At a Standard GPT Andrew has in a Bident of Thassa in play. His opponent Norbert has no nonland permanents and 2 cards in hand. Andrew slams down a Stormbreath Dragon sideways on the table and draws a card. Norbert immediately calls for a judge. Norbert explains what happened and says Andrew drew a card before he had a chance to respond. How do you rule?

Now, same scenario, but you see Norbert's hand and it is 2 swamps.

I assume if Norbert has no cards in hand then you tell Norbert to not be unsporting…

I am going to let others respond here, but I do want to add this:

We should not use the knowledge of private information not known by both players to make a decision on a course of action to take on a ruling, especially when us knowing that information might give away hidden information to an opponent, so situation 1 and 2 should have the same result.

OK, that's my exact opinion and what I believe is the intention of the rules. In the first two instances, I don't fault Norbert at all, and while it is a bit of rules mongering, I don't see any fault in his method of winning.

For either scenario, I would ask Norbert to speak with him away from the match so he could show me what he would have done in response at the appropiate time. Sect. 4.2 of the MTR specifies that players can't ask for priority and do nothing with it so he's going to need to indicate what he would do to respond otherwise I would tell him to resume the game at the point where the Bident's trigger resolved.

In the case where Norbert did have something to respond with and he showed Andrew what he could have done that would prevent the card draw, I would then inform Andrew that he is at fault because he took a shortcut through the combat and past a point where the opponent wanted to interrupt it. The drawing of the card is therefore a DEC infraction.

Eric, the method you propose gives hidden information to Andrew by letting him know that his opponent doesn't have a response.

Both players are required to pass priority for anything to happen in the game. We don't want to deny Norbert his option to do something or nothing. He's allowed to bluff.

Originally posted by Nick Rutkowski:

Eric, the method you propose gives hidden information to Andrew by letting him know that his opponent doesn't have a response.

Both players are required to pass priority for anything to happen in the game. We don't want to deny Norbert his option to do something or nothing. He's allowed to bluff.

Yeah. I kind of figured that after re-reading my post, but I don't have another solution to this dilemma.

I wonder what others would do in this case?

It seems to me that there are a whole bunch of steps being “skipped” here and that's more of a root problem than the sudden extra card. If Norbert is objecting on the grounds that he may have had a response to Andrew's actions, regardless of what that response is, my first instinct is to (with HJ approval) rewind to casting Stormbreath Dragon (Return a random card from Andrew's hand to his library, untap Stormbreath Dragon, and return it to the stack).

As noted by Michael Swager, I don't think we can reasonably ask for hidden information from a player to determine the potential outcome of this situation - whether Norbert has a response or not, the onus should not be on him to preempt Andrew's sudden actions.

MTR 4.1 expects players to be able to agree on the current step and/or phase, and considering that Andrew just jumped through ~4 steps without getting any confirmation from his opponent whatsoever, I believe this is the primary error we should tackle.

Andrew of course will get a stern warning about being communicative with his opponents to avoid these sorts of mishaps.

Originally posted by Nick Rutkowski:

Both players are required to pass priority for anything to happen in the game. We don't want to deny Norbert his option to do something or nothing. He's allowed to bluff.

Giving him his opportunity to bluff is my concern. I wouldn't want to bias a decision based on whether he had the ability to do anything or not. Being able to bluff seems to me at least is the ability to do something.

Originally posted by Nathaniel Lawrence:

It seems to me that there are a whole bunch of steps being “skipped” here and that's more of a root problem than the sudden extra card. If Norbert is objecting on the grounds that he may have had a response to Andrew's actions, regardless of what that response is, my first instinct is to (with HJ approval) rewind to casting Stormbreath Dragon (Return a random card from Andrew's hand to his library, untap Stormbreath Dragon, and return it to the stack).

This is in the competitive forums, so we should identify the infraction first. Then we apply any resulting penalties, and after that, we may fix it. We do it this way, because sometimes there's no need for an additional remedy because one player is issued a game/match loss.

In the given situation the dragon is put into play sideways and Andrew draws a card immediately. I'd have a hard time not applying GPE-DEC. This usually results in a Game Loss. However, we have to check whether the card drawn by Andrew is uniquely identifiable. If it's the only card in his hand, it can be identified easily and returned to the appropriate zone with minimal disruption, and for these cases the MIPG tells us to do so and to downgrade the penalty to a Warning.

Attacking with the Dragon and resolving the trigger without passing priority could be GPE-GRV, but the MIPG says that GPE-GRV handles violations of the CompRules that are not covered by the other GPE categories, and in my opinion, this situation is covered by GPE-DEC.

The identity of the cards in Nobert's hand should not be taken into account. He has the right to bluff. Taking them into account would effectively tell his opponent that Norbert has no appropriate answer to the Dragon. That's an information Andrew just shouldn't have. ;)

Edited Jasper König (Oct. 9, 2013 12:36:27 PM)

To player N I would say: “At what point would you like to respond to A's action?”

He would probably say something like: “I don't want to respond this time, but he should play slower and not rush through his actions.”

Then I would say to player A: “Please, in the future, give your opponent the opportunity to react to your actions. Especially, don't _ever_ draw a card before you are 100% sure that it is ok and supposed to happen. Thank you both, please continue playing.”


