> From a practical perspective:
> If the player who committed the error simply went “oops! Look at my hand- it's all creatures,” and the opponent was cool with that then we never would have received a call in the first place.
>
> At the point where we arrive at the table for a judge call, it is time to go by policy.
>
This is by far the best post I have seen on this. Players have a tendency to just fix things in the way that makes sense but if they get a Judge involved well policy needs to dictate our actions!

So let's be clear here. This is an official answer as to GRV - upgraded to GL due to failure to reveal…even if revealing is NOT required by the instructions of the ability UNLESS it's a creature. Correct?

This is where I'm personally having trouble understanding. Sure, the result is the same. We can all agree that the player who put the card in hand is going to receive a Game Loss for this particular scenario, but my main concern is whether or not the infraction is considered DEC or GRV because even with the explanation here, I don't see a GRV that preceded the DEC and therefore make it DEC because he followed the instructions perfectly until he put a card in hand and at the moment before he put the card in hand, he was following the instructions of “Look at the top card of the library.”

Do you kind of see where I'm going with this?

I am ready to accept that I am wrong, but I still don't understand how this situation fits the upgrade criterion. I really want to understand this because it is profoundly counter-intuitive to me.

I want to make my logic very explicit so holes can be poked in it without difficultly. We have to build a case for an upgrade from this line: “An error that an opponent can’t verify the legality of should have its penalty upgraded.”

I honestly don't see how we can do that here. If a player reveals his hand, the opponent absolutely can verify the legality of the action: Player put a card in his hand. All cards in his hand could have been put there legally. Opponent can verify this by seeing all cards the player could have drawn. He cannot literally verify it by the single “uniquely identifiable position” called out in the IPG, but he can verify that the power set of uniquely identifiable positions are legal, thus making it impossible that the action taken was illegal. Thus, we rigorously prove by contradiction that the action taken was legal.

Putting it in another context, this sequence is logically identical to NAP casting Peek in response to the Domri activation. Then NAP sees and records the whole hand. Then AP fails to reveal, says “Oh, here,” and reveals a creature card that wasn't present in the hand when Peek was played. Would we really give the Game Loss there as well? We are using the exact same logic: all the unknown cards in the player's hand are legal choices for Domri to put in hand. We just have the special case where there is only one unknown card.

So is Policy really to be read in such a rigid and literal fashion that we can only consider the special case where Unknown Objects = 1 and Possible Positions = 1? What if I fail to reveal for Congregation at Dawn, but I have 3 creature cards on top of my library before I draw a card? There we are willing to consider that three separate choices must have been legal, making it impossible that any of the cards I tutored weren't creature cards. The situation would be the same with Firemind's Foresight and an empty hand. Policy, it seems to me, is trivially shown to be robust enough to handle situations where “uniquely identifiable” is not meant to be read as “exactly one object in exactly one position,” but instead as “the collection of objects in all potential positions.” And the collection of objects in the player's hand is just as obviously a legal result of a Domri activation as would a hand of Brainstorm, Impulse, and Thirst for Knowledge be following a Firemind's Foresight.

This game loss feels like bad customer service. It doesn't protect the integrity of the event. It doesn't rigorously fit the upgrade criterion. I really don't get the philosophy we are applying here. (And I really hope it isn't “sloppy judges would do it wrong if this were the policy.”) I am willing to be wrong. I just need to understand why so I'm not wrong in this way again.

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 12:29 PM, Scott Marshall <
forum-4642-e870@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:

> While I'd love to judge in a world in which every judge is properly
> trained and equipped to apply ultimate wisdom and thus make extremely fair
> & just rulings without following strict guidelines … that judge just
> doesn't exist. Instead, we'd have 100 judges facing the same situation, and
> making a handful - or even dozens! - of different rulings. It wouldn't take
> long before the players would lose all trust in the judge program, only
> because they'd have no certainty of fairness or consistency.
>

To lighten this up a bit… we had these days long ago. The days when a
judge could DQ you because he didn't like the way you were dressed, or
because he just like your attitude, or just plain didn't like you. :)

Ahh, yes. The bad old days. :)

–David

–
Ab ovo usque ad mala. – Horace

Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

2) we (Judges) avoided a different mistake, which would be handling this situation differently than the other 80-90 times it happens. (Actually, the original example of a hand containing only creatures is probably more like 1 in 1000…)

Well it did happen at a recent Modern tournament. Some Pod decks play nothing but lands, Pod, Domri & creatures. As it's a fairly popular deck around here I expect to encounter the same situation somewhere in the future.

