A player at my store has trouble remembering his Bitterblossom trigger. It seems like every week he'll ask me if he still gets his trigger if he only remembers after he draws for his turn–he's usually still in his precombat main phase, so I tell him to go ahead and add it to the stack and warn him to play more carefully.

I notice that the JAR brings up the possibility of a game loss for repeatedly missing a trigger. Although it's a pattern I've observed across weeks and not necessarily repeated lapses in the same event, I'm worried that he's forgetting much more often than I'm aware of.

Unlike the IPG, which states forgotten non-detrimental triggers should not earn Warnings (and thus to my understanding never result in game losses), the JAR makes no distinction between detrimental triggers and non-detrimental triggers.
On the other hand, the JAR says the player ‘may’ be warned with a game loss, and discourages the judge from using a heavy hand.

Should I have a chat with the player about this? If I watch him more closely next week and notice he forgets his trigger four times in the course of a single match, should I be threatening a game loss? It seems odd that the JAR might recommend a game loss but we'd give the same behaviour a pass at competitive REL.

(I don't suspect the player of cheating.)

Why not try to help him instead? Tell him to put a marker on his deck, for
example a small bead. That way he'll have an easier time remembering the
trigger.


On Sun, Apr 6, 2014 at 9:43 AM, Bradley Morin <
forum-9434-fdf5@apps.magicjudges.org> wrote:

> A player at my store has trouble remembering his Bitterblossom trigger. It
> seems like every week he'll ask me if he still gets his trigger if he only
> remembers after he draws for his turn–he's usually still in his precombat
> main phase, so I tell him to go ahead and add it to the stack and warn him
> to play more carefully.
>
> I notice that the JAR brings up the possibility of a game loss for
> repeatedly missing a trigger. Although it's a pattern I've observed across
> weeks and not necessarily repeated lapses in the same event, I'm worried
> that he's forgetting much more often than I'm aware of.
>
> Unlike the IPG, which states forgotten non-detrimental triggers should not
> earn Warnings (and thus to my understanding never result in game losses),
> the JAR makes no distinction between detrimental triggers and
> non-detrimental triggers.
> On the other hand, the JAR says the player ‘may’ be warned with a game
> loss, and discourages the judge from using a heavy hand.
>
> Should I have a chat with the player about this? If I watch him more
> closely next week and notice he forgets his trigger four times in the
> course of a single match, should I be threatening a game loss? It seems odd
> that the JAR might recommend a game loss but we'd give the same behaviour a
> pass at competitive REL.
>
> (I don't suspect the player of cheating.)
>
> ——————————————————————————–
> If you want to respond to this thread, simply reply to this email. Or view
> and respond to this message on the web at
> http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/post/58219/
>
> Disable all notifications for this topic:
> http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/noemail/9434/
> Receive on-site notifications only for this topic:
> http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/noemail/9434/?onsite=yes
>
> You can change your email notification settings at
> http://apps.magicjudges.org/profiles/edit
>



–
Adam Cetnerowski
Gdansk, Poland

The JAR intentionally allows quite a lot of leeway for how judges want to handle triggers, and tries to keep things reasonably simple. Judging by the number of times that the topic comes up on these forums, ‘normally detrimental’ triggers is a concept which even reasonably experienced judges can struggle to get their heads around - which means that it is unlikely to be a concept which we want to incorporate in the JAR, which is meant to be accessible as a guideline even to people who are not necessarily certified judges.

In the end, this kind of situation is one in which you should feel free to use your discretion. You have already mentioned that you do not think that the player is cheating, which means that we don't need to consider whether this is a serious problem. Some rules of thumb that I would consider as to whether you want to go down the route of warning the player that repeating the behaviour could result in being assigned a game loss would include whether you think that the player is gaining an advantage from this mistake, and whether this mistake is proving particularly disruptive. If neither of these are true, a game loss seems like it might be quite heavy handed. Adam's suggestion of educating the player about putting a bead on top of the library to help them remember to resolve their trigger before drawing a card for the turn is a good one in this case.

We are working on an article currently for the JAR blog on when one should issue Game Losses at Regular REL; thank you for the reminder that this is an area which would definitely merit further explanation!