Am 09.10.2013 um 15:38 schrieb Eric Crump <forum-6376-b48b@apps.magicjudges.org>:

I strongly disagree that this should ever be DEC. The extra card is a red herring. The real issue is that one player has attempted to progress the game to a point that the other player is not ready to be at. I see two reasons not to issue DEC here:

1) The IPG has language about an infraction not being DEC if it occurred as a result of/immediately after a prior GRV, and Andrew skipping several priority passes to resolve his bident trigger sounds like a GRV to me. Although the scenario as presented says that Norbert felt he didn't have time to respond, Andrew was resolving a lot of actions, so Norbert at least had the opportunity to notice what was happening. Andrew got sloppy and shortcutted too aggressively, but he didn't magically end up with an extra card.

2) Issuing DEC establishes a precedent that you can get game losses for opponents by not acknowledging their card draw effects and then calling a judge “because I wanted to respond”. If Andrew picks up a DEC GL here then it sets an expectation that any unclear communication about card draws will turn into a game loss for the player drawing the cards. This is quite poor and we don't want to incentivize players to sit on infractions committed by opponents prior to card draws, or intentionally communicate ambiguously, to go fishing for GLs.

For me personally, I just wouldn't infract here, and get permission to back the game up to the point at which Norbert wanted to respond. Not everything is an infraction and sometimes players just communicate poorly. If you must infract I think GRV is appropriate for skipping priority passes, but DEC is not a good outcome.

Stefan, I don't think that is necessarily fair to N. He can't exactly say “I want him to back up, so I can bluff.” Can he also say, “I know he's guilty of DEC, he should get a game loss.” Should it matter if N really cared about acting at all and just wants A to get a game loss because that's the rule?

Note: I received a game loss for DEC at GP Vegas because my opponent knew the rule when I made a mistake. I'm was fine with it and had no objections. I screwed up and he called me out when it was impossible for him to win.

Originally posted by Joseph Wiesenberg:

I strongly disagree that this should ever be DEC. The extra card is a red herring. The real issue is that one player has attempted to progress the game to a point that the other player is not ready to be at. I see two reasons not to issue DEC here:

1) The IPG has language about an infraction not being DEC if it occurred as a result of/immediately after a prior GRV, and Andrew skipping several priority passes to resolve his bident trigger sounds like a GRV to me. Although the scenario as presented says that Norbert felt he didn't have time to respond, Andrew was resolving a lot of actions, so Norbert at least had the opportunity to notice what was happening. Andrew got sloppy and shortcutted too aggressively, but he didn't magically end up with an extra card.

2) Issuing DEC establishes a precedent that you can get game losses for opponents by not acknowledging their card draw effects and then calling a judge “because I wanted to respond”. If Andrew picks up a DEC GL here then it sets an expectation that any unclear communication about card draws will turn into a game loss for the player drawing the cards. This is quite poor and we don't want to incentivize players to sit on infractions committed by opponents prior to card draws, or intentionally communicate ambiguously, to go fishing for GLs.

For me personally, I just wouldn't infract here, and get permission to back the game up to the point at which Norbert wanted to respond. Not everything is an infraction and sometimes players just communicate poorly. If you must infract I think GRV is appropriate for skipping priority passes, but DEC is not a good outcome.

Just noting here that this was my line of reasoning as well. It wasn't searching for a fix before looking for an infraction - it was that this is clearly a communications breakdown first, with a possible GRV for rushing through priority passes, which are both potential grounds for a rewind, and neither really leaves room to look straight at the card draw as the first point of error. Sorry I wasn't terribly clear about that.

Edited Rebecca Lawrence (Oct. 9, 2013 02:42:24 PM)

Originally posted by Joseph Wiesenberg:

The real issue is that one player has attempted to progress the game to a point that the other player is not ready to be at. I see two reasons not to issue DEC here:

1) The IPG has language about an infraction not being DEC if it occurred as a result of/immediately after a prior GRV, and Andrew skipping several priority passes to resolve his bident trigger sounds like a GRV to me.

Shortcutting is allowed, so skipping priority passes is not a GRV.

Originally posted by Joseph Wiesenberg:

Although the scenario as presented says that Norbert felt he didn't have time to respond, Andrew was resolving a lot of actions, so Norbert at least had the opportunity to notice what was happening. Andrew got sloppy and shortcutted too aggressively, but he didn't magically end up with an extra card.

This is of course a “had to be there” scenario, but as described Andrew did not wait for any reaction between ‘slamming down Dragon tapped’ and ‘drawing a card’ thus not giving Norbert that time to respond.

Originally posted by Joseph Wiesenberg:

2) Issuing DEC establishes a precedent that you can get game losses for opponents by not acknowledging their card draw effects and then calling a judge “because I wanted to respond”. If Andrew picks up a DEC GL here then it sets an expectation that any unclear communication about card draws will turn into a game loss for the player drawing the cards.

I disagree, we're talking here about 0 communication, not unclear communication. I have no problem spreading the message “Drawing cards without giving your opponent any time to react might lead to a game loss”.
Unclear communication is a different scenario and not affected by this ruling.

Ignore the fact that the player has two swamps in his hand for a moment. I know that's hard, because we all know it.

Look at that player, from the perspective of the attacking player. You see two unknown cards. You should NEVER assume then that A) the Dragon is going to resolve, and/or B: it's actually going to connect.

Now, if there was a Duress somewhere in there, and somehow two Swamps are actually known information, then it changes for me. But 99% of the time if I see a player attack into a bunch of untapped lands and two unknown cards, and they rush to draw a card off the potential trigger, I'm giving DEC if nobody can uniquely identify the card.

Which is why you should always ask for confirmation on card draws now, so you can't actually get a Game Loss :)