Last week I Head Judged a fairly small PTQ, and was approached with the following situation:
Player A is late to his match, and since I happen to be talking with another judge by the player, I went over and issued the TE-Tardy GL to the player. The player now a little frazzled by the situation grabs his deck, does a few (about 6 or so) riffle shuffles, then sets the deck on his opponents playmat. Player A then grabs his sideboard and looks at it while his opponent shuffles his deck. At this point the judge who was besides me swoops in for a deck check. As soon as the player looks up he looks at the floor judge and states “I forgot to desideboard, I get a game loss right?” I seeing this happen come over, and pull the player away from the table while the floor judge verifies the failure to desideboard, and completes the deck check.

On brief investigation player is found to be very upset at himself for not desideboarding, and his story is reasonable based on the situation that made him tardy to his match. I quickly find he is not committing unsportsmanlike conduct - cheating, and have him sit down.

Now here is the tricky part - - - Game Loss? Warning?

In the current iteration of the MIPG there is a downgrade option for GPE-DLP “If a player upon drawing an opening hand discovers a DLP, and calls a judge the head judge may downgrade…”
This does not following the current guidelines for a downgrade.

“If a players notices a problem between games, there is no penalty, just as the player to be more careful next time” .
This situation was not technically between games, because he presented…

So again, what do you do?

Edited Amanda Swager (March 12, 2013 06:36:43 PM)

I don't think that this fits the “no penalty” option, as he has clearly shuffled and presented his deck, which is the line we wait for to do a deck check (because them presenting is a statement of “this deck is legal and what I will be playing with.”) However, he has called attention to the problem himself, before he could potentially gain advantage. Obviously, I'm going to ask a few questions to make sure he wasn't trying to get away with anything, but assuming that I didn't find anything shady, I would say that this absolutely qualifies as a downgradeable situation, and I would give the player a warning for D/DLP, instruct them to fix their deck and move it back to its original composition, shuffle again, and then present again, and which point I take the decks for their deck check.

Do we feel bad that we issue an additional game loss? YES. Is our personal
feelings supposed to get in the way of following the rules? NO. Why does
this person get special treatment? It is on the player to be aware what is
going on around them. He's late. It's his responsibility. He presented a
deck that he didn't de-sideboard after his last match. again its his
responsibility. Just because they will try and shift the blame on the
judge, (the judge matched loss me out of the event) it is still they're
fault. We didn't make him do these things. We are ensuring the integrity
of the event. Unless he can come up with a valid reason why he was late.
The HJ may downgrade to a warning. How we treat the player from a customer
service standpoint is a different animal. They are about to have a bad
day.We can try to help mitigate the damage and see if the TO will maybe
help get them into a side draft.

Casey, If we swoop for a deck check and a player says “I forgot to
de-sideboard.” every time we pick up a deck check does that absolve them
from getting a penalty if we find it to be true?

Just playing devil's advocate for discussion purposes. :)

Something that is troubling me about this example is that he picked up his sideboard to check it. That signifies to me that he is double-checking to make sure that he is presenting a legal deck. Would it be wrong to wait until he puts his sideboard down (back in the box) to give him a chance to catch his own error and allow him to potentially avoid the game loss? The fact that he put the deck on the opponent's mat is definitely troublesome for him, but is it wrong to give him a few extra seconds to potentially catch his own error? In fact, if he doesn't catch it, and then there is a problem with his deck, that gives me more conviction about giving him a game loss. Is this unreasonable or wrong?

It certainly wouldn't absolve every player… in fact, if a player in a normal situation said “I forgot to desideboard” when I swooped, there would be an investigation.

It is a little odd that there is an option to downgrade if a player catches an error when drawing an opening hand, but players who get deck-checked never have the opportunity for that downgrade. In both cases, the player has presented an illegal deck. I guess it's just the luck of the draw?

