Is it ever slow play, or even stalling for a player to scry when they know the identity of all cards left in the library (assume the scrys are resolved in a timely fashion)? What if every card left is the same basic land? This could definitely come up in limited with the new lantern.

I suspect not. Not least because even though they may know the order, they may decide that they want to bottom a card and get closer to a card further down.

More likely though is that even if it's theoretically possible to know the contents and order of the library, realistically almost nobody will remember the order of 10-15 cards after 15 turns of complex Magic.

If we're down to about 3 cards though, and someone is taking a lot of time on scrying I would be concerned.

I play a commander deck with a combo to put all my library in the order i want… and i allways only take 10-15 cards to top and the rest random… because the next turn i can need a card out of the 10-15 choosen… and be sure i dont remember where even if i order all… (and as Mark tells, i allways forgot the order of the 10-15 cards most of times).

Scry a card in 5-10 secs if the player knnow all cards in the library its aceptable for me…
Even if i see scrying a land… maibe the player was thinking about % of chance to get a non-land card next time with and without scry in upkeep…

The corner case of 3 cards… pls, no troll… and play… (and stay near him/her to wake up! the player ^_^)

Taking apart some corner cases (very few cards in library, repeated scrying for no reason other to eating up clock time), I'd say no.

I meant specifically the “corner case”. I was in a limited game with 40 life, 5 cards in Library, all lands. I chose not to scry as I didn't want to get the draw that way, and ultimately decked on the final turn of extra turns.

How would you rule/would you investigate if you saw a player scrying in this circumstance, but otherwise playing in a timely manner.

Edited Craig Annsa (Jan. 18, 2016 10:35:15 AM)

Craig, let me rephrase your question slightly: “How would you rule if you saw a player taking actions with no purpose other than to take advantage of the time limit?”

d:^D

Fair enough. My instincts were right.

I guess I don't understand how is that different than choosing to mulligan close to the end of a round? It's a legal action they are performing as long as it is done in a timely manner.

Jason - it is not different. Taking otherwise legal actions solely for
the purpose of eating up match time is Stalling.

On Tue, Jan 19, 2016 at 4:38 PM, Jason Crone
<forum-24003-f1df@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:

Originally posted by Jason Crone:

how is that different than choosing to mulligan close to the end of a round?

Tomas Sukaitis
Jason - it is not different. Taking otherwise legal actions solely for the purpose of eating up match time is Stalling.

Actually, there is a key difference. Repeated mulligans change the game state; if they're done in a timely fashion, it's unfortunately allowable. We probably won't like it, but we can't take away a player's mulligan options.

The original question was about Scrying without progressing or changing the game state - except for the amount of time remaining, nothing of significance changes. That can be Stalling.

d:^D

Thank you for the clarification. =)