Lancelot posted:

quote:

He caught the huge man and held him close, whispering into his ear.

Lieutenant Centaur posted:

Maybe a stupid question but do any LGS's have the ability or desire to say run a retro themed FNM? Would something like that be supported by Wizard or the player community?

I only started playing right when Dragon's Maze was released and I realize I can play those decks now if I wanted since they're modern legal but they lose out to actual real modern decklists.

I just thought of a casual style FNM of an old set/block would be hit with people who had favorite decks back then who can't play them now. ie Maze's End, U/W Control, Wolf Run Ramp, etc etc etc

JerryLee posted:

This is the only part I read

Orange Fluffy Sheep posted:

What a tragic story. Surrak hunts for bears but he keeps finding the wrong kind.

qbert posted:

Not really sure what the solution would be to reduce cheating at high-level events like this.

Starving Autist posted:

Lol if you were expecting quality writing from the MTG creative fluff pieces.

Wezlar posted:

Yeah there's no way that's accidental

Ciprian Maricon posted:

You'd be amazed at the incredibly retarded poo poo players do that really does end up being by accident, its no excuse and the penalty should still be applied in the interest of tournament integrity, but I don't immediately assume players are intentionally cheating.

jassi007 posted:

A judge at SCG Baltimore walked past while I had 2 cliques on the battlefield swinging at my opponent. Neither myself or my opponent noticed anything, the judge went "why are they there?" nothing else. I was confused, looked at him, looked at the board state, then it clicked. I got a GRV, I explained to him what I did. Thankfully the game hadn't proceeded to a point where we couldn't fix the situation. I just forgot about the legendary thing. I had just gotten the Cliques and it just never really crossed my mind.

jassi007 posted:

A judge at SCG Baltimore walked past while I had 2 cliques on the battlefield swinging at my opponent. Neither myself or my opponent noticed anything, the judge went "why are they there?" nothing else. I was confused, looked at him, looked at the board state, then it clicked. I got a GRV, I explained to him what I did. Thankfully the game hadn't proceeded to a point where we couldn't fix the situation. I just forgot about the legendary thing. I had just gotten the Cliques and it just never really crossed my mind.

So yeah, people can do dumb poo poo. That said, I don't know isn't a great explanation either. That is the poo poo toddlers say when you go "why is your hand in the cookie jar!" "I dunno."

Chill la Chill posted:

Magic Online, if it wasn't a POS. The commentators even get to see all the cards easily!

Serperoth posted:

Cheating is 100% about intent. It's pretty much "Commit an infraction knowingly and willingly, in order to gain an advantage". I'd write more but I'm kind of busy, but I'm sure Ciprian knows much more than me on the topic, if they want to take this one.

EDIT: And apparently they already did. But yeah, every infraction is "potentially" cheating. There's a good chance your Judge mentioned to other Judges that "so and so forgot the legend rule for his/her cliques, just so you know", even if he thought it was just a mistake. If you were seen 'forgetting' the legend rule again and again, that starts getting suspicious. Same if you're a known/notorious cheater.

jassi007 posted:

A judge at SCG Baltimore walked past while I had 2 cliques on the battlefield swinging at my opponent. Neither myself or my opponent noticed anything, the judge went "why are they there?" nothing else. I was confused, looked at him, looked at the board state, then it clicked. I got a GRV, I explained to him what I did. Thankfully the game hadn't proceeded to a point where we couldn't fix the situation. I just forgot about the legendary thing. I had just gotten the Cliques and it just never really crossed my mind.

So yeah, people can do dumb poo poo. That said, I don't know isn't a great explanation either. That is the poo poo toddlers say when you go "why is your hand in the cookie jar!" "I dunno."

jassi007 posted:

Yeah I'm sure I got some judge chatter. I was not fit for playing magic that day. After that round, round 2 I'm shuffling my opponents deck, I mash, then hand over hand. of course I miss a hand over hand (I am not a dexterous person) and of course a card is revealed. and of course it is a splinter twin. I got 2 GRV's in 2 rounds.

Serperoth posted:

I've never judged a big event like that, but I'd say that two GRVs in as many rounds would get you at least a more specific "watch out for them" mention, especially if it was early in the day. Last round before Top 8, people are tired, missing a shuffle would be more lenient I feel, but still.

Yawgmoth posted:

Today I learned the Vendillion Clique is legendary.

Ciprian Maricon posted:

You'd be amazed at the incredibly retarded poo poo players do that really does end up being by accident, its no excuse and the penalty should still be applied in the interest of tournament integrity, but I don't immediately assume players are intentionally cheating.

Count Bleck posted:

I cut someone's deck after they scryed with Magma Jet once.

That was awkward.

Count Bleck posted:

I cut someone's deck after they scryed with Magma Jet once.

