Last weekend I've judged my first big competitive Theros event and a lot of players forgot to scry, especially on high-impact game ending cards like Sea God's Revenge & Portent of Betrayal. You cast them, you attack for the win, but oops you forgot to look at the top card. Game loss?

Because these bonus scry abilities feel more like missed triggers the way a game is naturally played, a 3rd or subsequent GRV was often not upgraded to a game loss by the head judge if such scry warnings were involved, which definitely felt like the right thing.

(EDIT: and yeah also because the resulting gamestate is perfectly ‘legal’ (same outcome as looking and keeping it on top))

What are your experiences with these?

Edited Toby Hazes (Oct. 10, 2013 03:40:59 AM)

Since changing the order of scried cards and/or putting them on the
bottom is entirely optional, if someone misses a scry action, the
operating assumption among my local players (at Regular) has been that
they simply chose to leave the cards as-is. That's a perfectly legal
interpretation of their actions, even at Competitive, so if the player
who missed the scry is fine with that assumption, I'd rule that's what
happened.

If the player who missed the scry isn't fine with that assumption and
wants to back up to get their scry, then I would issue the GRV and
proceed the same way I would when considering backing up any other GRV.

The problem is that when you scry it also instructs you to look at the card(s). So if you didn't look at the card(s), then you didn't scry. So I pose the question, where do we draw the line then when a player breaks a rule? Why would some violations require penalties and other wouldn't?

Callum - you let the player choose their penalty and fix?

You're also supposed to search your library when you crack a fetchland, but should we really penalize a player for cracking a fetchland and shuffling right away because they know they don't have anything to find and just wanted the shuffle?

Or say a player uses a bounce spell and then sacrifices Thrull Surgeon, telling their opponent to discard the thing that was bounced without bothering to look. Should that be a GRV?

Punishing a player for not bothering to access information they happen to have permission to access when there's no actual requirement that the player care about, remember, or use that information in any way would be terrible customer service.

Originally posted by Kim Warren:

Callum - you let the player choose their penalty and fix?

I definitely won't lay it out in those terms for them, but effectively, yes.

The only conceivable advantage to be gained in forgetting a scry and remembering later is gaining access to additional information that might affect your choice of what to do with the scried cards, and that can only happen if a backup occurs. If the player doesn't care enough to want to bother looking, I'm not going to hand out a GRV for what amounts to something with no more impact on the game than a missed “may” trigger.


I'd much prefer if an appropriate partial fix were possible (maybe take a page from the Missed Triggers book, issuing the infraction without any penalty–possibly letting the opponent choose if the player gets their scry), but current policy doesn't permit that. I can't downgrade a GRV Warning to no penalty and I definitely can't let the player scry or even just look without a backup. My options according to policy are Warning for GRV and possible backup, or assume the player was playing suboptimally and instruct them to continue playing. I'm certainly not going to let the opponent decide whether or not a Warning is issued, so I'll go with whichever option the player wants.

Edited Callum Milne (Oct. 10, 2013 07:42:52 AM)

Since actually looking at the card (regardless of situation) doesn't change the visible game state, I instinctively have a hard time choosing to infracting with a GRV. (Especially with how beneficial-trigger-like it feels). Add to this that we'd also have to throw in a FtMGS for the opponent, and this is really starting to feel “off” to me.

However, some things do trigger on scry, so how would we factor that in? Should we treat “forget to scry” differently if Flamespeaker Adept is on the table? If NP forgets to scry, and AP doesn't give +2/+0 FirstStrike to the attacking Flamespeaker, would that mean he didn't miss a trigger at all? (no scry = no trigger), or would we say the scry “happened” with default actions and AP was still responsible for the trigger even though the scry was forgotten?

I like the idea of some handwaving for customer service, but the idea of treating this same infraction differently if it just happens to be the start of a series of other issues just doesn't sit right. I don't know if that's my inexperience here, or if it's inherent in the situation.

Originally posted by Chris Nowak:

Since actually looking at the card (regardless of situation) doesn't change the visible game state, I instinctively have a hard time choosing to infracting with a GRV. (Especially with how beneficial-trigger-like it feels). Add to this that we'd also have to throw in a FtMGS for the opponent, and this is really starting to feel “off” to me.

However, some things do trigger on scry, so how would we factor that in? Should we treat “forget to scry” differently if Flamespeaker Adept is on the table? If NP forgets to scry, and AP doesn't give +2/+0 FirstStrike to the attacking Flamespeaker, would that mean he didn't miss a trigger at all? (no scry = no trigger), or would we say the scry “happened” with default actions and AP was still responsible for the trigger even though the scry was forgotten?

