Ah, summer. Time for vacation, enjoying the fine weather, and—for pretty much your entire Ask the Judge team here—time for mad, frantic scurrying to prepare for all of the big, competitive events coming up. Between Regionals, Pro Tour San Diego, US Nationals, and Finnish Nationals, this group has a lot on its plate.

One of the balls in the air this month—one of many—was this week's Feature Friday column. Johanna will be back next week, I double up to fill in the extra June Friday, and Jason Lemahieu will make another appearance for the final Friday of the month. It all adds up.

Personally, these busy times are the best for me, when it comes to writing FF columns. There are months where it just sneaks up on you. What? I have to say something about Magic? I guess the prerelease was only two months ago...

It's unlikely that I'll be having those feelings any time soon. I'm cautiously optimistic that the stars may align such that when we close the books on 2007, I'll have worked a major event (Prerelease, Regionals, or pro event) every month but February.

For the moment, though, I'm not thinking about US Nats, or possible trips to San Francisco, Valencia, Daytona Beach, or New York City. I'm taking things event-by-event, which means closing the books on Regionals and preparing for this month's Pro Tour San Diego.

Regionals is always a fun event. This year it was so much fun, that we threw a parade. The Rose Festival parade is probably the biggest public event in Oregon. It's memorialized in an Elliott Smith song ("Rose Parade"). It takes about three hours to get past any given point on the parade route. And it was starting in the parking lot of the event facility that we use for major Magic events in Oregon. At the same time as the tournament.

Given that there was basically no parking for about a mile in any direction, and the closest major throughfare was closed off (as it was the parade route), we decided to delay starting the tournament for half an hour. We crossed our fingers and hoped that turnout wouldn't suffer too much.

Surprisingly, neither the parade, nor the rain, nor the absence of 2006 Regionals floor judge Matt Tabak served to dampen the spirits or the turnout. We beat last year's attendance by 4-5 players, which meant that, once again, we were a hair over the threshold for an 8-round event. Le sigh.

We were adequately but modestly staffed, with three floor judges plus myself. In all likelihood, any two of the four judges working could have run the event, but it's always nice to have enough staff to do deck checks every round without compromising response time when players need attention. For the most part, the day flew by, but there were a couple of incidents that I want to share that highlight current DCI policy.

Matt—solid and competitive, yet generally better informed on rules and policy than most players—called for a judge early in the second or third round. Two of my floor judges were involved in a deck check, and the remaining judge was at the other end of the room, so I took his call and collected the following information:

His opponent (a player unfamiliar to me) had announced a Life from the Loam. "Life from the Loam," he said, put the card on the table, and waited for Matt's response.

Matt wondered if his opponent had any targets for the spell, but didn't want to inadvertantly cause a change of plans, so he asked a question that was not terribly specific: "Anything else you want to tell me about that?"

"No..." said his opponent, a little confused.

"Ready for it to resolve, then?"

"Sure," said the opponent, and went to grab the couple lands that were in the 'yard.

Enter hero.

The main question here hinges on (I hesitate to use this word in public, for reasons I will shortly explain) intent. This is probably the most overused and misunderstood term in Magic, having dethroned "in response", which in turn, I suspect, deposed "the stack". Here, however, it's directly and unequivocably applicable.

Justus Ronnau, in his 2004 article Ruling by Intent, laid out two conditions for allowing a player to take an action that they wanted to take, even if they failed to do so in a technically precise manner:

• The player's intent to take the action at the time when they legally could must be clear.
• The player must not gain an advantage as a result of their sloppiness.

In this case, both prongs are easily met. This situation is strikingly similar to Justus's Harrow example. It's a little different, in that the opponent must have an opportunity to respond to the choice made, but that's not hard to ensure. Was the player's intent clear? Yes, every action they took reflects a desire to return lands to their hand. Did they gain an advantage? No. If we were to allow them to complete their illegal version of how Life from the Loam is played (with lands chosen on resolution), perhaps. But by backing the game up slightly and asking the player to complete the announcement of the spell, harmony and balance is restored to the universe. There is no productive information to be discovered by watching an opponent's reaction to an illegally-cast, targetless Loam. Information is the chief currency of technical sloppiness.

