Abalone has Jeskai Ascendancy in play. He casts Divination, and draws two cards. He then indicates the Ascendancy, says “trigger,” then draws another card with the intent to discard next. His opponent Nutria then calls a judge. Wat do?

I picked up this call recently and ruled that since the trigger had not been acknowledged and should have resolved before Divination, it was missed the moment Divination began resolving. After that point, there was no reason for Abalone to draw the card, thus the infraction was DEC, the penalty GL. (This scenario caused a great deal of consternation and discussion among L3's present, so hopefully I'm not duplicating their inquiries.)

Followup sitation: Abalone has Jeskai Ascendancy in play. He casts Divination, points to Ascendancy and says “trigger,” then draws two cards, then draws another card with the intent to discard next. Nutria calls a judge.

Since Abalone's acknowledged the trigger this time, it's effectively on the stack on top of Divination, and so by drawing two and then drawing one, we're in the realm of resolving objects on the stack in the wrong order, which rules out DEC. Or is Abalone actually resolving the Ascendancy trigger and drawing two instead of one? Or drawing one and failing to discard before drawing the next?

How badly off track have I gotten? The “first thing that goes wrong” rule of thumb is failing me here.

Isn't it quite similar to Vendilion Clique's usual misplay of draw 1, then put one to the bottom… ??

In both cases, the first thing that truly goes wrong is drawing a card you shouldn't draw, and no GRV has been committed before. I'd have a hard time not ruling DEC here, and if it's not DEC, it can be fairly abusable. Would your ruling change if AP knew what the top card of his library was?? (perhaps due to Scry or Courser of Kruphix…).

Does the following paragraph, emphasis mine, apply to the second scenario?

Originally posted by IPG:

A player illegally puts one or more cards into his or her hand and, at the moment before he or she began the
instruction or action that put a card into his or her hand, no other Game Rule Violation or Communication Policy
Violation had been committed, and the error was not the result of resolving objects on the stack in an incorrect
order.

For the first scenario, I would rule this DEC with a GL. Consider if a player controls Bident of Thassa and attacks with two creatures. One creature gets blocked, and the attacking player draws two cards. They've attempted to resolve a trigger that does not exist, but this is not a Game Rule Violation, so Drawing Extra Cards applies. In the first scenario, since the player has missed the trigger, it no longer exists on the stack, so there is no Game Rule Violation prior to drawing the card.

Edited Matt Braddock (Sept. 29, 2014 10:31:06 AM)

Interestingly, this is one of those (fairly rare) examples of this phrase, from the MTR's definition of Out-of-Order Squencing:

An out-of-order sequence must not result in a player prematurely gaining information which could reasonably affect decisions made later in that sequence.

There's no doubt that Abalone, while resolving things out of order, is also gaining information that will likely influence the discard. So, no OoOS, that much is clear.

And, as Matt pointed out, Drawing Extra Cards specifically calls out this series of actions as an exception; that tells us it's not DEC.

And that means, it's a Game Rule Violation (because it's not one of the previous Game Play Errors), so we'd probably just put two random cards on top of the library, have Abalone discard to finish the trigger's resolution, then draw 2 for Divination … and explain how triggers tend to stack on top of whatever triggered them.

d:^D

Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

And, as Matt pointed out, Drawing Extra Cards specifically calls out this series of actions as an exception; that tells us it's not DEC.

That much makes sense. But in the first scenario, if the player begins to resolve Divination and hasn't yet acknowledged the Ascendancy trigger, hasn't it been missed at that point? This harkens back to the Better Late Than Never KP scenario, wherein a player untaps a Pain Seer, draws a card for the turn then tries to resolve the Seer trigger. Does the trigger even exist on the stack to be resolved in the wrong order?

Yep, sorry - I was really addressing that second scenario; the first one seems pretty clearly a Missed Trigger that the player then tried to resolve without us. No tears shed when that ends badly…

d:^D

Awesome. Thanks Scott!

Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

we'd probably just put two random cards on top of the library, have Abalone discard to finish the trigger's resolution, then draw 2 for Divination … and explain how triggers tend to stack on top of whatever triggered them.

I was confused why we're rewinding the Divination, rather than the trigger first, since they said they resolved the trigger last.

After reformulating my question a couple times, I think I sorted it out. And since I doubt I'm the only one to have internalized it funny, I figured I'd share. (also there's the chance I'm overthinking it, but I think I just internalized it wrong before)

I usually hear rewinds spoken of in a short cut for “Rewind X spell”, “Rewind Y ability”. I internalized it as us rewinding the resolution of the objects as the things being rewind. It seems that those have been shortcuts for “rewind the actions that X spell ended up causing to happen”. The difference is subtle but sometimes significant.

Sticking with that follow-up scenario: They cast divination, and proceed to resolve the objects on the stack out of order. Drawing 2, then drawing 1 with the intent to discard 1.

Going into this, I was thinking “rewind the trigger”, then “rewind the Divination”, since that's the order the things were done.

But the IPG talks about actions being rewound, not object resolutions. So what we're really looking at is “they drew, drew, drew” instead of “they drew, discarded, drew, drew”. Since the stack had the trigger on top, the error was that second draw. We rewind to that, even though it was in the middle of what they said was resolving the Divination.

Most of the time, the difference doesn't end up mattering much, but it's kinda significant here.

How is it significant here? >.>

(Or do you mean potentially significant, like with dredge cards in the graveyard)

Edited Toby Hazes (Sept. 30, 2014 03:20:45 AM)

It's always significant, in that we always rewind individual actions as Chris says. There are plenty of spells and abilities with multiple steps. We have to determine what should have happened, what actually happened, then rewind each action that actually happened until we get the point where the two diverged. It's easy to think “rewind this trigger, then rewind the spell,” but that rewinds us way farther back than we need to be.

From a purely technical standpoint, we could back up all three of the card draws, then have Abalone draw and discard; only backing up two of the three card draws gets us to the same place - i.e., where things started to go wrong - and it's a slight time-saver. Meh…

And, yeah, let's throw this further into the corner with Dredge… :)

d:^D