Judge! My opponent shuffled my hand into my library on accident.
Additional information: this WAS an accident. It is at comp. REL. The player who shuffled the cards in does not know what was in his/her opponents hand.
Penalty/fix? (after slapping them that is)

Why was their opponent handling the hand, and why was the opponent shuffling?

Player casts Farseek, puts hand face down on table and resolves spell. Presents deck for shuffling by placing the deck on the table *gets distracted by flying spaghetti monster*. Opponent thinks the hand are cards that fell off the top of the deck, puts them on top and begins his own shuffling.

I know that the classic fix for “oops, I shuffled my hand into my deck” is “sorry, you now have no hand.” However, that doesn't seem to apply here, given that it was the opponent who made the shuffling error.

If there's some applicable philosophy/guidance here, I'd love to hear it.

With what I know right now, though, I think that this case fits the IPG's criteria of a significant and exceptional circumstance. If the game hasn't progressed beyond 2 or 3 turns, it might be fairest to restart the game (no sideboarding). Certainly assess a GRV to the opponent, and remind both players to be more careful about handling each other's cards – in particular, the Farseek player should watch his deck when his opponent is shuffling it!

Originally posted by Paul Baranay:

I know that the classic fix for “oops, I shuffled my hand into my deck” is “sorry, you now have no hand.” However, that doesn't seem to apply here, given that it was the opponent who made the shuffling error.

If there's some applicable philosophy/guidance here, I'd love to hear it.

With what I know right now, though, I think that this case fits the IPG's criteria of a significant and exceptional circumstance. If the game hasn't progressed beyond 2 or 3 turns, it might be fairest to restart the game (no sideboarding). Certainly assess a GRV to the opponent, and remind both players to be more careful about handling each other's cards – in particular, the Farseek player should watch his deck when his opponent is shuffling it!

Ultimately, this is a problem for the HJ to deal with. As a FJ, I'd run over and get the HJ.

As a HJ, the decision is more sticky. From my understanding of the MTR, whenever a card instructs you to shuffle your library, we treat it as though the card is instructing the owner to shuffle their library, then to pass it to their opponent to shuffle. As a result, the opponent has not properly executed a card's instructions, which means this situation falls under GPE - GRV. To me, here's the philosophy in the IPG that I think most strongly applies:

IPG 1.2
A Game Loss is issued in situations where the procedure to correct the offense takes
a significant amount of time that may slow the entire tournament or causes significant disruption to the tournament, or in which it is impossible to continue the game due to physical damage. It is also used for some infractions that have a higher probability for a player to gain advantage.

IPG 1.3
Any time a penalty is issued, the judge must explain to the players involved the infraction the procedure for fixing the situation and the penalty. If the Head Judge chooses to deviate from the Infraction Procedure Guide, the Head Judge is expected to explain the standard penalty and the reason for deviation.

This is clearly a situation where it is impossible to continue the game in any reasonable fashion due to physical damage. It's also an infraction that has a very high probability for a player to gain an advantage. As a result, as a HJ I would likely choose to deviate from the IPG and issue the player who shuffled in his opponent's hand a GPE -GRV with a GL penalty. I'd explain that this infraction is normally a warning, but due to the reasons I described above I feel the best option to preserve the integrity of the tournament is to deviate.

Originally posted by Paul Baranay:

If there's some applicable philosophy/guidance here

While I have no gems of wisdom to offer, here's my, maybe odd, approach to an already awkward situation.

W/o trying to reverse-engineer anything here – and now I'm looking at a situation where we can't simply re-start the game – I seem to see enough similarities here with what bothers us about hidden information violation while committing a GRV (like, not revealing a morph card at the end of a game) that I'd go with a W for GRV upgraded to a GL.

Reasoning in a nutshell. “Shuffle” is part of the technical language of the CR, so a GRV for shuffling the wrong cards is not totally inapplicable. Hidden Info Viol comes with an upgrade, first, since legality of cards can no longer be established (which is the case) and, second, b/c any attempt at fixing it is likely to delay the whole tournament (which is the case).

Originally posted by Bernd Buldt:

Paul Baranay
If there's some applicable philosophy/guidance here

While I have no gems of wisdom to offer, here's my, maybe odd, approach to an already awkward situation.

W/o trying to reverse-engineer anything here – and now I'm looking at a situation where we can't simply re-start the game – I seem to see enough similarities here with what bothers us about hidden information violation while committing a GRV (like, not revealing a morph card at the end of a game) that I'd go with a W for GRV upgraded to a GL.

