Penalty Philosophy
Of the major documents that govern tournament Magic, the Penalty Guide is unique. While all of the other documents provide very clear cut answers and clearly specify what is correct and incorrect, the Penalty Guide is by necessity fuzzier, relying on more judgment, interpretation, and application specific to the situation at hand. Because of this, many experienced judges consider Penalty Guideline understanding and application to be where the best judges differentiate themselves.

Despite the fact that not every possible situation can be accounted for, one of the explicit goals of the Penalty Guide is to provide as much guidance as possible and to cover as many situations as possible, to enable judges to apply consistent rulings across the DCI. In this regard, the recent updates to the Penalty Guide have made it much easier to do a great job of being fair to the players while maintaining tournament integrity, simply by reading, understanding, and applying the guidelines as written.

As with the Comprehensive Rules, though, there are different levels of understanding that can be helpful. With the CR, knowing how to figure out how card interactions work by deriving them from the basic principles is more effective than just memorizing the answer to some common interactions. Similarly, with the PG, knowing some of the guiding philosophies behind them can help you to better handle those cases where there isn't necessarily straightforward guidance.

Some of the basic philosophies underpinning the PG are written in the document itself. Additionally, Sheldon Menery and Toby Elliott have written an excellent piece on some of the basic principles, and both of these are well worth reading. Here are some additional philosophies that will help you to understand the rationale behind why things work the way they do.

Strategy
"I marked Goldmeadow Dodger by accident on the decklist, but I obviously meant Goldmeadow Harrier."

From time to time, players will argue to judges that a penalty or remedy doesn't make sense because their intent was obvious, due to one decision or play being "obviously" very good and the other being very bad. An example of this is with an error in registering a decklist, where a player will mark that they're playing one card when they wanted to play one right next to it.

Most judges are adept enough at the game and play enough to see when this is the case and to even know whether or not the player's argument makes sense, and yet nowhere in the PG is there any mention of handling things by taking this strategic knowledge into account. Regardless of what might or might not be common knowledge or understanding amongst players of the game, judges aren't expected to meet any bar of strategic knowledge or skill. Their job is to understand the game rules and tournament policies and how to apply them, not to actually be able to play well, and the guidelines are written accordingly.

Repairing Game State
"It's really easy, all you have to do is put that back into play and give him his two life back and everything should be fine; how does it make any sense to leave that creature in the graveyard?"

[This following section has been updated: see the last paragraph -Seamus]

One of the changes in the recent PG update was the idea that we don't try and repair game rule violations that take place unless they're caught immediately. Instead, penalties are issued and the game continues in the state that it's in.

In some cases, where the mistake happened many turns ago and things have changed drastically, this makes obvious sense. Even if it happened recently, if it was something board-sweeping or otherwise dramatic, it's also clear that trying to undo the mistake is too difficult to undertake. But there are many cases that seem to be pretty easy to fix. A creature that shouldn't have been in play that could easily be put back into hand, or a creature that should have dealt more combat damage than the players realized. These seem to be pretty easy to fix, so why don't we make the attempt?

The key principle here is this: Judges are not expected to know how to fix game states. The range of possible game state issues is such that things that might be obvious to some judges might not be obvious to other judges. Additionally, it can be very unclear what decisions have been made because of the error or what other things might have happened differently, and to make a judgment as to whether those factors are relevant or not requires strategic knowledge, which judge aren't required to have. It's impossible to codify what falls under "obvious enough" and what doesn't, so the only way to ensure consistent rulings is to uniformly not attempt to do game state repairs unless errors are caught immediately.

Update: As some astute judges and forum members have pointed out, there was a recent change to the Penalty Guide (section 125) that allows a little more leeway for the Head Judge to use their judgment in repairing the game state in the case of a Game Rule Violation. Rather than requiring fixes only to issues caught "immediately", it allows for fixes to situations caught in a reasonable amount of time. This only applies, as it says, if there is minimal disruption and the changes are simple—the intent here is to allow for fixes that are clear enough to be consistently applied while allowing for the fact that some errors are not the type that can be caught immediately. Still, judges are not required to know how to fix game states of any real level of complexity and the idea remains the same. This is part of the continued tuning to try and improve the service that judges can provide by using their skills and judgment while still maintaining consistency throughout the program, and further changes of this sort will be possible in the future. My apologies for missing this—a great example of why it's important to stay up to date with policies.

Infractions vs. Penalties
"That was a pretty minor mistake, you should get a Warning for that, so we'll call that a Procedural Error—Major."

