Hi everyone,

last Week on the FNM in my local store where I judge normally the Standard and Draft tournaments happened a weird situation.

Player A casted in turn 4 a Giant Spider (playing a Mono Green Casual “Giant Growth” Deck). Player B noticed that Giant Spider wasn´t reprinted in M13 so he called for a Judge. Player a argueed that he is playing Giant Spider more likely than Towering Indrik from Return to Ravnica which is Exatly a Giant Spider with different name. He also explained that he is not taking an advantage of the name or Creature Type (Spider) he just like the Artwork more than the artwork of the Indrik. He knows that the card is not legal but he knows what a functunal reprint is and he thought it would also work to play “the original” without taking an andvantage.

In one hand its simple obvious that he is playing an illegal card in a standard tournament, but on the other hand there is no advantage of playing a giant spider instead of Towering Indrik because those cards do booth exatly the same. So I ruled that he can keep the card in his Deck because he has no others illegal cards in his Deck and he didn´t want an advantage playing the Spider and played just for fun with no interesting in winning so I let him have the fun playing the Spider and don´t replace it by 4 Indriks ore 4 Forests.

In General I would not rule like this again but in this case of simple replacing an obvious functunal reprint card I wanted to keep up the enjoying way of this FNM for Player A.

How would rule in such a case or had you a situation like this on your FNM?

This may be more of a personal preference, but if it's against the rules, even if it technically doesn't matter this time, I'm highly unlikely to make an exception. Does it create a feel bad moment now? Yes, but I don't want something happening in the future and let people have “you let that guy do that, why can't I do this?” to fall back on.

I would allow him to play Indriks if he could get them reasonably quickly, but that's it, and only because regular is supposed to emphasize fun.

FNM? DLH! Make sure the player knows you're making a special exception and that it would be a game loss at Competitive rel.

In all seriousness though, go find him some Towering Indriks. If you're at a store this shouldn't be too hard.

Edited Adam Zakreski (July 11, 2013 05:39:44 AM)

Your first instinct towards customer service is excellent here. That being said, I think you may have taken it a step too far. There are lots of reasons a functional “reprint” isn't the same as an actual reprint - right off the top of my head Pithing Needle and Slaughter Games would be affected, and that's in the same set. Not to mention that you're going to get called over again and again as new opponents discover this little quirk, and you're likely to have to deal with a bunch of “but you let him get away with this little thing” arguments in subsequent weeks.

He needs to replace the spider. There's no need to be heavy-handed about it, but you need to explain that what he's doing is against the rules and while you're not going to penalize him for it, he does need to get back on the right side of the line. We have a lot of flexibility in fixing errors and being forgiving at Regular REL, but that doesn't extend to allowing illegal behavior to continue.

Aside from the obvious slippery-slope arguments here, this raises the question “how do we know there are no other effects that matter?” Are you prepared to look through his deck and tell his opponent “There are no cards that matter here”? This could be difficult; I can't think of anything specific off the top of my head, but it could reveal additional information about te contents of that player's deck to their opponent, which is something you do not want to do as a judge.

One thing that pops to my mind here is that, which not legal in standard either, but cards like Engineered Plague - that might not be in his deck but in his opponents. Or what about Riders of Gavony which is standard legal it makes a massive differance. Towering Indrik is a beast, Riders of Gavony giving humans Protection from Beasts has a larger effect then Protection from Spiders (for comparison sake there are 24 beasts in Standard but only 7 spiders)