Hello, judges! Welcome to another week of the Knowledge Pool, back with another scenario inexplicably torn from tomorrow's headlines. This week we're back to our usual Silver level, so L2+, please wait until after local FNM to add your opinions.

Here are your blog link and scenario:

You are the head judge of a Khans of Tarkir sealed PPTQ. At the end of round 2, a player turns in an Abzan Guide in a matte black sleeve that he found on the floor. He has no idea whose it is, and there are a couple dozen players with matte black sleeves. When you announce that the card has been found, nobody comes to claim it.

However, during round 5, you discover its owner, Jake. Jake confirms that the card is his, but he didn't realize it was missing. That card is registered in the “played” column on Jake's deck list. Jake is currently in game 2 of round 5 and his deck for the current game is 40 cards.

What do you do?

(First I find the guy who let me (a level 1) be in charge of a PPTQ and let him know I'm in no way qualified to do such a thing and his tournament is likely to be invalidated because he doesn't have a proper judge.)

I feel like there's a big question about how we discover that Jake is the one missing the card. However, I'm not entirely sure it matters.

I'm going to assume that Jake calls a judge when looking at his sideboard in the middle of game 2 and realizes the card has been missing.

I'll to jump out ahead and say that we have a D/DL for a game loss here. Jake has admitted to not playing his proper main deck in game one. I'm not going to go back and invalidate game one because it is already over. I'm also not going to end the current game in progress because it is currently being played with legal decks. If it was game one I would end it immediately with a game loss. In this case I'm going to apply the game loss to the current round because the an advantage was gained in the current round from not having desideboarded properly. I don't see a downgrade being necessary here since we know that Jake played game one with a sideboard card in his main deck and he has already gained an “advantage” from doing so. (In the end this may end up ending game two immediately.)

I don't think there's a penalty here.

The player is currently playing with a legal deck, so there's no infraction currently being committed. There's also no way to prove that the player actually played with an illegal deck in previous G1s.

Assuming that the player isn't cheating by purposely dropping the Abzan Guide so he could alter his deck (which doesn't seem likely), I would just tell him to keep better track of his stuff and move on.

First, we'll go through and do an actual deck check. Presumably, we'll find that the contents of the current deck plus sideboard match the registered pool, except for a missing Abzan Guide. I'm assuming there was only one guide in the pool, marked as played. Because the players are on game 2, we don't expect the deck to match what's registered in ‘played’.

This is an interesting situation.

1. Jake's deck, sideboard, and decklist are not a problem for the current game. With a 40 card deck, Abzan Guide is missing from the sideboard (for game 2). We wouldn't issue a penalty for this.
2. On the other hand, given that we have the Guide in hand, Jake clearly was playing with an illegal decklist in Game 1 of rounds 3,4, and the current round 5.
3. Unless perhaps he wasn't. We didn't actually see the state of the deck in any of those games. Maybe Jake picked up another Abzan Guide and was playing with legal decks. And, coincidentally, lost it before we came to talk to him. Unlikely, far-fetched, but it is worth pointing out that we didn't actually see an illegal deck.

My current thinking is that either

A) We assume he had an illegal deck in game 1 of rounds 3,4,5, and issue a single Deck/Decklist problem (multiple infractions, same root cause), with a Game Loss. The game loss applies to the current game (game 2). We add the Guide back to the pool. If there's a game 3 in this round, players can sideboard, and Jake chooses to play or draw.
B) We issue no infraction.

I'm leaning towards A. While rounds 3 and 4 are farther in the past, if there's not another Abzan Guide with matte black sleeves somewhere near Jake, he almost certainly had an illegal decklist game 1. In this situation, I would issue a Game Loss. That said, I could see arguments that B) is the correct course of action.

After a bit of investigating - no error, no penalty, chat with the player and possibly issue a direct instruction.


Rather, there was an error, but we're not going to retroactively apply it.

