Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

As for that line in Toby's blog post, I'm going to go ahead and put words in his mouth - and Toby can correct me if I'm wrong: I think that “and talk about {it} with other judges later” refers to our love of discussing odd policy scenarios - i.e., an acknowledgment that we'll do that anyway, not meant as an action item.

Not quite. I said that to illustrate that there's a fair chance that if a remedy seems way out there, it's possible that a judge missed something (such as the top card of the library being a public fact, even if the specific identity of the card is not known) that makes it not HCE. There are also weird corners possible, and we like to hear about them so that we can make things more explicit (for example, if the cards are already randomized into the deck, involving the opponent in randomizing further isn't a worthwhile remedy) or fix them in the future.

I personally think that the difference between top of library and bottom of library isn't huge.

When we shuffle we usually make sure that unrandomized parts remain where they are. Wouldn't it be possible to apply the fix and shuffle the random part. This way the possibility of abusing the rule is gone but the penalty is arguably pretty hard.

Why has this not been considered? As I understood the article we want to discuss how to make the new policy better and this seems like a good way to me.

Originally posted by Markus Bauer:

I personally think that the difference between top of library and bottom of library isn't huge.

When we shuffle we usually make sure that unrandomized parts remain where they are. Wouldn't it be possible to apply the fix and shuffle the random part. This way the possibility of abusing the rule is gone but the penalty is arguably pretty hard.

Why has this not been considered? As I understood the article we want to discuss how to make the new policy better and this seems like a good way to me.

Hi Markus,

In the situation in the original post, the cards are already shuffled in. What do you think would be fixed by shuffling again?

You missed part of his proposal. He would have the opponent choose 4 cards
to be placed on the bottom of the library, and then shuffle the *random*
part. We agree that this is not supported by policy, but is there a reason
it isn't permitted?

Originally posted by Dan Collins:

We agree that this is not supported by policy, but is there a reason it isn't permitted?

I'm tempted to say “because it's not supported by policy”, but that's a bit snarky, even for me. :)

I think you're asking why we didn't craft policy to support that?

It's a valid question; I think the answer is, primarily, that we don't consider every conceivable scenario. We can't. Even if we could, we couldn't hope to codify that in policy; there probably aren't enough bytes in the cloud to store that massive of a document. (OK, slight exaggeration - you get my point.)

On further reflection, I don't think it's a fair remedy, to (a) give the opponent perfect knowledge of the contents of your library, and (b) to deny you X specific cards - by “bottoming” them - when all you did was move X random cards into a different, random location instead of the bottom. I wouldn't want to craft policy that is this … well, disconnected, for lack of a better word.

While it's true that the CoCo shuffler may have seen a valuable card among those headed for the bottom of the library, and shuffled to increase the odds of drawing it sooner, it's both unlikely, and no different from any other “cheat of opportunity”. This is why you'll hear me (and other senior judges) say “every infraction includes some investigation”. (Very often, “some” is the 3 seconds it takes to realize there's nearly zero potential of Cheating.)

d:^D

Originally posted by Eli Meyer:

Markus Bauer
I personally think that the difference between top of library and bottom of library isn't huge.

When we shuffle we usually make sure that unrandomized parts remain where they are. Wouldn't it be possible to apply the fix and shuffle the random part. This way the possibility of abusing the rule is gone but the penalty is arguably pretty hard.

Why has this not been considered? As I understood the article we want to discuss how to make the new policy better and this seems like a good way to me.

Hi Markus,

In the situation in the original post, the cards are already shuffled in. What do you think would be fixed by shuffling again?

As always we only shuffle the non random part of the library which was fixed by the opponent. We would therefore shuffle all but the bottom cards (and all other known cards). This way we would end up with cards on the bottom. This is what I understood when reading HCE even if i find it too harsh myself.

edit: after further discussion with some judges I found my error. I was thinking about set to set and not set to zone which is entirely different.

Edited Markus Bauer (Feb. 4, 2016 03:51:58 AM)

This isn't true for HCE. HCE specifically states that if returning cards to
the library, they are shuffled into the library. As Scott mentioned above,
this is intentional.