A few weeks ago, I was involved in a discussion about backups.

Here is the case study.

"Player A controls Virulent Plague and casts Chandra, Flamecaller. A activates the +1 ability of Chandra and both players miss the plague and player B takes 6. Player A passes the turn.

Next turn, Player B draws a card and activates two Shambling Vents, attacking Chandra, dropping her to 1 loyalty and gaining 4 life. Player B passes the turn.

Player A draws a card. At this point Player B notices the virulent plague and calls a judge.

My question here is, do you back up, and if so why? Or do you not back up and if so why?“

What was interesting were the answers. They ranged from ”I would absolutely not back this up“ to ”This seems like an easy backup to me"

What I DID find interesting, was on that scale, the judges who play more often favoured the backup and the judges that played less frequently preferred not to back up.

This lead to a worry for me in terms of customer service, are we as consistent as we can be with backups? Are we presenting opportunities for players to call a judge expecting a backup because of a similar past event and being denied or vice versa?

Two questions from this -

1. Would you backup here and why? (Id also be interested in how much competetive magic you play if you'd like to share, just to put a you somewhere on the small sample size I've observed.)

2. Do you think there is a way to tighten up the policy on when and how we back up?

Thanks in advance.

Edited Mark Brown (June 19, 2016 05:32:20 PM)

The troubling bit is that there were a lot of decisions likely made based on that 6 damage coming through. Suppose we back up: we end up on A's turn with a Chandra at 5. Does B, on their turn, now activate the Vents to attack? Do they make an alternate play? It's possible they were only pursuing that line because they had to in order to not lose next turn.

Even though it seems like we have all the information we'd need to decide if we should back up or not, there are still missing bits. How many cards were in B's hand? Are there any ways to manipulate the library?

I like to remind players when these mistakes happen that it is both player's responsibility to maintain the game state, so while it feels like only Player A made the mistake it is up to Player B to point out that mistake. It is in Player B's best interest to point it out given what happened.

The IPG says this about backing up -

Due to the amount of information that may become available to players and might affect their play, backups are regarded as a solution of last resort, only applied in situations where leaving the game in the current state is a substantially worse solution.

A good backup will result in a situation where the gained information makes no difference and the line of play remains the same (excepting the error, which has been fixed). This means limiting backups to situations with minimal decision trees.

plus a caution

Backups involving random/unknown elements should be approached with extreme caution, especially if they cause or threaten to cause a situation in which a player will end up with different cards than they would once they have correctly drawn those cards. For example, returning cards to the library when a player has the ability to shuffle their library is not something that should be done except in extreme situations.

In this instance we have Player A having drawn a card and Player B having drawn a card. So we have 2 random/unknown elements that need to be backed up. Assuming there is no way to shuffle the library it may well be reasonable to back up.

If I chose not to back up, due to information gathered after investigating, I would refer back to what I said first, it's both player's responsibility. If I chose to back up I would still remind both players and ask them to be more careful in future.

As has been stated, there isn't enough information presented here for me to make a determination on whether to backup or not.

I will answer your second question. No I do not think there is a way to tighten up policy, because making rules like “never back up past a card draw” is heavy-handed and can lead to bad no-backups as well. I think what needs to be tightened up is people reading the policy and actually applying the principles written.

Riki's made a great point, about “hard-and-fast rules”. And let's not forget, we already have a very clearly stated rule about backups: only when it would be worse to not back up (as Mark quoted).

d:^D

Is the card draw the only action that prevent a simple back up?

Originally posted by john bai:

Is the card draw the only action that prevent a simple back up?

I'm assuming IF we back up, we are backing up to the point of the Chandra +1 activation.

We need to put a random card back from A's hand, and a random card from B's hand, and adjust life totals.

My choice: No backup because the backup will be more disrruptive than continue the game, even without fetchs or another shuffle efect.

Extra: investigate about cheating or not and if it´s first time this happens…

Originally posted by john bai:

Is the card draw the only action that prevent a simple back up?

Please remember a “simple backup” is a term defined and used by the IPG in fixes. A simple backup is backing up a single action. So the only thing preventing a simple backup here is that a lot more than one thing happened.

Simple backups are used/referenced in HCE and GRV

Originally posted by Bryan Prillaman:

john bai
Is the card draw the only action that prevent a simple back up?

Please remember a “simple backup” is a term defined and used by the IPG in fixes. A simple backup is backing up a single action. So the only thing preventing a simple backup here is that a lot more than one thing happened.

Simple backups are used/referenced in HCE and GRV

Yes, this isn't a simple backup.

I just found it interesting that it was so polarizing.

Also, the activation of Chandra's +1 may have been a bad play move, but completely legal. Seeing the thought presented of backing up to the point of the activation might be a bit far in my opinion - the error was committed when two 3/1 tokens entered the battlefield and didn't die to having 0 toughness.

That's of course, assuming we back up at all, which I doubt we're going to do at this point. Everything I'm about to say is assuming there's not a missing piece of information that is relevant to the scenario, but here goes. Despite going back to after the Chandra ability resolving, we now have two card draws that need to be accounted for (rewinding by moving a random card from each player's hand back to the top of their library,) and having said that, the likelihood of cards being in each players hand that weren't there originally because we can't confirm which cards should have been in their hand in the first place, which may actually give each player different lines of play from the point of error. I'm not OK with a backup here personally.

How if, by to be fair, as one way to “keep” the game stage “realistic” by giving both player a backup on the knowing information, but still keep their hand because it is the same advantage that shard by both players, where if we change their hand, the game may resolve in a unexpected resolution. And if we take a card away, also let the game keep moving, they will draw another unknown information, then the “hand backup” would just be wrong.

–John B