Here's a fun one:

In the middle of round two out of four during an FNM Booster Draft, our entire small town lost power. Instead of calling it a night, we moved tables out front and played using car headlights. It's all for fun, so we gotta keep playing!

Here's what had happened:

Player One casts Dwynen's Elite, gaining a 1/1 token.
Next turn, he casts Eyeblight Assassin to take out the lone potential blocker, then swings with the Elite, the token, and one other creature.
Player Two casts Celestial Flare, and player one sacrifices the token.
Player One passes turn, player two casts Separatist Voidmage…

This is where Player Two asks for a little more light to read the Voidmage in detail. When someone shines a phone over, they see the lone Forest Player One has is actually a revised Swamp, giving him three Swamps in total.


Everyone and their brother had an idea on how to resolve it, but the final decision I made was to keep the board state exactly as how they each thought they had perceived it. We replaced the Swamp with a Forest and play continued.

I took this call since FNM is intended to be fun, and they both had been enjoying the game just fine until they both saw a card wasn't what they thought it was.


I wanted to throw this out there for other opinions. How would you have ruled in this case?

Assuming no cheating, leave the game state as-is.

I certainly wouldn't fix a player's mana for him or her because he or she thought that it was better. And while a lack of quality lighting could leave one to believe that this constitutes “significant and exceptional” circumstances, I think that's a fallacy - the low visibility explains why the player believed that he or she had a forest (which is a valuable collateral truth to help explain the situation), the board state of “there's a thing on the board that shouldn't be there based on the lands available” isn't exceptional at all - players are casting spells with incorrect mana all the time!

I'd also like to discuss a line in your question:

I took this call since FNM is intended to be fun, and they both had been enjoying the game just fine until they both saw a card wasn't what they thought it was.

The JAR allows you some leverage to fix problems creatively:

If you feel that the suggested remedy is not well adapted to your particular situation and you can suggest a more appropriate fix which is accepted by both players, apply that fix instead.

But we need to be really careful in how we apply this - there's a significant possibility of peer pressure when we ask players, “Come on, you're cool with this fix, right?” In addition, when you substitute your own fixes for the JAR's prescribed remedies, you put yourself in the line of fire - part of the reason we have policy is so we can act consistently in analogous situations and so that if players feel that a solution isn't fair to them, they can understand that it's not you, but the policy, that's ruling against them. Even at Friday Night Magic, you want to be seen as impartial and fair, and want to be careful how frequently deviate just because it feels right.