Hello all, great job discussing things this week. An especially big thanks to those of you who stepped in to give a nudge in one direction or the other. Here's your solution:

What we have here is a Game Rule Violation. A spell controlled by Natalie was resolved incorrectly by Anton, so both players will receive warnings for GRV. Due to the players going through a combat phase and Natalie drawing 5 off of Sphinx's Revelation, too many decisions and exchanges of information have happened for the GRV to be rewound. Luckily, we have a partial fix available to us:

If an object changing zones is put into the wrong zone, the identity of the object was known to all players, and it is within a turn of the error, put the object in the correct zone.

Since the Aurelia, The Warleader went to Anton's hand from the battlefield instead of to the deck, and both players know that the card in question is Aurelia, we will apply this fix and put the Aurelia on top of Anton's deck.

A few important things to note:
1) It's not Drawing Extra Cards, because Anton received confirmation of his action before moving the card to his hand.It's not Drawing Extra Cards, because Natalie confirmed Anton's incorrect resolution of Azorius Charm - i.e., a GRV immediately preceding the card going to his hand.
2) It's not a Communication Policy Violation. The communication policy is in place to prevent against giving false information to your opponents. Saying the word “yep” in response to an inquiry based on terms that aren't defined in the game of magic does not constitute a violation of that policy. If Natalie had said “yes, it goes to your hand” or if Anton's question had been “Does that put it into my hand?”, then it would be a different story. But ‘bounce’ can have different meanings to different people, and people for whom english isn't their primary language may not understand the word's colloquial english meaning.

Phew, that's about all the time I have today for wordcrafting. I'm gonna bounce, see you tomorrow with the new scenario!

Edited Scott Marshall (Oct. 24, 2013 02:04:47 AM)

Originally posted by Aric Parkinson:

Does “Bounce it?” necessarily mean that Natalie was asking for oracle text? Furthermore, is answering “yes” to that question necessarily false?

“Bounce” is not, nor has it ever been a keyword action. I would never rule that players are required to have the same definition of that word. Both players understood a different meaning. Its poor communication but not illegal, and not even close to a CPV as Natalie didn't misrepresent from her point of view.

Originally posted by Patrick Vorbroker:

1) It's not Drawing Extra Cards, because Anton received confirmation of his action before moving the card to his hand.

Please, explain to me how we can make this conclusion based on current documents.

1) "A player illegally puts one or more cards into his or her hand and, at the moment before he or she began the instruction or action that put a card into his or her hand, no other Game Play Error or Communication Policy Violation had been committed, and the error was not the result of resolving objects on the stack in an incorrect order." (DEC definition in IPG).
2) “If the player received confirmation from his or her opponent before drawing the card (including confirming the number of cards when greater than one), the infraction is not Drawing Extra Cards.” (from DEC in IPG)
3) "A player draws a card by putting the top card of his or her library into his or her hand.“ (CR)

You're referring to (2) as explanation to the fact that this situation is not a DEC. However, I can't say that I'm satisfied with this explanation. Wording used in (2) (”draw a card“) is simular to wording in (3) (”draw a card“ definition) and is quite different from wording used in (1) (”put one or more cards into his hand").

So, current wording means to me that DEC infraction can be awarded for both illegally drawing the card and illegally putting a card into your hand, and (2) can be applied only for actually drawing the card (such as during Sphynx's Revelation's resolution).

So, if your explanation is correct, that means one of the following:
A) I don't understand that “put a card from battlefield into your hand” is equal to “drawing a card” because of my poor English and/or poor rules knowledge.
B) Current IPG is poorly worded (as it was a recent update), and we should have something like this instead:
"If the player received confirmation from his or her opponent before starting his action (including confirming the number of cards when greater than one), the infraction is not Drawing Extra Cards."

My apologies, all - we (the KP team, including me) made an assumption; now, I've clarified that - as Alex suggests - that 2nd point is only supposed to apply to DRAWING cards.

This phrase was added to the IPG because of the all-too-common “draw?” when it's not time yet, and your opponent confirms. Less often, you might say “draw 4?” when it should only be 3, and your opponent confirms the mistake you're about to make. In those situations, we don't want the opponent to then say “hah, gotcha - Judge, DEC!”

