That just highlights that it is important to let the Judges doing the
deck check know that this isn't a random selection and it is targeted.
When it's targeted it is worth doing the DC after opening hands have
been decided. If it is just random and you missed it because you had
to take a ruling for 3 minutes I don't see the need to do the *hard*
deck check.

Other than practice at doing one that way.

On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 7:25 AM, Carlos Ho
<forum-3859-34f1@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:
> Scott Marshall
>
> Dominik, we changed to allow deck checks after opening hands because players
> had learned to avoid deck checks by rushing ahead.
>
> And I'm pretty sure many of us have our fair share of stories about how we
> caught a cheater after the opening hands had already been drawn.
>
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–
Gareth Pye
Level 2 Judge, Melbourne, Australia
Australian MTG Forum: mtgau.com
gareth@cerberos.id.au - www.rockpaperdynamite.wordpress.com
“Dear God, I would like to file a bug report”

Judges, thank you for all the insightful comments and thoughtful debate! Before I provide our solution, I would to highlight a few key points:

1. Unless you have a strong reason to check a specific table (e.g. a targeted deck check), don’t deck check a match after players have drawn their opening hand! Just find another table to check. While you may lose some time finding the new decklists, you prevent the confusion, embarrassment, and dissatisfaction associated with losing a player’s opening hand. (If you end up checking another table, remember to take their match slip as well so you know who you're actually checking.)

2. Alert your HJ as soon as possible. This situation will probably result in upset players, and the HJ is best-equipped to handle it.

3. Other than the IPG’s general philosophy of “When a judge makes a mistake, he or she should acknowledge the mistake, apologize to the players, and fix it if it is not too late”, there is no prescribed solution to this scenario. The solutions presented are therefore simply the Knowledge Pool’s suggestions. As always, use your best judgement.

And now, our solution:

If possible, reconstruct the player’s opening hand. You may be able to rely on memory, or deduce the contents of the hand based on the way you sorted the cards. However, be very careful with this. Memory is a fragile mental construct, and may trick you into believing you have the correct cards. Make sure you are absolutely certain if you try this method. And even if you do, ask the players to verify their opening hands when you return their decks as a final safety check.

If you cannot correctly reconstruct the player’s opening hand, it’s time to inform the players and apologize. There are a couple of reasonable ways to proceed from here:

1. Explain to the players that you lost their opening hands, and instruct them to restart the game. You may want to use this solution because it is simple and neat – you don’t have to explain why one player may or may not be allowed to mulligan, and neither player feels that the mistake was directed at them specifically.

2. Explain to the players that you lost Nancy’s opening hand, and instruct Nancy to redraw a hand of seven cards. Tell the players that, because the situation and information have changed, they may choose to mulligan from here if they wish, even if they had already chosen to keep. You may want to use this solution because it preserves game as much as possible – Adam’s hand was not disrupted, so we should not try to fix his hand.

As you can see, there are merits to going with either solution. This is a “Significant and Exceptional” problem, which means our focus is no longer adhering to policy, but rather providing good customer service. Your solution should be based on what you think players will accept more willingly – there's a good chance the players will be unhappy, let’s make sure they believe we tried our best to fix the mistake.

Okay, a decent amount of time has passed, so I'm going to talk about what Jason and I did.

When sorting the deck, I remembered that I had counted the mountains first, and the rest of the lands were sitting in a pile with mountains on top (this was a limited event). This helped me remember that the mountains I sorted were in his hand. As far as the rest of the hand, I remembered from a combination of how I sorted the cards and where the cards were in their piles.

We immediately brought this to the attention of the Head Judge, and I informed him that I was about 95% sure I had reconstructed the hand correctly. We were given the go-ahead to return the decks to the players, and I told Jason to get the players to verify their hands (I always get players to verify their hands and sideboards when I return them just incase we messed up and didn't notice) without explaining that there was a problem. Both players verified there was no discrepancy and continued playing.

As a side note, I believe the player whose hand was destroyed and reconstructed was honest because the hand we returned to him was terrible - if we hadn't returned the correct hand, he would have known immediately.

PLEASE do not use this as precedent for anything of this nature happening in the future because each situation is unique. Always check with your Head Judge before attempting something like this.

I noticed this question doesn't have an answer on the main page.

Christopher do you mean on the blog, or in this forum? In the forum the solution is two posts above by Jason Wong. If on the blog, I will make sure that gets fixed, thank you!

Fixed on the blog post! Thanks for pointing this out! :)