PPTQ, Sealed, round 4.

Anthony wins first game against Nathan.

While sideboarding and shuffling, players have a chat like this:

N: “Your deck is pretty good”.
A: “Kinda … at first I had built it wrong. Then I changed four cards, now the deck works better.”
N: “Er … you are telling me that in game 1 you played a deck different than your decklist?”
A: “Yes.”
N: “JUUUDGE!”

How would you handle this?

Extra: suppose the same error (deck/decklist problem in game 1) is discovered after game 3, i.e. after the end of the match. How would you handle this?

Have a quick chat with Anthony, confirm the statement, check if he knew it was illegal. Assuming no cheating though - we are in between games, we have no way to prove that they played a different deck in game one, the deck is in a legal configuration at the moment, so no infraction and no penalty explain to Anthony the need to return to original configuration at the start of each match.

Originally posted by Gareth Tanner:

we have no way to prove that they played a different deck in game one

Once they've stated as much, why do we need to prove anything?

There are four criteria under which a situation can be a deck/decklist
problem. Let's review them here.

• The deck or decklist contains an illegal number of cards for the format.
That's not what we're dealing with here. Next.

• The deck or decklist contains one or more cards that are illegal for the
format.
Nope. Next.

• A card listed on a decklist is not identified by its full name, and
could be interpreted as mor
Truncated names of storyline characters (legendary permanents and
Planeswalkers) are acc
as they are the only representation of that character in the format and are
treated as referring
even if other cards begin with the same name.
This isn't it either. It must be the last one, I guess?

• The contents of the presented deck and sideboard do not match the
decklist registered.
It looks like this one, right? Except it's not. By the time we're involved
in this situation, there's no longer a presented deck.

Since the situation doesn't fit any of the four critera, it can't be a
deck/decklist problem.

By all accounts, there was indeed a D/DLP during game one, but that game is
over and the deck that was presented for that game no longer exists.

To quote Uncle Scott from a thread a couple of years ago (
http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/post/27457/):
“When a player tells us “I had a D/DL Problem” between games, there isn't
an infraction at the time. It's only when that infraction occurs - i.e.,
when the deck is presented (and during the game) - that we assess a penalty
and *apply a remedy*.”

I agree that it's impossible to issue a D/DLP infraction here as the game has already ended. However, we have a player who has admitted to doing something, and that something was illegal. How likely is it that the player did not realize what they were doing was against the rules in some way? They altered the contents of their deck in order to gain an advantage. Regardless of whether or not the player realized the severity of their actions or the potential consequences, this seems like cheating to me. For it to be cheating when a person breaks a rule, we must meet two conditions:

The player must be attempting to gain advantage from his or her action.
The player must be aware that he or she is doing something illegal.

What would it take to convince you that the person was completely unaware, on any level, that what they did would be against the rules? After all, the did fill out and submit a deck list. What would have been the point of this if they weren't required to adhere to it?

Originally posted by Nathaniel Bass:

What would it take to convince you that the person was completely unaware, on any level, that what they did would be against the rules? After all, the did fill out and submit a deck list. What would have been the point of this if they weren't required to adhere to it?

The fact that the player is volunteering this information to an opponent who would never otherwise have noticed is, IMHO, pretty good evidence that the player had no idea he was doing anything wrong :)

You can always investigate if something feels out of place, but in this
situation, I would simply explain the situation and not give it a second
thought. If the player just shrugs it off, maybe you deck check him in a
future round, and if a problem arises at that time, we're now well into the
realm of cheating.

On Thu, Sep 17, 2015 at 1:48 PM Eli Meyer <

Being a PPTQ I wouldn't be surprised if this was the players first Comp REL Sealed event. If it is and they have only ever played in Pre-Releases and similar where continuous deck construction is allowed it's not that big a jump to think the player just didn't know, of course to get to this point you ask them those questions but honestly I don't like taking “judge, I cheated” statements and acting on them without being able to confirm them.

“no infraction. no penalty” seems to be the consensus answer, and the official answer.
Moreover, outside of this thread, a few high-level judges told me that, when a game finishes, all infractions in that game “vanish”.

In all honesty, I am not completely fine with that, and I would appreciate some explanations, for my better understanding.

1) IPG: “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 the proposed scenario:
- game 1 has finished
- game 2 has not started yet
- we have evidence of an offense occurred in game 1 (player accusing himself)

doesn't this lead to a GL to apply in game 1? Is there a fault in my reasoning?

2) Everyone of us has assigned penalties to players not revealing their morphs at the end of a game. But the game has finished. How is it that we can still assign penalties? (Ok, I'll admit this is a bit of rules-lawyering).

Originally posted by Francesco Scialpi:

2) Everyone of us has assigned penalties to players not revealing their morphs at the end of a game. But the game has finished. How is it that we can still assign penalties? (Ok, I'll admit this is a bit of rules-lawyering).

The infraction happens as the game is ending, the game hasn't actually completely ended yet when it's noticed.

Sure, the players may have already completed the physical actions of ending the game by the time you can actually say something (or their opponent could say something), but they don't get to rush through to the actual end of the game just by being faster than everyone else's reflexes. The game just hasn't quite ended yet.