Hello fellow judges!

I'd like to have your opinion about this scenario:

AP casts a Thought Scour on him/herself and resolves it correctly.
NAP realizes that the spell was casted tapping a Mountain instead of an Island.
AP committed a GRV, but how can we fix it?
Would you perform a backup? If yes, how?
If no, why?

Would your decision be different if AP has or has not blue mana sources among his/her lands?

Thanks in advance for your help!
Cheers!
Jacopo

Edited Jacopo Strati (Sept. 16, 2017 04:49:36 PM)

I do believe the situation is different if AP does not have the mana to cast thought scour.

IF he does, I would change the way AP generated the mana, and move from there. Taking away the known information is too difficult for a ‘simple’ fix.

If AP cannot actually pay for it, I would use the thoughtsieze effect to take the card from player's hand, along with the 2 cards put into the graveyard (assuming he targeted himself), and shuffle them into their library.

I'm just an L1, and the fix on both ends just feels bad, but as long as nothing else has happened, I would be ok with that outcome.

Originally posted by Andrew Pickell:

IF he does, I would change the way AP generated the mana, and move from there. Taking away the known information is too difficult for a ‘simple’ fix.

Just to check, is the suggestion “untap the Mountain, tap the Island”? This doesn't fit our “back it up or leave it alone” guideline. This is probably a fine FNM fix, but it doesn't suit Comp.

IPG as-written, I dislike a backup here. We'd have to end up with something like the following:

The two Scoured cards go back to the library
The drawn card is “undrawn,” but because this isn't an HCE situation, the judge is going to pick a random card from hand
The undrawn card is not added back to the library yet
The library (with the two un-scoured cards) is shuffled
The undrawn card is put into the library 3rd from the top
The (wrong) land is untapped, Thought Scour is back in hand

That's a lot of stuff, and it also leaks a nontrivial amount of information to NAP – they've seen two cards, and another Scour lets them see two more (and the last four could all be unique cards, or the second two could be pertinent sideboard information).

Our documents aren't comprehensive, and are designed to produce good results in 99,9% of the situations. Unfortunately, situations involving Thought Scour tend to be in the 0,1 %.
I wouldn't back up most situations involving a Thought Scour.

- Emilien

Originally posted by Andrew Villarrubia:

Just to check, is the suggestion “untap the Mountain, tap the Island”? This doesn't fit our “back it up or leave it alone” guideline.

But it fits our “If a minor violation is quickly handled by the players to their mutual satisfaction, a judge does not need to intervene” philosophy, which should be the majority of cases (to be clear, we should not pressure the players into agreeing to this fix).

For the other cases, the backup is ugly, so we should leave the game as it is.

The main answer has already been covered elsewhere. As for the second question about AP not having the correct mana at all, I would investigate for Cheating, but otherwise I wouldn't change the fix (or lack thereof) that others have suggested.

Originally posted by Andrew Villarrubia:

Just to check, is the suggestion “untap the Mountain, tap the Island”? This doesn't fit our “back it up or leave it alone” guideline. This is probably a fine FNM fix, but it doesn't suit Comp.

Originally posted by Florian Horn:

But it fits our “If a minor violation is quickly handled by the players to their mutual satisfaction, a judge does not need to intervene”

If the players call a judge, I believe we've passed the point where the players are handling the situation – they have explicitly asked for someone else to handle the situation.
If I were watching a match and the AP untapped their mountain and tapped an island instead, and both players seemed happy with what happened, I would not feel a need to step in and issue any penalties. Once they call for a judge and ask someone else to fix the problem, however, that bit of the IPG no longer applies.