Welcome to Personal Tutor, where we discuss how to maximize our opportunities for player education. Our goal is to transcend the basic answer to create an informative answer that the player will really remember. You may even find this process helps you come to a better understanding of rules and policy yourself.

Our scenario this month is the product of some educational cross pollination and comes from Nick Rutkowski and the Knowledge Pool team!

The Scenario:
You are watching a match between Ambivalent and Nonplussed at a Standard PTQ. Ambivalent casts Domri Rade, which Nonplussed counters with Dissolve. Ambivalent looks at his hand, shrugs, then passes the turn. Nonplussed untaps her lands. At this point, you stop the match and tell Nonplussed that she forgot to Scry. That's a Game Rules Violation, so you are issuing her a Warning.
Nonplussed looks at you quizzically, “I could have just chosen to leave it on top and it would be the same as what I did. You're giving me an actual penalty for this?”

The Basic Answer:
You broke the game rules, so you get a Warning.

This month, there are no complicated rules interactions to contend with. Just a simple and common mistake. But good education applies to policy at least as much as it does to rules. How can you best answer this question from Nonplussed?

L1s and Judge Candidates, feel free to give your answers immediately. L2s, please wait a day to add your input. L3+, please wait two days.

Here's my answer for this times personal tutor:

Nonplussed, the problem is that it is part of the card's text, so you need to follow the whole cards text, even if it doesn't seem to make any difference for you. There is always a chance that there is something on the battlefield that cares about the scry effect, or your opponent might have chosen to do something differently, if he knew you kept the card on top. If you really don't want to look at the card, please mention that you're leaving it at the top as part of the scry effect.

(I hope that mentioning that you scry by leaving the cards where they are is a suitable way of scrying.)

When you cast and resolve a spell, you are expected to fully and correctly resolve the spell. The knowledge of the top card of your library is, in fact, a change in gamestate and we can't pick and choose which spells we enforce these rules. Don't worry too much, I am only issuing a warning to each of you as a reminder to play more carefully. Nonplussed, I'm issuing a Game Rule Violation and Ambivalent, you are getting a warning for Failure to Maintain Gamestate since we'd like you to make sure your opponents resolve your spells correctly. You may continue play and I'll give you two extra minutes for the time it took to give this ruling.

You're only allowed to skip two things:
1) optional instructions and
2) triggers that would have no impact on game play.
Scry is not an optional instruction. I'd give you a warning if it was Dismiss and you didn't draw a card too.

Edited Todd Bussey (Jan. 3, 2014 09:29:02 AM)

Seems like Nonplussed is basically asking for an appeal, if not precisely. Explaining scrying is not something she is allowed to skip, and you as a judge are not able to overlook the offense seems like roughly the right direction to go, but if she still seems unconvinced after my explanation, I'd reiterate her right to issue an appeal to the Head Judge.

Slight variation to this. What if Nonplussed reveals that earlier in the turn she had already scryed, and chose to leave the card top? At this point, would you still insist on the warning?

Originally posted by David Xu:

Slight variation to this.

Let's not propose any variations. The Warning here is the correct policy to enforce. (There is more policy to apply that hasn't been mentioned, but the GRV Warning is the only part of it that matters for the discussion so far.)

The thing I would like people to be thinking about is the response to this question:

“You're giving me an actual penalty for this?”

There are a couple things that I would want to address in response to N's questioning. (As far as I can tell, it's been a full day - if I should wait a few hours longer in the future, please notify.)

First, there is the issue of the question itself.

I would want to inform N that:
1) The penalty is just a Warning - it has no impact on the game state and is not meant to be excessively punitive, but is intended to make an official note of such behavior in the event that there is a pattern of improperly resolving spells / abilities in the tournament. Inform her that we recognize that Magic is a game played by humans, and that we recognize that humans do not play perfectly, and we take steps to balance this fact with the potential for abuse.
2) While in this case, the potential for abuse is minimal, we do have to make sure we apply policy uniformly. It would not be fair to assess penalties in a haphazard manner. Doing so opens the door to problems of potential favoritism, if judges are applying penalties in a manner that is not consistent. It is the philosophy of the judge program that applying penalties in a manner consistent with the documents is the best way to ensure such uniformity and procedural fairness.

There is also the manner of the way in which the question is asked. Depending on exactly what was said and the intonation, there is the potential for a USC - Minor warning. However, I am hesitant to apply a penalty in this situation. I note that in the header for USC, there is the following line:

Unsporting behavior is not the same as a lack of sporting behavior. There is a wide middle ground of “competitive”
behavior that is certainly neither “nice” nor “sporting” but still doesn’t qualify as “unsporting.” The Head Judge is
the final arbiter on what constitutes unsporting conduct.

In this case, I would want to recognize that as this is a game played by humans, we note that people sometimes get overly upset over seemingly trivial matters, and that giving a USC penalty here seems more likely to escalate the situation, particularly given the frustration already present. While being upset over a seemingly trivial penalty is not the paragon of sporting behavior, I would likely take the view that being upset is reasonable here, and I wouldn't think that this necessarily requires an escalation to a formal USC penalty, though a verbal caution may be worth considering in this situation. In either case, I would want to recognize in this situation that tensions may be high, and offer N a moment or two to step away and cool down, with the requisite time extension being provided. If I'm not the HJ at this event (it's not clear one way or another what the respondent's tournament role is), I would also remind N that he/she retains the right to an appeal to the HJ if he/she wishes.

