I am playing in a Standard Competitive REL event. I have 2 cards in hand, cast Collected Company, and look at the top 6 (so far, so good). I put Elvish Visionary and an irrelevant card into play, point at the Visionary, and say “Trigger”. I take the top card of my library, look at it, and put it with the other four cards from Collected Company instead of in my hand. So at the time the Judge arrives, my one-card hand is in my left hand, and my four cards from CoCo plus the card I drew for Visionary are in my right hand.

I know what I *want* to do, but I'm quite certain that the IPG doesn't support it. I'm on the borderline of whether these events are “significant and exceptional”

Infraction/Penalty/Fix?

These scenarios are becoming rather out there.

That being said, it seems in-line with HCE to reveal the five cards sitting there and have the opponent choose one to go into the hand. Technically it's treating “original” as “originally intended,” but that's pretty clearly what the remedy is trying to do.

Seems a lot better than trying to sort this out as a GRV :P

Really? You'd put a card in the player's hand? I noticed earlier with some interest, as you've noted, that the fix is to return the card to the “original zone”, not the “correct zone”, as after all, I've heard ;) that the point of the fix is to act as a deterrent, leaving the player down a card in some situations.

As for the note that these scenarios seem “out there” - this actually happened today at a high-profile Competitive REL event, my first since the policy change. It's certainly not the only weird borderline scenario in my notes, and I'm sure our head judge and team leads have others that I haven't heard of. Either I'm a lightning rod for corner cases, or this policy just has more corners than were anticipated. In any event, since the HCE remedy seems a bit odd to apply as written in this situation, I figured I'd talk about the situation with other judges later.

Edited Dan Collins (Jan. 31, 2016 05:53:21 AM)

That seems fine to me. I mean they are all random cards from the library, even if the Company player knows what they all are (his opponent doesn't).

And of course, if we bar cheating (doing this on purpose to get a 4/5 chance of getting one of the other cards) there is no real advantage gained here from this fix.

Sal: not true. If we need a land to cast our remaining card in hand and there is a land in the top 4 it is more likely our opponent will give us a land vs a spell. The odds are better for us in that case than a random card off the top being a land.

Corner case of corner case, but advantage could be gained.

The entire reason we let the Opponent decide is so that they can make the choice that provides the least advantage. If the player needs a land we will be able to see that and react accordingly by giving them an uncastable or minimally impactful spell.

In this situation we have 4 cards that should be on the bottom of the library and one that should be in hand I think what Toby is suggesting here (not to put words in his mouth) is that we speed up the process of pulling 4 cards to go to the bottom of the library (where they technically were before getting mixed into the hand) by choosing which of the 5 isn't going there. The end result is 4 known cards on the bottom (correct), 2 cards in hand (also correct) and a bit of information gained by the opponent from choosing the card to go to hand.

Edited Bryan Henning (Jan. 31, 2016 06:00:20 PM)

The opponent doesn't know our hand though, and thus the potential for advantage exists. Per the fix the only cards revealed would be the 5.

We appear to be getting lost in the weeds - and those weeds are way off in a very distant, dark, and implausible corner.

I don't want to close this, because I think we did have some valuable learning opportunities - but let's shift the focus back to the policy, the philosophy of it, and real-world, practical applications.

d:^D

It's probably also worth pointing out that there is some corner case potential for a player to get an advantage most times we have to fix a game state. If we have to do something to fix an error that doesn't restore 100% of the game state, someone is probably coming out ahead. That doesn't mean the fix is bad, or that we should err on a more broken game state in order to punish the offending player.

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