Thanks everyone for the great back and forth discussion last week on our GOLD problem. I love seeing everyone working together through the details.
This week were back on a SILVER question so our L3+ judges please wait until Thursday to join in with your answers. Good luck!
You are the Head Judge of your local standard RCQ. Alex wins the die roll and elects to go first.
Both players draw their opening hands. Before either player audibly elects to keep their hand, Alex draws a card, plays a mountain and says, “your turn.”
Startled, Nathan says “Ok I guess you kept your hand. I wanted to mulligan. Wait, did you just draw a card for your first turn? Judge!”
Alex explains that they are primarily a commander player and they just weren’t thinking.
What do you do?
Hi everyone! Thanks again for your answers. There were some mixed responses here so if you want to discuss it further please don’t hesitate to reach out. Felipe was pretty much spot on so great job!
Alex receives a Warning for a Hidden Card Error (HCE).
First, Nathan should finish their mulligan procedure before applying the fix. It is important to do this first as he should not have full information of Alex’s hand for his mulligan. We are just catching him up to when Alex’s error has happened slightly in the future.
Our fix should be: simply backup the mountain to Alex’s hand, reveal the hand to Nathan and Nathan may select any card from the hand to return to the random portion of the library. Now we are in Alex’s first main phase and they may continue.
This seems to get a little confusing here because we have multiple things that have gone wrong. Alex jumped forward past Nathan’s ability to mulligan and also Alex drew a card for turn when they shouldn’t have.
Unintentional process errors that provide no advantage, such as declaring an intent to mulligan early or exiling too many cards to Serum Powder, are not an infraction.
This line in the Mulligan procedure error definition is our first clue. The list of examples here is not exhaustive. All Alex has really done is give Nathan some extra information that he has a mountain in hand and intends to play it. Nothing here can give Alex an advantage in the game (and in fact it gives him a disadvantage since now Nathan has information for his mulligan decision!!) so it would not be within our philosophy to issue a penalty for the procedural error. If the HCE had not also occurred we would have just instructed Alex to hang out for a second with his mountain on the battlefield while Nathan finishes his mulligan.
The first thing that has actually gone wrong is Alex drew a card when he shouldn’t have and there is no publicly correctable information we can use to fix the issue. Thus, we land on Hidden card error as our only infraction and penalty. We do backup the mountain to hand as a simple backup is allowed for our fix as that could have been the extra card drawn for turn. Note only a *simple* backup is allowed for a HCE.
In cases where the infraction was immediately followed by moving a card from the affected set to a known location, such as by discarding, putting cards on top of the library, or playing a land, a simple backup to the point just after the error may be performed.
Gonna talk things out, because I'm new at this.
If I had to handle this right now, I'd be looking at the IPG on my phone, so that's what I'm doing (on my computer). My first thing I looked at was Looking at Extra Cards. However, there's a section in there that says once cards in the library go to another hidden zone, then it's either a Hidden Card Error or a GRV. Since the hand is a hidden zone, this looks like it'd get bumped to a HCE. Checking that section, we see that drawing for your first turn is a given example of an HCE, so that looks right.
But there's also Mulligan Procedure Error, which has also been committed, since Alex didn't allow Nathan to make their mulligan choice. The MPE section seems to state that once the game has begun, a mulligan error becomes another sort of error. But in this instance, it looks like Alex, though unintentionally, rushed the beginning of the game, and is the only one that has wanted to go to the beginning of the game.
Both an MPE and an HCE deserve warnings, so that looks like what will happen here. At first glance, I'd say back up the beginning of the game, do the HCE fix of shuffling a random card from Alex's hand into their library, then allow Nathan to mulligan, then let the game start over.
The trick here becomes that Nathan has technically gained information about Alex's deck, however minimal. He knows that Alex is on red mana. And that might have influenced his mulligan decision. Looking at the IPG, I can't necessarily determine a fix that can properly account for this knowledge gain. Insisting that Nathan not be able to mulligan is far too great an advantage for Alex, because it means he was able to rush past a fairly significant decision point if Nathan really did want to mulligan in the first place.
I also don't think that this should be a Game Loss either, since that's not how multiple errors at the same time works.
Final answer: Warning for Alex for MPE and HCE, roll back the beginning of the game by putting the Mountain back into Alex's hand, shuffle a random card from Alex's hand into their library, allow Nathan to mulligan. Once Nathan has decided to keep their hand, Alex can begin the game.
(The last thing to consider is, after losing a random card, what if Alex wants to mulligan now? Should he be allowed to? My thought is no, his decision was made. But there's argument for it.)
There are two main issues:
Unintentional process errors that provide no advantage, such as declaring an intent to mulligan early or exiling too many cards to Serum Powder, are not an infraction.
Alex revealing their first turn to their opponent doesn't provide them an advantage, so it shouldn't be a Mulligan Procedure Error.
I'd go MPE here.
Just because a player has attempted to take a game action doesn't mean the game has actually started. Calling this an MPE leads to an outcome that I think would feel pretty fair and comprehensible to both players:
"Because Nathan hasn't finished mulliganing, the game effectively hasn't started yet and what you've done is just accidentally drawn an extra card and revealed a mountain from your hand. The good news is that because we're still mulliganing, the infraction here is a Mulligan Procedure Error, which has a fix which isn't too disruptive— Alex, you're just going to take a mulligan, and then Nathan will continue with the first mulligan decision. We'll be marking down a Warning for you Alex, so please be a bit more careful with your mulligans. And thanks for calling a judge over right away, that was the right thing to do."
Edited Buck Bukaty (Sept. 19, 2025 01:27:11 PM)
Hi everyone! Thanks again for your answers. There were some mixed responses here so if you want to discuss it further please don’t hesitate to reach out. Felipe was pretty much spot on so great job!
Alex receives a Warning for a Hidden Card Error (HCE).
First, Nathan should finish their mulligan procedure before applying the fix. It is important to do this first as he should not have full information of Alex’s hand for his mulligan. We are just catching him up to when Alex’s error has happened slightly in the future.
Our fix should be: simply backup the mountain to Alex’s hand, reveal the hand to Nathan and Nathan may select any card from the hand to return to the random portion of the library. Now we are in Alex’s first main phase and they may continue.
This seems to get a little confusing here because we have multiple things that have gone wrong. Alex jumped forward past Nathan’s ability to mulligan and also Alex drew a card for turn when they shouldn’t have.
Unintentional process errors that provide no advantage, such as declaring an intent to mulligan early or exiling too many cards to Serum Powder, are not an infraction.
This line in the Mulligan procedure error definition is our first clue. The list of examples here is not exhaustive. All Alex has really done is give Nathan some extra information that he has a mountain in hand and intends to play it. Nothing here can give Alex an advantage in the game (and in fact it gives him a disadvantage since now Nathan has information for his mulligan decision!!) so it would not be within our philosophy to issue a penalty for the procedural error. If the HCE had not also occurred we would have just instructed Alex to hang out for a second with his mountain on the battlefield while Nathan finishes his mulligan.
The first thing that has actually gone wrong is Alex drew a card when he shouldn’t have and there is no publicly correctable information we can use to fix the issue. Thus, we land on Hidden card error as our only infraction and penalty. We do backup the mountain to hand as a simple backup is allowed for our fix as that could have been the extra card drawn for turn. Note only a *simple* backup is allowed for a HCE.
In cases where the infraction was immediately followed by moving a card from the affected set to a known location, such as by discarding, putting cards on top of the library, or playing a land, a simple backup to the point just after the error may be performed.
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