At the final of a PPTQ where I HJ'ed, both players are super nervous. AP activates Nissa, Sage Animist +1:

+1: Reveal the top card of your library. If it's a land card, put it onto the battlefield. Otherwise, put it into your hand.

However, he puts the card into his hand without revealing it. At the time I issued a GPE/GRV - W and backed up the situation placing a random card from his hand on the top of his library. Both players agreed with the fix, but I have mixed feelings about this. I even believe it helped the player doing the infraction. While discussing it with other judges we can't really agree on an infraction, much less the fix.

Game state should not influence the decision, and NAP was actually dead on board, but since this was the first game I may have influenced the outcome of the match.

Feedback is much appreciated, an (O) answer even more so.

Edit: I typed “O” in brackets and didn't show up. Replaced by (O).

Edited Luís Guimarãis (Sept. 14, 2015 08:16:06 AM)

This is very unfortunate, but it fits the upgrade clause from the GRV: If an opponent had no opportunity to verify the legality of the action, the penalty is a Game Loss. These errors involve misplaying hidden information, such as failing to reveal a card to prove that a choice made was a legal one. If the information was ever in a position where opponents had the opportunity to verify the legality (such as on top of the library, as the only card in hand, or on the battlefield), do not upgrade the penalty and reveal the information if possible.

The opponent can't verify whether the card was legally put into the hand or that it should have been put onto the battlefield. As you experienced yourself, a rewind here leads to suboptimal results. The only ruling that I see in line with the IPG is to give a Game Loss for GRV.

On a completely irrelevant side note: I am not happy with this, but applying the IPG consistently is extremely important. What I would like to do, is apply some kind of DEC remedy here: reveal the hand, opponent chooses a card to place on top of the library, continue. This seems in line with the idea to cancel any potential advantage and still have the players play their game. But this would be a deviation and should not be done…

Truth be told: I made the exact same ruling as you did during GP London, and I regret my decision in hindsight. It however lead to some very interestign discussions and I learned a lot from them, so this is my new stance… until the new IPG comes out in a few weeks ;)

I remember discussing this at GP London. I believe it happened at the Main Event.

-I would have ruled and applied DEC. The player incorrectly added a card to his hand, but it's due to incorrectly resolving an effect (so do not use the “thoughtseize” fix).
-Other (and to be fair, more experienced) judges were instead for GRV, upgraded to GL because the opponent couldn't verify the legality of the action.

I keep feeling the DEC is more appropriate (since giving GRV and especially GL doesn't seem consistent nor balanced with how we deal with cards put in hand for other reasons) but I totally understand the other argument.

I am quite curious to see what others think, and an eventual (O) at a point.

-Will

Edited William Tiddi (Sept. 14, 2015 07:23:23 AM)

Originally posted by William Tiddi:

-I would have ruled and applied DEC. The player incorrectly added a card to his hand, but it's due to incorrectly resolving an effect (so do not use the “thoughtseize” fix).

The clause that means we resolve a DEC as a backup is as follows:

IPG 2.3
If the cards were drawn as part of the legal resolution of an illegally played instruction, due to a Communication Policy Violation, or were as the result of resolving objects on the stack or multiple-instruction effects in an incorrect order, a backup may be considered and no further action is taken.

None of these apply here (no communications issues are details, nothing was done out of order and the problem here was the legality of the resolution not the instruction), so if you were to treat this as a DEC we'd resolve with the ‘pick a card’ fix.

However the first line of DEC is:

IPG 2.3
A player illegally puts one or more cards into his or her hand…

We don't know that the card was illegally drawn (in fact I suspect looking at the hand would reveal no lands meaning the draw was in fact legal) which leaves us unable to apply a DEC error here - we therefore fall through to GRV and the clause about upgrading this is very explicit and actually references this issue exactly (emphasis mine):

IPG 2.5
If an opponent had no opportunity to verify the legality of the action, the penalty is a Game Loss. These errors involve misplaying hidden information, such as failing to reveal a card to prove that a choice made was a legal one.

I discussed this with Luís a few hours ago, and I believe this is a GPE-GRV that should be upgraded to a GL (for “failure to reveal”). Like Dustin said, the opponent can not verify the legality of this play, so we have no other choice but to upgrade the Warning into a Game Loss.