Reasoning in a nutshell. “Shuffle” is part of the technical language of the CR, so a GRV for shuffling the wrong cards is not totally inapplicable. Hidden Info Viol comes with an upgrade, first, since legality of cards can no longer be established (which is the case) and, second, b/c any attempt at fixing it is likely to delay the whole tournament (which is the case).

The problem with TE-CPV is that it deals specifically with abuses and/or errors involving MTR 4.1, which has to do with what makes information free, derived, or hidden and how we handle the differences between them. None of that really applies here.

Originally posted by Darcy Alemany:

The problem with TE-CPV is

I was referring to Section 2.5 of the MIPG and its upgrade philosophy.

Originally posted by Bernd Buldt:

Darcy Alemany
The problem with TE-CPV is

I was referring to Section 2.5 of the MIPG and its upgrade philosophy.

Fair, sorry about the misinterpretation. I still don't think this situation falls under that philosophy. The opponent can certainly determine the legality of their opponent shuffling their hand into their library: it's absolutely illegal. This upgrade path involves those errors that an opponent can't verify: adding cards to a hand without revealing as appropriate, or not revealing morphs at the end of a game.

If a HJ is going to give a GRV infraction for this, I think upgrading the penalty is almost certainly a deviation.

Originally posted by Darcy Alemany:

The opponent can certainly determine the legality of their opponent shuffling their hand into their library

Darcy: While I'm NOT trying to defend my proposal – such corner cases usually allow for many and quite different resolutions – I maybe should clarify more. The legality issue I see refers to individual cards, not actions. Once you have shuffled a face-down card back into the deck, it can no longer be determined whether it was legally played (whether it had morph or not). Likewise, once you shuffled the hand into the library, you can no longer determine whether a particular card was previously in his or her hand or not (ie., you can no longer legally restore the player's hand).

Regardless, I think that this situation is pretty straight-forward. The opponent has performed an illegal action that ended up putting the player's hand into his library. We've come to the conclusion that this was not intentional. There is no way to bring the game-state back to normal, save the opponent had just used a Gitaxian Probe or another hand-looking card immediately prior to the Farseek and wrote down the results. Since this is a large breach to the integrity of the match, a fitting - but fair - penalty should be issued. A Game Loss to the opponent seems to be the best option given the scenario, since allowing the current game to continue is impossible without giving the player a major disadvantage.

As for the penalty, I should first state that a Floor Judge should likely not make a ruling in this scenario, and rather retrieve the Head Judge. The reasoning for this is explained above: this is a GRV for taking an illegal action, which is shuffling a hand into a library without something making that happen. However, this being a rare situation and a corner-case, issuing a GL would be a deviation, and would have to be made by the HJ. (Also, there has to be an investigation for cheating in such situations).

As a HJ, however, I would personally issue a Game Loss on a GRV.

Edited Peter Richmond (April 11, 2013 12:15:28 AM)

Originally posted by Darcy Alemany:

This is clearly a situation where it is impossible to continue the game in any reasonable fashion due to physical damage.

What is the nature of the physical damage in this situation? Because I think “physical damage” is being taken to mean something other than what the phrase is intended to mean. Likewise, I find that going to the definition of “Game Loss” as a reason to issue that penalty in this situation rather than the standard Warning is overlooking the following…

As a result, no attempt should be made to determine or correct any advantage gained in assessing the penalty and associated procedures for fixing the offense.

…and it seems to me that there's more “correction” for what the opponent did to the player by accident, especially as the player seems to have contributed to the situation by putting his hand close enough to the library where it was reasonably confused as being part of the library.

Any thoughts about determining how many cards he should have and simply having him draw that many cards from the top of his library? Both players contributed to this happening, and there's pretty much equal chance of this being advantageous or disadvantageous to either player. Obviously this is a deviation, but this whole situation is a corner case.

I don't see any reason to deviate. This is a bummer for the guy who lost his hand, but he would have been able to stop the problem from ever occurring if he were paying attention to his cards.

There's nothing we can do to fix it, GPE-GRV, Warning for the opponent. No rewind, no partial fix, continue play. Tell the active player to keep his hand and deck clearly separated, and watch his game instead of that Flying Spaghetti Monster, especially when his opponent is handling his deck. Tell the opponent to be more careful, and be sure to ask his opponent if he isn't totally sure where cards belong.

If we explain that there is, essentially, nothing we can do to fix this game, we can hope the players might reach some mutually agreeable outcome, such as “I'll concede since I'm the one who messed up…” or “Want to just draw this game and start over?” I probably wouldn't directly ask the players to consider these options, but I definitely would approve of that sporting behavior if it was offered. :)