Welcome back to our crash course(r) on Courser of Kruphix! Since today is Tuesday, we’ll be covering some IPG and MTR things about Courser of Kruphix, rather than just your normal Comprehensive Rules stuff. Mainly, we’ll be talking about the more common mistakes people make with Courser, and what the rules say has to happen when those mistakes are made.
First, we’ll talk about forgetting to reveal your new card. Most commonly this happens after a shuffle effect, where you get your deck back from your opponent and just forget to flip the new top card over. If it’s caught within a few moments, or within that turn, there’s no real problem. However, let’s say you crack a fetch at the end of your opponent’s turn, and forget to reveal before your turn. What we’ll do there is reveal the new top card, and issue you a Warning, for Game Play Error- Game Rule Violation. Your opponent will also receive a warning for Failure to Maintain Gamestate, since they didn’t notice the problem either! It gets a little hinky if you draw before you reveal, there’s no way for us to ‘fix’ that. It’s not as big a deal as it is with Morph or the like, since you’re not revealing the cards to make sure something is done legally, so it’s still just a Warning. A word of advice, though- those warnings pile up! After two Game Play Error infractions (except Failure to Maintain- that should never, ever be upgraded) during an event, they’ll stop being Warnings and start being Game Losses. So play carefully!
The other common error with Courser is the opposite- revealing a card when you don’t need to! The most common way you’ll see this happening is that Courser will end up leaving the battlefield, whether it’s destroyed or exiled or just bounced back to the hand, and the Courser’s controller will forget to turn their library’s top card face down. Again, we can give a little leeway if you notice it later in that same turn and no new information has been gained, but if you reveal a NEW top card, we’ve got to penalize that. The infraction is also a Game Play Error, but this specific one is called Looking at Extra Cards. Like a GRV, we give a Warning to the player who goofed, and give Failure to Maintain to the opponent. UNLIKE GRV, we have a ‘fix’ for this- we shuffle the deck! More specifically, we shuffle the random portion. If any cards have their positions known (for example, because of a previous Scry), we set those cards aside first so they can be placed in their ‘proper’ position once the rest of the deck is randomized. Then we randomize the part that ought to be random, put the ‘known’ cards back, and remind the players to be more careful!
Courser is a great card, but know how to use it or you might end up costing yourself some games. Knowledge is Power!
Today’s Rules Tip written by Trevor Nunez