Howdy folks and welcome back to the Knowledge Pool. This week we have another Silver scenario. L2s should wait until Friday to join in the discussion.

You are head judging a Guilds of Ravnica Sealed PPTQ with a store owner (who is L0) as a helper, who is doing deck checks for the first time. You’re deck checking, and your helper tells you the deck he is checking is about half blue cards and half black cards, but on the checklist player has registered 7 Mountains and 9 Forests. He is actually playing 7 Islands and 9 Swamps, and everything else is correct. He doesn’t know what to do and asks for your help.

What do you do?

First time giving one of these a go, hope I don't embarrass myself too much!

So this appears to me to be a Decklist Problem, the decklist not matching what the player intended to play. It is not a deck problem as the decklist appears not to represent the correct form of the deck. In less clear cut cases I may speak to the player and check what they were planning to submit but it seems pretty clear here.

While the usual penalty for this is a Game Loss, in this case we may have an out: Because this is a limited tournament, we may choose not to issue this penalty if the only error is a wrong basic land count and we believe the right count is obvious. That said we can't use the contents of the deck to determine what is obvious and have to make the call from the decklist alone.

So with that in mind, I will issue the penalty here; while it is obvious that our basics are wrong, its not obvious without looking at the deck which way around the 7 and 9 islands/swamps are supposed to be.

End result: Correct the decklist and issue the player a Game Loss for the current game (or the next game if checking between rounds).

Edited Thomas Coleman (Jan. 9, 2019 12:17:01 PM)

The player has registered an incorrect decklist that does not match what they intended to play. As Thomas pointed out, we can choose to not issue this penalty if the correct basic lands are obvious. They may be obvious once looking at the land counts in the deck, but aren't just from looking at the list. Therefore we must issue the penalty.

Issue a Game Loss for Decklist Problem. Update the decklist to reflect what is actually being played.