One of the most immediately noticeable changes in the recent Penalty Guideline updates was the removal of the Procedural Error category of penalties. This was disconcerting to a lot of judges, who were used to using these as catch-all errors when they were trying to figure out how to issue a penalty appropriate to the magnitude of the infraction that was committed. Without the option to issue a Procedural Error, how can you ensure that somebody gets a Warning when they do something minor, but that doesn't fit in one of the new buckets that results in a Warning?

This change and this dilemma were introduced intentionally, because of another core principle: Judges should be determining what infraction occurred and assigning penalties accordingly, not assigning a penalty and then searching for an appropriate infraction. This is derived from the primary goal of ensuring consistent rulings across all tournaments—while people's judgment as to the severity of an issue might differ if they try to guess at a specific penalty level, it's much simpler for their assessments of what infraction occurred to agree, which will then result in more consistent rulings.

Additionally, the penalties specified for each type of infraction have undergone a lot of thought about what that infraction might do to game and tournament integrity, as well as how exploitable that infraction might be, things that can be difficult to derive on the spot, so those guidelines can do a better job of ensuring an appropriate penalty level.

Deviations
"Listen, my son is only twelve years old and this is his first PTQ, how can you be making him forfeit a game just because he didn't know how he was supposed to fill out that form?"

Even though the Penalty Guide does a good job of assigning appropriate levels of penalties for various infractions, it does have to try to distill all possible situations into a relatively small set of infractions, which means that they won't always be perfect for every possible circumstance that comes along. Luckily, there's a clause to deal with this—in the case of "significant and exceptional circumstances", the head judge has the discretion to deviate from the standard penalty.

The latter half of this statement, that only the head judge can deviate and floor judges must not (passing any possible cases of deviation to the head judge again), is now relatively well understood. The first half, however, is not. At first blush, this seems pretty simple, but exceptional is actually a much higher bar than many players and judges understand, and deviations should be substantially rare. While this may feel odd, since your circumstances might be a little unusual, every deviation represents the opportunity for an inconsistency in judging across tournaments, and with the overall goal of consistency, this should be minimized only to the truly exceptional cases that are not likely to reoccur.

The Penalty Guidelines themselves mention the case where this is most frequently violated –the premise of "education", where a player is young or inexperienced and didn't know how something should be handled. This is not a situation for a deviation. In fact, anything that any judge sees with any level of frequency probably doesn't fall under the realm of "significant and exceptional." Judge Manager Andy Heckt has mentioned in the past that at local tournaments, the average judge should only find the need to deviate approximately once in every twenty tournaments.

A good rule of thumb is this—if you can't explain the circumstance to a random other judge and surprise them with the details, then a deviation is probably not warranted.

Evolving State
"This is the critical turn, and the board is really complicated, how can you expect me not to take the time to think?"

Judging Slow Play infractions is difficult in itself, but it's made even more complex by the fact that players are more prone to argue about this than any other infraction. Most commonly, the argument will come up that the board is really complicated, with a large creature stall and a lot of interacting effects. This argument feels sound, but in practice doesn't make sense, because it ignores the principle of evolving game state.

"Evolving game state" refers to the fact that the current game state didn't (usually) spring out of nowhere, but instead was just a small development over the game state that existed last turn. Because the players have been following the game state from turn to turn, the level of complexity that exists now is (generally) not that different from last turn, which is similarly not very different from the turn before that.

Unless a massive game state changing effect has just resolved (for example, Living Death), the current level of complexity of the board isn't really a relevant factor to whether or not Slow Play is occurring, and players need to be thinking through and playing their turns in a similar amount of time. A useful metric here—if enough time has gone by for someone experienced in the format being played to have digested the board state from scratch, then that's more than enough time for the players to have figured out what to do given their exposure to the evolving game state.

Wrapping Up
Ultimately, the Penalty Guidelines share a goal with all of the DCI Judge program—to ensure consistent and fair judging across tournaments, so that players can know what to expect and to be able to step into tournaments anywhere in the world knowing that they'll be treated the same way they would at home. Understanding this, and knowing the corollaries that come from this, can help both to interpret and apply the guidelines, and to help explain to players why things work the way that they do and to help them better understand tournament play.

Next month: Judging in your regular events with the same judges you usually judge with can have a very different feel from judging an event with a few new or unfamiliar faces, or even judging in a new area entirely. The differences between these scenarios can be instructive, and we'll talk about how you can make your judging stronger by knowing these differences and working them to your advantage.

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Nicholas J. Fang
DCI Certified Level 3 Judge—Redmond, WA
mtgjudge@live.com
Agbaar and Ag|Work on EFnet's #mtgjudge