I like the idea of some handwaving for customer service, but the idea of treating this same infraction differently if it just happens to be the start of a series of other issues just doesn't sit right. I don't know if that's my inexperience here, or if it's inherent in the situation.

They feel like triggers, and in fact the set has a few scry triggers (Aqueous Form, Prescient Chimera) that may confuse the issue. However, they (being the scry effects on spells like Sea God's Revenge from the OP) are not triggers. They are mandatory parts of the spell's effect. It's not an optional effect. (The reminder text actually contains a red herring of saying “may,” which does not appear in the official scry rules.) It's hard enough to teach players what is and is not a trigger (entering the battlefield with counters for example) that we don't need to make things pseudo triggers.

If players feel that it is important enough to get you, a judge, involved, then do you duty and enforce the IPG. Let's not take actions that will encourage players to hand wave away things that their opponents have forgotten in the name of “we ended up at a legal game state.” Let's encourage them to communicate with each other, remind each other of mandatory effects, and play with a sense of fairness.

If you're the Head Judge, you can consider not upgrading for multiple GRVs pertaining to forgetting to scry. You have that right (as you have the right to do just about anything as HJ). Let that responsibility rest with the HJ, and not with every individual Floor Judge to inconsistently decide whether scry is “enough like a trigger to ignore.”

I do not penalize players who do not scry, since all parts of scrying are effectively optional. I also do not penalize players who fail to take a “look at XYZ” instruction. If I would penalize a player for scrying, I would also have to penalize a player who knows the top card of their library for failing to scry 1.

Originally posted by Sebastian Rittau:

I do not penalize players who do not scry, since all parts of scrying are effectively optional. I also do not penalize players who fail to take a “look at XYZ” instruction. If I would penalize a player for scrying, I would also have to penalize a player who knows the top card of their library for failing to scry 1.

Their is a difference though, one player has not followed the instruction the other has short cut it

Originally posted by Gareth Tanner:

Their is a difference though, one player has not followed the instruction the other has short cut it

As an observer, how can you tell the difference? The player does exactly the same thing in both cases. You would have to be watching a match for a turn or two, examine the board state for cards which may clue you in to whether the player knows what the top card is or not. Or instead, you'd have to interrupt the game to ask them if it was forgotten or shortcutted, which is disruptive.

A question that needs answering if you're thinking about this is - what are
the opponent's responsibilities when I play a card that has Scry?

Paul Smith

paul@pollyandpaul.co.uk

So, I happen to know that the L4+ judges are discussing this because I brought up the same issue in a project forum. I'm not sure if we are wasting time discussing this before we get a pronouncement from them or if they are using this discussion as data points in their internal discussion.

That said, I would like to mention a couple analogous situations:

We all know it is technically a GRV to play Snapcaster Mage as an Ambush Viper and “target nothing.” However, it is also the case that giving a Warning for this error is not useful or educational, and we shouldn't actually be awarding an infraction here. This is because there is no upside to “targeting nothing” and the course of play will not change as a result of this technicality.

Likewise, it is technically a GRV to play Ponder as a pure cantrip without first looking at the top 3. However, because drawing the current top card and leaving the other two is a legal outcome of the Ponder, we don't penalize. (You could say this is OOS, but that carries some additional baggage of letting the player rearrange the top 2, which I know not all judges agree with.)

If we look at these scenarios, we see that a player declining to take all-upside action that may not have any impact on the game state is generally not an infraction. If a card says “Scry,” you Scried. You just chose to leave the top of your library ordered as it was before.

I would additionally say that it is within the realm of acceptable competitive behavior to deliberately resolve a Scry effect without touching your deck so that you don't tip off your opponent regarding the current power and abilities of Flamespeaker Adept.

I will throw my vote in for making any “look at X (where X is an object in a hidden zone)” effect inherently optional, where the effect consists wholly of looking at or rearranging said objects in said zone. It's an unfeasible amount of work handing out warnings for Scry when players by and large are not holding themselves to the letter of the card because a) the cards on top are already known, and/or b) failing to look gives the scrying player no general advantage.

If the opponent noticed you didn't Scry but sat there because “Well in the
past they missed their Scry and the judge just didn't do anything,” we'd
have to start talking about USC - Cheating (Probably wouldn't go that far,
but that's not the point of this discussion).

Yet when the player misses their own scry, we do nothing?

This sounds like applying Missed Trigger philosophy without A) Having a
trigger and B) Giving the opponent the protections they get for Missed
Trigger.

A game rule was broken, and policy says what to do in that case. This is
not significant or exceptional, and I honestly just don't see a need for
any sort of exception for this case.