Yes, this feels bad, and like Luis said this likely would have zero influence in the outcome of that game, but this situation fits *exactly* in what the IPG describes as a situation for an upgrade, that I can't see how to rule differently than this. Sure, you could deviate here (and I like the DEC fix if we were to deviate), but is this a “significant and exceptional” situation that warrants a deviation? I believe that answer to be no - and I would like to reiterate what Dustin said: consistency when applying the IPG is very important.

I would like to address this point:

Originally posted by William Tiddi:

I keep feeling the DEC is more appropriate (since giving GRV and especially GL doesn't seem consistent nor balanced with how we deal with cards put in hand for other reasons)

William, this is a textbook situation. You say it yourself:

Originally posted by William Tiddi:

The player incorrectly added a card to his hand, but it's due to incorrectly resolving an effect

- this is exactly what makes it a GRV and not DEC. Having extra cards in your hand does not always mean it's a situation where DEC occurred, and this is exactly one of the cases where that happens.

Originally posted by Marc Shotter:

We don't know that the card was illegally drawn (in fact I suspect looking at the hand would reveal no lands meaning the draw was in fact legal)

The fact that he added it to his hand without revealing (and so, without being instructed to do so) make it illegally drawn.

Pedro Gonçalves
Having extra cards in your hand does not always mean it's a situation where DEC occurred, and this is exactly one of the cases where that happens

Guess that's where I am a bit surprised… and like Dustin, wondering if we could do better than that ^^

-Will

Edited William Tiddi (Sept. 14, 2015 08:50:49 AM)

Don't get me wrong, there is a card in the player's hand that should not be there - it's just that that doesn't mean that that player committed “Drawing Extra Cards”. There is a difference between having one or more extra cards in your hand because you put them there incorrectly, or having them because you resolved a spell or ability incorrectly.

The fact that he did not reveal it, per se, does not make this DEC. Take something like Idyllic Tutor, for instance - if you don't reveal the card you tutored for, did you commit DEC? No, you can account for the effect that placed the card in your hand. You committed a GPE-GRV, but you will still get a GL (unless you have exactly one card in your hand, the one you tutored for) because you didn't reveal. This is the same - you can account for the “extra” card in your hand, it got there due to Nissa's ability. So the card is there, but you know exactly how and why it got there - it's not DEC because of this, but it's a GRV because you resolved Nissa's ability incorrectly. Only then we upgrade to a GL due to “failure to reveal” (in quotes, because that's no longer a thing).

It's a subtle difference, but it's a difference and we should pay attention to this.

Edited Pedro Gonçalves (Sept. 14, 2015 09:03:51 AM)

Originally posted by William Tiddi:

Originally posted by Marc Shotter:

We don't know that the card was illegally drawn (in fact I suspect looking at the hand would reveal no lands meaning the draw was in fact legal)

The fact that he added it to his hand without revealing (and so, without being instructed to do so) make it illegally drawn.

I was trying to highlight that we treat the draw as illegal because it wasn't revealed, it may be (in an objective sense) that the card placed in hand was a non-land card and so would have been legal to draw, the error here is the failure to reveal. I think Pedro did a much better job of explaining the difference between this unrevealed draw and a DEC in terms of the IPG.

Personally I'd much prefer this type of error be added into DEC and handled with the same ‘pick a card’ fix, because it matches all the reasons for not treating a DEC as a GL, but currently that isn't the case.

I was thinking about these cases for a bit now (failure to reveal - upgrade to GL) and this part of the IPG feels very outdated since the DEC changes.

Current rules interpretation is in short:
If I have an ability that lets me reveal a card and if it fits a certain requirement, i can draw it. (Ajani, Mentor of Heroes comes to mind). So if I don't reveal it, i get a GL even if I could legaly draw it, but i cannot prove it anymore.
If I just draw a card for whatever reason, I get a warning?

This should be changed asap.

Edited Juergen Wierz (Sept. 14, 2015 10:53:23 AM)

I would be ruling this as DEC. The first time the problem was evident was when the card was added to hand. It seems strange to me that the infraction and penalty is different between this and AP drawing a card before resolving Nissa's +1 , even though the actions taken by the player would be the same in both situations.

I'm going to close this one, with a simple note: please wait for the next update (Battle for Zendikar) of the IPG. If your concerns about this policy persist after that, we can revisit this topic then.

d:^D