Edited Toby Hazes (June 17, 2013 11:42:46 AM)

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:04 PM, Ronny Alvarado <
forum-4642-e870@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:

> So let's be clear here. This is an official answer as to GRV - upgraded to
> GL due to failure to reveal…even if revealing is NOT required by the
> instructions of the ability UNLESS it's a creature. Correct?


I'm not sure I understand the last part of your question, but here's my
explanation of why this is GRV.

Resolving a spell or ability involves following the instructions in the
order written. Domri's ability has 3 steps:

1) Look at the top card
2) If it's a creature, you may reveal it
3) put it into your hand.

If you skip step 2, you have not followed the instructions (which is a
GRV). Further, if you put the card into your hand at this point there are
two possibilities:

A) If it was a creature, then there was a game instruction that said you
could put it there.
B) If it was not a creature, there is no instruction.

In case (A), there is a game instruction but your opponent can't verify it;
in case (B) there was no instruction at all. As a judge, we can look at
their hand and see whether there is a creature present. If so, we don't
know which case it was and we still have the preceding GRV (by not
following the reveal). The opponent has no way of knowing which case it
was at all; as judges we can see the player's hand and we can usually say
“yes, that *might* have been legal…” but we still don't really know.

If there is not a creature in the player's hand, then there may be a bigger
problem–but the card was still not revealed and you still have the
preceding GRV.

–David

–
Ab ovo usque ad mala. – Horace

I'd like to be clear on one thing for this discussion – if Anna activated Domri with ZERO cards in hand, drew the card into her hand, then Nikolai calls a judge then we can just issue a warning as the card is uniquely identifiable – the only card in Anna's hand.

Originally posted by David Hibbs:

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 1:04 PM, Ronny Alvarado <
forum-4642-e870@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:

> So let's be clear here. This is an official answer as to GRV - upgraded to
> GL due to failure to reveal…even if revealing is NOT required by the
> instructions of the ability UNLESS it's a creature. Correct?


I'm not sure I understand the last part of your question, but here's my
explanation of why this is GRV.

Resolving a spell or ability involves following the instructions in the
order written. Domri's ability has 3 steps:

1) Look at the top card
2) If it's a creature, you may reveal it
3) put it into your hand.

If you skip step 2, you have not followed the instructions (which is a
GRV). Further, if you put the card into your hand at this point there are
two possibilities:

A) If it was a creature, then there was a game instruction that said you
could put it there.
B) If it was not a creature, there is no instruction.

In case (A), there is a game instruction but your opponent can't verify it;
in case (B) there was no instruction at all. As a judge, we can look at
their hand and see whether there is a creature present. If so, we don't
know which case it was and we still have the preceding GRV (by not
following the reveal). The opponent has no way of knowing which case it
was at all; as judges we can see the player's hand and we can usually say
“yes, that *might* have been legal…” but we still don't really know.

If there is not a creature in the player's hand, then there may be a bigger
problem–but the card was still not revealed and you still have the
preceding GRV.

–David

–
Ab ovo usque ad mala. – Horace

David, I want to take a look at your steps that you pointed out.

1) Look at the top card
2) If it's a creature, you may reveal it
3) put it into your hand.

Ok, here's the problem I have with this. #2 and #3 should be under one line. Because the ONLY time you would put the card in hand is if you would have revealed a creature. If you follow steps 1 and notice a land and proceed to step 2, you notice you can't reveal it, but because so far you still followed the instructions correctly at this point, you proceed onto step 3 which you can't do so I see it as…

1) Look at the top card
2) If it's creature, you may reveal it and put it into your hand.

That is one instruction.

So with that said, if you just put a card into hand as part of steps 2, the GRV would have to occur in step 1…which isn't there because you followed the instructions correctly.
Hopefully I'm making some sense here.

Edited Ronny Alvarado (June 17, 2013 12:14:08 PM)

Hi,

I read a lot about how it would seem more fair for the player to
reveal his whole hand… And as in most calls, we totally forget the
other player.

If my opponent had done such an error and this deviation had been
proposed, i would have felt cheated. If I know the rules or know
someone who got a GL because of ‘failure to reveal’ or even maybe
because it happened to me, I would not look at this fix and find it
'better' or ‘fairer’ than my opponent getting a GL like the IPG
describes.

I would personally not deviate because having a hand full of creature
is not exeptional enough for me.