So, in this KP scenario (admittedly, an unlikely one, chosen to illustrate certain key learning points): it's STILL not DEC; Anton resolved Natalie's spell incorrectly, with her acknowledgment (albeit a distracted “OK”). That GRV precedes the card getting to his hand … and the rest of Patrick's explanation is valid.

Again, I apologize - mo' bettah fax checking FTW, eh?

d:^D

Thanks a lot for clarification!
I'm sorry for troubling you, yet, due to my rather limited judging experience, I want to completely understand this scenario to avoid any future mistakes.
That means that I have yet another question. :)

Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

So, in this KP scenario (admittedly, an unlikely one, chosen to illustrate certain key learning points): it's STILL not DEC; Anton resolved Natalie's spell incorrectly, with her acknowledgment (albeit a distracted “OK”). That GRV precedes the card getting to his hand … and the rest of Patrick's explanation is valid.

Question's as follows: how can we say that Anton resolved Natalie's spell before he actually did any action (put Aurelia into his hand)? We have three consequent events:
A) Anton asked “Bounce it?”
B) Anton heard Natalie's answer
C) Anton put Aurelia into his hand.
Clearly, (C) is an “action that put a card into his or her hand” from DEC. It's also clear that no infraction was committed prior to (A). And it also seems to me that, as far as (A) is a question “based on terms that aren't defined in the game of magic”, that by asking that question Anton didn't commit any infraction. Neither he did by hearing an answer to his question, because even after he got an answer from Natalie, he could cast something in responce to Azorius Charm and/or exclaim “Ooh, I remember, this is an Azorius Charm, and you want to put Aurelia to the top of my deck!”

I mean, first visible indication that the spell actually started resolving is that Anton started his action (putting Aurelia into his hand); that's because he did this action instead of another action (put Aurelia to the top of his deck), which is a part of actual spell resolution. Before he started this action, the spell could still be considered on the stack (as there was no indication of its visible resolution), and after he started his action, DEC exception doesn't apply any more as GRV had to happen "at the moment before he or she began the instruction or action that put a card into his or her hand".

What am I missing here?

Edited Alex Zhed (Oct. 24, 2013 07:39:46 AM)

Good morning/afternoon everyone! I don't post here publicly very often anymore, but please allow me to introduce myself, my name is Ben McDole and I'm the current lead of this project. You may not be aware but I approve the questions/solutions that get posted here. That being said, let me address this question in particular.

To be short, we missed it a little bit. I made the unfortunate assumption that the clause in the IPG about confirmation extended to “drawing” cards in the sense described in the infraction. In reality the intent is for that clause to only apply to drawing cards in the normal sense of drawing. That being said, this teaches us a great lesson! Policy is very carefully crafted by the policy team and what is written is absolutely what is intended. We made a (careless) mistake when crafting the solution and things unraveled a little bit. We can and will do better and I hope that you will continue to read and learn from our project.

On to the answer for this scenario:
Anton has committed a game rule violation by incorrectly resolving Azorious Charm, this is true. However the game rule that was violated caused an extra card to be added to his hand. If we are not (and we definite are NOT) extending the confirmation clause, and we also are absolutely not considering ‘bounce this?’ to be a communication policy violation, then this leaves us with one solution, Drawing Extra Cards. Note however, that DEC also gives us a wonderful option to downgrade. In this case the identity of the card absolutely was known to all players before it entered the hand, and can definitely be returned to the correct zone with minimal disruption. Thus the infraction here is Drawing Extra Cards, Anton is awarded a warning and the Aurelia is moved appropriately to the top of the library.

The moral of the story here? Everyone makes mistakes now and then! Be particularly careful when you read and apply the policy, and above all else always run a game loss by the head judge. Thank you again for reading and I hope to see you next time.

Ben, thanks a lot for detailed answer and explanation!
Anyway, it was very interesting learning experience to study and discuss this scenario. Even the mistake in initial solution made me learn something, as I looked through IPG & CR some extra times and discussed it with my friend-L1 while posting my questions. So - thank you all again.

No problem! Thanks for the feedback and I'm glad people are reading :)