Hello fellow judges,

I'd like to have your opinion on a situation I encountered last weekend during a tournament in Ghent.

Situation is as follows:

2 players are playing a game, the score is 0-1 in favor of player 2.
There are only 15 minutes left in the round.

The second game starts, both players draw 7 cards.
Player 1 decides to keep
Player 2 takes a mulligan.
Player 2 draws 6 cards and decides to take another mulligan.
Player 1 says the following: “in order to save time, if your hand is bad again, we could just go to the next game”
Player 2 replies: “I will see after I draw my hand”
Player 2 draws 5 cards. He looks at them and says “OK”
Player 1 thinks he is saying ok for going to the next game and shuffles his hand into his library.
Player 2 says he wants to play the game and that's why he said OK.
They call a judge.

What is the correct fix for this situation?

Thanks in advance

Bastiaan

“OK” does not explicitly mean “Yes, I want to go to the next game”. Player 1 should have confirmed Player 2's intent before shuffling his hand away. Player 1 has committed a Mulligan Procedure Error by shuffling their hand away after already announcing they would keep it, and it should be handled accordingly. Player 1 now mulligans to 5 (not 6, as the remedy here is a forced additional mulligan).

Originally posted by Bastiaan Smis:

What is the correct fix for this situation?

There really isn't a “correct” fix for every corner case; our documents would simply become unmanageable.

However, it seems to me - from your necessarily limited description, as opposed to being able to ask the players questions - that player 1 made a poor assumption. I would probably have him complete his pregame procedure again - finish shuffling, then draw 7 cards, and allow mulligans.

This is not HCE, as the mistake can be corrected with public information - he had 7 random cards in hand. We know it was 7, because of the odd circumstances; we know they were random, because no other actions had affected the hand yet.

d:^D

Ack, early submit!

This is also not MPE, as the player was not attempting to mulligan, they were simply acting on a miscommunication. While the error was almost entirely theirs, it's fair to say that player 2 could have improved the communication, by being more specific (“I'll keep this” or similar).

I hesitate to assess any infraction. It's an error of communication, but not a CPV.

d:^D

Edited Scott Marshall (Sept. 21, 2017 03:44:45 PM)

Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

he had 7 random cards in hand

I disagree with this assessment: the cards are not random anymore, as Player 1 has looked at them and decided to keep them. While I find your solution elegant (and something I'd like to do at Regular REL!), I think that at Competitive REL we need to follow the procedure that Nathaniel pointed out: Player 1 committed a MPE and should mulligan to 5. I'm very tempted to feel pity for that player and let them mulligan to 6, but that would be a deviation, and these circumstances don't read that exceptional to me.

I agree this is MPE, although I have to say we're really stretching the meaning of “makes an error during the mulligan process”.
But I disagree with Dustin. The player intent was not to take a mulligan, so the “additional mulligan” should make him go to 6 cards, not 5.

Dustin is correct that the cards are not random- Player 1 had the opportunity to mulligan and did not. That's a choice made upon the cards, and we now know that the cards are better than a 7-card hand that they would have mulliganed.

However I don't believe this changes Scott's point. No MPE was committed- Player 1's action was perfectly legal in their reality, while illegal in Player 2's reality. Both players were partially at fault for unclear communication, but Player 1 is the one who actually took the action without being clear, so we should go with Player 2's reality of the game not having ended.

As for how to fix Player 1's hand, I agree with having them simply redraw to 7 and continue from there. There is no penalty for miscellaneous communication errors, we just try to restore the game state as best we can. We don't know what cards were in the original hand, so the best we can do is give them a new 7.

Edited Isaac King (Sept. 21, 2017 05:35:33 PM)

I also agree that it is an MPE. One of the examples fits into this case, in my opinion:
Here we have P1 who decides to keep, then re-shuffles his card back after his opponent (P2) has made a decision (in this case, keep).
I cannot see, however, why he should be mulliganing to 5. In my view, up to the point of error he had a hand of 7 cards.

If you imagine the situation described and mute the sound, it does resemble a case for MPE. However, i don't think discarding communication here does us any good, because it contains relevant information about what the root cause of the issue is.
The same is true for a lot of other situations and errors.

Originally posted by Samuele Tecchio:

I cannot see, however, why he should be mulliganing to 5. In my view, up to the point of error he had a hand of 7 cards.

If you think this is a MPE you should apply MPE's additional remedy and it does not allow any form of backup :

If cards are not removed from the hand this way (either due to an error that didn't lead to too many cards, or by the player choosing not to reveal), that player takes an additional mulligan.

