This infraction is pretty easy to commit. Any time that a library is touched, it is possible that a card will be dropped, or flipped over; or when drawing a card, two cards may get stuck or picked up together. Additionally mistakes aren’t limited to cards seen from the deck. Sideboard cards and facedown cards can count as well. 

Generally, when we are talking about Looking at Extra Cards (L@EC), we are talking about a player seeing the face of some card in his or her own deck. However, you might also see some cards in your opponent’s deck while shuffling it.

Be careful not to confuse this infraction with the Hidden Card Error infraction. In particular, the Hidden Card Error infraction also covers situations where you are looking at some number of cards on the top of your library and you look at too many of them. So, in this specific case, you are looking at extra cards, but you aren’t Looking At Extra Cards.  Does your brain hurt? Mine does.

As mentioned in the section above, HCE touches similar space to the Looking at Extra Cards infraction.  When you are manipulating a set of cards from the top of the library, and you manipulate too many of them, that’s considered HCE. For the purpose of HCE, once the drawn cards have significantly left the library as part of a draw, they can no longer be considered Looking at Extra Cards.

From the explanation released with a recent change to this infraction, it is stated that “the key [to determining the LEC/HCE border] is to look at whether the opponent intended (mistakenly or not) to pick up that many cards, or if they were trying to pick up the correct number and failed to do so thanks to bad dexterity (as opposed to bad counting!)”

Sets are defined in section 1.5, so head there if you need a refresher.  Basically, once the card you are just looking at is added to a set of cards, you aren’t looking at it anymore, and the infraction is no longer L@EC but rather HCE.  But if you are supposed to Scry 1, and you instead pick up two cards, you didn’t add that second card to the Scry set until you actually start to Scry. Get it? It’s ok if this is a little confusing because this distinction is probably the least clear of anything in this entire guide.  Basically, there is a point when picking up those two cards where we transition from “oops, I grabbed a second card” to “I have a second card that I can perform actions on”. Its that point that marks the line between L@EC and HCE in this case.

Looking at Extra Cards also covers when you knock over a card, drop a card while shuffling an opponent’s deck, start to draw a card when you shouldn’t, and milling or dredging too many cards. Milling and Dredging are covered by Looking at Extra Cards because the cards are being placed into a public zone we can all see.  However, this only applies if we catch the error right away. If we start to take other actions, we have moved past the point where we can claim we accidentally saw an extra card, and we have instead accepted that card is supposed to be in the graveyard.

Sometimes players put cards on the table face down before drawing them, for the purpose of counting the cards or for thinking before putting the cards into the hand. This is not forbidden and judges should not penalize it. In this situation the difference is that the player does it intentionally and takes care about not seeing any cards improperly.  This statement also applies to the HCE infraction.

Dropping a card while shuffling your own library is not Looking at Extra Cards. Just put the card back and continue to randomize your deck.

Observing the face of a card your opponent dropped or flipped is also not Looking at Extra Cards. There are two reasons for this: 1) If a player could drop a card and get their opponent a Warning, they are going to messy-shuffle their way into a top 8. 2) MTR 3.12 allows players to reveal hidden information to their opponent that they are entitled to know.

It’s important to note that this infraction doesn’t just apply to cards in a library (or sideboard).  If you accidentally look at cards exiled by a Bomat Courier, that’s also Looking at Extra Cards.

We don’t penalize a player for each card seen if all the cards are seen during the same game action or sequence of game actions.

In Example B, please consider ‘pulls’ up, as ‘lifts up, but not so much that it could reasonably be considered separate from the library’.  Other examples could be: A player flips over an extra card while resolving a Cascade ability. A player flips over extra cards when milling their deck, and this is noticed immediately.

Players touch their decks a lot. They touch to shuffle, they touch to draw, they touch to search. And every time a deck is touched, there is the possibility that you are going to see something you shouldn’t. Since it is easy to do, easy to notice, and easy to fix, a Warning is the appropriate penalty.

We all know that drawing is different from looking but sometimes the line is not easy to see. The line here is when the card we are looking at is added to another set of cards, either the hand, or seven other cards from Dig Through Time.  Keep in mind that for this infraction, we do allow you to use your judgement a bit when it comes to “I meant to pick up one card and instead I picked up two.” That’s not “adding to a set” just yet.

This point involves judge ability to understand if a player is lying. Some players know that the additional fix for Looking at Extra Cards is a shuffle, so they might “accidentally” peek at a card in order to try to get a shuffle. This is cheating, and helps to emphasize the point that we need to determine if there are any known cards before we apply the additional fix. When you arrive at the table ask both players some questions to get a sense of what is really happening.

Shuffling a deck requires some time, and players know this. As judges we must prevent players taking advantage of the time limit and understand when a player is trying to do that. This is also considered cheating, but will be very hard to discover. If it is close to the end of the round, stick around and watch if you suspect this may be the case.

This means that the player doesn’t have to waste time by shuffling as they would for the pregame procedure. A few mash shuffles or 3-5 riffle shuffles should be sufficient. The purpose is to “lose” the seen cards in the deck.

See IPG 1.3 on the details on how to randomize a deck. A summary is: figure out what cards are legally know from things like scry or cascade, and, leaving those cards where they are supposed to be, shuffle any cards left over. If the cards accidentally seen were previously known (like from Brainstorm) you don’t have to do this. If the cards accidentally seen don’t belong in the library (a player accidentally looks at an opponent’s sideboard, or a player accidentally looks at a stack of cards exiled by their own Bomat Courier), then there is no fix.