Die problematische Aurelia

| bimmerbot

Anton is attacking Natalie during their local GPT. Natalie casts a German Azorius Charm targeting Anton’s attacking Aurelia, the Warleader. Anton isn’t quite sure what the card does, so he asks, “Bounce it?” Natalie is distracted by combat math and simply replies, “Yep”. Anton puts the card in his hand, then they resolve combat damage. Anton attacks Natalie again, and before damage she casts Sphinx’s Revelation for 5 in order to survive the attack. In his postcombat main phase, Anton sees that Natalie has mana available and says to himself “Hmm, should I risk you countering Aurelia or go for something else?”. Natalie says “You have another one?” When Anton says no they realize they have a problem, and call a judge. You investigate and feel confident that no cheating has occurred. What is your ruling?

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

View Answer
What we have here is a Game Rule Violation. A spell controlled by Natalie was resolved incorrectly by Anton, so both players will receive warnings for GRV. Due to the players going through a combat phase and Natalie drawing 5 off of Sphinx’s Revelation, too many decisions and exchanges of information have happened for the GRV to be rewound. Luckily, we have a partial fix available to us:
If an object changing zones is put into the wrong zone, the identity of the object was known to all players, and it is within a turn of the error, put the object in the correct zone.
Since the Aurelia, The Warleader went to Anton’s hand from the battlefield instead of to the deck, and both players know that the card in question is Aurelia, we will apply this fix and put the Aurelia on top of Anton’s deck.

A few important things to note:
1) It’s not Drawing Extra Cards, because Anton received confirmation of his action before moving the card to his hand.
2) It’s not a Communication Policy Violation. The communication policy is in place to prevent against giving false information to your opponents. Saying the word “yep” in response to an inquiry based on terms that aren’t defined in the game of magic does not constitute a violation of that policy. If Natalie had said “yes, it goes to your hand” or if Anton’s question had been “Does that put it into my hand?”, then it would be a different story. But ‘bounce’ can have different meanings to different people, and people for whom English isn’t their primary language may not understand the word’s colloquial English meaning.