Date : 1/18/2013
Setting: FNM

Player A plays a mountain, casts Falkenrath Aristocrat and attacks.

Player B takes damage

Player A passes turn

Player B untaps, draws, lays land, goes to play a creature

Player A then notices that he did not have black mana to play Falkenrath Aristocrat and calls Judge on himself.

What are your thoughts?

I'd say too late to rewind. There's been a lot of opportunities for
spells(Player A could have opted not to cast something on their second
main, for example.) In addition, and possibly more importantly, there's
been a draw step, and definite concrete information gained. A land has been
played, and (potentially, since it's not clear) another creature in the
process of casting.

Definitely a Game Rule Violation, and some investigating to make sure
Player A isn't trying some fairly bold cheating involving calling a judge
on themself for a lesser penalty, but I wouldn't rewind this.

Steven Zwanger produced this powerpoint for the Judge Conference at GP
Philadelphia regarding GRV Remedies, and it includes a couple of situations
similar to this, regarding backing up or not. Perhaps it could be the
source of some additional insight:

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0BxChLcc7HH8KQnozNmNybWlOT3c/edit?pli=1

Originally posted by Andrew Rula:

Definitely a Game Rule Violation

At FNM?

Wrinkle: The setting for this situation is an FNM, so GRV doesn't apply.
Depending on how complicated the combat was, and by the description it
sounds like it was fairly straight-forward, I'd probably rewind at FNM.

Ah, missed the REL. Ignore the GRV penalty I said - replace it with a caution to both players asking them to play more carefully.

Still, we've passed a number of decision points, especially including a card draw, which makes me hesitant to rewind it.

I appreciate these answers, I will wait a bit for more and then I'll post what I did.

Having encountered an identical situation at a pre-release (substitute Falkenrath for Carnival Hellsteed), I'm generally in favor of rewinding this. Additional factors could include if Player B is tapped out, if Player A has removal in hand, and whether Player A noticed the issue before or after seeing what new creature Player B is casting.

That said, at that particular pre-release, the head judge didn't allow for the rewind. I would certainly understand people who choose not to rewind here.

Given that this is FNM, I would explain the options of rewind and not rewind to the players and gauge their reactions to see which one they favor more. If there is a clear one that would make both players happy, I would go with that. If they seem split or are not reactive, I would choose to not rewind (since this option teaches them that sloppy play has consequences). I think that making the players happy is more important than consistency when at Regular REL, but then again it depends on how competitive your play group is.

I issued a double DQ - j/k :)

We rewound it and everyone was happy.

On Sat Jan 19 09:04, Andrew Rula wrote:
> Ah, missed the REL. Ignore the GRV penalty I said - replace it with a caution to both players asking them to play more carefully.
>
> Still, we've passed a number of decision points, especially including a card draw, which makes me hesitant to rewind it.

I definitely don't think this is true. What has happenned:

1. AP casts a creature with haste (which was the error).
2. AP attacks with the creature. Not a real decision point, he just cast a creature with haste, presumably in order to attack with it. Unless the life totals and board state look like leaving it back to block is relevant, it's not really a ‘decision’ per se - everyone is going to do it.
3. NAP (presumably) doesn't block. It's likely (not specified by the OP) that he couldn't block, so again, not a decision.
3. AP doesn't cast anything post-combat. Now, the OP didn't specify how much mana AP had, but since he's lacking black it's _likely_ that it's early in the game and therefore can't cast anything else. In this case, that's not really a decision either
4. NAP doesn't cast anything either. Here it's less clear, he may have had mana untapped, but if he was also tapped out then there also weren't any decisions to be made here either.
5. NAP untaps, draws a card and starts to cast something precombat. While nothing happenned during upkeep and draw, it would be very unusual to do so in (more assumptions, but FNM) Standard, I don't think there's any real decisions either up until tapping mana to cast something - at which point the error has occurred.

So, I would contend that no real decision points have been passed (with my assumptions, obviously those need to be checked at the table in practice) and, in all likelihood, the whole process passed very quickly. There was a card draw, but the IPG specifically guides us in how to rewind past those and so we should always be willing to do so. Further more, as described it seems likely that whichever card we put back from the NAP's hand will be drawn immediately before he takes any relevant actions, which makes it completely trivial to back up through it.

I feel that not backing up here leaves the AP with too large a game advantage to not back up if we at all can.

Matt

Using the language from the JAR, I'd caution all respondees to check the
title of the forum before hitting “send”, as it can influence the answer
substantially at the moment.

To the issue at hand, would anyone be in favour of the following;

{Scenario as described}
Aristocrat player: “Judge, I have a swamp - can I just switch them out?
Sorry, I spaced!”

??


On 21 January 2013 22:56, Matthew Johnson
<forum-2592@apps.magicjudges.org>wrote:

Originally posted by James Mackay:

{Scenario as described}
Aristocrat player: “Judge, I have a swamp - can I just switch them out?
Sorry, I spaced!”

Sounds like sloppy play to me if this happens.
I'm not in favour of it, and switching them out is definitely a no, since laying a mountain isn't illegal to begin with, I don't think we should allow the game to rewind for the player to take back the mountain and lay a swamp instead.
Although it's Reg REL and players are there to have fun and learn, I don't think that there's a need to condone sloppy play in my point of view.
However, there are fringe cases (eg. a player who just picked up his first Intro/constructed deck a week ago) to watch out for, and I would say special attention should be given to such players.

Rewinding to the point of the error seems easy and fair to me; as Matthew pointed out, not many decision points have passed.

Now for the tricky question James presented: This sure is a deviation, but if B is OK with it, sure I am too!

Re: James' scenario, I'd be a lot less inclined to rewind if the dropped land was the result of a mental lapse. The problem is that I want to be consistent, such intents are difficult to gauge, and errors of dexterity result in the wrong card being put on the table all the time. My default reaction is not to rewind unless the mistake is obviously a reflex - e.g. someone lays down a Plains and says “Mountain” - and 9 times out of 10 an opponent will let that slide anyway.

To follow up , in my situation - Player A - who played the Aristocrat - meant to play a Cavern of Souls instead of a Mountain - the rewind went back to him playing the mountain - he was not allowed to play the cavern instead - as he did nothing illegal by playing the mountain (except sloppy play) - he then passed the turn with no further action and the game continued.