Hi everyone!

I had a case that is causing a lot of discussion, so I thought it could be interesting to share with you (and, if applicable, to receive an )

I'll explain the particular case and then I'll pose a more general question.

What happened is this: end of R1 of a GPT, a player comes to me and tells me that he has just counted 61 cards in his deck, while his decklist is 60 cards. You check with him and you find that he has an extra Forest in his deck, not listed. What are we supposed to do?

In general, we have a mismatch between a deck and a decklist, which both are perfectly legal. What applies here?


Thanks, bye!
Donato

Thank him for his honest, and award no penalty. While he may have played with an illegal deck, the game is now over, and we do not retroactively apply penalties for mistakes.

Pretty much, what Sean said - and, of course, instruct him to present a deck that matches his list the rest of the day.

Thanks. Unfortunately, while I was sure I was not going to issue a GL, I considered that the deck “won” and that the problem was the list. So I downgraded and had him play with the 61-card deck. My bad, I'll apologize with him :(

Thank you, Sir!
Donato

Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

Pretty much, what Sean said - and, of course, instruct him to present a deck that matches his list the rest of the day.

Some followup questions, if you don't mind:

1) What if, rather than a 61 card deck but a 60 card list, it was a 60-card deck with a 59-card list (and the player somehow catches this on his own before the judges do)? Clearly the same fix does not apply.

2) What if it was a 60-card deck with a 61-card list rather than a 61-card deck with a 60-card list? We can ask the player to present a deck that matches his list, but this is not always possible (particularly in older formats or smaller events without retailers present).

Thanks,

I met simillar situation in GPT. A player came to me and said he relized his DL was wrong.

However, in our case, player has 60-cards deck and also 60-cards decklist.
Problem is, he mistakenly wrote his decklist with switching 3-of and 4-of. (His deck actually has 3 of card A and 4 of card B, but his decklist says 4 of card A and 3 of card B).

So, I said, “please fix your deck to match your DL”. Unfortunately, player could not do this, because he didn't have 4 of card A (he has only three of them).

Now I need to fix his decklist. Now it is very difficult to do “no penalty, please be careful”.
I fixed his list and said “I'm sorry, you are nice guy, but you cannot play at following round with the deck which shown in your decklist, so I need to give you Game Loss.”

I thought about downgrade, but decided to issue GL as usual.
Your opinion? Should I have downgraded?

I feel that because he had the time between rounds to fix his deck to match his registered deck list, he should take the effort to fix it. If unfortunately he is not able to get his 4th card, I think he was very unlucky. He might be honest, but I think we cannot discount the fact that he might have switched his 3-of and 4-of around after taking a quick peek at the metagame but before handing in deck list for the GPT. As what Scott Marshall has said and following the IPG, he is supposed to play with a deck that matches his deck list, so I think the GL was appropriate.

Originally posted by Lyle Waldman:

Scott Marshall
Pretty much, what Sean said - and, of course, instruct him to present a deck that matches his list the rest of the day.

Some followup questions, if you don't mind:

1) What if, rather than a 61 card deck but a 60 card list, it was a 60-card deck with a 59-card list (and the player somehow catches this on his own before the judges do)? Clearly the same fix does not apply.

2) What if it was a 60-card deck with a 61-card list rather than a 61-card deck with a 60-card list? We can ask the player to present a deck that matches his list, but this is not always possible (particularly in older formats or smaller events without retailers present).

So, case #2 is quite simillar to my case. If player cannot fix his *deck*, I'll issue GL and then fix his decklist.

In case #1, even though player comes to us before we realize it, he could have gotten some benefit from this list in previous round (he could made 59 cards list and test 60th card in round 1, and realised it was not good in the field and changed 60th card and then came to us). So no downgrade. I'll issue GL.
( If he came to us before round 1, he got nothing from this, so no penalty. )

On Mon Jul 08 09:54, James Winward-Stuart wrote:
> I may be wrong here, but my understanding was that these days we fix the decklist to match the deck, not the other way around - so it doesn't matter that they don't have the listed cards, as we're just changing the list.
>
> From the May 2013 IPG, 3.9:
>
> Remove any cards from the deck that are illegal for the format or violate the maximum number allowed, fix any failures to de-sideboard, restore any missing cards if they (or identical replacements) can be located, then alter the decklist to reflect the remaining deck.
>
> So for the 3-of/4-of player, can we not simply (assuming there is no reason to suspect cheating as Andrew mentions, which would be a whole other issue) alter the decklist and allow him to continue with the deck he started with?

I think if we are invoking this part of the IPG, we are issuing a game loss. On
the other hand, if they submitted a legal decklist and happenned to have the
wrong cards in round one, well that's something we can't penalise
retrospectively and as long as they present the correct cards for subsequent
rounds we have no quarrel. It's only if they _can't_ present the 60 they
registered that we have to step in.

Now, whether we should say “you must present that 60 if you can (how do well
tell if they are lying here)” or just let them pick the 60 they registered or a
GL and the 60 they are presenting is something to discuss. I think we should
explicitly give them that choice, since if they just say “I don't have those
cards” then how can we stop them.

Matt

Kenji, you handled your situation correctly.

When a player tells us “I had a D/DL Problem” between games, there isn't an infraction at the time. It's only when that infraction occurs - i.e., when the deck is presented (and during the game) - that we assess a penalty and apply a remedy.

If the list is legal, the player can present a matching deck, and there is still no infraction.
If the list is not legal, we ensure that the deck is legal, then change the list to match.
If both list and deck are legal, but don't match, we change the list to match what was presented.

In the two examples where we change the list, the infraction is recorded and the Game Loss applies.

I'm happy that this apparently simple question led to a whole overview of the case. I know now that the answers are somewhat deducible by the philosophy in the documents, but I find the three lines by Uncle Scott so concise and illuminating that I think it would be very useful to have them printed in there. They would prevent many mistakes like mine.
Just my opinion, anyway. I don't know if that would be really practicable.

Thank you all for the fruitful insight!
Donato