The matchup is Ponza vs. Tron. On turn one, Urza drops an Italian Urza's Mine with this art into play and says “land, go.” Ponza drops a Forest and a Utopia Sprawl. On turn two, Urza drops a German Urza's Mine with this art next to (not stacked on) his other land and says “land, go.” Ponza plays a Mountain, taps his lands, and lays a Molten Rain on top of “Urzas Bergwerk.”

P: “Destroy your Tower.”
U: “No response, but it's a Mine, not a tower.”
P: “Wait, that's a second Mine? I'm not casting this, then.”
U: “You've already cast it, though.”
P: “Judge!”

Do you permit the Ponza player to undo his cast of the spell?

Points in favor:

• The Urzatron player didn't identify any of his lands, and the MTR specifies that foreign cards cannot be used to create confusion.
  
• “Destroy your Tower” isn't a legal play, because there is no Tower on the battlefield.

Points against:

• Targeting the Mine is a legal play. We'd be backing up a legal play without an infraction to justify it.
  
• Both players are responsible for the game state, and the Ponza player could have asked the card names at any time.
  
• We presumably would not permit a backup if a player mistook, say, Llanowar Elves for Elvish Mystic, so backing up creates a blurry line.
  

Thoughts?

{Edit: corrected card tags}

Edited Scott Marshall (Aug. 27, 2018 11:00:02 PM)

I assume the line you're referring to is this one:

MTR 3.3
Players may use otherwise-legal non-English cards provided they are not using them to create an advantage by using misleading text or pictures.

There are a decent number of players who do play foreign cards in order to confuse their opponent, and realistically I've never seen a judge tell them they can't do it. While I wish we could make players stop doing this, it would be very difficult to enforce and would most likely result in significant backlash.



I don't have a strong opinion one way or the other as to whether we should allow the backup or not. There are reasonable arguments for both sides. However if the backup is performed, I do believe a GRV needs to be issued to AP. We're either saying “everything is fine, play on” or “you've cast a spell with an illegal target”. We don't allow players to take things back without penalty if significant time has passed since the action was first taken, which is this case has clearly happened with the opponent stating “no responses”.

I would hold AP to their decision. They uniquely identified their target by placing the card on top of it. I don't believe this is a case of using foreign cards to create confusion because that “Mine” is a “Mine” in every language that the card is available in. Additionally, the Tron player is not required to play same lands on top of each other. I personally play lands side by side until I reach about 4 or 5 lands and then it's simply to conserve space on the playmat.

Originally posted by Isaac King:

However if the backup is performed, I do believe a GRV needs to be issued to AP.

I'm not sure the correct fix to this problem, but I'm fairly confident this isn't it. Issuing a GRV because we've already decided we want to back up is precisely the opposite of how we should handle infractions–we should determine if there was an underlying GRV first, and apply the fix only if there is

In this case, I'd be supremely disinclined to issue an actual infraction here. Consider the following hypothetical conversation:

“Molten Rain your Tower.”
“It's a Mine, actually.”
“Whatever, I'm still killing it.”
“No, you said Tower. Judge!”

Would you issue an infraction there? And if not, can the player in the actual call get out of his warning by saying “Nevermind, Judge, I'll just have the spell be cast on the Mine?”

We can potentially back up because… well, we just let players take back certain actions, like half-casting a spell or tapping and untapping lands. The exact circumstances in which we do so are sketchy and it's a tool we should use sparingly (as I understand it, it's currently a hot topic for debate among L3s). But we do it, and we could do it here. However, if you feel that too much has passed for a “takesies backsies” backup and we can only backup with an infraction, then we're probably not backing up.

I'm with Brock here – I'm not backing up, or issuing any infraction. The player could have confirmed their opponent's lands before making the play, and didn't. We don't back up when a player makes a bad attack when they thought their opponent was at a lower life total than they truly are, and this strikes me as the ~same situation.

Playing with non-English cards is entirely legal, and we shouldn't be giving extra allowances based on that because it leads to a real mess of inconsistent rulings. We can't start getting into the weeds of how well each player could read each other's cards, or else we may start giving different rulings in this scenario vs if it was the same scenario but both players were German vs same scenario, but AP said they spoke German fluently vs same scenario but AP took several years of German back in High School … and so on down an endless rabbit hole. Trying to see how fluent the players were with the cards involved and factoring that into account in our rulings would be a mess.

The only reasonable way I see to avoid getting into that is to draw a hard line – the play was legal, and the player misunderstanding the board state is not grounds for a rewind due to their opponent's non-English cards.

Originally posted by Brock Ullom:

that “Mine” is a “Mine” in every language that the card is available in.

I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. Every card is itself in any language.

Originally posted by Eli Meyer:

we should determine if there was an underlying GRV first, and apply the fix only if there is

Yes, we should only back up if we determine that a GRV occurred. I never said that we should be determining the infraction by the fix we want to perform.

Originally posted by Eli Meyer:

Consider the following hypothetical conversation:
[…]

That seems like a reasonable argument as to why this isn't a GRV.

Originally posted by Eli Meyer:

we just let players take back certain actions, like half-casting a spell or tapping and untapping lands.

That's a completely different situation. We let players take things like that back because they haven't finished their action yet. They haven't had any opportunity to gain an advantage in those examples. In this Urza's Mine scenario, the player has gotten the information that the opponent wasn't going to respond. Would you let a player cast a spell legally, wait for the opponent to say “I'm not going to respond”, and then let them take it back?

