Hi,

Aaron plays Doom Blade, targeting at Neville's Desecration Demon. When the players notice the problem and call for a judge, we'll most likely issue a Warning for GPE-GRV (after having ruled out cheating) and we'll rewind back to the point immediately prior to the error.

However, will we untap the lands Aaron used for paying Doom Blade's cost? I've seen many judges do that without asking whether the lands have been tapped during the casting of the spell or prior to the casting. Even at competitive and professional REL most players tap their lands to get mana and announce the spell afterwards. Considering that activating the lands was legal, but putting the spell onto the stack with an illegal target was not, we should, as policy tells us to do, rewind to the point immediately prior to the point of error, leaving the lands tapped.

I'm pretty sure that many players, if not the majority of players, are not aware that they can actually activate mana abilities during the casting of a spell. How do we deal with this when rewinding a gamestate to undo a violation of the game rules?

Edited Jasper König (April 22, 2014 04:27:46 AM)

It would be incredibly pedantic and punitive to punish a player this way
for tapping lands before casting the spell. If we're rewinding to before
the spell is cast, then we're going to untap the lands used to cast the
spell, whether or not the mana was produced before or during the casting,
since it's all part of casting the spell in the player's mind.
Remember, our job as judges is to allow players to play magic and have fun,
even at competitive and professional RELs, not to punish them for not
knowing the intricacies of casting a spell.

Charlotte Sable
Guelph, Ontario, Canada

Even though it's not written anywhere explicitly, I've always considered playing a spell and getting mana for it as a single action (although technically they are seperate ones) and never made a difference if mana abilites were activated before or in the middle of casting a spell.

In both cases I would untap two lands used to pay for Doom Blade.

Relevant quote from CR (bold by me):

717.1. If a player realizes that he or she can't legally take an action after starting to do so, the entire action is reversed and any payments already made are canceled. No abilities trigger and no effects apply as a result of an undone action. If the action was casting a spell, the spell returns to the zone it came from. The player may also reverse any legal mana abilities activated while making the illegal play, unless mana from them or from any triggered mana abilities they triggered was spent on another mana ability that wasn't reversed. Players may not reverse actions that moved cards to a library, moved cards from a library to any zone other than the stack, or caused a library to be shuffled.

I believe you are right in your analysis.

I also think that this can open up a can of worms, as you have to ask: “did you tap before or after announcing the spell?”. From this point you can have a full spectrum of answers, ranging from **puzzled look** to “after!” (cheating) and from “before!” (cheating) to “uhm… after!?” to “what?”.

So my take on the matter is "let's take that while in the CR loosely".

BTW, strictly speaking, when you add mana before announcing, you are still passing priority after each mana ability activation, so you *should* announce floating mana and then announce the spell. In your scenario Aaron didn't announce any floating mana, so I want to assume this is just OoOS and he actually meant (even if he doesn't have a clue about that) to activate mana source during the casting process, falling straight into CR 717.1.

Does this wall of text make any sense?

Edited Andrea Mondani (April 22, 2014 05:02:52 AM)

Even knowing the steps for casting a spell, it's natural to tap mana before putting the spell on the stack to count out the cost. Remember when putting the card out before tapping mana was a punishable offense?

Originally posted by Andrea Mondani:

BTW, strictly speaking, when you add mana before announcing, you are still passing priority after each mana ability activation, so you *should* announce floating mana and then announce the spell.

Mana abilites do not go on the stack; there's no passing of priority and no announcement necessary, as long as you use all that mana to play the thing you're playing.

Edited Aaron Huntsman (April 22, 2014 04:58:48 AM)

Many years ago - and I do mean MANY - we got rid of that distinction between tapping before announcing vs. tapping during announcement. Always rewind the tapping of mana sources…

…except, of course, when there's extenuating circumstances. Say I use a Chromatic Star to get Black - my only source of Black - and draw a card; then, I aim that Doom Blade at an illegal target, tapping another land for 1; we'd untap that land, used for the colorless - but we can't rewind the sacrifice of the Star, nor the B mana in my mana pool. After all, everything was fine until I announced an illegal Doom Blade…

I do find it interesting that this isn't written anywhere (except now, it's written here… meh). I know it was brought up on the old Judge-L mailing list, in years past. Maybe we'll find a place for that bit of “tribal lore”…

d:^D

Originally posted by Aaron Huntsman:

Even knowing the steps for casting a spell, it's natural to tap mana before putting the spell on the stack to count out the cost. Remember when putting the card out before tapping mana was a punishable offense?

Andrea Mondani
BTW, strictly speaking, when you add mana before announcing, you are still passing priority after each mana ability activation, so you *should* announce floating mana and then announce the spell.

Mana abilites do not go on the stack; there's no passing of priority and no announcement necessary, as long as you use all that mana to play the thing you're playing.

