> On Aug 19, 2016, at 5:38 AM, Mark Mc Govern <forum-29396-ff1c@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:
>
> I imagine that very quickly becomes a giant negative feeling when you don't get your token because of a minor typo…

“Feel bads” isn't the major hurdle to overcome with the token idea.

But Let's stop for a moment and just realize that “feel bads” actually do a lot of good.

Losing feels bad -> practice more
Game Loss for being late feels bad -> be on time
Lost my best card in hand -> pay more attention and don't draw extra cards
Didn't make top 8 on breakers -> don't try to double draw into top 8 when you are unsure of the math
Missed passing L2 because you misread a few questions -> take your time next time/study more.
Get a speeding ticket-> don't speed (for about 2 weeks before the lesson wears off)

The point here is…don't default to “feel bads are bad and should be eliminated”
The point is: look at the ‘feel bad’ and determine if it's doing its job effectively.

I definitely favor the “appropriate amount of feel bads” side of things. DDLP errors are 100% in the control of the player receiving them and are 100% avoidable. I just wish we had similar knobs to turn for playmats/t-shirts/mean but not vulgar language.

Originally posted by Michael Warme:

DDLP Errors are 100% in the control of the player receiving them

I agree in general, but I think there's an exception for the case where a player forgets to take his card that was exiled by an opponent's O-Ring or similar. In that situation, both players are partially at fault, and I like being able to downgrade that one.

Originally posted by Bryan Prillaman:

Get a speeding ticket-> don't speed (for about 2 weeks before the lesson wears off)

The point here is…don't default to “feel bads are bad and should be eliminated”
The point is: look at the ‘feel bad’ and determine if it's doing its job effectively.

Is it doing its job effectively? We wouldn't be having this discussion if player errors weren't somewhat common. Anecdotally speaking, your last example (quoted) could be relevant.

I don't think we're arguing that “feel bads” should be completely eliminated, although there were sentiments mentioned by higher-up judges that they would like to eliminate(?) Game Losses one day, if possible, and I think Eli's suggestion stems from that. (This was when the new HCE stuff came around.) Can you make an argument about why eliminating Game Losses from DEC->HCE is a different situation than limiting Game Losses from D/DLP?

Dominik, you missed the point of my post.
I was specifically responding to McGovern dismissing a novel idea because a player would have “feel bads” if they failed to earn a reward because they didn't do the thing the reward was for.

I'd like to mention languages, this post originated in North America where I suspect the supply of foreign cards is lower than in Europe. This weekend I'll be heading to GP Lille, which is modern, the last modern tournament I played was 2-3 months ago. Let's have a look at my deck, I'm playing G/R tron, I'll skip past the English cards.

Four cards in I find Ulamog, der unermessliche Hunger, I have no idea what that means, fortunately at the moment it's a new enough card I can remember it. I have German copies because English seemed to be sold out everywhere, I bought these on the morning of a tournament in Italy.

Now I come across Regard sylvestre, I wasn't even playing magic when this was first printed, I bought them on the morning of a WMCQ almost a year ago, the English vendor was apologetic he didn't have any in English. I remember Sylvan because of Sylvan Library, so maybe I write this card down as “look Sylvan” or if I remember any French grammar, “Sylvan look”. Clerical error? Obvious?

There is also Fulmine, and several robot looking colorless planeswalkers that costs 7. In my sideboard there are some Gabbia del Becchio. None of these cards were obtained when I could have got English ones. Karn is unambiguous, will it always be? There is noway I can get a name from Gabbia del Becchio, though I read enough Italian to understand the card.

I don't know whether this is for or against any proposed policy changes, I just wanted to throw an example out there of how if I got up on a weekend morning and decided I would go to that modern event, so I wouldn't have written a deck list advance I might have trouble giving you a correct version.

Also, it could be me waving a grafdiggers cave under someone's nose to ask them what it was in English that distracted them from writing bolt after lightning, it could equally well be a tournament announcement.

Originally posted by Anne Harrison:

I'd like to mention languages, this post originated in North America where I suspect the supply of foreign cards is lower than in Europe. This weekend I'll be heading to GP Lille, which is modern, the last modern tournament I played was 2-3 months ago. Let's have a look at my deck, I'm playing G/R tron, I'll skip past the English cards.

