Hello fellows!

I'd need an Official Answer for this scenario:
Alex and Nathan are playing in a Standard pPTQ.
Alex casts a Oath of Nissa tapping an Island. Nathan says “Ok, it resolves”.
Alex looks at the top 3 cards of his deck, put two of them on the bottom of his library and adds the third one to his hand, but he forgets to reveal it.
Both players realize now these errors and call for a judge.
What should we do?

Infraction(s)? Penalty(ies)? Fix(es)?

Thanks in advance for your help.

Edited Jacopo Strati (April 7, 2017 03:25:42 PM)

Thread closed, pending Official answer.

It's a Game Rule Violation, Warning (unless it's the third one that day), and Failure to Maintain Game State seems appropriate for Nathan, since he OK'd the incorrectly played spell.

The Philosophy for Hidden Card Error is quite clear on this, even using an example that's almost an exact match for your scenario: “Be careful not to apply this infraction in situations where a publicly-correctable error subsequently leads to an uncorrectable situation such as a Brainstorm cast using green mana.”

The section on Backing Up explains what we could do: “To perform a backup, each individual action since the point of the error is reversed, starting with the most recent ones and working backwards. Every action must be reversed; no parts of the sequence should be omitted or reordered. If the identity of a card involved in reversing an action is unknown to one of the players (usually because it was drawn), a random card is chosen from the possible candidates.”

But that section also cautions us: “Backups involving random/unknown elements should be approached with extreme caution, especially if they cause or threaten to cause a situation in which a player will end up with different cards than they would once they have correctly drawn those cards. For example, returning cards to the library when a player has the ability to shuffle their library is not something that should be done except in extreme situations.”

We could rewind this - put the two cards from the bottom of the library, and one randomly chosen card from hand, on top of the library in a random order. Put the Oath of Nissa back in Alex' hand, and untap the Island.

If a fetch land or other means to shuffle the library is an element in this scenario, then the IPG is fairly clear - that's not a good backup.

d:^D

Hi Scott,

If the player had cast oath of nissa for the wrong mana and then resolved it correctly then I would agree with you. Here the player has made a second ‘unforced’ error by also resolving it incorrectly. You don't think that this changes the situation at all?

Matt