There was some confusion, after I announced that we would be putting Life from the Loam back on the stack, about why I would do such a thing. Matt's concern was that I was handling the situation based on the event being a lower-REL event, which was not the case. Further, I characterized the announcement as "illegal", as the player had omitted the declaration of targets step entirely, and Matt saw the declaration as being legal, given that no targets is a valid option for the card. However, I was eventually able to persuade him that, at the least, he was unlikely to change the outcome for the game in progress.

The notion of information-gain is at the heart of many of the rulings that I make or that players ask me about. It's often a fine point, but it creates a clear theoretical line, even if it can be muddy at times to determine precisely. A player at Regionals asked me when I, as a judge, would allow a player to take back a land drop they'd just made. Here, I attempt to discern whether the player dropping the land into play has had an opportunity to gain information from their opponent that might influence their decision to want to change their play. Actual information gain is less important than potential information gain. "The player must not gain an advantage as a result of their sloppiness" is an excellent statement of that philosophy, though it does obscure what the "advantage" generally is.

Later in the afternoon, in perhaps the fifth or sixth round, a low-point table called me over. They were playing game two, happened to have identical white sleeves, and discovered that a Faith's Fetters played in the first game had stayed on the wrong side of the table after the game concluded. Hence, both players were playing with illegal decks. The penalty for this is clear: Game Loss for each. This is a bit awkward, as it means, under current DCI policy, that the match is now over. Some judges might be tempted to call the penalty offsetting, but there is no policy basis for such a thing. The most likely way that this might change, down the road, would be to apply the game loss for the player who won game one (and is winning the match right now) to their next match, since it is otherwise essentially downgraded to a warning, being recorded for DCI posterity but without further impact on their tournament.

There's policy on how to handle this situation if it arises in game three, as well, but I'm not going to share it with you just yet. Feel free to speculate in the forums as to how this situation should be handled.

The final situation of the tournament was, quite literally, the final situation of the tournament. The last of our four final matches was getting ready to start game three. There were a good number of spectators, and the players were making a little bit of a production of their preparations. Just as each was about to present his deck, one of the players stopped suddenly, produced his sideboard, and elaborately counted it out, to ensure that he had sideboarded one-for-one. His opponent did the same. Confidently, each presented their deck. For the first time in the match, they pile-counted each other's decks. And one deck came up a card short.

The play area was thoroughly searched, to no avail. Eventually, the table judge pulled the deck aside and we started sorting it, decklist at hand, with the intention of figuring out what the missing card was. We'd deck checked each competitor before the Top 8 started, and I'd checked this particular deck. I was confident that the match had started with a legal deck. Some concern was expressed that the opponent had waited until game three to count the cards. Perhaps he knew that the deck was short, before he began?

I began to consider how I'd investigate for that possibility, when it was announced that the missing card had been discovered, under its owner's backpack on the floor. I convinced myself that it was highly improbable that the opponent had managed to navigate it there, and awarded the player a game loss for presenting an illegal deck, which ended the tournament.

In times past, matches with table judges were just about penalty-free zones. Every effort was made to hold the judge responsible to ensure that mistakes did not happen. But they do happen, and the message that we send, that poor or sloppy play is more acceptable in a Pro Tour Top 8 than round 1 of a PTQ, is a poor one. The current policy is that players are responsible for the mistakes they make, and a table judge is a convenience, to help get mistakes resolved as quickly as possible. It may seem harsh, but it suits our goal of making each sanctioned match at a given Rules Enforcement Level as similar to every other match at that REL as possible. Is it unfortunate that the match, and indeed the tournament, had to end that way? Yes. But not because of the way we handled it.

In two weeks I'll be back on the site of my very first Pro Tour (PT San Diego '04). Between now and then, I'll be working overtime to help a huge staff of expert judges produce a full slate of judge seminars. Chris Richter, Rafael Dei Svaldi, and I have been charged with managing the development of nine seminars or so. I'm pretty excited. Seminars have long been one of the most engaging parts of a Pro Tour for an up-and-coming judge, and we're going to have a veritable mini-con. Look for more on that from me in this column in three weeks or so; I'm sure I'll have a lot to say on the subject.

Until then, keep shufflin'.