Here's a situation in a ~50 player 5-round T8 Competitive event. There's a lot going on to think about. It would be great to hear how people would handle the investigation and rulings.

In G2 of a Legacy match, Alvin is playing an UG Elves/Food Chain deck. He has three Nettle Sentinels and a Heritage Druid in play, has resolved two Glimpse of Natures this turn and is well on his way to drawing his deck. Alvin has been announcing all his plays and triggers and mana and is playing quickly.

His opponent Norbert won G1 playing a Prison deck. Norbert has Torpor Orb, Ensnaring Bridge and Bottled Cloister in play (locking out Alvin's attacks). His hand is exiled under the Cloister. Norbert has said nothing but “sure, yes, yeah, okay” for the past several minutes and is visibly and audibly exasperated as he waits to see whether Alvin has a way to get out of the lock.

At some point, Alvin plays Elvish Visionary, announcing "Visionary, 5 floating, untap , draw three.“ The following event lead to Norbert calling for a judge.

Alvin's description of what happened next was: ”I announced my draw, and Norbert just sat there looking disgusted at me as if he'd lost his will to speak. After a couple awkward seconds, I figured he just wanted me to get on with it.“

Norbert's description was: ”I gave him a quizzical look to indicate that something was wrong. I was going to point out the Torpor Orb, but I gave Alvin a second to figure it out for himself. When he went to draw cards, they were in his hand before I could stop him.“

Questioning both players separately yields the following information:

Both agree that Norbert had audibly confirmed all of the previous card draws. They also agree that it was 3-5 seconds between Alvin announcing his draw triggers, and him swiping three cards off of the deck.

Alvin concedes that his ”draw three“ motion was swift enough that Norbert *might* not have had time to intervene once he started it. However, he is completely convinced that Norbert tried to engineer a GL against him by encouraging the card draw without actually confirming it.

Having overheard Alvin's accusation from across the room, Norbert immediately volunteers a case that he wasn't trying to mislead Alvin into a DEC penalty. He was pretty sure that all of Alvin's answers to Bridge/Cloister were shut off by Torpor Orb, and he had nothing to gain by Alvin being GL'd. His largely silent response to the ”draw three“ announcement was mostly due to the extreme annoyance he had with Alvin playing on with no outs and ”saying dumb catchphrases whenever he cast Glimpse of Nature.“

While Norbert's argument seems to be one contrived after-the-fact, and he does seem a bit weaselly, there's nothing inconsistent with his mindstate being ”I'm going to stare at my opponent, and he will figure it out.“ He was clearly honest in his belief that all of this was Alvin's fault. Norbert seems close enough to having a full-blown panic attack that further questioning is inadvisable.

While discussing the situation with another judge who was playing but had completed his match early, Norbert approaches on the verge of tears. He pleads that ”If you're even thinking about giving me a DQ, you should check Alvin's decklist to see if he even had outs. I… it's probably not the case… but he might have set me up on purpose.“

These are the some of the things I'm thinking about:
* Does a few seconds of silence count as ”confirmation from … opponent“ for the purposes of IPG 2.3?
* If the existence of a card draw trigger on the stack is free information, ”Players must answer completely and honestly any specific questions pertaining to free information“ should compel Norbert. But does the lack of an immediate response constitute a TE-PCV?
* Can non-verbally intimidating opponents to discourage them from seeking free information constitute a USC penalty?
* What would have been the best questions to ask Norbert?
* If Norbert openly admitted to trying to engineer a GL for DEC, but didn't commit TE-PCV, would that even be USC-Cheating? Or would it be legal?
* Should DQ investigations ever be cut short for customer service purposes because of someone's emotional state?
* Alvin already knows if he's going to win or lose this game, based on the contents of his deck. If it seemed plausible that Alvin masterminded this entire brouhaha to get Norbert DQ'd (to be clear, it doesn't), would it be reasonable to check Alvin's library to determine whether he was going to win, or if judge intervention was his only out?
* What's the best way to phrase the request ”Try not to be openly disdainful toward your opponent?"

There are a bunch of things included in this, but I am grouping them into:
What is DEC?
What is CPV?
How do you run a DQ investigation?

I am not going to answer the last one, since there is too much to cover,
but I'll try to address the first two.

First, the player committed DEC, since there was no confirmation from the
opponent. The opponent doesn't have to confirm verbally, but the opponent
needs to do *something* for it to be a confirmation.

Second,.it is you cannot commit a CPV if you do not communicate with your
opponent. A lack of communication isn't a violation of the Player
Communication Policy.

Hope that this clears those parts up.

While I sympathize for Alvin. This is just a straight up DEC. I don't see Norbert having done anything wrong.

I'm more on the side of Norbert. He was probably annoyed, tired and bored of a long, long turn of a Elves! combo deck (Second Sunrise deck, anyone?? :D) and he sounds quite convincing to me.

And the plain fact is Alvin drew cards he wasn't allowed to without any specific GRV. Pure and simple DEC.

Also, I'll remind both players, after trying to calm things down and prevent escalating any further, that communication is the key to make things clear and stop that kind of disgusting and easily avoidable situations.

But is it true that no GRV was committed before drawing the card? Alvin did not just draw a card because he felt like drawing a card, but because the EtB trigger of Elvish Visionary instructed him to do so. And the GRV he committed was putting that trigger on the stack with Torpor Orb in play.

Invisible objects being on the stack won't give an opponent the opportunity to stop the error.

