A topic of discussion that came up over the weekend was the difference between the remedy for Looking at Extra Cards and the remedy for extra cards being drawn as a result of a GRV/CPV. That is, in the former case, the illicitly viewed cards are shuffled back into their owner's library, and in the latter the extra cards are randomly replaced on top without being shuffled in. It's a somewhat unintuitive conclusion for an inexperienced floor judge (like me), and experienced judges enjoy being cryptic when asked these sorts of questions - a good thing, as it keeps us thinking harder about such situations. So I thought I'd give my reasoning to make sure I'm on the right path.
Example 1: Augie casts
Divination and draws two cards. As he picks up the second card, the card underneath it gets flipped up; he sees what it is, and calls a judge right away. The judge gives Augie a warning for Looking at Extra Cards, then shuffles the flipped card into the library.
Example B: Augie casts Divination and draws two cards. A moment passes, then Augie and his opponent realize that Augie controls only three Plains. The judge is called; she warns Augie for a GRV, takes two cards randomly from Augie's hand and puts them on top of his library.
A judge with a cursory knowledge of the IPG would look at the first example, see that we're fixing by ensuring that the order of the deck is unknown to both players, and wonder why we don't take the same step for the second example. In that case, Augie has an advantage in knowing roughly which cards he'll be drawing next. Why doesn't the random card get shuffled back into the library?
First we have to point out that the library and the hand are two very different zones. In the general case, any particular card is in its owner's hand due to deliberate choices made by that player to keep it there - they haven't played it yet, they decided not to mulligan it away, and so on. Now a number of cards come into the player's hand illegally due to some GRV, and are now indistinguishable from the cards that were in hand previously - they belong to a set now, not an ordered list. So we can't use the more ideal fix of just taking the extra cards in question and putting them back in the random list. The question now is not what fix is perfectly fair, but what is the least unfair and the least imposing to both the players and judges involved.
Let's say at the point where a judge applies the fix in Example B above, Augie's hand is XY, where X is the set of cards that should be there, and Y is the set of cards that shouldn't. Let's assume the judge decides to take |Y| cards out of Augie's hand randomly and shuffle them into his library. One of the randomly selected cards came from X, one that Augie was holding onto to save him against an aggressive push from his opponent. Since his deck has quite a few cards still in it, he's effectively been handed down a forced random discard - Legacy players should know just how fair that feels.
But what if Augie lost cards from X, and Y turned out to be much better? Perhaps Augie
Pondered, then cast Divination without having the proper mana to draw the two cards he just looked at. Well, Augie's raising a big red flag to all judges if any kind of deck stacking effect happens before the “accidental” drawing. If he's not stacking his deck first, then it's really not in his interest to get in a couple “draw X, then put X back on top of your library at random” effects before he starts racking up game losses.
I can think of all sorts of ways these rules might be abused, but at the end of the day, if I'm a player in a Competitive event, I know it's in my best interest to avoid GRVs, and I won't be punished excessively for making a common error. I feel like I'm missing something more obvious, and I'm sure the L5s could answer this in a sentence or two, but it helps me to write these things out. Comments are appreciated.