That was awkward.

qbert posted:

Legendary Creatures with ambiguous sounding names are the worst. Hell, Yuuya Watanabe had to learn the hard way that Radiant, Archangel was a Legendary at the freaking World Championships.

jassi007 posted:

lol, how'd that turn out?

qbert posted:

Also wanted to mention that Patrick Chapin wrote a long article on SCG's Premium side about his own particular controversy at the Pro Tour.

I don't want to just copy/paste a wall of text, but the gist of the article was that he spent thousands of words arguing that he should not have gotten a game loss off of that Ajani play, citing a bunch of rules minutiae and arguing the interpretation in his favor. He just really, really thinks he should have been given a pass on that one.

On the plus side, he did acknowledge the 2 lands play earlier in the game, called it an accident, and proposed that people should carefully watch his play in the future and make their own decisions about whether a pattern of potential cheating emerges. Which I think was a classy way of addressing that issue.

jassi007 posted:

i think all his rationale is bullshit and while he most likely did not intentionally cheat, taking your lumps for your errors is part of magic. Arguing at the time is relevant but continuing to do so afterward mostly rubs people the wrong way. Unless his article was a constructive way to change the rules/IPG so that his almost but not quite unfixable cards in hand situation should now be allowed to be fixed, then it really is pointless.

quote:

Here's a question for you:

Have you ever seen someone take a mulligan, counting out how many cards from the top of their library they are going to draw? They reflexively lay out a seventh card and then remember they are taking a mulligan, putting it back...

After it had touched their hand.

Let's say you start your turn with no cards. You draw a card for your turn, but your opponent motions in a way that you suspect means they want priority during your upkeep, so you put the card back, but it turns out they don't.

When you had drawn the card, it was your hand, and now it's touching the top card of your deck.

These examples seem obvious and easily resolved, but so was this situation. The physical location of the card was not in question. The identity of the card was not in question. The event that had just transpired was not in question. My intent was not in question. The explanation of the ruling was that the facts of the case don't matter once it has been determined that the card physically touched any of the cards in my hand.

Of course, the above examples and numerous others reveal there are exceptions. For instance, the penalty guidelines explicitly state that if the contents of your hand are known because of Courser of Kruphix, the penalty should not be upgraded. Clearly, judgment is needed. The floor rules are not as crystal clear on this as might appear on the surface.

Some relevant portions of the Game Rules Violation section of the Floor Rules:

-An error that an opponent has no opportunity to verify the legality of should have its penalty upgraded. These errors involve misplaying hidden information, such as the morph ability or failing to reveal a card to prove that a choice made was a legal one.

This is the section that speaks to why I would have been issued a game rules violation and had it upgraded to a game loss. Note, this is a very different situation than intentionally violating game rules, which in this case, would be Cheating - Fraud and result in disqualification from the event.

-If the information was ever in a position where opponents had the opportunity to verify the legality (such as on top of the library, as the only card in hand, or on the battlefield at the end of the game), do not upgrade the penalty and reveal the information if possible.

This is an important point, because the point of the rule is not to create as many game losses as possible, but to minimize the possibility of abuse. In my match, my opponent wrongfully believed that none of my hand was public information, and it was his statement as such that lead to my penalty being upgraded to a game loss. As it turns out, the Abzan Charm had been revealed, however, the Read the Bones had not been revealed by Courser, so there was still basis for upgrading the penalty if the legality could not be verified.

Recently, some have suggested that it doesn't matter if the cards were revealed by Courser, but this is not true. As mentioned above, Courser of Kruphix itself is named in the penalty guidelines as a reason to not upgrade the penalty. The important thing is whether or not the legality of the play can be verified.

-Additionally, if the card that was supposed to be revealed was put into an empty hand, we also will not upgrade that. This is because there is no question, no ambiguity what the physical card is.

This is the crucial point of this situation. This is not a "Our hands are tied, there must be zero tolerance for mistake, a game loss is the only way to preserve the integrity of the event" type of situation. An important part of the philosophy here is to avoid being disruptive as much as possible. When there is no question, no ambiguity what the physical card is, do not upgrade the penalty, because this section is not designed to "punish" players for sloppy play, but rather to prevent potential for abuse.

That there was no ambiguity what the physical card was was the crux of my argument and a fact that was agreed on (and could have been verified by countless witnesses), as the cards had not changed order. The counterargument was that while this fact was agreed on, we also agreed that the card had touched other cards in my hand. I certainly do not fault the judges for choosing to prioritize that element of the case over the previous, however, I believe that is the more disruptive path and in the future, we should do the reverse.

-Please note, this is NOT an exhaustive list of exceptions, just the most common ones. Use the guideline of "ever in a position where opponents had the opportunity to verify the legality" and you should be able to apply this exception correctly.

