Hello follow Judges,

I recently Judged with another Judge at a GPT and I encountered a Problem with Sensei's Divining Top and Stony Silence.
The Situation was as followed Player A used the Divining Top in his Upkeep, rearranged his 3 Cards and drew a Card in his Draw Step and didn't cast any Spells in his Turn and ended his Turn.
Player B casted his Stony Silence in his Pre-Combat Mainphase entered the Combat Phase did attack with some Creatures and in the Post-Combat Mainphase Player A activated the Diving Top and looked at the Top 3 Cards.

Since I was not Level 1 at this Point it wasn't entirely clear to me how to acess this Error since there are two GPE here (HCE / GRV) and it still is not entirely clear… :x

Should Player A receive a Warning for both GPE or just one?

I would say it's GPE-GRV as this is at the root of the infraction, the fact that he looked at the top three cards is just a logic consequence from the first infraction

Olivier is correct. In the IPG, 1.2. Applying Penalties, you can find the following:

“Infractions with the same root cause, or multiple instances of the same infraction that are discovered at the same time, are treated as a single infraction.”

The root cause is activating the Divining Top with Stony Silence on the battlefield. The rest is just resolving something that should not even be. So the infraction is indeed GRV.

Peter, how would you remedy the infraction?

Well since there are two cases of infraction I would give the Player a Warning for GRV and let him shuffle his Library after setting the top 2 Cards asside since those were not Unknown to him

Can you be sure the top 2 cards are supposed to be known to him? Did he re-order the top 3 cards during the illegal activation? If so, how do you fix this if you cannot accurately determine which 2 cards should be known to the player?

In that case it's kinda tricky I'm not entirely sure about that but most likely I would fix it like drawing extra Cards so I choose one of the three Cards he looked at at random and he shuffles it into the Library.

So to me this is GRV that lead to HCE and Looking at Extra Cards, so AP reveals his hand and NAP chooses one to put back on top of the library. The top 3 cards are now know when they shouldn't be, so we've essentially looked at extra cards. We do need to now shuffle the library (keeping any legally known cards in their positions) as well.

From what I read is that the first activation of Sensei's Divining Top was legal because Stony Silence was cast a turn later. So the card draw is fine and only the second activation of Top is problematic. Therefore i don't think that there is any HCE infraction here.

I actually read the scenario wrong the first time. Looks like the turn he did it legally, he activated in upkeep, and drew 1, meaning he knows 2 of the cards. The second time is illegal, and he's looked one more card deep. So 2 of the 3 are known, and 1 is illegally known. So we take the top 3 and the opponent chooses one to shuffle back?

The problem with the fixes many are discussing here are that they are applying the fix for HCE to a GPE-GRV. If we are assessing the penalty for a GRV, we only have the fixes available to us to that are of a GRV though the HCE fix would SEEM to apply here more appropriately.

Personally, I would like to apply the HCE fix, but the root cause is a GRV, so we have to apply one of the GRV partial fixes to the situation, which none of them cover. We can't “back up” through the activation either since there were cards in a particular order, which we don't know.

From the IPG on Shuffling:

“A card that became legally known to a player after the error was committed is not considered random and is returned to the appropriate location after the shuffle has been completed.”

The manipulation completed after top activation should not be undone since we don't know the order of the cards and are not random as stated in the IPG.

All we can do is assess a warning for that player at this point.

Edit:

This is very similar to doing something like Brainstorming with a green mana. Again from the IPG on HCE:

“Be careful not to apply this infraction in situations where a publicly-correctable error subsequently leads to an uncorrectable situation such as a Brainstorm cast using green mana. In these situations, the infraction is based on that root cause.”

This is the situation we have here. A publicly correctable error (using Top with a Stony Silence) lead to an uncorrectable situation (rearranging the top 3 cards). We need to base the infraction on the ROOT CAUSE and not the subsequent issues. Top's ability was legally carried out. The issue is that it should not have been activated.

Edited Samuel Polio (June 8, 2016 10:24:06 AM)