This situation came up at a sealed PPTQ this weekend, and generated a discussion between the player (who was also a judge) the HJ and myself after the event.

Scenario:

The game has gone long, and both players have extensive board states with multiple morph / manifests in play both players are using tokens to mark their respective cards. Nathan is using custom overlays for his manifests. Anna finishes resolving a creature during her second main phase and indicates a shortcut to end step. Nathan responds by indicating that he wants to activate Mastery of the Unseen to manifest the top card of his library. Anna agrees that she has no response.

Nathan resolves the activated ability and fishes out a new manifest overlay and puts it into play. The turn then passes. Nathan untaps, determines that he has no relevant upkeep effects and moves to his draw step. With three cards in hand, he draws the top card of his library. Looking down at his board state, Nathan immediately calls a judge, as he has discovered that when he put the Manifest overlay into play he didn't actually put the top card of his library under it.

Disregarding the GRE-GRV involved, I'd like to hear what the community thinks the best fix would be.

It was ruled that the fix would be to place a random card from Nathan's hand (since no one could verify which card was drawn for the turn) face down, and then have him draw the top card of his library. This fix gives a 25% (drawn card + three in hand) of returning the game to its proper state before the error occurred (in accordance with 1.4 of the IPG). The discussion resolves around whether this fix allows too much potential for a player to abuse it by using the “mistake” to have a chance at putting a dead card from their hand into play rather than potentially useful cards from the top of their deck.

The possible deviation discussed (and not implemented) was to leave the player's hand intact and manifest the top card of the library, rather than attempt to randomize a fix from their hand + drawn card. While this fix has no possibility of returning the game state to its proper structure, it removes the potential for gaming the system. The justification for this potential fix is that at the time of the violation (end of Anna's turn, when Mastery of the Unseen's trigger is resolved) the top two cards of Nathan's library represent equally “random” cards, since neither is known. Assuming that the identity of the card shouldn't matter when determining a random fix, by manifesting what was at the time of the error the second card from the top, a random ‘top’ card is put into play.

As I said, this discussion occurred after the event with a strong philosophical divide between which fix was potentially more abusable, if that should matter at all, and where the point of abuse / randomization exists.

We have two options (assuming we rule out cheating) either we back the game up to before the manifest and have it resolve properly, basically put a random card from hand down, or we leave the game state as it is meaning that as the manifest token has nothing under it nothing was manifested and we remove it from play.

Personally I would rewind, we've ruled out the player was trying to get rid of the dead card so rewinding the draw isn't that disruptive.

As for the proposed partial fix, it isn't supported by policy and the situation is neither significant or exceptional so I wouldn't consider applying the partial fix

Originally posted by Gareth Tanner:

We have two options (assuming we rule out cheating) either we back the game up to before the manifest and have it resolve properly, basically put a random card from hand down, or we leave the game state as it is meaning that as the manifest token has nothing under it nothing was manifested and we remove it from play.

Personally I would rewind, we've ruled out the player was trying to get rid of the dead card so rewinding the draw isn't that disruptive.

As for the proposed partial fix, it isn't supported by policy and the situation is neither significant or exceptional so I wouldn't consider applying the partial fix

I agree with your assessment of the situation, but I would not rewind here. A rewind should only be done if it is not disruptive and ideally if the line of play is the same. Rewinding a card draw is always dangerous because of the potential to change the available options during a rewind, and so usually we rewind only if we're reasonably confident that the same card is going to end up in hand anyways.

Rewinding here would mean that a random card from hand gets put onto the battlefield, and this is a terrible solution. If a player has been playing around one particular card in hand—whether it's a trick or a bomb—suddenly locking that card face-down on the battlefield could have a drastic effect on the game. A rewind is just too risky and shouldn't be done. The issue here is not a matter of abuse, but of the simple fact that backing up here has a chance (and even a 50% chance is too much, in my opinion) of significantly altering the game state. As per the IPG, we should only back up when leaving the game state as is is a “substantially worse” solution, and we're far from that in this scenario.

Agree with Sean, manifesting a card from the hand seems not that far away from shuffling it in the library.

Why not manifest the top card of the library? Assuming the deck is random, the top two cards should be equally unknown, and therefore which was drawn and which was manifested should be irrelevant. I'm eager to hear reasons on this.

-Ben

Ben, please provide quotes from policy documents that support your suggested fix.

…

Oh, wait - there aren't any, are there? :)

That's why we don't do that. As I just said on another topic - the temptation to do the obvious-but-unsupported “fix” doesn't really fix, it destroys consistency, and fairness is a victim of that.

d:^D

I feel that that technically Nathan never manifested a creature. The overlay is not a manifested creature. A card placed face down on the battlefield is a manifested creature. This is not vastly different from saying you're casting a creature but never putting it on the battlefield (though that might not get you a GRV).

I don't like the backup because I'm uncomfortable with forcing one of Nathan's cards in hand being manifested, and I'm even less comfortable backing up to before he manifests with him then having knowledge of the card on the top of his library when he decides to or not manifest. I'm much more comfortable with “you tapped mana and didn't do anything with it” as that is a less damaging game state than any of the other options.

Per the IPG, “backups are regarded as a solution of
last resort, only applied in situations where leaving the game in the current state is a substantially worse solution… 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.”

The current game state is not badly broken, and the only backup the IPG permits would result in essentially manifesting a random card from Nathan's current hand. That seems much worse than leaving the game state as it is. Remove the manifest overlay (which has no real meaning under the rules), give the Warnings, and play on.

Scott - Do you agree with Sean that a rewind is too disruptive here? If so, given that you would not manifest the top card of the library, what fix would you propose?

If not, would you proceed with the rewind because there is no other way to achieve a more “fixed” game state? (Trying to understand, not to challenge. Thanks!)

Yep, I think Sean summed it up pretty well. Leaving things as is falls short of ideal, but the various options are either unsupported fixes, result in an even less ideal situation, or both.

d:^D

The Judgecast folks just released (as in an hour ago) a whole podcast on GRVs and more specifically, rewinding! We even have special guest and rewind hipster (he was hating rewinds before it was cool) Riki Hayashi!

http://judgecast.com/?p=776

(Normally I wouldn't drop a plug in a thread, but the timeliness is too much to resist.)
-Bryan

Really glad to hear all the various voices weighing in on this. I can definitely see the rewind being too problematic (and the argument for that solution was put forward specifically because it “punished Nathan” but was argued down because we're explicitly not supposed to be looking at punishment), and the fix being unsupported. It was an interesting situation to be a fly on the wall for.

Thanks all for this discussion!