Greets

On Mon Jun 17 17:29, Scott Marshall wrote:
> Topher, I see your point, but you're discarding two important facts:
> 1) the player made the mistake - not us;
> 2) we (Judges) avoided a different mistake, which would be handling this situation differently than the other 80-90 times it happens. (Actually, the original example of a hand containing only creatures is probably more like 1 in 1000…)
>
> While I'd love to judge in a world in which every judge is properly trained and equipped to apply ultimate wisdom and thus make extremely fair & just rulings without following strict guidelines … that judge just doesn't exist. Instead, we'd have 100 judges facing the same situation, and making a handful - or even dozens! - of different rulings. It wouldn't take long before the players would lose all trust in the judge program, only because they'd have no certainty of fairness or consistency.

Do we make the rules simpler whenever a judge makes a mistake? Or when they might potentially make a mistake? Making the penalty for any play error be a game loss would certainly be simpler to enforce consistently, but clearly ridiculous. Decrying the poor state of judge training is not an excuse for implementing bad rules, it's a reason to improve judge training.

More importantly, I think that Joshua Feingold is right in what he says about the current wording of policy. Maybe that wasn't the intent, which I'm sure Scott can attest to, but I find it hard to see anything wrong with the current wording.

Finally, for all those people complaining that a player gets to ‘pick their punishment’; I don't see the problem? The fix is ‘the player can reveal their hand to show the play was legal’. End of story. Players are independent of that allowed to concede, even in response to something which would reveal their hand. I've had opponents scoop in response to thoughtseize or gitaxian probe before. Why is it somehow different when it's policy rather than game rules that's instructing a player to reveal their hand? If you think ‘people got a game loss for it before, I shouldn’t be “cheated” out of my free game win now' - things have been downgraded in policy from GLs to Warnings before and will be again. An opponent isn't _entitled_ to a free game win just because their opponent made a mistake. Policy is primarily about making games of magic happen wherever possible without disadvantaging the non-offending player. Here the opponent is clearly not disadvantaged - he got to see the creature that was drawn. Thats all he's _entitled_ to.

Matt

On Mon, Jun 17, 2013 at 2:13 PM, Ronny Alvarado <
forum-4642-e870@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:

> Ok, here's the problem I have with this. #2 and #3 should be under one
> line. Because the ONLY time you would put the card in hand is if you would
> have revealed a creature. If you follow steps 1 and notice a land and
> proceed to step 2, you notice you can't reveal it, but because so far you
> still followed the instructions correctly at this point, you proceed onto
> step 3 which you can't do so I see it as…
>

Let's look at this another way; we'll start with the assumption that this
is DEC. Ignoring for a moment the GRV/CPV exceptions, either the player
has a card for which we cannot account -or- the player must have illegally
put the card into their hand. We know the card is from Domri, so that
leaves the question of legality.

How do you know that it was illegal for the card to go into their hand?

We look at their hand, right? Maybe the player has no creatures in their
hand. (I'm probably looking at the player funny and asking a lot of
questions if this happens.) More likely they have at least one creature in
their hand. How do I know that the creature card was not the one put into
their hand for the ability? I don't. Why don't I know? Well, I don't
know because an instruction – the one to reveal the card – was not
carried out. In the extreme case, we as judges know that the action of
putting the card into his hand WAS legal, because his hand is full of
creatures–but their opponent doesn't know that.

Their opponent doesn't know the legality (and often we don't either)
because an action was not performed at the correct time. If an action was
not carried out properly, then there must be a GRV.

“Because the ONLY time you would put the card in hand is if you would have
revealed a creature.” – Did you reveal a creature? No? What did you
reveal? Nothing? OK, then, you didn't do what you were supposed to do?

You are right that these two pieces are connected, and they are all one
sentence. The catch is that a *sentence* does not necessarily correlate to
a complete *action*. There are many cards with multiple connected clauses,
sentences, paragraphs, keyword actions, and phrases; Domri is just one of
them. In order for Domri's ability to make any sense at all, you must
carry out ALL of the actions IN ORDER whether there is a period, semicolon,
space, paragraph, hyphen, comma, bullet point, wingding, etc etc between
them. I'm being a bit silly with this list, but the main point is that if
you skip instructions or do them out of order you have (technically)
violated the game rules. That violation often affects actions taken after
them, so we try to act on the root infraction.

–David

–
Ab ovo usque ad mala. – Horace

Originally posted by Joshua Feingold:

Putting it in another context, this sequence is logically identical to NAP casting Peek in response to the Domri activation. Then NAP sees and records the whole hand. Then AP fails to reveal, says “Oh, here,” and reveals a creature card that wasn't present in the hand when Peek was played. Would we really give the Game Loss there as well? We are using the exact same logic: all the unknown cards in the player's hand are legal choices for Domri to put in hand. We just have the special case where there is only one unknown card.

