Hello and welcome back to the Knowledge Pool! We have a Silver scenario this week, so L2s should wait until after their FNM to join the discussion.


Antoine and Nancy are playing in a standard Grand Prix event. Antoine, who controls three untapped Cryptbreakers, taps one of them and two swamps, draws a card, and marks down one life loss on his note sheet. Nancy stops him to point out the mistake and Antoine replies, “Oops! I meant to draw a card but I activated the wrong ability. I was supposed to tap my two other zombies instead of the lands. Judge!”

What do you do?

Antoine's actions during activation of his Cryptbreaker seems pretty clear that he intended to activate the second ability, so I would treat this as a GPE - GRV, by failing to pay the correct cost for the ability.

The fix is more difficult.

Option A (the fix I think is the correct answer): Entirely back up the activation by placing a card from Antoine's hand onto the top of the library (Nancy will choose which one), putting him back up one life, and untapping the swamps and the Cryptbreaker. Antoine can choose to activate the ability now, but is not required to.

Option B (the fix I'd much rather use but I don't think it fitsanywhere in the IPG): Antoine's ability has already resolved, and we will leave it that way – no revealing his hand to Nancy. However, we will require that he pay the correct cost by simply untapping the two swamps and tapping the other two Cryptbreakers. In other words, we back up the activation but then re-activate the ability by paying the correct cost.

Option C (the fix I think is technically correct but not the best choice here): Leave the game state as-is, no backup.

This situation – incorrect casting/activation costs – has been a big concern for me since I first started judging! I REALLY want Option B to be a partial fix in the IPG, but I don't see it. This same issue arose with the “It's Plain to See” scenario (https://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/topic/34340/ ), and I really disliked the solution although I understand that it is official. Why can't we simply partial-fix the incorrect tapping of mana, rather than backing up through the entire activation? Instead, we have to back up the entire ability, including the scry/draw, and then afterwards we don't even require the player to activate or cast correctly?

In short, I wish there were a partial fix for incorrectly paying casting costs or activation costs. Maybe I'm missing something…I think I'm going to create a discussion in the Competitive REL forum so we can discuss it further.

Edited April Miller (June 14, 2017 11:36:53 AM)

Originally posted by April Keeler:

I think I'm going to create a discussion in the Competitive REL forum so we can discuss it further.

Looking forward to this discussion!

Originally posted by April Keeler:

Hi April, just to correct you on option A, the correct fix should be to shuffle the excess card into the unknown part of the library, not place it on top.

Originally posted by Kenneth Pletinckx:

Hi April, just to correct you on option A, the correct fix should be to shuffle the excess card into the unknown part of the library, not place it on top.

I believe this is incorrect. If a backup is determined to be warranted here (and I believe if it's caught at this point specifically and no other actions are taken, that a backup here is feasible), a card from AP's hand is randomly selected to be put back on top of the library, we fix the life total for AP, and Cryptbreaker and the lands are untapped (since the payment of the second activated ability is the rule violation). Deciding to activate Cryptbreaker's ability was a legal play, and once we've backed up to the untapping of Cryptbreaker and two lands, paying for the activated ability's cost is required.

Originally posted by IPG 1.4 - Backing up:

If the identity of a card involved in reversing an action is unknown to one of the players (usually because it was drawn), a random card is chosen from the possible candidates.

My response is ultimately GRV for active player and potential backup pending HJ approval as outlined above.

Looking back at the mentioned “It's Plain to See” KP that April linked, I think that this one would be:

GPE - GRV - Warning for Antione for paying an incorrect cost, no punishment for Nancy.

In this I would go with no backup, because Antione now knows the top card of his library (and after a backup would still know the card on top because it was in his hand) and could change his play by activating Cryptbreakers first ability, to make a zombie, instead of the second ability. Since we don't want backups to lead to different lines of play, the game state would be left as it is.

I also agree with April in that a partial fix for fixing costs paid would be helpful, but could be harder in a format with dual lands, and in determining if any decisions were made based on the error. Since we don't have that partial fix, I would go with the above.

If anyone is interested in the discussion of a partial fix in situations like this, I posted on the Competitive REL forum here:

https://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/topic/36189/

I look forward to hearing from you all about this. :)

I think that the infraction here is an HCE.

This clause: "Be careful not to apply this infraction in situations where a publicly-correctable error subsequently leads to an uncorrectable situation“ exists because we want both player to be responsible for their game-state.
If AP, before dealing with different sets of hidden infos, commits an error that NAP can see then there's at least one chance for the situation to be stopped before it will get worst.
If no-one notice the visible error, then the responsibility lies on both players and, consequently, we have to consider it to be a GRV and not an HCE. We don't want NAP to look at AP's hand (or set) if the error is his/her fault too.

My question here is: which one is the ”publicly-correctable error" made by AP, in our scenario, before drawing a card?
Is it forgetting to discard a card?
If it is so, well: that's not an action. It's a non-action. This is why it's impossible for NAP to realize that this action is missing before AP draws a card.
Actually, drawing a card is the very first moment in which NAP has the chance to realize that something wrong is happening. But it's already too late.
That's why I'd consider it to be an HCE.

Edited Jacopo Strati (June 18, 2017 01:14:05 AM)

As a side note, a very very basic advice I offer to players is: before drawing an extra card, always ask permission from your opponent. Maybe he wants to play something in response, or whatever.

If AP had asked permission before drawing, this scenario would be trivial.

Not to say we shouldn't question ourselves with scenarios like this, of course - just to say that we can and should always try to educate players as much as possible.

Thanks everyone for all the participation this week. We really appreciate the desire to make changes to policy to make situations like this better, and I'm following the thread that April created in the other forum.

As for the solution, April pointed to the recent scenario It's Plain to See. In that case, there was a previous error: the wrong mana was tapped to cast Veteran Motorist, so we have GRV and choose rewind or no rewind.

In this scenario, it appears that we have a previous error: something went wrong with activating Cryptbreaker. However, NAP could not see there was a mistake before the card draw. AP tapping Cryptbreaker and two swamps was a legal action; drawing a card instead of discarding a card to finish paying the cost of Cryptbreaker’s ability is the illegal action. Because the first illegal action matches HCE, this is HCE.

Many judges I've talked to about this say that the error was incorrectly activating the Cryptbreaker's ability because it was clear that Antoine wanted to draw a card. The issue here is that only Antoine knows which ability he wants to activate until the point of the error, which was drawing a card. If Antoine had said “draw a card” or “activate the draw ability” then the error would be at that point, but he did not. Thus, there is no prior illegal action at the point of the draw.

Antoine receives a warning for Game Play Error - Hidden Card Error

To fix this error, Antoine reveals his hand to Nancy and she chooses one card to be shuffled back into the random portion of Antoine library. Antoine untaps his Cryptbreaker and two swamps and resumes play.

Since I expect some additional discussion to be desired here, I'm going to lock this thread now and open a discussion thread in the Competitive REL forum.

Edited Joe Klopchic (June 19, 2017 10:55:16 AM)