Originally posted by Aric Parkinson:

…but if she still seems unconvinced after my explanation, I'd reiterate her right to issue an appeal to the Head Judge.

Be careful not to use the option to get the Head Judge as a ‘crutch’ of sorts. While yes, players always have this right no matter what the ruling is, 9 times out of 10 this is a situation where the floor judge should easily be able to resolve the situation.

Basically, dragging the Head Judge into this particular issue means that either (a) we've failed to clearly explain what's going on to the player; or (b) we're dealing with a particularly disagreeable player. Personal Tutor has been set up to eliminate the chance of (a) as much as possible. There's a lot less we can do about situation (b) though :)

Originally posted by Joshua Feingold:

The thing I would like people to be thinking about is the response to this question:

“You're giving me an actual penalty for this?”

“Yes, I'm giving you a Warning, which is a reminder to play more carefully, as prescribed by the rules. It's just like if you cast a Thoughtseize and forgot to lose two life - you have to do everything the card says, unless it's a ‘may.’ As long as you play carefully the rest of the day, there's no lasting penalty here - just make sure you read the cards carefully. I'm happy to discuss why it works this way in detail with you after you finish your match.”

While this scenario addresses Comp REL, I've been encountering this at my LGS's Regular REL limited events a lot - folks play various cards that say “You're about to win the game. Scry 1” (Portent of Betrayal, Sea God's Revenge, gigantic pile of Titan's Strength and Battlewise Valor on Centaur Battlemaster), forget to scry because they're so excited and move to combat. Obviously, there's no Warning at Regular, but if I see it, I'll pause the game and remind them to scry; this often upsets their opponent (“You want to not remind them about missed triggers, Judge?”) and provides a good opportunity for education of both players so they don't accumulate warnings (for accidents) or DQ's (for letting your opponent miss it on purpose) at higher level events.

Edited John Brian McCarthy (Jan. 4, 2014 11:30:07 AM)

I think the biggest opportunity that we have is to educate Ambivalent about their responsibility to make sure their opponents are scrying. This is the more serious misconception among players and has a higher opportunity for abuse.

We have a couple people bringing up the opponent's failure to point out the error. This is a good discussion, but it's one for another week (and perhaps another Personal Tutor).

However, I want to refocus on the core issue here.

"You're giving me an actual penalty for this?“

We've had a couple people touch on this point, but it's actually the heart of the question: Are you giving out an ”actual penalty" in the colloquial sense? What is a Warning? Why do we give them out? And, most importantly, how can you convey this to a player in just a couple plain English sentences?

What I would say is:

I'm going to give you a Warning for this. If you'd like to appeal the ruling, you have the right to do so. Otherwise, I would be more than happy to discuss the ruling after your match. A Warning won't affect your play right now, and we don't want to delay the tournament.

After the match, I would try to figure out what the player's issue is. Is he upset about the fact that he's gotten a penalty, or the fact that he's gotten the penalty for something inconsequential in particular? The latter is more interesting, so I'll just address that one.

When we give Warnings, we don't give them out differently for violations that are “big deals” versus little ones. The biggest reason for that is that it's often difficult to tell what is and isn't a big deal. If a player plays a land that comes into play tapped on their first turn and leaves it untapped, is that a big deal? Probably not. But if that land taps for red and they have Lightning Bolt in hand, they might be able to kill their opponent's mana dork. There are a lot of possibilities, and in order to be consistent, the policy is that we don't try to distinguish between the different game states. A Warning isn't a big deal. If you keep playing clean, you'll be fine. Warnings are given for two main reasons. The first one is to discourage illegal play, which your failure to scry was. The second is to track them. If you later get disqualified for Cheating because you “forgot” a scry and went back to do it a turn later, then they'll do an investigation. If they see that you got a bunch of Warnings for missing scries, then they might get a little suspicious. But if it was an honest mistake, then all you need to do is make sure to scry next time and you shouldn't expect much to come of it. My ruling will have taught you the correct way to play, and that's what we want to accomplish with Warnings.

“It's alright, I'm just giving you a warning. Magic's a complicated game and sometimes things go wrong. When they do, it's our job to fix it and record what happened. As long as it doesn't keep happening, the warning isn't going to have any any effect on the rest of your day.”

Originally posted by Sean Hunt:

What I would say is:

I'm going to give you a Warning for this. If you'd like to appeal the ruling, you have the right to do so. Otherwise, I would be more than happy to discuss the ruling after your match. A Warning won't affect your play right now, and we don't want to delay the tournament.

Honest question here, do you not think that conveys a lack of confidence in your ruling? Personally, I reserve the option to appeal for when I can see the player is visibly bristling or clearly unhappy with the ruling (you know, greater than “I just got a game loss” or whatever). In my experience I've found a player who is given the option, or rather, the reminder, that they can appeal, they are more likely to do so “just ‘cause”.

Would be interested to hear your and others’ thoughts on this

- Jack.
L2, London, UK.