I would really want to downgrade here. However, you're no more likely to be able to detect an attempt to cheat in this situation than in the situation where a player purposely pre-sideboards, then when you swoop, glances at the sideboard and says, “Oh, I forgot to de-sideboard!” or says nothing and accepts the game loss with a surprised look, “Oh, I forgot to de-sideboard?”

So while I appreciate that it's most likely the error was unintentional, it's not a great precedent to set to downgrade in a case that isn't really provided for in the IPG. Do you think he would have noticed this error and fixed it if he HADN'T been deck checked? Only if he drew a sideboard card in his opening hand, I suspect. We can't (and shouldn't) wait for every opening hand to be drawn before swooping in order to give the players a chance to notice their own deck problems (logistical nightmare). So it's only “fair” to follow the normal procedure for deck checks, and issue the game loss penalty. Those players that don't get deck checked, draw a hand and notice a sideboarding error are getting two kinds of lucky to get the downgrade. :)

No, this doesn't fit a by-the-book downgrade scenario for Deck/Decklist problem. But from the general philosophy section of the IPG, it states:

If a player commits an offense, realizes it, and calls a judge over immediately and before he or she could potentially benefit from the offense, the Head Judge has the option to downgrade the penalty without it being considered a deviation, though he or she should still follow any procedures recommended to fix the error. For example, a player offers his deck to his opponent and while cutting his opponent's deck discovers that a card that belongs in his deck is still exiled from a previous game. If he calls the judge over immediately, the Head Judge may choose to issue a Warning rather than a Game Loss.

Assuming that our questioning turns up nothing shady, this is exactly the type of behavior we should be encouraging in players - He realized he committed an error, called attention to it immediately upon discovering it, and did so before he could gain any advantage from the error. I stand by my previous assertion; this is something that I would downgrade, were I the HJ.

Edited Casey Brefka (March 12, 2013 08:23:53 PM)

I had a similar situation at GP Verona this past weekend. A player
presents his deck, then notices the 60th card in his pile of tokens while
his opponent is shuffling his deck. He called it on himself and had no
chance for advantage. No reason not too downgrade in that case.

Casey is correct that it fits the general case to downgrade. In the
original post, Michael mentions:
“If a player upon drawing an opening hand discovers a DLP, and calls a
judge the head judge may downgrade…”

You may notice that he truncated the sentence. This removes the meaning of
the sentence. The rest of it is “…the penalty, fix the deck, and allow
the player to redraw the hand with one fewer card.”

This is from the Additional Remedy portion of the D/DL Problem section. It
is not telling you when to downgrade. It is telling you an addition fix
that you use when you chose to downgrade in this particular situation. It
is not saying that you can only downgrade in that situation. The times to
downgrade is described in the section of the IPG that Casey quoted. I can
understand where the confusion comes from, but I hope that this helps
clarifies it for people.

If a player notices the error before drawing his hand and calls a judge, that's a fine time to downgrade. But if the player only notices because he's being deck-checked and grabs his sideboard to hand it to the judge, isn't that different? That seems more like a judge calling attention to the error than the player. Is there any way to know whether the player would have caught this error otherwise, or whether he would have continued playing with the illegal deck? Or is this not something we should consider?

I'm open to the idea of downgrading, I just would like to see some strong support for that decision. Do we think that noticing an error after presenting and after a judge asks for the deck and sideboard is “before he or she could potentially benefit from the offense”? What if a player, after giving the deck box to the judge, runs over to the deck check area to explain that he just remembered that he forgot to de-sideboard something?

Thanks for the discussion so far. :)

Josh,

I think that if the player noticed it and/or mentioned the problem because
they were being deck checked, then there should be a good deal of
skepticism about the player calling it on themselves. However, the way I
read this situation was that he was looking at his SB before the deckcheck
and realized the mistake because of that searching, not because he was
being deckchecked.

We don't want situations where a player has pre-SBed but then “remembers
that he forgot to de-SB” only when he is deckchecked. Judgement must be
used when deciding the situation.

