At GP Chiba, I got a judge call and player said,

“ I activated 0 ability of Tezzeret, and I mistakenly picked up 2 cards although I don't have 3 artifacts”.

At that time, that 2 cards didn't touch his original hand (or cards). His opponent wasn't sure which of these two cards are top and bottom though. Is this LEC (and shuffle them in his library and draw one) or HCE ( and opponent choose one from these two cards and he draw that one) ?

My ruling was LEC, because these 2 cards are not drawn.
However, some judges said it was HCE, because we can think these 2 cards as “set of cards”.

Then another question appeared. When you scry 3 when you should scry 2, it is HCE (example of HCE!). What is the difference between my case and scry case? I thought like “When you picked up cards for scry, you are already in the process of scry. However, when you are going to draw and picked up cards, you don't draw them until that cards touch your hand”. But this seems really weird for me.

Then, during discussion with other (L3) judge, another problem arise. He said “HCE is very limited. Even you (mistakenly) picked up 3 cards in scry 2, it will be LEC in many cases”.

Yes, I'm confused now. What is the borderline of HCE and LCE…?

Great questions, thanks for asking!

It is HCE when a player creates a set, with the intention of creating a set, but the set ends up with too many cards in it. Notice that there is no need to draw cards, the infraction is not called Drawing Extra Cards for a very good reason. The instruction is to Scry 2, but the player picks up 3 cards: HCE, because they created a set of 3 instead on 2 cards. The player picks up 2 cards and accidentally flips over the top card of the library? The intended set is 2 cards as it should be, the flipped over card was never meant to be part of that set.

Tezzeret, Artifice Master's second ability reads: Draw a card. If you control three or more artifacts, draw two cards instead. The player was instructed to make a set fo 1 card, then add that set to their hand. Instead, they put 2 cards in the set they wanted to add to the hand. So, this is HCE, we reveal the 2 cards from this set, opponent chooses 1 to draw and 1 to be shuffled away. The only thing that would change if the player had already drawn the card, is which set we need to reveal to fix the situation; if the 2 cards are in the hand, then we reveal the hand (and not the set of 2 cards to be drawn, as that set is no longer uniquely identifiable), opponent chooses 1 card from the hand, and we shuffle that into the random portion of the library.

To summarise: the difference between HCE and L@EC is if the player intended to create a set with a certain number of cards. And how do we determine intent? Usually, we ask the player :)

Per the Annotated IPG:
This infraction does not apply to simple dexterity errors, such as when a card being pulled off the library sticks to another card and is seen or knocked off the library. The cards themselves must be part of a distinct set intended by the player.

These lines are here to give a distinction between when a player action should be considered Hidden Card Error versus Looking at Extra Cards. If we use Dig Through Time as an example, if a player resolving this spell looks at eight cards rather than seven, we have the wrong number in the set. This is Hidden Card Error, as the set contains a card it should not, and that set is hidden. If, however, during the resolution of Dig Through Time, a player looks at seven cards, but knocks the eighth card off the deck while picking up those seven, then that eighth card is not a part of the set, and should be treated as a Looking at Extra Cards infraction.

Additionally, if a player goes to scry one card, and accidentally picks up two, this could still be Looking at Extra Cards. The difference does require a bit of common sense, as defining an exact technical line between Hidden Card Error and Looking at Extra Cards would require a lot of text and examples and still not cover everything. Take a moment to consider whether Looking at Extra Cards is a more appropriate infraction, whether the player made a mistake in the number of cards or the number of cards was an accident, and whether the player has already started to make decisions about the set of cards.

My take on this is: If the two cards stuck together then it is LEC, while if the player thought they were drawing two cards when they should have only drawn a single one it would be HCE.

I'm pretty sure Kenji was looking for an answer, not a discussion topic, so I've locked this thread until I can confirm that Dustin's answer is, in fact, correct. (It looks good to me, but I'm not ready to put the ‘O’ stamp on it, yet…)

d:^D

Wow, I'm bad - set this aside, then forgot to come back once I had confirmation.

In any case, the ‘O’fficial answer is “what Dustin said”. :)

d:^D