Hello,

First of all, I did not observe these events myself, I was informed later. However, they were reported to me by a person (Alice) I consider trustworthy. Moreover, I wasn't judging this event.

During last week's (8/3/19) FNM Draft, a player (Bob) offered his opponent (Charlotte) to use the “London Mulligan” rule instead of the current of current mulligan rule. The TO or HJ did not talk about this alternate mulligan rule (I am not sure, if there was an official judge) and nobody was asked for permission or consulted in general. Alice merely eavesdropped on this discussion. As far as she understood, Bob offered the alternate mulligan rule to prevent a “non-game” because Charlotte had a bad initial opening hand. Alice is new to the store and doesn't know their names.

I tried to give as many details as possible, but if there is anything missing, I'll try to fill in the gaps.

In case this happens again, what would be appropriate to do ? When reading the JAR, it does not look like a “Serious Problem” case, since the offending player (Bob) did not gained any advantage from that, Charlotte did.

Thank you in advance,
Frédéric

That's an interesting one, Frédéric.

This is comparable to players going “hey, what if we start with 8 cards each?”, “lets try something different, lets play two lands a turn each” or “want to play with our commander decks?”. These are all variants of magic, but they are not the specific variant of magic that everyone in the tournament signed up to play. We want to keep things consistent, while it seems Bob's offer was fair, it can cause problems later down the line. Imagine Alice is paired against Bob next round, and, being a new player assumes that the London mulligan is normal, or that Bob is ok with all his opponents doing it. Bob keeps, Alice mulligans and performs a London. Bob, realizing what she did, says that he would have taken a mulligan if he knew he could have London'd. What if Alice gets paired up against someone else, and thinking that it's normal, London mulligans? What if word spreads to the games next to Bob and Charlotte, and they also agree to London mulligan, then half the room is essentially playing a different format.

If it happened again, I would explain that I would like the players to use regular mulligans to keep things consistent, giving one of the examples above.

That's my two cents, anyway. Thanks for the question!

It seems unlikely that Bob knew it was wrong to agree to a “rules variant”, and - as noted - Bob wasn't seeking advantage, he just wanted a fun game. Sounds like it's time to educate Bob (and possibly Charlotte).

I think we may encounter this for the next several weeks, until Wizards concludes its study of the London experiment. Maybe it'd be worth a quick announcement, start of each event, reminding players that we need to follow existing rules at all times.

d:^D