This is the Gold edition of the Holiday Knowledge Pools.

This thread will remain open until January 1st. Judges of any level are welcome to jump into the discussion right away. Enjoy!

Ames is playing against Netty at an Ixalan Sealed PPTQ. Netty is tapped out when Ames untaps on his turn 5. Ames draws for turn, then immediately uses one hand to tap his 4 lands, and the other to put a land and a Charging Monstrosaur into play, both tapped and saying “Attack for 5”. Netty says “I guess I take the 5.” As life totals are being adjusted, Netty notices that the land Ames played was a Stone Quarry, and calls for a judge. When you ask Ames, he says that he was playing quickly to conserve time, and had mixed up the cards in his hand, playing the wrong land. When you check, the rest of his hand is three Mountains.

What do you do?

Since I've been asked, I'll clarify that the intended interpretation is that Ames played the land and tapped his lands at the same time.

When we ask the players, its unclear whether the Stone Quarry was ever physically on the battlefield untapped, but since Ames thought it was a Mountain, it could have been.

Let me try this.
Since there is not much if any advantage to be gained and we rule cheating out, since It is a KP Scenario i would just swap out the Stone Quarry with a Mountain from As Hand.
Both players agree on the Reality, in which a charging monstrosaur just dealt 5 Damage in Combat.
There is no Infraction committed for me since there was just to happen a simple dexterity error.
For me this is OoOS gone wrong and since both Players agree on the rest of the sequence i would allow A to simply exchange his Lands, since that leads to what he intended to do very clean.

Hi,

I would be perplexed if I saw a Stone Quarry during an Ixalan Sealed PPTQ… Is it a Planeswalker Deck Sealed Deck? That is not an allowed format for a PPTQ. ;-)

Thanks, Milan. This isn't intended, I did a search for enters the battlefield tapped lands in Ixlan and forgot about the planeswalker decks.

I don't believe there are actually any battlefield tapped lands that make red in the set, so lets go with Glacial Fortress.

The intent of the question is to look at how to handle how it was put into play and cast a spell, not to discover this issue.

Error
Ames is unable to pay the cost of Charging Monstrosaur.

Occur Timing
Although Ames played the spell and land at the same time, the player should play a land first, and then he can get enough mana source to cast the spell. So I think it should be the time after Ames played the tapped land

Investgation
Ames has 3 other mountains in hand. So I think it is a unintentional mistaken.

Penalties
The situation is clear now. Ames get a GPE-GRV warning. Netty get a GPE-FtMGS for she did not point out the error timely.

Backup
As the situation is simple enough. I prefer to backup to the timing when the error occurred.
Reset the life.
Return Charging Monstrosaur to Ames's hand.
Ames untaps his land except the tapped-enter land.
The game resume at the pre-combat main phase of Ames.

P.S: My English is not very good. So the word I use might be not very correct. Hope you can understand what I'm trying to express.

Here's a question: does the fact that this was performed as an Out of Order Sequence affect whether/to where we decide to back up?

@Andrew - yes, that is the question that is being asked by this scenario.

@ yue xiao - 谢谢！我同意你写的东西. Your English is much better than our Chinese. :)

I agree with Yue Xiao's assessment of the situation, but I may or may not be issuing FTMGS to Netty, as the speed of the actions combined with the fact that Netty pointed out the error leaves me hesitant to issue a penalty that is designed to remind them to be more careful, when it seems as though they were reasonably so.

Relevant MTR 4.3:

All actions taken must be legal if they were executed in the correct order, and any opponent can ask the player to do the actions in the correct sequence so that he or she can respond at the appropriate time (at which point players will not be held to any still-pending actions).

Thanks :D.

Originally posted by Russell Deutsch:

@Andrew - yes, that is the question that is being asked by this scenario.

@ yue xiao - 谢谢！我同意你写的东西. Your English is much better than our Chinese. :)

I agree with Yue Xiao's assessment of the situation, but I may or may not be issuing FTMGS to Netty, as the speed of the actions combined with the fact that Netty pointed out the error leaves me hesitant to issue a penalty that is designed to remind them to be more careful, when it seems as though they were reasonably so.

Relevant MTR 4.3:

All actions taken must be legal if they were executed in the correct order, and any opponent can ask the player to do the actions in the correct sequence so that he or she can respond at the appropriate time (at which point players will not be held to any still-pending actions).

Originally posted by Andrew Keeler:

Here's a question: does the fact that this was performed as an Out of Order Sequence affect whether/to where we decide to back up?

I am not sure we can talk about OoOS at all.
OoOS is about actions taken “in an incorrect order”. Here, player is rushing through his actions, but he isn't doing anything in an incorrect order, is he?

MTR 4.3: “Due to the complexity of accurately representing a game of Magic, it is acceptable for players to engage in a block of actions that, while technically in an incorrect order, arrive at a legal and clearly understood game state once they are complete.”

Edited Francesco Scialpi (Dec. 14, 2017 07:15:38 AM)

I'm with Yue Xiao here. The first error is casting the Monstrosaur, so GRV - Warning, back up to that point.

I also disagree with this being OoOS. There's no legal sequence in which these two actions could have occurred.

I agree with yue xiao rulling, except I wouldn't give NAP a FTMGS, he noticed the error in a short interval of time for what I can read.

If we could determine if the land entered the battlefield untapped I think maybe we could look at this differently.

By following Gabriel's line:

I think we could argue that both players assumed the land was played untapped, then tapped for mana, even if not physically represented as such. (If this were untrue, NAP would likely not have gone to take damage as he would have seen that not enough mana was available.)

As a result, we can rule GRV on playing the land incorrectly, and backup to just before it was played.

No infraction for NAP. Because the land and the creature appeared at the same time, the only visible change to the game state since the infraction is the adjustment of life totals—which is still in process. Nothing has finished happening since the infraction, so NAP has essentially pointed it out immediately.

To go a different direction (for discussion purposes), could you just replace the wrong land with a Mountain? It's obvious that that's what he wanted to play. In fact, he couldn't have done anything else because that's all he has in his hand.

Will Bumgardner <forum-40318-9cb9@apps.magicjudges.org> schrieb am Do. 14.
Dez. 2017 um 19:48:

> To go a different direction (for discussion purposes), could you just
> replace the wrong land with a Mountain? It's obvious that that's what he
> wanted to play. In fact, he couldn't have done anything else because that's
> all he has in his hand.
>

While this looks like a reasonable fix and is indeed a reasonable fix at
regular REL, it is not on the list of applicable Partial fixes for a GRV.
Which leaves us with two choices: Either perform a backup or leave the game
state as is. The error was caught pretty early, nothing much has happened,
so a backup seems reasonable.

The only question remaining is how far we go back. Which leads to the
question when the GRV occurred: Either AP played a tapped land untapped or
they cast a spell and didn’t pay the correct cost.

Putting a land onto the battlefield tapped is regularly done as a shortcut
for playing and tapping an untapped land, so I could see an argument for
going back to AP having the land in hand.

For the sake of further argument. How about leaving the gamestate as is,
why do we consider that “substantially worse” than backing up?