Four cards in I find Ulamog, der unermessliche Hunger, I have no idea what that means, fortunately at the moment it's a new enough card I can remember it. I have German copies because English seemed to be sold out everywhere, I bought these on the morning of a tournament in Italy.

Now I come across Regard sylvestre, I wasn't even playing magic when this was first printed, I bought them on the morning of a WMCQ almost a year ago, the English vendor was apologetic he didn't have any in English. I remember Sylvan because of Sylvan Library, so maybe I write this card down as “look Sylvan” or if I remember any French grammar, “Sylvan look”. Clerical error? Obvious?

There is also Fulmine, and several robot looking colorless planeswalkers that costs 7. In my sideboard there are some Gabbia del Becchio. None of these cards were obtained when I could have got English ones. Karn is unambiguous, will it always be? There is noway I can get a name from Gabbia del Becchio, though I read enough Italian to understand the card.

I don't know whether this is for or against any proposed policy changes, I just wanted to throw an example out there of how if I got up on a weekend morning and decided I would go to that modern event, so I wouldn't have written a deck list advance I might have trouble giving you a correct version.

Also, it could be me waving a grafdiggers cave under someone's nose to ask them what it was in English that distracted them from writing bolt after lightning, it could equally well be a tournament announcement.

This is an issue I got a lot in Japan, so I have some experience with it. In Japan, many players play with English and Japanese cards mixed. Often (probably >50% of the time in fact), the solution these players use is to simply write the name of the card, as printed, on the decklist, regardless of language. Whether your native tongue is English or Japanese or German or whatever, copying characters from one piece of paper to another is not a difficult task, even if you have zero understanding of what those characters mean in a linguistic sense. By doing so, not only have you removed the ambiguity of “did I write the name of this card correctly?”, but you have also done the judge checking your list the service of telling them “These cards are non-English, so when you're looking for them in my deck, don't look for English ones”. Having done multilingual deck checks in Japan, I can tell you this was actually more of a help than a hindrance; rather, the cases where the player played English cards but wrote the names in Japanese to conform to the rest of their list (or vice-versa, although the opposite case was less of a problem because I'm good at associating card art to English names) were the problem ones for me.

Thanks for this thread. I can't help but agree with your opening statements. This penalty is easily one of the most feel-bad penalties there is in the IPG. I remember having to GL someone for writing down 4 Lightning Helix twice when it was abundantly clear he meant 4 Lightning Bolt + 4 Lightning Helix. When Theros block was legal, this was also a huge issue because of the apparently ambiguous “Xenagos”. There is in almost all cases a 0% chance of abuse and it would be great to have some more discretionary power in these circumstances. In case of typos or brain lapses, I highly doubt the ‘effectivity’ of the GL penalty. Everyone has these sometimes. In the IPG, all unintenional brain lapses are just Warnings (see GRV, HCE).
I can see some arguments for your fix being a slippery slope and decklists becoming increasingly confusing. However, in my opinion those arguments do not outweigh the severity of the GL penalties we would otherwise need to apply. So I'm all for this.

Edited Kurt Vooys (Aug. 29, 2016 08:08:23 PM)

Yeah, this proposal definitely has its heart in the right place, but I'm not convinced it is a good change. I think the cases we should consider aren't the relatively ubiquitous cards like Lightning Bolt. A while ago, I was judging Competitive Legacy, and I had a Miracles player (running Monastery Mentor) who wrote “Fire and Ice” on his sideboard. Upon deck checking this player (it was a random check), I saw that the card in the deck was actually Sword of Fire and Ice, not Fire//Ice. The player argued that, since he wrote the “and” and obviously miracles would never play Fire//Ice and often plays the Sword, the error was unambiguous and should be downgraded. As it is, I was comfortable with the game loss, and I think that is the outcome we want here. This error is potentially abusable, and at the very least, it is not clear to someone who doesn't know the deck which card it is supposed to be.

