I judged a legacy event last week-end and made a mistake during the ruling (I was very sloppy) but it made me thinking if the current policy incentivizes players to ‘cheat’, i.e. call judges a little while after the mistake is noticed.

A player calls me and tells me he found a card that is supposed to be in his deck but must have been hidden since game 1 under a sheet of paper with life totals. The card is trinisphere and to my knowledge it is not supposed to be sided out. The sideboard is 15 cards and the deck is 52 + 7 cards in hand. Somehow I completely failed to notice permanents on the opponent's side of the table. For me they have only just decided to keep their hands so I ruled shuffling the Trinisphere into the deck and having the player take a mulligan. I was appealed and the HJ managed to make the correct ruling without the forced mulligan.

This situtation demonstrates that just waiting for your opponent to play their land for the turn (and casting Ponder actually) is enough to improve your situtation. Having one less card is very crucial especially if your current hand is good. Is there a way to maybe add a different upgrade path or just eliminate the mulligan clause when an error is discovered during opening hands? Why is it there in the first place?

Intentionally waiting to call attention to your own error to gain advantage is cheating. The IPG for non-cheating sections works the way it does, because the assumption in all of them is that its not cheating. A player can't wait to call for a less severe penalty, because they'd get DQ'd. The mulligan policy for deck problem exists because it not existing leads to confusion. If we just applied the “remove all illegal cards” fix and left them with say 6 cards in hand, then the question becomes what do they now mulligan to? What if fixing it took them to 5 in hand? Because of this we have them just mulligan to save the headache.

Looking back at Toby's policy update for Amonkhet, it isn't clear that the forced mulligan was intended to apply to situations in which no cards were removed from the deck/hand. There is a mention of “consistency” which suggests that we apply this fix even if no cards are removed from the hand (though how you discover failure to de-sideboard without having drawn a sideboard card is beyond me), but at the same time the guidance seems to suggest that the forced mulligan was intended to apply in situations where sideboard cards were removed from the deck, which is not what happened here.

Having the forced mulligan apply during all opening hands does create a kind of perverse incentive to wait until game actions are taken, as Arman points out. This doesn't happen in the failure to de-sideboard case because the player would be losing the sideboard cards anyway, so they can't improve their prospects by waiting. This could be a very difficult cheat to catch as well, since it's not unreasonable for an obscured card to remain undiscovered during opening hands, and it seems extremely bad form to use the strength of a player's opening 7 as the primary metric for whether we think they were cheating or not.

So my gut reaction says that we don't want to be forcing a mulligan in this situation, though I'm open to being wrong (and policy, as written, currently says that we should be applying the mulligan in all cases).

The “If the error is discovered during opening hands, instruct the player to mulligan” line is there for two reasons:

1. If the deck had cards in it that shouldn't have been there, it's assumed that the player noticed due to drawing one of them in their hand, and so their hand is going to have the wrong number of cards after being fixed. The best way to rectify that is to have them mulligan.

2. If the deck was missing any cards, the player didn't have any chance of drawing them, so they have an illegal hand. We can't let players manipulate probabilities of drawing cards they want or don't want by removing them from the deck, so we need to rectify that error, and the only way to do so is to have the player mulligan.

Reason #1 doesn't apply here, but reason #2 does. We need the player to have a hand that was drawn from a legal deck, so we need to have them mulligan. And keep in mind that the player was perfectly capable of catching them error by looking through the deck before presenting.

Isaac - and everyone! - please, frame your opinions in a clearer manner (“I think” is a good lead-in), lest some unsuspecting new judge reads that and thinks it's official or, even worse, “correct”. (It's neither.)

Originally posted by Toby's blog post:

Only one piece of policy changed: discovering sideboard cards in your opening hand is an automatic mulligan rather than removal of the cards. Removing multiple cards from the opening hand was too punitive, so this ensures the same remedy no matter how many cards are discovered before the game begins.

This explanation is in addition to the IPG text, which instructs us to “remove any incorrect cards”. Toby's explanation is really focusing on the change from a prior version; now, we fix things and then require a mulligan - thus, no matter how many sideboard cards were in hand, only one card is “lost” to that player's starting hand.

d:^D

Okay, after reading Andrew's and Marshall's posts I think that the remedy with the mulligan is there to let players not lose more than one card from their opening hand. Why not spell it out? The way Additional Remedy paragraph is written now the mulligan part applies every time a Warning is issued for the Deck Problem.

Originally posted by Isaac King:

We need the player to have a hand that was drawn from a legal deck, so we need to have them mulligan. And keep in mind that the player was perfectly capable of catching them error by looking through the deck before presenting.

It is true but it does create an incentive for players to ‘cheat’. As far as I understand current policy trends, we want players calling a judge to not be penalized harshly hence all the downgrades. We also want them to do that asap and we don't want to give them an opportunity to gain dubious advantages wherever we can. Mulliganing after deck problem is something that can be improved in this case.
To be honest this ‘cheat’ is not even a cheat per se. It is rather a technicality that is there to make policy shorter but has the potential to turn good people into cheaters.