A player activates Chromatic Sphere's ability, draws a card, looks at it and then chooses the color of mana to add to mana pool. If it's intentional, they get disqualified for Cheating. Otherwise, what happens?

If I read the documents right, it appears to me that out-of-order sequencing does not apply and drawing a card was the first illegal action that happened and it was not as a result of resolving stack in wrong order, therefore this is a Drawing Extra Cards with no possibility of downgrade (unless the card is identifiable).

EDIT: Typo corrected.

Edited Petr Hudeček (Jan. 2, 2014 09:49:03 AM)

(thread locked while Official answer to Petr question is being prepared…)

If they just pick up the card and look, but don't put it in their hand, we can solve this fairly easily. However, your scenario says “draw”, and that means it's in the hand already - too late to save that player.

You're right that OoOS can't apply: “An out-of-order sequence must not result in a player prematurely gaining information which could reasonably affect decisions made later in that sequence.”

And, sadly, the rest of your conclusion is about the only option, there - DEC, downgrade only if the card was known to all.

One key takeaway, for all of us: if Chromatic Sphere gets played, in the next Modern season, we can do our part to educate players about the correct procedure for playing that card. Working in our favor (slightly) is the fact that the wording on the card says “choose a color” before it says “draw a card”; simply following instructions correctly will spare us this mess.

It get's played in the GrTron deck so I would expect some appearance in competitive play. Will be interesting at GP Prague next week…