Hi everyone!

A small disagreement on local judge forums about handling the following situation:

Andrew casts a Vendilion Clique, and makes no mention at this point of who is being targeted by the Clique's ability.

Nick immediately drops his hand in front of him on the table, face up.

Andrew takes a look at the hand, before saying “But I never announced a target - I want to target myself!”

• Will you allow him to target himself with the Clique's ability?
  
• Does it make a difference to you how long he spent looking at Nick's hand?
  
• Does your answer change if this happens at FNM?
  

Try to give reasons for your answers :)

Originally posted by Anastacia Tomson:

Will you allow him to target himself with the Clique's ability?

Yes I will allow him to target himself. Otherwise Nick could force Andrew to choose to target Nick by revealing. Besides everything is quite legal because everyone can reveal cards that are not hidden to him to the other player(s).

Originally posted by Anastacia Tomson:

Does it make a difference to you how long he spent looking at Nick's hand?

That has no influence at all on my ruling. Even if he wrote down the hand, everything is perfectly fine, because Nick basically volunteers to show his hand with the vendillion trigger on the stack. There is no reason why he shouldn't be allowed write down the cards as he does everytime cards are revealed.

Originally posted by Anastacia Tomson:

Does your answer change if this happens at FNM?

I would be a little bit more extensive with my explanation on how those things work for Nick, but the ruling itself will not change.

This has been discussed a few times. There is a risk of slow play as
Andrew has spent time doing nothing, so it is important to remind
players to keep the pace of play up.

But in the end it is just unfriendly behaviour and Nick needs to be
reminded that he should wait to learn what the target of an ability is
without assuming.

I to me this would border on USC, ESPECIALLY if he in the past had cliqued his opponent without naming a target and taken a card. The idea of “I didn't name a target” has always bothered me simply because his opponent is trying to be a good sport and not drag out a game, if I had an opponent ask me who I was cliquing more than once, I would want to call judge for slow play.

But alas, in an isolated incident it can be feasible that Andrew intended to clique himself and Nick was impatient.

William: The issue that arises with your reasoning is that previous choices all of a sudden influence what choice the clique player gets to take. What if that player actually meant to choose themselves and they merely take the advantage offered to them because of opponent?

I would also never feel comfortable with giving slow play for a player communicating with their opponent to avoid misplaying and misunderstanding.

I'm in agreement with Markus. I don't see anything in the rules that allows us to force Andrew to choose Nick as a target (we may want to rule that way because it seems wrong, but that would be manufacturing a penalty where none exists - unless someone can show me otherwise).

Originally posted by William Barlen:

if I had an opponent ask me who I was cliquing more than once, I would want to call judge for slow play.

I don't understand this, Twin players will often Clique themselves to remove excess Splinter Twins from their hand - the target of Clique's trigger is not arbitrary and the opponent is more than entitled to ensure who the target is and then respond appropriately.

Edited Edward Bell (May 22, 2015 02:26:34 AM)

Originally posted by Edward Bell:

I don't understand this, Twin players will often Clique themselves to remove excess lands

I would hope they aren't doing this

Originally posted by Gareth Tanner:

Edward Bell
I don't understand this, Twin players will often Clique themselves to remove excess lands

I would hope they aren't doing this

Lol - yeah, brain fart (was thinking of looting with Desolate Lighthouse). I'll edit my original post.

Originally posted by Anastacia Tomson:

Will you allow him to target himself with the Clique's ability?

He's obviously entitled at choosing targets for his own triggered abilities an cannot be forced to choose otherwise by a clumsy move by his opponent (he acknowleded a trigger Andrew could have missed and revealed information he could have kept hidden).

Does it make a difference to you how long he spent looking at Nick's hand?

Yes it does. Doing so he confirms he's resolving the trigger the way Andrew believed.

Does your answer change if this happens at FNM?

My ruling would be the same and I think there is a need to explain my ruling both at Competitive and at Regular.

We had the same question recently, looking for a unified criteria, in the spanish forums.

The conclusion our L3/L4 agreed on was: It's ok if you cast a Vendilion and your opponent shows his hand without giving us time enough to announce the target; It's ok if you take a brief look at his hand before announcing the target, because It's his mistake; but if Player A believes that the opponent assumed he's being targeted, and allows the mistake to continue, It's something Illegal.

Also, in the example I talked about (the Vendilion's player spending like 20-30 seg to investigate his opponent's hand before announcing the target), we're speaking about cheating because of that.

Here you have some interesting links Kepa provided us, with Tessitori writing about it, and an article about how Martin Juza became DQed because of getting advantage of a situation like this:
http://www.blackborder.com/q/node/10464
http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/the-riki-rules-click-clique-dq/

Hope it helps

Edited Carlos Fernandez (May 22, 2015 05:50:42 AM)

The key difference there appears to be the casting of Path to Exile - without that everything (including the writing down of the cards in the hand) is legal.