cheating out of the way. Two random cards to top of library. Yeah, this is not perfect, and Anafenza can get a free improvement on the quality of her hand, but if it's not intentional it's fine, and it will be tracked anyways via Warning :)

Edited Joaquín Pérez (Dec. 17, 2015 05:24:31 AM)

I drop to the pool ^_^

For secure, GRV- she try to pay something that can´t pay. Warning.
The biggest problem was the mix in hand ¬¬ (why mix?? smells bad… tricky??)
to fix… all ways may be a bit injustice for any player… soo “can we choose 2 cards in hand at random and put back on top?”. I think it´s the best way to fix, if she dont make this “mistake” before… if she do it before… i sure will think about cheating.

I fail to see why this is not DEC. In fact, this is an example of the first case of DEC in IPG, “putting cards into his or her hand illegally”. Anafenza was not allowed to put these cards into her hand, as she did not have the life to pay for them. At the very least, this is a GRV (not being able to pay life for the extra cards) which led to DEC (having cards in hand that Anafenza cannot account for), which is also DEC, as presented by Joaquin above.

So I'd apply DEC, with the appropriate fix for DEC, the new “Thoughtseize”, once for each extra card. Nin gets to look at Anafenza's hand and choose 2 cards from it to shuffle into Anafenza's deck.

21:35 -Datatog(Datatog@irc.datatog.com)- Sylvan Library {1G} |Enchantment|
At
the beginning of your draw step, you may draw two additional
cards.
If you do, choose two cards in your hand drawn this turn. For
each of
those cards, pay 4 life or put the card on top of your library. ·
4E-R,5E-R,CM1-R,LE-U,LE-U1,MED-R,PZ1-R,REN,VMA-R

What exactly about putting cards into her hand was illegal?

How exactly can we “not account for” these cards? I think it's pretty clear
where they came from.

Originally posted by Dan Collins:

21:35 -Datatog(Datatog@irc.datatog.com)- Sylvan Library {1G} |Enchantment|
At
the beginning of your draw step, you may draw two additional
cards.
If you do, choose two cards in your hand drawn this turn. For
each of
those cards, pay 4 life or put the card on top of your library. ·
4E-R,5E-R,CM1-R,LE-U,LE-U1,MED-R,PZ1-R,REN,VMA-R

What exactly about putting cards into her hand was illegal?

How exactly can we “not account for” these cards? I think it's pretty clear
where they came from.

My understanding of “account for” is “using only rules-legal actions”. In which case, it is now in Anafenza's main phase (or at least in the draw step with Sylvan Library's trigger no longer on the stack). Anafenza failed to either pay 8 life or put 2 cards back from Sylvan Library. Therefore Anafenza has 2 cards she cannot account for “using rules-legal actions” (my emphasis added). Therefore DEC.

If we fail to assert the addition of “rules legal actions” to the definition of DEC then the entirety of DEC breaks down. (Obviously satirical) example:

Judge: “Player, you seem to have an extra card in your hand. Please explain to me how it got there.”
Player: “Oh. Judge, I just drew 2 cards during my draw step this turn. Is this a problem?”
Judge: “Uh…I guess not? Carry on.”

Edited Lyle Waldman (Dec. 17, 2015 10:08:07 PM)

So, some of these questions are getting a little far out into corner case land. Yes there are places where the policy simply isn’t going to cover things ideally. Notice what had to go wrong here:
Player A has to misplay Sylvan library
Player A has to be at low enough life total to not pay for the cards
Player A has to mix up the cards wit the rest of their hand in such a way that we have no idea of knowing which card is which.

Those are a fair number of significant breakdowns for a card that most players know how to use pretty well. Just do your best with things that don’t fit neatly into policy. That is going to happen from time to time when we add layers of complexity that just won’t come up all that much.

Now, for what it’s worth, unable to account for is intended to mean “players have no idea how the cards got there”. The AIPG has a section or two that clears it up nicely.

