[This article is somewhat out of date. For a more current take on these situations, please see this updated article - Seamus]

Feature Friday: How to Resolve Rulings on Player Mistakes: Looking at Remedies

This is mostly an article geared toward judges, but players may find it interesting also. Many judge calls deal with one or both players making some sort of mistake — we'll assume the judge does not believe there is any intent and it's an honest mistake — and one of the players calls the judge to see what the situation is. Let's look at an example from the Penalty Guidelines for an Illegal Main Decklist:

Here, the penalty is described at the end, it's a game loss. But what do you do about the illegal decklist? That's the remedy, and is described first. Let's define what we mean here explicitly:

Iinfraction: An infraction is an action taken that is in violation of the rules (including the rules of Magic as well as tournament rules). These are listed in the penalty guidelines, along with the suggested penalty for that infraction at each Rules Enforcement Level.

Penalty: A penalty is a punishment a player receives for violating the rules. Most often, the purpose of a penalty is to discourage repeat behavior, help compensate for the chance that the player might be cheating and the judge did not catch it, and, in some cases, to deal with situations where no remedy is available (see below).

(Note: In Magic there are only five penalties: Caution, Warning, Game Loss, Match Loss, and Disqualification.)

Remedy: A remedy is a step or series of steps taken by a judge to attempt to restore as much as possible the game to what would have happened had the infraction not occurred.

Why is this distinction, you ask, important enough to write an entire judging article about? Well, while I am one of the more recent Level 3 judges (I was tested at the recent Pro Tour Columbus), I have been involved with training newer judges before this time. One of the most common mistakes when getting a tough call is jumping right to the penalty, but having no idea what the remedy was.

Example #1 (Taken from a judge call at Grand Prix — Seattle)

Situation: Player A has Isochron Scepter with Orim's Chant on it. Player A taps three lands, then Isochron Scepter, and says "Activate Scepter, targeting you with Orim's Chant." Player B says "No, wait, I wanted to respond to your Isochron Scepter activation. I play Orim's Chant, targeting you." Player A decides to call a judge to resolve this.

Infraction: Procedural Error.

Penalty: No penalty is really needed here, aside from a Caution to Player A to perhaps remind him to give his opponent a chance to respond. Usually, though, this is an acceptable shortcut and I probably wouldn't. Especially since it's so easy to fix! How to fix, do we ask? That's what we look at for the.....

Remedy: While the ability of the Scepter is on the stack, Player B played Orim's Chant. After it resolves, Player A cannot legally play the Chant. Therefore, we must back the game up and let Player B play his Orim's Chant. Of course, this means Player A has not played the Chant yet either, so we should back up the entire announcement of that, including untapping a blue mana source. One could argue that the mana ability is seperate from the actual announcement and should not be reversed, but the intent is clear here, and in general I do not favor forcing technical precision on players when intent is clear.

Hopefully this is clear example of what I mean by the differences between these two. Now while I have been talking this whole time about the penalty first and the remedy second, I think that's actually the wrong way of looking at it. I'm going to take another example, using each approach, and see what happens.

Example 2 (A common ruling from a previous season)

Situation: Player A begins his turn by untapping, and then starts to draw his card for the turn, but then notices Braids, Cabal Minion is in play, to which he forgot to sacrifice a permanent. The card isn't in the physical hand yet, but Player A has already seen what it is. Player B calls the judge.

Infraction: Looking at Extra Cards. Some might call this Drawing Extra Cards, but as long as which card involved is clear to both players, I consider it to be of the looking variety.

This seems to be a case of Looking at Extra Cards. That's a Warning. Was there an extreme advantage here? Probably not, so warning is fine.

What's wrong with this? Hopefully you'll see the difference....

At this point, once you've established the facts (or at least each player's version of them), a good idea is to review the remedies you feel are available to you. Here, I've listed them in the order that they might occur mentally (or, at least, do to me; your mileage may vary). Also, as I think of it, I identify what I like and dislike

Option #1:

This is a case of Looking at Extra Cards. Reveal the card to both players, put it back on top of the library, have Player A resolve the Braids ability, and then draw the card.