That's an entirely different situation though, and one that may deserve another thread. What it seems like you're proposing is granting judges the ability to apply an arbitrary Peek effect to the game state at a player's request. Scott already touched on why this is a slippery slope, but consider that the IPG has no provisions allowing us to alter the game state unless it's as a -necessary- fix to another problem - I'm thinking specifically of the fix for drawing a card as a result of a GRV/CPV.

Logically, at any point in which an unknown card enters a player's hand, every card in the hand becomes unknown, even if you revealed what some or all of those cards were previously. The hand is an unordered set of cards; once an unknown card enters the hand, it is subject to dexterity and no longer uniquely identifiable. The library is an ordered sequence of unknown cards, which is why you can easily verify the legality of Congregation and Dawn if the positions of those top three cards haven't changed. In the case of adding unknown cards to an empty hand, those cards are uniquely identifiable until another unknown card enters the hand.

So what we're trying to verify is that a card that is put into the hand (without being revealed) satisfies some conditions. Let's use a miracle as an example. If I peel Bonfire of the Damned, put it in my hand, then try to cast it for its miracle cost, how can you verify that was the first card I drew if there are N other cards in my hand, where N > 0? You can verify that there -is- a miracle card in my hand, but that doesn't let me miracle it. In the Domri situation, I put the card in my hand without revealing, and a judge offers to let me reveal that the rest of my cards are also creatures. Okay, you've verified that -one- of those cards was legally obtained with Domri's ability, but which one was it? You can't uniquely identify it. Now you may be thinking here, “Well it doesn't really matter” but do you want to be the judge who made that call when it -did- matter?

Here are my closing points: 1) let's not give judges more power to evaulate game states than we actually need, and 2) failing to reveal is behavior that should be discouraged constantly. Decklist errors are easy to make, and we give GLs for those, too.

Re. GRV+ vs DEC, it's the kind of thing where, by the letter, it -could- be interpreted as one or the other, but the most obvious intent is that it falls under GRV+ (failing to reveal) since there was an instruction to reveal that was skipped. DEC is kind of a superset of those situations, so the policy should be to see it as failing to reveal if the opportunity to reveal was presented, and as DEC otherwise.

Edit: Meh, meant Congregation at Dawn, not Eladamri's Call.

Edited Aaron Huntsman (June 17, 2013 02:00:30 PM)

Originally posted by Matthew Johnson:

Decrying the poor state of judge training

That's not at all the message I was trying to convey; in fact, I believe that - overall - judge training is far better than it ever has been, and there's ever-increasing efforts to improve it yet more.

Rather, you should read my point more like this: it isn't possible to train judges to the point where they can simply discard the IPG and rely solely on their wisdom and deep understanding of policy philosophy, and always reach an ideal conclusion.

I'll admit, I'm more than just a bit surprised that this is getting so much traction. I understand not enjoying the side effects of applying the correct infraction and penalty - that Hall of Fame player I mentioned is one of the nicest, most upstanding and sporting people I've encountered in all my years as a Judge. Having him lose a game he was about to win is not a happy moment - but it's still the right decision, and the correct ruling.

Go back and re-read Jeremie's post: he makes a critical point about the importance of consistency.

***Here the opponent is clearly not disadvantaged - he got to see the creature that was drawn. Thats all he's _entitled_ to.***

While much of the rest of your argument seems reasonable, the sentence above does not. The opponent is also entitled to know WHICH card you just searched for, which info could be useful to him as he attempts to think about your future intentions. If AP shows his own hand, NAP will not know which card was searched for.

I'd like to point out that while he can see the creature drawn with Domri's ability, he cannot identify it as such. Therefore, the above statment appears to be quite false. Of course, this might not affect your argument about why we should not upgarde to GL.

I think it would be awesome if Domri read “…reveal it and put it into your hand. You may play that card this turn without paying its mana cost.” Lots of fun now…

-Eric Shukan

On Mon Jun 17 21:12, Scott Marshall wrote:
>

Originally posted by Matthew Johnson:

Decrying the poor state of judge training

That's not at all the message I was trying to convey; in fact, I believe that - overall - judge training is far better than it ever has been, and there's ever-increasing efforts to improve it yet more.
>
> Rather, you should read my point more like this: it isn't possible to train judges to the point where they can simply discard the IPG and rely solely on their wisdom and deep understanding of policy philosophy, and always reach an ideal conclusion.

And noone is arguing that the IPG should be discarded either. We're just pointing out that here “the legality of the action can be verified”. I don't believe that this is something we can't train judges to be consistent about and I certainly believe that game losses are neccessary evils where the game can't be fixed and not something we should scatter about because players deserve it for having made a mistake. Here it's clear to everyone that the game can be simply fixed with no potential for abuse and no advantage to the offending player.

Matt