I believe you will find that typically, drawing two cards during one's draw
step qualifies as:

> Puts one or more cards into his or her hand illegally

And since the definition of DEC begins with the following:

> A player does any of the following:

Once the first criterion is satisfied, we need not consider the others. The
final criterion which you are fixated on applies to unexplained excess
cards - that is, if counting cards reveals excess cards in a player's hand,
and there is no explanation as to why, this is drawing extra cards. It is
not necessary for a judge to pinpoint the moment of the infraction in order
to decide that the cards are extra.

These cards are explained - we know where they came from - and they aren't
even extra - at the time they were drawn, the game state was entirely
legal. The problem arose when the player encountered the choice to either
return 2 cards or pay 8 life (or 1 and 4) and realized that they were
unable to do either.

Beyond that, I have no comment on the fix to this scenario, as I believe
there are far too many threads coming up with ways to complicate this card.
On Dec 17, 2015 11:08 PM, “Lyle Waldman” <

The IPG cannot covers all cases. It would make it a document that would be both too long and too complex to be readily usable. Instead, it covers both the most common and the most grave cases.

That means that some rare situations won't be covered by the IPG, and trying to push these situations into one of the IPG infraction, penalty, and fix won't provide good solutions. In this kind of situation, use your best judgement and educate players on how to avoid that from repeating.

- Emilien

In past topic, Scott said this (similar) case is not DEC. Even if you cannot lose by negative life, it still is not DEC.

http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/topic/20127/

Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

No functional changes re: Sylvan Library, as a result of the changes for Drawing Extra Cards.

First, Library tells them to draw those cards, so DEC doesn't apply there; next, they have to put back cards or pay life, and the fact those cards were “drawn this turn” must be verifiable - so if a careless player doesn't keep them separate, they're paying life, same as before.

d:^D

Originally posted by Kenji Suzuki:

In past topic, Scott said this (similar) case is not DEC. Even if you cannot lose by negative life, it still is not DEC.

http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/topic/20127/

Scott Marshall
No functional changes re: Sylvan Library, as a result of the changes for Drawing Extra Cards.

First, Library tells them to draw those cards, so DEC doesn't apply there; next, they have to put back cards or pay life, and the fact those cards were “drawn this turn” must be verifiable - so if a careless player doesn't keep them separate, they're paying life, same as before.

d:^D

Thanks for the quote from Scott, Kenji! But I think you're missing the point of the question. Scott says that if they mix up the cards in their hand, then they are forced to pay life. Which is fine, except that in this case, since the player is only at 1 life, they can't pay life. In fact, the player wanted to pay life and go to -7 (because they have Phyrexian Unlife in play), so if the player could pay life then that would be fine. But the rules say they can't, so the question is “ok, now what?”

The point being, Sylvan Library is a dumb card. If it was me (and it isn't me, but if it was me), I'd probably just errata the card to be Sensei's Divining Top-like. Functional change yada yada, but it makes situations like this one go away quite nicely.

Originally posted by Lyle Waldman:

My understanding of “account for” is “using only rules-legal actions”. In which case, it is now in Anafenza's main phase (or at least in the draw step with Sylvan Library's trigger no longer on the stack). Anafenza failed to either pay 8 life or put 2 cards back from Sylvan Library. Therefore Anafenza has 2 cards she cannot account for “using rules-legal actions” (my emphasis added). Therefore DEC.

The IPG section on GRVs says that “If a player forgot to…discard cards…that player does so.” If having an extra card in hand was automatically DEC, then this fix would never come up, since any case where a player forgot to discard would be DEC and not GRV.

Originally posted by Lyle Waldman:

If we fail to assert the addition of “rules legal actions” to the definition of DEC then the entirety of DEC breaks down. (Obviously satirical) example:

Judge: “Player, you seem to have an extra card in your hand. Please explain to me how it got there.”
Player: “Oh. Judge, I just drew 2 cards during my draw step this turn. Is this a problem?”
Judge: “Uh…I guess not? Carry on.”

This should be covered by the first clause: “Puts one or more cards into his or her hand illegally.”

Lyle, the thing with Sylvan Library is, that you don't have to pay in order to draw the cards. You draw the cards no matter what, and you have to pay to keep them.

If you have Sylvan Library out, you (may) always draw 3 cards, even at 1 life when you can't pay. So the cards were drawn legally. Keeping all three cards is the illegal part, but that's not DEC.