You're right, i mixed 116.3b and the tournament shortcut (it says “add to the stack” instead of “resolve”)

Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

Many years ago - and I do mean MANY - we got rid of that distinction between tapping before announcing vs. tapping during announcement. Always rewind the tapping of mana sources…

I guess this is also true if a player generates more mana than he needs for the (illegal) spell? If a player activates his Nykthos, Shrine to Nyx, gets 8 mana and then goes into the tank for 30 seconds to plan his turn before casting anything, untapping Nyktos when rewinding Doom Blade could cause a protest by the opponent. Or is this one of those extenuating circumstances you mentioned?

Charlotte is totally right when saying that making a difference regarding the exact moment of the activation of the mana abilities would be too pedantic and punitive. I never did that so far, just because I learned otherwise when becoming a judge. I don't know if that's a good reason, but that's how it is. However, a few weeks ago I actually had that problem, and the question just came back to my mind today.

Edited Jasper König (April 22, 2014 05:23:30 AM)

I think your specific scenario would justify not rewinding the activation of Nykthos - but this is really going to vary, from case to case.

Doom Blade your guy, activate Nykthos for BBBBBB, use B and 1 from this land to pay for Doom Blade –> yep, rewind Nykthos.

Nykthos for BBBBBB, use BB for Doom Blade on that guy, leaves me with BBBB –> sure, rewind Nykthos.

Nykthos for BBBBBB, play another Nykthos & lose the first one, use BB to activate the new one, now I've got BBBBBBBBBB … let's start with BB for Doom Blade on that guy –> yuk. No, we're not rewinding all those legal actions.

See how it can vary? See how this is that dreaded “you had to be there” kind of thing?

d:^D

Thanks for all the input so far. If we actually do rewind the activation of some lands, do you have any advice on what to tell the players in the very unlikely case that one opponent knows the documents exactly and says “I definitely saw him tapping his lands before casting the spell!”?

Yes. “Don't be a jerk about it.”

> Jasper König <forum-9661-12d8@apps.magicjudges.org> hat am 22. April 2014 um
> 17:43 geschrieben:
>
>
> Thanks for all the input so far. If we actually do rewind the activation of
> some lands, do you have any advice on what to tell the players in the very
> unlikely case that one opponent knows the documents exactly and says “I
> definitely saw him tapping his lands before casting the spell!”?
>
I tend to give them some variation of “We normally treat the tapping of lands
for the spell and the casting of the spell as one big, compound action, because
in the minds of most players it is exactly that. And since we are playing Magic:
The Gathering, not Magic: The Gotcha, or Magic: The Rules-Lawyering, we undo the
entire action.” (With the Magic: The Rules-Lawyering part normally reserved for
more insistend opponents.)

Originally posted by Jasper König:

Thanks for all the input so far. If we actually do rewind the activation of some lands, do you have any advice on what to tell the players in the very unlikely case that one opponent knows the documents exactly and says “I definitely saw him tapping his lands before casting the spell!”?

I've had success with asking the opponent, “We back up mana abilities that were part of playing the spell. What did you think that your opponent was tapping lands for?”

The opponent will answer, “The Doom Blade.”, to which you can then say, “Ok, so we'll back up tapping the lands, as they were the mana abilities that were used on Doom Blade.”

This avoids the whole “batch of actions” discussion, as that can create confusion vs (as an example) the Perplexing Chimera scenario that came up recently. It also makes the opponent think about how pedantic their argument is.

Indeed, i had in some GPT's and FNM players that wanted to play at a “professional” level, so i left them pley using this concept of playing a card firs announcing it, but to players that was watching the game i told them that it's not ruled that way, because isn't asked to player to be so perfectionist, because we came to play, not to follow the rules at the edge of blade, and sometimes if there is a player who insist in this issue that his/her oponent tap the lands first and after cast the spell, maybe he/she is looking to win an advantage rather than maintain a fair play.

I think in general, I interpret activating mana abilities prior to casting the spell as an example of Out of Order Sequencing performed during the single compound action of casting a spell. This case just happens to involve an illegal target, therefore I would rewind through the whole action.

However, if they take other actions during this entire process(drawing a card/playing a land/etc), I'm not going to rewind past all of those actions, only to the point at which they initiated the casting of the spell(and performed that block of actions, including any lands tapped while doing that regardless of sequencing).

Example #1 (AP casting a Fireball):
NAP has Leyline of Sanctity in play and no creatures in play
AP Taps 2 Lands, and activates Nykthos for RRRRRRR
AP attempts to cast Fireball x=6 targeting NAP.

I'd rewind all of it.

Example #2 (AP casting a Fireball):
NAP has Leyline of Sanctity in play and no creatures in play
AP Taps 2 Lands, and activates Nykthos for RRRRRRR
AP plays another Nykthos
AP activates Nykthos. Now has RRRRRRRRRRRR
AP attempts to cast Fireball x=11 targeting NAP.

I'm only going to rewind to the second activation of Nykthos. AP will have RRRRR in his pool, a Nykthos in his Graveyard, 2 tapped lands, and an untapped Nykthos in play.