That being said, there's going to be quite the chat.

Edited Olivier Jansen (Nov. 5, 2014 07:31:59 PM)

Originally posted by Marc DeArmond:

I feel like there's a big question about how we discover that Jake is the one missing the card. However, I'm not entirely sure it matters.

For the purposes of this scenario, assume it doesn't matter and that Jake did not call the judge on himself.

This is a real scenario with player and card names adjusted, and a full explanation of how it came about will be posted next Tuesday in addition to the routine contents of a Knowledge Pool solution.

Until then, please don't worry about how we discover that Jake owns the lost card.

This strikes me as incredibly likely to be cheating, but since that option
is out of play for knowledge pool, it's no infraction, no penalty, give him
his card back.
On Nov 5, 2014 12:16 PM, “Joshua Feingold” <

To me, the IPG states that a missing sideboard card should not result in a penalty, this is game two where any individual card in Jake's pool can be considered a sideboard card, so there is no D/DL penalty right now.

I'm also happy not trying to go back in time and retroactively apply game losses to earlier matches (which I don't think anyone would think is a good idea), however, I have a hard time saying, “Yes, we know that in game one Jake had a D/DL problem, but because he was lucky enough to get to game two before anyone noticed, we're just going to ignore it.”

If it were me, I think I would issue the game loss based on his deck clearly not matching his list in game one.

So I see there GL for TE-D/DL. We know that Jake was playing at least 3 games with improper deck (game 1 in round 3, 4 and 5) but there's same root of those infractions - missing card. So key question is when do we apply that GL. Because players begun new game, I would apply that GL to current game (based on GL definition - Game Losses are applied to the game in which the offense occurred unless the players have begun a new game or the tournament is between rounds, in which case the loss is applied to the player’s next game.)

In short - GL for Jake for TE-D/DL applied to current game.

Originally posted by Talin Salway:

Maybe Jake picked up another Abzan Guide and was playing with legal decks.

We have in scenario “Jake confirms that the card is his, but he didn't realize it was missing” so I assume, that he couldn't replaced that missing card.

So… let me get this strait. It's game 2, and he has 40 cards in his deck currently?

This means A: he knows he's missing a card and did not tell a judge, and B: he fixed it himself by adding a card to his deck from his sideboard so he has 40 cards.

I think I would investigate for cheating, did he know he should have gotten a game loss? Did he intentionally not tell a judge so he wouldn't get in trouble?

Originally posted by Sal Cortez:

I think I would investigate for cheating, did he know he should have gotten a game loss? Did he intentionally not tell a judge so he wouldn't get in trouble?

A piece of information - never consider cheating for Knowledge Pool scenarios, unless stated otherwise in the scenario itself. ;)

I will restate this one more time:

How this situation arose will be explained in detail on Tuesday. Until then, your speculations are likely to be neither accurate nor useful in determining the correct infraction and penalty to apply.

Please focus on the scenario as presented. No cheating has taken place.

Hmm, well in that case he is not currently committing any infractions; his deck is legal as of now. I don't think we go back and penalize for things that happened earlier in the day, unless they are serious issues. His card is back in the deck before the next game starts, so he won't have a D/DL error then either.

Firstly, I do a complete deck check. Since this is game 2, I assume (and check) that he has sideboarded for this game. The IPG does not penalize players for having missing cards in the sideboard. However, since he did not have the Abzan Guide in his pool, and he confirmed that the Abzan Guide was his, he would not have been playing with a complete deck during the previous rounds, and in game 1 of round 5.

Thus, I would explain that Jake receives a TE-D/DLP-GL. He receives a GL for round 3/4/5, but this is combined into one GL, as the root cause is the same. Replace the Abzan Guide into his pool, then the players may sideboard and prepare for game 3, if there is one. I'd also remind Jake to take more care of his cards. Then give the players additional time based on how much time I've used up.

How many cards there were on “played” column on Jake's deck list?