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Competitive REL » Post: Grabbing opponent deck and known position of cards

Grabbing opponent deck and known position of cards

Oct. 17, 2018 07:56:11 PM

Francesco Scialpi
Judge (Level 2 (International Judge Program))

Italy and Malta

Grabbing opponent deck and known position of cards

AP: Land, Preordain. Bottom, bottom, draw a card, go.
NAP: Bloodstained Mire, crack for Swamp.

NAP mistakenly grabs AP deck, looks the two cards scried on bottom, then realizes the mistake.

What do you do?

Edited Francesco Scialpi (Oct. 17, 2018 07:56:34 PM)

Oct. 17, 2018 08:03:05 PM

Lars Harald Nordli
Judge (Level 2 (International Judge Program))

Europe - North

Grabbing opponent deck and known position of cards

And I guess both players had the same colored sleeves? Hmm, I'm thinking Looking at Extra cards infraction. Warning to NAP. Shuffle the unknown portion of the library as the fix, and put any known cards back in their position. Not sure if an investigation would do anything good as it seems like an honest mistake.

Edited Lars Harald Nordli (Oct. 17, 2018 08:05:20 PM)

Oct. 17, 2018 08:10:55 PM

Francesco Scialpi
Judge (Level 2 (International Judge Program))

Italy and Malta

Grabbing opponent deck and known position of cards

Originally posted by Lars Harald Nordli:

And I guess both players had the same colored sleeves?

Let's assume that.

Oct. 22, 2018 08:14:14 PM

Winter
Judge (Level 2 (UK Magic Officials))

United Kingdom, Ireland, and South Africa

Grabbing opponent deck and known position of cards

I've had a comparable situation come up where a player wanted to Stifle their opponent's Jace, the Mind Sculptor +2 ability to keep a particular card on top. The Jace player didn't give a moment for responses and just grabbed the top card. After ruling out cheating, it was a quick arrival to Looking at Extra Cards.

Originally posted by IPG 2.2 - Looking at Extra Cards:

Definition
A player takes an action that may have enabled them to see the faces of cards in a deck that they were not entitled to see.
This penalty is applied only once if one or more cards are seen in the same action or sequence of actions.


As for the fix, there's to consider whether or not we shuffle away the scried cards. They were previously unknown to NAP. However, they weren't completely unknown and we want to follow through with the part of the fix that says “then put any known cards back in their correct locations.”

The Jace example above is perhaps more illustrative of the fact that we really don't want to shuffle away cards that one player knows about just because the other made a mistake and gained unnecessarily knowledge. We can't extract that knowledge from their head without also destroying knowledge for the other player.

You should shuffle the library, maintaining any scries including these ones. I thought about not bothering to shuffle, as it won't really change anything, although in this situation it protects us in case NAP saw the third card from the bottom. In the Jace situation, we did not shuffle and we were very sure no player had seen cards in the previously unknown portion of the library.

Edited Winter (Oct. 22, 2018 08:14:31 PM)