Anthony casts Serum Visions. Nancy allows that to resolve.

Anthony Draws 1 Card.
Anthony Looks at the top 2, and puts 1 on the bottom and one into his hand.

Then he realizes he shouldn't have done that and calls you over. You ask him “why did you do that?”, and he says I thought "I was resolving Sleight of Hand."

Whats the Penalty, infraction, and fix for this situation?

Sleight of Hand wouldn't let him draw first so I might dig a little deeper, but…

Anthony reveals hand, Nancy picks a card. The bottom card Anthony's library is retrieved and Anthony correctly performs the Scry 2 on those 2 cards.

Anthony gets a GPE - HCE.

Originally posted by Rob Marti:

Sleight of Hand wouldn't let him draw first so I might dig a little deeper, but…

Anthony reveals hand, Nancy picks a card. The bottom card Anthony's library is retrieved and Anthony correctly performs the Scry 2 on those 2 cards.

Anthony gets a GPE - HCE.

Sure. For arguments sake, let's say you investigate further and you rule out cheating.

I think there's a good argument to be made for leaving the card on the bottom of the deck where it is, and just doing HCE of one card to the top of the deck.

In that case, we're separating the set of “cards looked at by scry with Visions” into two different sets – “Card/s put on the bottom with Visions” and “Card/s put on the top with Visions,” which is fine with me because the IPG says a “set” is basically ~“a chunk of cards we can separate” not “all the cards looked at by an effect.”

Originally posted by IPG:

if a player resolves Collected Company, picks up three cards with one hand and then four cards with the other, the last drawn set of four cards should be used for the remedy, instead of the full set of seven cards..

Why would we put it to the top? I agree there are two sets of cards but I disagree with labelling the second set as “Card/s put on the top with Visions”

Excess cards are returned to the correct location. If that location is the library, they should be shuffled into the random portion unless the owner previously knew the identity of the card/cards illegally moved; that many cards, chosen by the opponent, are returned to the top of the library instead.

Based on that section of the IPG, I would have to agree with Brook that the excess card chosen by the opponent should go to the top of the library.

I'm going with HCE Warning and choosing a card at random from his hand and returning to the top of the library. Putting the card anywhere else would add further damage to the state of the game, we want to keep it as close as it should have been to the normal resolution of the card.

After talking it over with some other judges, I want to slightly modify my answer.

The card on the bottom belongs there, and we have one extra card in hand. I'd give an HCE Warning and reveal the hand to the opponent, separate any cards the opponent previously knew from a Thoughtsieze the previous turn or something similar, and then have them pick a card that is the extra from Serum Visions. AP then scrys that card to finish resolving their Visions correctly.

Originally posted by Megan Holden:

I'm going with HCE Warning and choosing a card at random from his hand and returning to the top of the library. Putting the card anywhere else would add further damage to the state of the game, we want to keep it as close as it should have been to the normal resolution of the card.

HCE doesn't allow you to choose at random, right?

Originally posted by Brook Gardner-Durbin:

After talking it over with some other judges, I want to slightly modify my answer.

The card on the bottom belongs there, and we have one extra card in hand. I'd give an HCE Warning and reveal the hand to the opponent, separate any cards the opponent previously knew from a Thoughtsieze the previous turn or something similar, and then have them pick a card that is the extra from Serum Visions. AP then scrys that card to finish resolving their Visions correctly.

Now they get to Scry 1 and then Scry 1? Let's say that want card A to be above B and B was the card they initially scried to the bottom and card A is the chosen card from the hand. With your fix, you are denying the player that option.

Perform HCE and create a a set of cards being the ones looked at from Serrum Visions. THis set should have 2 cards in it. We can find one of the real cards. Its on the bottom. And we know one of those cards is in the players hand. So allow the opponent to select one to go into that set. So now that set contains 2 cards which is the correct number of cards in that set. So let the player scry 2, from those 2 cards. They can now Bottom, Bottom; Bottom, Top; or Top,Top. Chances are they want to bottom at least one of those cards(most likely both of them). And then carry on.

I disagree with letting the player scry the card already on the bottom to the top – they already made a legal choice for that card's location.

There's only one card that is in an illegal place, and that's the one in hand right now. We need to HCE it to a legal place, so we should take it away and put it somewhere legal – the player's choice of on top, on bottom, or 2nd from the bottom.

Originally posted by Brook Gardner-Durbin:

I disagree with letting the player scry the card already on the bottom to the top – they already made a legal choice for that card's location.

I disagree calling it a choice. Yes, it's a legal outcome for the card to be where it is, but for me it's akin to arguing that announcing a Doom Blade was legal, only the choice of the target was an issue, so the player has to stick with casting the spell, just choose something else than White Knight as a target.

- Emilien

Emilien – You'd let the player rescry with both the card on the bottom and the card we HCE away from the hand?

From IPG:

“Always operate on the smallest set possible to remedy the error. This may mean applying the remedy to only part of a set defined by an instruction. For example, if a player resolves Collected Company, picks up three cards with one hand and then four cards with the other, the last drawn set of four cards should be used for the remedy, instead of the full set of seven cards..”

Using this methodology, I believe Brook's remedy is applying the fix to the smallest possible portion of a set. I do not agree that the bttm card should be added to the scry-able set.

I also think that putting the hce'd card on top of library most accurately rebuilds the game state, and does not allow the player to gain any possible advantage by scrying an unwanted card to the bottom of the library.

Edit / follow-up : if the worry is that a shuffle effect will change the card drawn when we put the card on top of the library (the normal concern when putting cards on top of the library as part of a rewind), then doesn't giving the player the option to scry that card to the bottom effectively do the same (if not more beneficial) thing without activating a shuffle effect?

Edited Russell Deutsch (March 30, 2017 07:56:21 PM)

Russell – putting the card on top instead of letting the player re-scry it was my first answer, but I changed my mind because the player was supposed to be able to put the card on the bottom if they wanted – forcing them to leave a card on top turns their Serum Visions into Telling Time, which isn't the correct end game state.

I can see an argument for allowing the player to re-scry both the bottom card and the one we HCE away from hand, as Emilien and Frank are suggesting, as that is closer to the correct resolution of Serum Visions. My argument against that is I feel the player has already made a choice on the bottom card, and I don't want to allow them to change that if they've reconsidered.

Either way on that card, however, I am confident allowing a scry on the HCE'd card is closer to the correct game state and in line with the spirit of HCE, even if it is a deviation from the letter and I would need to get it approved.

Edited Brook Gardner-Durbin (March 30, 2017 08:14:03 PM)