Emphasis mine for later use.

Player 1 was obviously not trying to mulligan but if we allow him to draw 7 cards again he has now the advantage to decide weather to mulligan or not knowing his opponent has a 5 cards hand. I'd also highlight that Player 2 doesn't have much responsibility in this situation, saying “Ok” to keep a hand seems very normal to me.

I really like what Federico said, and looking at the sentence I highlighted I'm wondering why it was written this way instead of clearly saying “due to the player chosing to mulligan when he wasn't allowed to”. It feels like it does fit the scenario and this more cryptic writing was made to cover up some corner cases like this one.

Player 1 did not mulligan. Player 1 shuffled their hand into their library since the game had ended, at least as far as Player 1 was concerned. It turns out that they were mistaken, but we don't shoehorn communication mistakes into superficially similar infractions.

There was a similar situation a week or two ago you can read about here. And here's a nice article written a while back by Kevin Deprez about this sort of thing.

Originally posted by Àre Maturana:

if we allow him to draw 7 cards again he has now the advantage to decide weather to mulligan or not knowing his opponent has a 5 cards hand

That's true, but one player is going to be gaining at least a small advantage pretty much every time an error occurs. Official policy is written so that it's usually the player who didn't commit the error who gets the advantage, but it's impossible for that to be true every time. And in this case it's not as much of an advantage for Player 1 as you might think- he just replaced a hand that he was comfortable keeping with a hand that he might now have to mulligan.

Originally posted by Àre Maturana:

If you think this is a MPE you should apply MPE's additional remedy and it does not allow any form of backup

My use of the words “point of error” was not suggesting a backup. I was using them to state that, at the moment when the error was committed, the player had a 7-card hand. But I agree with all your reasoning.

If I understood correctly, we have a solution that hinges on us being certain that this was a communication error and with a solution that is less punitive. And another solution (MPE) that, albeit being more punitive for something that could be only communication error, allows us to stick to the policy documents.

So player 1 made a non-trivial error during pre-game procedures? I feel strongly that this is MPE. Communication weirdness may have caused it, but it does not fit CPV so it is not CPV.

As for the fix, player 1 shuffled his cards into his library. It was not an error that led to too many cards in hand (it was caught before drawing a new hand) so all we do is make it a forced mulligan. Player 1 goes to six and can continue mulligan procedures from there.

Remember, it does not have to fit any of the examples to fit the description of the infraction and it does not matter if the player thought he was doing a correct thing if he wasn't.

Full disclosure, when I first read it in Bastiaans tournament report ( https://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/topic/38346/ , no additional context ) I was less sure:

Originally posted by me:

Interesting, what a weird situation. I am not sure what the correct fix would be but I definitely feel that player 1 should not just get a free new hand. It does not really seem to fit any infraction either, though. Player 1 basically decided to end game 2 (although based on misinformation, but that was caused by his own weird suggestion anyway). I partially feel inclined to hold him to that and count it as that he conceded game 2. On the other hand, we might be able to just make it a GPE - Mulligan Procedure Error, which would punish player 1 way less severely. We would just force him to take an actual proper mulligan (so he wouldn't get a new 7, he would get 6 + eventual scry after keep). Make sure to be quite clear when entering the penalty into WER about the weirdness of the situation beforehand because this is an interesting thing to keep track of.

I guess I wasn't clear enough: this is not MPE, this is not CPV. It's a simple misunderstanding, not really covered by policy - not everything can be! - and quite definitely a corner case scenario. In this extreme example, we use judgment, guided by - but not constrained by - what we learn from policy documents.

Let me reiterate: not every oddball situation that players can (and will!) create, could possibly be covered by our policy documents. That's not a failing of policy, it's an acknowledgment that people do strange things, sometimes. Stop trying to interpret exactly the letter of the law, so to speak; instead, work that hard at understanding the philosophy behind our policies, so you're well-prepared to deal with the exceptions that will occur.

This is one of those exceptions. It isn't (doesn't have to be!) an infraction; we don't have to find the closest infraction, in order to undo most of the damage done.

A very basic philosophy applies here: we want players to play the game as organically as possible. The closest we can come to that, is to reset player A's hand - i.e., seven random cards - and let him repeat the pregame process. It's not perfect, but I maintain that it's minimally invasive.

For those who were determined to apply the IPG: A didn't take a mulligan, he was already past pregame and thought the game was over; arguably, he scooped, thus conceding that game and losing the match!
Hopefully, through that ludicrous example, you'll better understand my point, that we can't always apply the IPG to everything.

d:^D