Advantage: Basically the legal game state

Disadvantage: Possibly allowing Player A to benefit from his mistake

Option #2:

That disadvantage in #1 isn't really acceptable; players shouldn't benefit from their own errors. And since there is no way to remove the knowledge of the card from the player's head, we'll just have to end the game with Player A losing.

Advantage: The player making the mistake will not benefit from it

Disadvantage: A game loss is harsh for something that is pretty clearly an accident

Option #3:

Put the card back, and shuffle the library. Then have the player resolve Braids and draw a card (which may be the same one, or may not).

Advantage: Combines the advantages of both of the above, without the disadvantages

Disadvantage: This involves shuffling the deck, which is bad to do without good cause. Also, it's not being possible to do this if there was any library manipulation effects (say the player had scryed putting both cards on the bottom last turn).

See the difference? The Penalty Guidelines have some tips on remedies for very common situations, but a large portion of the situations will encounter as a judge are not. Which option is chosen isn't that relevant to this discussion. The point is that it quickly allowed us to review the available options, decide how to fix it, and the penalty should naturally flow from this. Once you've assigned a penalty, newer judges often feel like you are "done," and then need to ask for help to determine a remedy. I'm not discouraging approaching a fellow judge with help on dealing with a tough scenario (ALL judges do this, especially at the Pro Tour level, regardless of their level), but this shouldn't be done at the expensive of getting some impressions from it yourself.

The Penalty Guidelines, as great of a document as it is, is not and can never be comprehensive. I still go to tournaments where people come with new issues all the time. In fact...

Example #3

Even just at the recent Betrayers of Kamigawa prerelease, two players watched as everyone else in their flight built and registered decks (unknown to the flight judge that they were in the flight), and decided not to inform the staff until Round 1 started that they had no decks or cards. What do you do here? No obvious infraction or penalty obviously applies to this situation, other than perhaps "tardiness", since they aren't coming prepared to play.

Instead of going with that, I thought a bit and tried a more remedy-based approach that I felt was in the spirit of the prerelease: I changed the pairings so their scheduled Round 1 opponents were playing each other, and then had these two changed to play each other. I then entered their result as an Intentional Draw and had them spend Round 1 building decks. They then were able to play Round 2 and later rounds out, and had a blast doing so.

Final Thoughts

In conclusion, penalty-based thinking leads to judges being quick to penalize, coming across as overly harsh, and tend to look more like machines blindly applying rules rather than judges making intelligent decisions about the game state. Also, focusing on penalties too much is a common mistake of newer judges, when learning how to judge is far more important.

What to do you are by yourself:

How can I (as the judge) restore this situation? Can I at all? If so, how?

What infraction did this player commit?

What is the penalty for the infraction suggested by the Penalty Guidelines?

Is there something about this situation that suggests that the penalty should be upgraded or downgraded? (Hints: The answer to this question is usually "no." Also, if you answered the first question right, the answer should be obvious).

I'd appreciate some feedback on this article in the forums or by e-mail. If it seems positive, I'll try to follow up on this more. Thanks!

Coming Up!

Just to keep myself focused, I want to announce what I'm going to be doing with the other two weeks Sheldon has entrusted me with his column:

March 18: Pro Tour Qualifiers versus Pro Tours : The different skills of judges that are required at each (Sheldon suggested this as a topic, and it seemed like an interesting one to me. I almost wrote it this week, but I thought it might be better to wait until after I got back from Atlanta to do so).

March 25: Core Rules Concepts. I've had actually several requests from various persons with an article on this sort of topic, so I feel somewhat obligated to write it. I'll explain why rote memorization of the rulebook isn't a good way to learn the rules, as well as explain some rule concepts (as opposed to mechanics), that judges often have trouble learning.

Stay tuned to Ask the Judge, and don't forget to follow the coverage of Pro Tour — Atlanta this weekend!

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Lee Sharpe, lee DOT sharpe AT gmail DOT com

DCI Level 3 Judge