Originally posted by Joshua Feingold:

This is followed by announcing the loss of zero life. Even though no physical action is required to record a loss of zero life, this is a game action. We can easily understand this by examining the situation where a player is legally resolving a Pain Seer trigger and reveals a Pack Rat but fails to lose 2 life. We would treat this as a Game Rules Violation and rewind to exactly the point of losing life in the middle of the resolution of the ability if the error is caught within a reasonable time frame. This error is the key to this scenario because it does two things:

First, it tells us that LEC stops applying. Per IPG 2.2, “if a player takes a game action after removing the card from the library, the offense is no longer Looking at Extra Cards.”

Second, when the player puts the card in his hand, it tells us that this is not Drawing Extra Cards. Per IPG 2.3, an infraction can only be Drawing Extra Cards if “at the moment before he or she began the instruction or action that put a card into his or her hand, no other Game Play Error or Communication Policy Violation had been committed.” So, even though an extra card is put into the player's hand, Drawing Extra Cards does not apply.

Pain Seer's ability says: “Whenever Pain Seer becomes untapped, reveal the top card of your library and put that card into your hand. You lose life equal to that card's converted mana cost.”
So, if the player wasn't OoOSing and followed the instructions correctly (i.e. 1) reveal, 2) put into hand, 3) lose life) it would be DEC. Is it correct?

There are a lot of small details in this scenario that affect how you rule. We've given our official answer, and there are two important things to note about it.

1. It is our solution for this exact scenario. Slightly different cards at play, different interactions between players, etc. all can change rulings.

2. As Josh mentioned at the end of the solution, the IPG is conveniently very redundant in this regard. If you rule LEC, the card goes back and you shuffle the deck. If you rule DEC, the downgrade clause is applicable and the card goes back to the deck, likely followed by a shuffle. If you rule GRV, you rewind the game, the card goes back and you likely follow it up with a shuffle. The most important thing in this scenario isn't which exact infraction to award, it's what the fix boils down to.



At this time I'm going to close this thread. There's been a lot of good discourse but once we've presented our solution the scenario is finished. If you're interested in continuing discussion on this and similar topics, there's always the Competitive REL thread and the floor of your next event. You can also feel free to message me if you would like further clarification of this example, though I think Josh did an excellent job of covering it.

Edited Patrick Vorbroker (May 21, 2014 03:34:52 PM)