Originally posted by Todd Bussey:

What if Ajani says “Why did you just shuffle your library into your graveyard?” and Nissa responds “because you milled an Emrakul” and Ajani says “I didn't see it”

Can we upgrade to game loss there?

Could this have another negative effect?

Note that if we upgrade the penalty to a gameloss we will be doing that solely because of Ajani´s statement, that he didn´t saw Emrakul. Be sure to investigate this propperly, because both players could be trying to cheat.

In this scenario I would usually be upgrading the warning to a game loss penalty, because Ajani can´t verify the legality of Nissa´s mistake, but there are still situations I wouldn´t do so.

If Nissa did nothing wrong besides resolving her Emrakul trigger too fast, I would still not upgrade the penalty here. Say she put every card into her yard, one by one, giving Ajani all the time to check what he mills and and then took a moment and after that started to shuffle, I would not want to upgrade the penalty then, just because Ajani was not caring what Nissa reveals, Ajani also has some responsibilty, he should focus on the game.
On the other hand, if Ajani was maybe fetching for a land meanwhile or Nissa did mill herself in a way that Ajani had no chance to see Emrakul I would upgrade the penalty.

Edited Thomas Ludwig (Aug. 19, 2014 09:42:36 AM)

Originally posted by Thomas Ludwig:

(…)Say she put every card into her yard, one by one, giving Ajani all the time to check what he mills and and then took a moment and after that started to shuffle, I would not want to upgrade the penalty then, just because Ajani was not caring what Nissa reveals, Ajani also has some responsibilty, he should focus on the game.(…)

But in the scenario presented, that was not what happened.

Raymond Fong
(…)After the ten cards are put into the graveyard, Nissa immediately picks up her graveyard and begins shuffling it into her library.

I'm reading this as Nissa putting Emrakul down as let's say the 5th card and then instantly picking up her 'yard, not giving any opportunity to react, without announcing the trigger. I tried this out with a sleeved up deck at home - if you already have your deck in your hand from milling you need a second or two at most to do that which is not even enough time to get out a “wait”.

Which is the reason why I was going with the investigation for cheating (since this makes the difference between “Nissa will most likely lose” and “Nissa will almost certainly win”), but in the pool we usually assume that we are dealing with an honest mistake.

So, after reading every post we seem to all mostly agree on GPE - GRV with a warning, most erring on the side of not upgrading since there are no rules to support this. Still, giving this ruling would leave a bad taste in my mouth as HJ.

The Scenario is different, but I just answered Todd´s question about Emrakul not being seen by Ajani and wanted to point out that I would decide here depending on how fast Nissa actuall milled herself and if Ajani should have been able to see Emrakul. The “…took a Moment” part of my words are indeed surplus and don´t fit the situation, this doesn´t change my answer though, just ignore them.
I am new here, so I am not sure if it is ok to talk about small changes like Ajani not seeing Emrakul, if so, I am sorry.

Is there an assumption that Nissa's actions are just careless, and that nothing shady is going on? The pure mechanics of this scenario are confusing to me.

Nissa presumably had to show Emrakul, square up her graveyard, flip it upside down, then pick up her library with her hand before she could begin to shuffle the two together. For most people, this also involves sliding the second pile off the table to get a better grip.

I tried this, and I'm reasonably fast with card manipulation. The time between when it's obvious that I'm shuffling my graveyard into my library, and the time that the two are irreversibly combined is plenty long enough for someone to raise an objection. I would really want to know whether Ajani saw all of this and didn't respond until it was too late, or if Nissa heard the objection and decided to complete her shuffle anyway.

Hi Glenn, Knowledge Pool scenarios normally discard cheating. Ignore shady
things, both Nissa and Ajani are honest players.​

Thank you for everyone who contributed to this week's KP discussion. 4 pages of lively debate made for some interesting readings and opinions. This week, there are two possible ways to address the situation. Fortunately, they have almost identical outcomes!

The first way to approach this is as a GRV. Technically speaking, Nissa is responsible for giving Ajani priority before resolving the trigger, which means in this case she's violated the CR. We can assess the GRV for the error, but a rewind is impossible here and no partial fixes are relevant.

The second approach is to look at Nissa's actions as a proposed shortcut. While she didn't communicate it well (or at all), what she's doing is shortcutting through two priority passes straight to the trigger resolving. Shortcuts exist to allow players to just play, and not worry about the highly technical side of things, so in many situations this would be fine. Unfortunately she didn't give him the chance to accept or reject her shortcut, which violates the MTR in a way that's not a specific infraction. As such, there is no penalty, we would simply tell her that she needs to not repeat this error, and any further issues of this type would be handled with USC-Minor and an investigation.

Both approaches lead us to the same place- the game has been messed up in a way we don't have the power to fix, we tell Nissa she needs to be more careful moving forward.

When handling a situation like this, I will also remind Ajani to be more pro-active re: actions he intends to take, that he hasn't been taking all along - i.e., something new & different. Since Ajani's strategy is to mill Nissa, and he has the Crypt Incursion in case of Emrakul (et al), then he *should* have announced the mill ability by saying something like “Glimpse, you mill ten, and I may have a response after I see those cards”. Or even the very innocuous “Glimpse, you mill ten, let me see what you mill?”

d:^D