In the discussion for this KP, CoriAnn brought up the fact that in Modern, players are allowed to rearrange their graveyards. (EDIT: as Justin notes below, even outside of Modern it is legal to put the cards in the gy in any order in the first place – and thus, Atari may have picked up three cards, reordered them, and then placed them in the graveyard before Nintendo had a chance to see what order they were actually in.)

If Atari knows that a judge is going to apply the suggested fix, namely putting the top card of the graveyard into her hand, this can easily be abused - if she dodges the cheating investigation, she gets to choose which of the three milled cards she ends up drawing.

Q1: The answer post doesn't address the order issue at all, not even suggesting that we ask the players whether the cards were reordered. Is there something I'm missing that makes this ok?

Q2: Assuming we do ask, and Nintendo can't recall whether the cards were reordered or not (or Atari says that they are reordered, but she doesn't remember the original order), what is the new fix? It's not clear that it's possible to perform a backup, since no one knows what order the cards moved to the graveyard in, and it's not HCE, so we can't let Nintendo choose. It seems like maybe we just have to let the third card stay in the graveyard, and have Atari draw the new top card?

Q3: If we ask and the players agree, is it ok to trust Nintendo's memory and Atari's honesty? Or should we always apply the fix as if they can't agree, since the judge can't verify, and reordering three cards without Nintendo noticing would be quite trivial?

Edited Jake Eakle (Sept. 11, 2017 11:45:36 AM)

404.3 complicates this, as in this situation, Nintendo is in fact entitled to reorder the cards milled by Thought Scour even in Legacy.

404.3. If an effect or rule puts two or more cards into the same graveyard at the same time, the owner of those cards may arrange them in any order.

I'm interested in seeing what the answer is. Although the KP answer is elegant, it's not hard to imagine the wrench thrown in here.
Sent from my iPhone

I am curious as well as to how to address this issue if Nintendo does not recall the last card Atari put into the graveyard.

(I am new to judging and this is my view so far) To Q3, don't we, as judges, mostly have to believe the players at hand? We mix it with board state and maybe an observers' view, but it all comes down to the story the players tell. If we can't disprove their story, we have to take them at their word. We might warn them of the consequences if their story is false.

Thank you for posting about 404.3, Justin. I wasn't aware there was a way in legacy for the cards to be rearranged. I will keep the knowledge tucked away for future legacy tournaments.

Originally posted by CoriAnn Theroux:

(I am new to judging and this is my view so far) To Q3, don't we, as judges, mostly have to believe the players at hand? We mix it with board state and maybe an observers' view, but it all comes down to the story the players tell. If we can't disprove their story, we have to take them at their word. We might warn them of the consequences if their story is false.

The IPG says:

Originally posted by IPG 2:

Most Game Play Error infractions are assumed to have been committed unintentionally. If the judge believes that the error was intentional, he or she should first consider whether an Unsporting Conduct — Cheating infraction has occurred.

and:

Originally posted by IPG 1.1:

Disqualification can occur without proof of action so long as the Head Judge determines sufficient information exists to believe the tournament’s integrity may have been compromised.

You don't need to disprove a player's story, just determine what is most likely to have occurred. That is, based on the physical evidence, the game state, and the players' explanation, does the player's story add up?

However, the Knowledge Pool generally has the “house rule” that we assume that you've already investigated for and ruled out cheating, and that we can believe what the players have told us. That's because the one-sided nature of the prompt (where you can't ask the players questions) becomes much more complicated if you can't rule out cheating. At a real event, it's important to consider these things, but for Knowledge Pool purposes, proceed as though you've already verified all the facts.

If the players agree on what happened, there's little reason to distrust them. On some level we do “have to believe” players because it is unworkable to be skeptical about everything; ultimately you need to believe some account of what happened in order to make a ruling at all.

That being said, one of the caveats in applying the partial fix in the KP scenario is that the identity of the card in the wrong zone is known to both players. If the two players can't agree on which card was the third card, perhaps because of re-ordering the graveyard, then we move from partial-fix territory into backup territory, and backing up would involve putting the three cards on top in a random order since the players can't agree on the order they were in originally.

Nothing in the KP mentioned reordering of cards in the graveyard. While it is not strictly required to have the cards in the same order, it is assumed in that scenario that you have already verified that (and at a real event you should do so before acting!).

That said, if the identity of which of the 3 cards was the top card is unclear (if the players disagree on which one it was), then a random card of the 3 can be chosen. If the graveyard has been mixed completely in this interval so that the identity of which 3 cards were milled is itself unknown, this is where the KP rule of “cheating has been exempted” becomes fishy to me and I start investigating more heavily in that direction.