I feel two ways about this situation - maybe it's one of those “you had to be there” judge calls. It sounds like the deck-checking judge was late on the swoop (I try to get the decks before they are touched by the opponents) and that the opponent is already shuffling A's deck before he (the floor judge) reveals the deck check. And instead of shuffling B's deck, A is checking his sideboard. For me the fact that player A is checking his sideboard when the deck check is announced tips this over to a possible downgrade by the head judge. But I really don't like it when players “remember” they forgot to desideboard only after the deck check is announced. I agree with Michael and Josh that this needs a brief investigation, and with Casey and Shawn that it is a potential downgrade situation.

The two cases are very differerent, actually, due to the presence of the judges, and I disagree that this is a downgrade. Once the judge arrives for a deck check with presented decks, the opportunity for the player to find it himself is gone. If the player finds it himself in a stack of tokens, without the judge asking for the deck, that's fine.

In this case the player was deckchecked and it is now too late to “call it on yourself”.

Now, given the tardiness penalty, you might consider downgrading because he was very flustered, but actually I wouldn't. The player, in shuffling and presenting quickly was not flustered, he was frustrated by the penalty, and that is very different. He presented quickly to prove a point. In effect, he was being spiteful because he got a GL for tardiness. The bad deck was ENTIRELY his fault, and he didn't catch it - the judges did by initiating a deck check. Basically this player adhered to NONE of the requirements that we put on players.

Now, I don't say that you shopuldn't downgrade (I wouldn't, but that's me), but I do think you have to come up with another reason for it. I do not believe that the downgrade is supported by anything that as yet has been claimed.

-Eric Shukan
—– Original Message —–


I had a similar situation at GP Verona this past weekend. A player
presents his deck, then notices the 60th card in his pile of tokens while
his opponent is shuffling his deck. He called it on himself and had no
chance for advantage. No reason not too downgrade in that case.

Casey is correct that it fits the general case to downgrade. In the
original post, Michael mentions:
“If a player upon drawing an opening hand discovers a DLP, and calls a
judge the head judge may downgrade…”

You may notice that he truncated the sentence. This removes the meaning of
the sentence. The rest of it is “…the penalty, fix the deck, and allow
the player to redraw the hand with one fewer card.”

This is from the Additional Remedy portion of the D/DL Problem section. It
is not telling you when to downgrade. It is telling you an addition fix
that you use when you chose to downgrade in this particular s ituation. It
is not saying that you can only downgrade in that situation. The times to
downgrade is described in the section of the IPG that Casey quoted. I can
understand where the confusion comes from, but I hope that this helps
clarifies it for people.

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Oh, I see now. This is why “you had to be there”. If the player was checking his sideboard, not realizing a deck check was about to happen, and was about to call attention to the error when the judge came up, I would feel comfortable downgrading. I would feel *more* comfortable if the player mentioned the failure to de-sideboard *before* the judge asked for the deck, since he was already looking at the sideboard… but without being there to get a feeling of just how long the player had to notice the error and call a judge, I can't say if it was too long or not. And of course, if I felt that the player noticed but wasn't going to say anything about it until he realized a deck check was happening, then there would be whole different conversation.

It's not clear from the original post whether the judge took the time to explain the Tardiness penalty and what it meant for the match, which could have given the player a moment to cool down and think rationally, or whether the player was acting out of spite vs. a sense of urgency due to the tardiness penalty. I would take that into consideration as well.

Edited Josh Stansfield (March 12, 2013 09:48:04 PM)

Seems to me that you COULD say that the failure to de-sideboard and the
tardiness penalty have the same root cause. He was not at his match, ready
to play.

Now, I am not sure I would say that. The relative timing its very important
here. It is something I think is worth chewing over.
On Mar 12, 2013 1:43 PM, “Josh Stansfield” <forum-3337@apps.magicjudges.org>
wrote:

Would it be worth looking into what was side boarded, and see if it fits with previous opponent? This would depend on if he called himself out before or after he knew he was being checked.