Edited Isaac King (Aug. 28, 2018 08:03:03 PM)

Originally posted by Brock Ullom:

Judge (Niveau 2)
I would hold AP to their decision. They uniquely identified their target by placing the card on top of it. I don't believe this is a case of using foreign cards to create confusion because that “Mine” is a “Mine” in every language that the card is available in. Additionally, the Tron player is not required to play same lands on top of each other. I personally play lands side by side until I reach about 4 or 5 lands and then it's simply to conserve space on the playmat.

While I do understand the ruling you are issuing regarding the first part of the reasoning I am kind of torn regarding the justification beyond “They uniquely identified their target by placing the card on top of it”.
Saying that this land does not create confusion is disingenuous. I hope we all know that playing this mine looking like a tower is a thing that players do or do not do on purpose but it is definitely creating unclear visual board states. Most of people recognize cards by global aspect, color, picture and not by name. I do not think the language has anything to do with the situation, but I am convinced that the art does.

I think that now most people would forbid the german wald with the picture of a plains, most people now forbid heavy withe alterations (snow etc.) for non-white cards, but since this is a regular printing issued by WotC, nobody has forbidden this version yet as far as I know. But this card create problems in a recurring maner (at least in my experience).

In short I think the crux of the problem is not the language but the art.
And the problem is much closer to let's say a sensei's divining top altered to look very much like a counterbalance and a player targets one believing it is the other.

Originally posted by Brock Ullom:

They uniquely identified their target by placing the card on top of it.

Is it really true? They said destroy tower at the same time. In other situations what do we take as the action of declaring the target, i.e. Dark Confidant and Snapcaster Mage are both in play, player plays a Lightning Bolt saying, “Bolt Bob” but touch Snapcaster. What would you hold them to there?

In the Confidant/Snapcaster situation I would say there is confusion over who the player is targeting and rewind back to the point of targeting and allow them to choose the creature they want with no penalty. I would say the same is true here and would rewind with no penalty, the issue was caught as soon as it happened.

Originally posted by Théo CHENG:

Saying that this land does not create confusion is disingenuous. I hope we all know that playing this mine looking like a tower is a thing that players do or do not do on purpose but it is definitely creating unclear visual board states. Most of people recognize cards by global aspect, color, picture and not by name. I do not think the language has anything to do with the situation, but I am convinced that the art does.

I think that now most people would forbid the german wald with the picture of a plains, most people now forbid heavy withe alterations (snow etc.) for non-white cards, but since this is a regular printing issued by WotC, nobody has forbidden this version yet as far as I know. But this card create problems in a recurring maner (at least in my experience).

- If you were the Head Judge of a PPTQ, would you forbid this card from being played?
- If you were the King of the World, would you forbid this card from being played?

I don't think I would because I have not until now.

Since it is a regulard card issued by WotC, I do not think it is my call to make and doing so would in my opinion be an error.
Still, I can aknowledge the problems that this card creates and understand the issue encountered by Eli.

Originally posted by Isaac King:

Originally posted by Brock Ullom:

that “Mine” is a “Mine” in every language that the card is available in.

I'm not sure what that's supposed to mean. Every card is itself in any language.

This art of Urza's mine is used as Urza's mine in every language. Compare that to the Wald forest for example, there we have a forest that was printed with the art for plains. That, to me, would be a situation where the art would create confusion and could be used to create an advantage.

Originally posted by Gareth Tanner:

Is it really true? They said destroy tower at the same time. In other situations what do we take as the action of declaring the target, i.e. Dark Confidant and Snapcaster Mage are both in play, player plays a Lightning Bolt saying, “Bolt Bob” but touch Snapcaster. What would you hold them to there?

The difference between these 2 scenarios is that the Ponza player knew which land they wanted to destroy, and in both scenarios I'm not letting the player uncast the spell.

Originally posted by Brock Ullom:

The difference between these 2 scenarios is that the Ponza player knew which land they wanted to destroy, and in both scenarios I'm not letting the player uncast the spell.

The Ponza player did know what land they wanted to destroy. They wanted to destroy the Urza's Tower that they they thought was on the battlefield. The problem is that they pointed at something that wasn't an Urza's Tower. Does it matter if there was an Urza's Tower on the battlefield or not? What if there was a actual Urza's Tower next to the Mine-that-looks-like-a-Tower? Would you let that player destroy the actual Tower or still hold him to the card he physically pointed to?

Originally posted by Brock Ullom:

Originally posted by Gareth Tanner:

Is it really true? They said destroy tower at the same time. In other situations what do we take as the action of declaring the target, i.e. Dark Confidant and Snapcaster Mage are both in play, player plays a Lightning Bolt saying, “Bolt Bob” but touch Snapcaster. What would you hold them to there?

The difference between these 2 scenarios is that the Ponza player knew which land they wanted to destroy, and in both scenarios I'm not letting the player uncast the spell.

So which creature are you holding them to targeting?

Originally posted by Francesco Scialpi:

- If you were the Head Judge of a PPTQ, would you forbid this card from being played?
- If you were the King of the World, would you forbid this card from being played?

If I were king of the world, I’d permit players to use multiplayer or language/art versions of the same card, but I would also require them to proactively provide the English name of the cards as they played them.

An interesting discussion, but I just want to add a couple observations.

1) Judges do not do take-bakcs. Period. Ever. That's not something in our toolkit - only opponents can approve a takeback, and once the judge is involved, it's pretty clear that's not what's desired.
Judges only rewind when it's called for as part of the Additional Remedy section of any infraction(s).

2) There is nothing illegal about the actions taken so far by Ponza and Urza.

d:^D