If Torpor Orb is in play and Alvin says nothing and immediately draws a card with Visionary, are you at all tempted to not call this DEC?

If so, why?

If not, this is a demonstration of exactly why we have the “opponent confirmation” escape clause for DEC. (And, in this case, the opponent did not confirm.)

Julien, the reason we look if there was a GRV committed before DEC is to determine whether opponent had a reasonable chance to prevent the error from being committed or would be able to notice that something wrong is happening. One of the reasons for high penalty for DEC is being hard to spot, which is less true if there is any other GRV happening before that.

If we would try to find a reason for an extra drawn, we would never give out DEC penalty, because there is almost always some explanation what rule you broke to draw an extra card. I can always say something “Oh I just illegally resolved this spell, I though it was a cantrip, but it isn't” or something similar.

Originally posted by Joshua Feingold:

Invisible objects being on the stack won't give an opponent the opportunity to stop the error.

If Torpor Orb is in play and Alvin says nothing and immediately draws a card with Visionary, are you at all tempted to not call this DEC?

The statement “Draw 3” gives the opponent the chance to stop the error. Immediatly drawing a card is very different.
I'm not saying that in the original scenario I would not rule DEC. But I don't think it is as clear cut as the posters above make it seem.

Jernej Lipovec
Julien, the reason we look if there was a GRV committed before DEC is to determine whether opponent had a reasonable chance to prevent the error from being committed or would be able to notice that something wrong is happening. One of the reasons for high penalty for DEC is being hard to spot, which is less true if there is any other GRV happening before that.

If we would try to find a reason for an extra drawn, we would never give out DEC penalty, because there is almost always some explanation what rule you broke to draw an extra card. I can always say something “Oh I just illegally resolved this spell, I though it was a cantrip, but it isn't” or something similar.

Maybe I have been misinterpreting the IPG here. The way I understand DEC is that if you follow an instruction to draw a card and the card draw itself is not the first error it is probably not DEC. You still need to give your opponent a way to prevent your error, e.g. by announcing a trigger or the explicit card draw. But then even if there is no explicit confirmation that drawing a card is ok you are probably not in DEC territory. The “confirmation clause” is just another reason not to rule DEC that is independent of the “previous GPE clause”.


Sorry if this is too far off topic.

Edited for clarity and removed an irrelevant example.

Edited Julien de Graat (Feb. 21, 2014 12:29:57 PM)

While I can see why someone would rule “No comment is not confirmation” I think this creates an incentive to remain quiet when your opponent states a wrong number of cards to be drawn and allowing players to play the policy to create gotcha's which is something we look to avoid.

My apologizes Gareth but I don't understand what you mean. Why wouldn't a player remain quiet when his opponent states a wrong number of cards to be drawn? Assuming that player knows the IPG, he also knows it is likely his opponent is about to earn a DEC, so why would he stop him? Nothing compels him to intervene, doesn't it?

If I announce my draw before drawing, if that draw is incorrect (too many/nonexistant), and I gave my opponent time to react (saying draw 1 while putting the card into my hand already is still DEC - saying ‘draw 1’, looking at my opponent, the going for my library is not), it is not DEC, it is a GRV (this changed with the M14 Rulesupdate I believe, but I could be wrong about the point in time).
The opponent can NOT bypass this ‘safety-switch’ by just not saying anything.

An opponent saying nothing is not confirmation. The whole point of the DEC escape clause is if both players miss something and the opponent somehow indicates “Yeah, that's right” then it's not DEC. If player A doesn't actually get an answer from player B, it's not confirmation. Assuming silence means “that's ok” is not going to save player A here.

Originally posted by Philip Körte:

The opponent can NOT bypass this 'safety-switch' by just not saying anything.

Is there a policy you can reference for that? I'm more than a little uncomfortable with having to judge whether they waited long enough, or maybe their opponent was daydreaming or something.

Slow Play is a Tournament Error, not GPE or CPV, and doesn't end up fitting into the exception for DEC, so we're still looking at a DEC as far as I can tell.

If the opponent is just sitting there, it seems that for safety sake we'd want the person to either ask for confirmation again or call for a judge (Your opponent does not have your best interest at heard, if you're not sure of something call a judge, right?).

This sounds like slow play for the opponent to me. I get that he's annoyed, and we'll have to be careful in how we have the discussion with him, but that's not an excuse to delay the game. (on top of that, I'm not comfortable with him instructing a judge on how to do his job, so I'd carefully caution against that.)

As policy has been evolving we've been looking to move away from having it that an opponent remaining quiet about something they are aware of being wrong changing the infraction. If we have it stand that remaining silent is fine and doesn't invoke the confirmation clause we incourge remaining quiet and not communitcating with your opponent.

I must misunderstand something here. It seems to me that you are explaining that a player has zero responsability for its own actions, but full responsability for its opponent's, and the additional duty to help him play correctly. This reminds me a lot of when both players were supposed to take care of their opponents' triggered abilities, which upset them…

If my opponent always announces his draws before drawing, and always asks me for confirmation in order to avoid DEC forever (with or without thinking anytime about the game state, since it seems that it has become my duty now), would I not be allowed, not only to remain silent voluntarily, but also to answer him explicitly: "I will never confirm your draws, neither now nor anytime later, whether they are legal or not: you are grown-up and thus responsible for your own actions, and if your draw is not legal, then I will call a judge to inform him about your infraction. Yours, not mine." ?