This speaks to the reason I asked the head judge to use discretion in this case, as this is very much a situation that has countless potential exceptions, many of which have never been imagined yet. In this case, we had the ability to verify the legality, as the location of the card was not physically ambiguous. In fact, I immediately did just that, revealing the card.

The head judge does have the ability to determine when an exception is called for, and I believe that such a situation in the future should warrant one, when the location of the card is agreed upon to be not physically ambiguous, as that is a much more relevant fact of the case than whether or not two cards touched, for the purposes of minimizing abuse and preserving integrity of a match.

-If the infraction falls into one of the following categories, perform the fix specified unless backing up is very simple: So right here we are going to have a list of partial fixes. You do them first. If you can't, then you evaluate if you need to do a back up or leave alone. However, if the backup is trivially simple, (ex. a single action) and makes for a more organic fix, the HJ may authorize the back up.

Because nothing has happened yet, including changing the order of any cards, it is trivially easy to back up the game and reveal the card and then add it to the hand. Failure to reveal is not always a backup type of situation, however, when you Mystical Tutor for a card and fail to reveal it before putting it on top of the deck, it is easy to backup; take it off the deck, reveal it, then put it on top. The physical location of the card is not ambiguous.

A lot of people have focused on the fact that the video coverage could verify the legality of the card, a suggestion I had made during the appeal. However, that is not currently an option under current procedure (in stark contrast to the Kibler/Finkel/Wolf thing in Hawaii a few years ago), and I am sympathetic to arguments that it shouldn't be. In my specific case, it didn't particularly matter anyway, as there was agreement on the key facts of the card not being revealed, the physical location of the card, and the cards touching.

However, on the topic of not making feature matches "different" than regular matches, I do have a few observations. Games being covered and watched by tens of thousands of people are different than random matches that don't have spectators or even a table judge, whether we like it or not.

Whenever I am doing commentary on a match, if I see something wrong, you better believe we send word to the floor ASAP. Cedric Phillips, Patrick Sullivan, and Matthias Hunt do the same. Why would you not? You don't want to be disruptive and interfere, but when we see state-based effects resolved wrong, an illegal gamestate, or someone doing something illegal, we typically start by having a spotter on the floor look into it real fast, potentially even stopping the match if it's important. We're not always going to be right. Sometimes we'll think we're seeing something and just missing a key part of some complex boardstate or interaction.

Now, isn't this just making the gamestate more often correct? Absolutely. And that's the point. When there are spectators watching a match and there is a dispute, the judge may ask the spectators for information on what they saw. This means matches with spectators are functionally different than matches without. And guess what? Matches with spectators have a higher chance of what really happened being known. Matches on camera are just the extreme form of this, a time where there may be ten thousand spectators.

I am not arguing in favor of using instant replays, nor against it. I think it is a nuanced issue that I could imagine making sense either way. I am just arguing that a major issue is (or should be) tournament logistics. A lot of suggestions people make would run a serious risk of slowing down the tournament. Regardless, it would be bizarre if a non-featured match was more likely to involve asking spectators because of feature matches having a policy of judges not questioning spectators that were "only able to see because it was televised."

Angry Grimace posted:

It doesn't help that Mistbind Clique is not legendary, yet Vendilion is.

Zoness posted:

Um the solution is to just know the game's rich and storied lore, duh.

Radiant is the leader of the angels on the plane of Serra that's why she's got like Dragoons and poo poo. Presumably she's the executor and she has to fight off the Zerg Phyrexian invasion but refuses to escape the dying plane. Basically blame Urza for not constructing enough pylons.

the vendilion clique has that name because that's their names but other cliques are named for what they do like fencer clique, knacksaw clique, mistblind clique etc.

This is like the dumber version of "not understanding Kamigawa names because Tomorrow, Azami's Familiar is too hard to semantically parse".

Zoness posted:

This is like the dumber version of "not understanding Kamigawa names because Tomorrow, Azami's Familiar is too hard to semantically parse".

qbert posted:

Actually, I will copy/paste the relevant portion of his argument, because it's kind of funny that he's basically continuing right where he left off from the judge appeal on camera onto the internet, and also maybe the judges in this thread can comment on the validity of his arguments.

black potus posted:

wait in this analogy is radiant aldaris?

Irony Be My Shield posted:

Forgetting about the legend rule in that case seems understandable - it comes up rarely for that card and normally you're allowed to have two creatures on the board. There aren't many reasons to be returning scrylands to your hand during a wrath though.

Also I always found Master of the Way rather confusing.

Ciprian Maricon posted:

Chapin's argument isn't without merit, it was a repairable game state, but it was only a repairable game state because it was a feature match with a table Judge and a camera, we can't apply a different standard in those situations, rulings should strive to be universally applicable and at this point Patrick needs to take his lumps like the Hall of Famer he's supposed to be not use his column on SCG to have a nice big moan about the ruling.