I ran an Eternal Masters draft at last week's FNM. After giving the usual “Here's how you draft” spiel, I left the drafters to it. A short while later, one of the pods called me over. One of the drafters had not drafted for a very long time (and I guess he didn't listen to my spiel). For some reason, that player thought you were supposed to take two cards out of every pack, not one. The pod discovered this at the end of pack one, when the “overdrafter” had 24 cards and everyone else had between 12 and 14. I am positive that he was not cheating - the poor kid was mortified.

I called our store's L2 for advice. After deliberation, we decided the following: There was no way to rewind the pack. There was no fair way to redistribute the cards. And we couldn't just start the draft over with new packs, since Eternal Masters packs are both too pricey and too scarce. Instead, I obtained one Eternal Masters pack from the store, shuffled it up, and doled out cards from it at random to top off the players who were missing cards. For the player that had too many cards, I shuffled his pool and removed the excess number of cards at random from it. He was allowed to keep those cards, but he could not play with them. I put that pod in its own tournament (normally we do cross-pod pairings), since I figured it would be unfair for them to have to play against people from the other pods. Finally, I gave each of them (overdrafter included) an old promo card as a “Sorry for your rocky FNM experience” door-prize.

I am very curious to know how other people might have solved this.

​
​This is a weird one and definitely falls into weird-it'll-only-happen-once
territory, but it can be good learning to share ideas.

I think I'd got with Overdrafter has already drafted a whole extra pack, so
he's going to step out for a pack. I think i'd go with him drafting
correctly in pack 2 and then sitting out of pack 3, this way he's drafted
cards going each direction in about the right amount. I'd still have 8
packs opened in the 3rd pack. thinking more to make the card numbers
correct Overdrafter gets his first 4 picks in pack 3 then steps aside.​

Cross pod pairings are always evil :P But yes pulling this pod out because
of it's issues would also make sense.

Agreed with Gareth that analyzing the specifics of your fix is kinda pointless–this one is so weird!

That said, I think you did a good job. You made a fix that at a minimum *felt* fair to the players in the pod, and you isolated the damaged to the single pod to keep it from spilling into the rest of FNM. From a customer service angle, it sounds like you handled this excellently.

Edited Eli Meyer (July 22, 2016 11:01:16 AM)

The simplest thing coming to my mind right now:
remove 12 cards at random from the overdrafter pile, and distribute these cards to other players.
I don't get why you had to open another pack … am I missing something?

I also like Jareth suggestion, but I think it gives overdrafter too much advantage … he has picked, i.e. chosen, two cards from the beginning. If he drafts 2nd pack, he is going to make his choices based on knowledge of 24 cards already in his pool, while other guys have only 12.

Edited Francesco Scialpi (July 20, 2016 11:27:41 AM)

I think the problem with removing cards from the player's picks is that they become “his” cards as soon as he picks them. I don't think we should be confiscating a player's property if at all possible, even if he didn't obtain it completely correctly.

Additionally, taking cards at random has a chance of taking away his money card that he first-picked legitimately, which doesn't seem fair. I can see an analogy to the DEC fix- shuffling it away wouldn't be fair to him, so we put it on top instead. Or in this case, let him keep the cards, but not play with them.

And indeed, they removed them for use in the tournament, not property from the player.

Good to insist on it, though - we should never confiscate other player's property. This includes proxies. We're not legally authorised for that anyways. The only thing we do (and should do) is prohibiting a player to play with these cards.