Looking through IPG3.5 I stumbled on something that I don't quite understand. It's on how we choose between sideboard cards when we are having to remedy a problem.

First there's this bit in the additional remedy section:

If the deck/sideboard and decklist both violate a maximum cards restriction (usually too many
cards in a sideboard or more than four of a card), remove cards starting from the bottom of the appropriate section of the list.

Then a couple lines later in the downgrade section there's this:

If a deck is discovered to be missing cards after players have begun drawing opening hands, and the missing cards can be located, issue a Warning and shuffle those cards back into the deck.(…) If the missing card(s) are with the sideboard and it isn’t the first game, choose the ones to be shuffled into the deck at random from all sideboard cards.

The annotated IPG does a good job at explaining that we do not want the player to be able to pick and choose from the sideboard at a later time, so there's a need for a consistent approach coded into the rules. I also get that for the downgrade section it's appealing for players to have equal chances of access to all those cards that were with the sideboard, so going with a random card there feels fair.
What I cannot figure out is what the appeal is of going from the bottom of the decklist for the additional remedy, rather than a random card. Is there a historical, philosophical or mechanical reason why this has become the standard? Can someone help me understand?
Or is there no particular reason and would it be an option to change the additional remedy to also go for random cards and add some consistency to the fixes within the IPG?

If I had to guess (and I'm guessing here), the idea was probably that the decklist was legal up until the player wrote card number 16 on the sheet of paper. Therefore it is card number 16 that is responsible for the error, and hence the one that should be removed.

The first remedy applies to too many cards in a deck/sideboard (list). The
fix applies to the list, after which the deck will be made to match the
list. The philosophy is that the card(s) written down last are the ones
last added and should be the first removed.

The downgrade section is about a deck not containing enough cards (illegal
deck), while the list can be completely legal. In this case the deck needs
to be made legal again, which is done by adding cards to the deck from the
sideboard. To prevent a player from benefiting from their error, we do this
randomly.

However, I could see another specification that can be added to this fix;
If you've found a specific card, on the floor or previously exiled, which
is determined to be part of the deck, shuffle that card back in.

-R.


2017-02-28 12:11 GMT+01:00 Quinten van de Vrie <

I have been judging for a significant period (20 years) the explanation provided to me many years ago when I asked about this was “sideboards are usually filled out in the order of importance” So removing the last card would be removing the least important sideboard card.

That being said, Mark's logic makes a lot of sense as well.

Edited Jim Shuman (Feb. 28, 2017 09:51:55 PM)

The other difference here is that in once case, we are (in essence) sideboarding for a player for one game, which we'd want to do randomly to avoid doing it arbitrarily and inconsistently (sideboarding well for some players and poorly for others, and inviting charges of favoritism).

In the other case, we're determining which cards properly belong in a player's sideboard for the entire event. Making this kind of determination randomly would be potentially very disruptive to a player's event. We still want to have a neutral method for determining which cards to remove from the list (favoritism is still a consideration), but since randomly removing cards is too disruptive here, we instead opt for removing cards from the bottom of the list, on the theory that the cards near the bottom of the list are the least likely to significantly disrupt the overall sideboard plan of the deck.

Thanks for the feedback so far everyone.

The reasoning that the last sideboard card added would be the one of least relevance does make eliminating cards from the bottom of the list appealing if true.
However, I have a hard time believing this is actually the case. Since I was skeptical of people sorting their sideboard in such a way, I asked around in my (admittedly small) local community what order they go by. The responses varied, I heard: by colour, by frequency, converted mana cost, similar effects together, by card type and most frequently just in arbitrary order. What I didn't here was order of importance. If this got you curious and you want to poll your own communities I'm curious to hear about the feedback you get.
Now I understand that finding that this group of players does not sort their sideboard cards in descending order of importance does not mean that nobody does. But even when people do I'm skeptical that going from the bottom matters because their appears to be a bit of a selection bias. Intuitively I would think that the type of person that sorts their sideboard by order of importance is a very organised and structured thinker. Exactly those organised and structured thinkers are the least likely players to ever register too many cards in their sideboards. Sorting sideboard cards in order might essentially cause people to self-select out of ever having the fix applied to them.

Just eliminating the last card(s) added because they are the offending card works, but strikes me as no less arbitrary than going with a random card.

The one thing I did come up with in the mean time is that going from the bottom being codified might make some people more thoughtful of their sideboard order. If that phrase just being in the rules makes people more likely to be attentive and list a legal number of cards than that's a fine enough benefit I suppose.

I don't think the current rule of removing from the bottom is broken by any means. It does exactly what it needs to do and fixes the decklist to be legal. So I'm not going to argue for any massive overhaul here.
That being said, I haven't seen anything to convince me that going with a random card wouldn't be equally as effective at fixing the problem. And going with a random card is something we do on a different occasion when sideboard cards are involved. It feels to me like the IPG could be more consistent there.

So maybe there's some food for thought there, and maybe it's something to consider if/when changes to that section of the IPG are made.

Edited Quinten van de Vrie (March 1, 2017 02:22:12 PM)

I'm with you there - my experience has been that everyone writes their sideboards down in different orders.

But I strongly suspect that most illegal sideboards stem from last minute changes - e.g. The printed decklist which then has pen scribbles and crossing out and cards added. I think I've only ever had this infraction come up once, and that's what it was. So the late additions to the sideboard were at the bottom of the list, while the unchanged cards were still at the top of the list.

While that still doesn't mean that the bottom cards are less important or not, I think it comes close enough.

And one other explanation I remembered is by doing it this way, we have a consistent method or correcting the deck list.

Originally posted by Jim Shuman:

by doing it this way, we have a consistent method

This.

It's interesting that some wanted to rationalize it by saying “last = least”, or even “last card(s) made it illegal”, but I think the consistency was the only real objective.

I'll agree, that rule has been in place a long time - maybe since the change that made decklist problems a Game Loss (used to be DQ)…

d:^D

Edited Scott Marshall (March 1, 2017 11:42:18 PM)