Under this proposed policy, the burden would be on me to judge if it is true that Miracles would always play the sword over the split card. We want to minimize the number of “judgment call” scenarios with our D/DLP policy to provide a maximally consistent experience. A judge in this situation who perhaps plays the same Miracles list might find this unambiguous and downgrade, where I definitely would not do so. We can justify a lot of policy changes in the name of customer service, but ultimately, we need to focus on the experience of players in general, not just those getting Game Losses for D/DLP. Consistency in the application of policy is extremely important here, and I think the current policy is much better on that front. We downgrade pretty universally for “Jace the Mind Sculpture”, but not “Bolt” (which could be Forked Bolt, which sees play and is an excellent SB card), and that's a good thing in my opinion.

Originally posted by Eliana Rabinowitz:

Under this proposed policy, the burden would be on me to judge if it is true that Miracles would always play the sword over the split card.

Actually, this isn't the case. Under the current policy, this burden is on you! And, to be honest, I'd probably have determined that it was obvious, since Fire//Ice makes no sense with no access to red mana.

My proposed policy, in general, will never require you to judge whether a card is likely to be played by a given list. The only burden is to make sure that the card corresponds to something played in the actual deck. Although in the exact case you're citing, I believe my proposal would lead to a game loss, since Fire (and) Ice is the name of an actual magic card.

Originally posted by Eli Meyer:

My proposed policy, in general, will never require you to judge whether a card is likely to be played by a given list. The only burden is to make sure that the card corresponds to something played in the actual deck. Although in the exact case you're citing, I believe my proposal would lead to a game loss, since Fire (and) Ice is the name of an actual magic card.

Eli, have you evaluated your proposal in light of actual decklists from previous events, with a delta in terms of the number of penalties issued? Specifically, how many situations that are currently Game Losses would become Warnings? Because I would like to get a feel for an actual impact on a broader scale, rather than with anecdotal situations.

While I have been reading the thread and see merit in giving the Head Judge more leeway to downgrade, I also do worry about shifting the burden of responsibility here from the player to the Head Judge to make the decision as to whether the “intended card is obvious” or that a card is unambiguous. Likewise, I also do have concerns in terms of the time to make such decisions and the consistency of such decisions. While the very nature of these scenarios and individual evaluation of judges will result in a delta on rulings here… I worry that it opens a much broader range of inconsistency. And that even with such an allowance, many Head Judges may choose to not downgrade just to be on the safe side. Because phrases like “small number” will mean different things to different people.

Even still with such an allowance, there is opportunity for “feel bads” where we somehow don't preserve the player experience because the downgrade option won't apply. And I could see many people having trouble explaining why it applied in one situation and not another.

Originally posted by Eli Meyer:

Fire//Ice makes no sense with no access to red mana.

Indeed, but don't forget to check the deck (and sideboard) for that. A lot of Miracles lists run a Volcanic Island or two, mostly for sideboard purposes (Wear // Tear being particularly sick with Counterbalance.) There's even a list on MtGTop8 with Fire // Ice main.

Originally posted by Jochem van 't Hull:

Eli Meyer
Fire//Ice makes no sense with no access to red mana.

Indeed, but don't forget to check the deck (and sideboard) for that. A lot of Miracles lists run a Volcanic Island or two, mostly for sideboard purposes (Wear // Tear being particularly sick with Counterbalance.) There's even a list on MtGTop8 with Fire // Ice main.

And this is a perfect illustration of why we shouldn't be trying to guess what ambiguous card names are.

Originally posted by Brian Schenck:

Eli, have you evaluated your proposal in light of actual decklists from previous events, with a delta in terms of the number of penalties issued? Specifically, how many situations that are currently Game Losses would become Warnings? Because I would like to get a feel for an actual impact on a broader scale, rather than with anecdotal situations.

This is a great suggestion. I'm going to reach out the the head judge and deck-checks team lead at the next constructed event I'm at to see if I can gather some data.

I think obviousness of the intended card name can be defined by other things than familiarity with the format. I tend to look at things like whether the ‘candiates’ for possible card names are the same color as the rest of the deck / make the appropriate color of mana for the deck they are in. If someone writes ‘Vessel’ on a mono-green standard decklist, I'm willing to assume it's Vessel of Nascency. If the deck is red/green, tough luck. This way I don't need to know anything about the format, and I don't need to make judgements about what's strategically obvious.