Anita is playing against Norman in a Comp REL legacy tournament. Anita, with two cards left in her hand, casts Ponder, leaving her with now one card in her hand. She sets away the card, then starts looking at her top 3. As she think how she's going to set the card and which one to draw, she keeps looking at the last card in her hand, and at one moment, she holds the four cards in her hand. Norman, seeing that, calls a Judge, explaining that Anita has mixed all of her cards like if it was a Brainstorm.

How do you rule this? It came up to me as I was playing legacy with a friend and we both couldn't agree on which infractions, if any, would be issued. As a judge, I tried to find which IPG infraction would apply but I couldn't find any. Because the ponder isn't fully resolved yet, we can't rule a GPE-DEC.

Can you guys help me?

Thanks,

Sam

Originally posted by Samuel Tremblay:

Because the ponder isn't fully resolved yet, we can't rule a GPE-DEC.

Huh? What do you mean by this?

This seems pretty clear cut to me: there are cards in Anita's hand that should not be there, we can not uniquely identify which cards should not be there (unless Norman just resolved a Vendilion Clique or something like that), so all conditions for DEC apply. While State-Based Actions only check after a spell has finished resolving, a Judge-Based Action can apply at any moment, even while resolving Ponder ;)

Edited Dustin De Leeuw (March 8, 2014 09:11:47 PM)

Sorry for my missunderstanding, so it will be a GPE-DEC with a game loss, am I right?

No need to be sorry, by asking questions we all learn and improve!

And yes, indeed, this is DEC so a Game Loss penalty.

Yes, it's a game loss. There were plenty of these at the side events to GP Barcelona last weekend.

When cards from the library physically touch the cards in a Player's hand, they are considered “drawn.”

While Anita was looking at her cards to Scry, she drew them when they touched the other cards in her hand.

A small addition:

It is not GPE-GRV because before the cards touched the hand, no other GPE occured. Up to the point where the cards touched his hand, all moves were legal.

It's a GRV if he casts Ponder with only a Mountain (an infraction) but resolves it correctly.

Originally posted by Dustin De Leeuw:

This seems pretty clear cut to me: there are cards in Anita's hand that should not be there, we can not uniquely identify which cards should not be there (unless Norman just resolved a Vendilion Clique or something like that), so all conditions for DEC apply.

The clause that allows a downgrade for Drawing Extra Cards to a warning only applies if the card(s) drawn are uniquely identifyable, not if the card can be identified because all other cards were identified ‘some time before the drawn card’.
That downgrade exists for cases where someone puts a card in hand with Worldly Tutor. The card that was drawn erronously was known before it was placed in the hand, not identified later by a process of elimination.

If you use the known information about the cards that were in the hand, you open a whole can of worms. What if the information is not from immediately before, but from last turn? What if the opponent didn't write down, or misremembers? In those cases, bad memory of the opponent gives that opponent a more favorable ruling (the Game Loss)