Decklist’s ‘mini-skirt’ rule

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You are the only judge for your Modern event. While verifying the legality of the players’ deck lists, you come across Andy’s deck list that has 61 Mainboard cards and 15 Sideboard cards. On his list, you find these card names written, among other cards:

1 City of
3 Nissa
1 Chandra
1 Huntmaster of the Fells

After you finish verifying all the deck lists, it is 5 minutes into the new round. You decide to do a mid-round deck check on the player with the problem deck list. You see Andy win game 1, and decide to wait for them to finish sideboarding and present their decks for the 2nd game. Then you pick up the decks and find the following in Andy’s box:

60 cards in the presented deck, including:
1 City of Brass 3 Nissa Revane 1 Chandra, Pyromaster 1 Checklist card marked “Huntmaster of the Fells”

Remainder of the cards, separated from the presented deck:
16 cards in the sideboard, and
1 Unsleeved Diaochan, Artful Beauty 1 Transparent sleeved Huntmaster of the Fells

All cards are accounted for. What do you do at this point?

Judges, feel free to discuss this scenario on Judge Apps!

View Answer
We have a lot going on this scenario, so let’s look at each potential problem individually:

1) 1 City of : City of Brass is the only card legal in Modern for which “City of” is a truncation. From IPG 3.9, “A card listed on a decklist is not identified by its full name, and could be interpreted as more than one card.” So, everything is good here because we can interpret the partial as only a single card.

2) 3 Nissa : Taking the next sentence from the IPG, “Truncated names of storyline characters (legendary permanents and Planeswalkers) are acceptable as long as they are the only representation of that character in the format and should be treated as referring to that card, even if other cards begin with the same name.” As the only Nissa, everything is still fine.

3) 1 Chandra : We have a whole mess of Chandras in Modern. We don’t meet “the only representation” provision like we do with Nissa. So, we have our first real problem.

4) 1 Huntmaster of the Fells : When dealing with double faced cards, we want to check out MTR 3.5. “If a player uses a checklist card to represent a double-faced card in his or her deck, then all of the double-faced cards in the deck must be represented by checklist cards, and double-faced cards in a hidden zone are considered to not exist for purposes of determining deck legality.” So everything is fine here. The checklist card is the only that counts.

5) 1 Diaochan, Artful Beauty : Jumping back to IPG 3.9, we can see that “if there are extra cards stored with the sideboard that could conceivably be played in the player’s deck, they will be considered a part of the sideboard.” It’s inconceivable that Diaochan could be played in Modern, so this is not a problem.

6) 16 cards in the Sideboard : From the Comp Rules, “100.4a In constructed play, a sideboard may contain no more than fifteen cards.” This, again, is a problem.

So, we have 1 Chandra and 16 Sideboard cards. As a result, we award a single Game Loss to Andy for a Deck/Decklist Problem. We then update the list to reflect the full name of Chandra, Pyromaster. In addition, we remind Andy that he must make sideboard choices that leave at most 15 cards in his sideboard prior to game 3. There is no need to randomly put one card into the main deck, as Andy will have the opportunity to sideboard prior to game three.

Shoutouts to Chris Kuzmin for identifying the infraction and penalty right off the bat, Eric Pare for very a thorough answer, Michael Sell for quoting “one or more,” and Chris Nowak for correctly clarifying that we do not want to alter Andy’s decklist, just have him correct his currently illegal deck configuration.