Nathan has just lost game 1 in the 4th round in a PTQ. While sideboarding for game 2, he yells, “Judge!” You walk over and ask, “How may I help?” Nathan explains, “It looks like I played a 54-card deck in game 1.” You ask for more details and he elaborates, “I had sideboarded for round 3. After the match, I took my sideboard cards out of my deck but forgot to put the original cards back in before playing game 1 of this round.”

What do you do? How do you determine if this is a USC-Cheating situation? If it’s not Cheating, what penalty, if any, do you apply? Would your answer be any different had he won game 1 instead of losing it?

Judges, feel free to discuss this scenario here!

[expand title=”View Answer”]Thanks to everyone that participated in this discussion. A lot of great points were brought up about this scenario.

There is no penalty to apply here, unless our investigation questions lead us to believe that cheating was involved. We need to ask questions to find out when Nathan discovered that the deck was 6 cards short, such as: “When did you notice the deck didn’t contain 60 cards?” “Was it during the game?” “Did you purposely ‘forget’ to add the cards back in?” The fact that he called over the judge and the fact that the deck was short, as opposed to containing sideboard cards, probably means that this was not USC-Cheating. Another important question is to ask Nathan’s opponent if he noticed that the deck presented contained less than 60 cards.

We do not assign a Game Loss for TE-D/DL. To put it simply, there is no infraction at the time the judge is called over. The game has ended. We won’t give a game loss for something unverifiable. Had either player noticed this during the game, Nathan would have gotten a game loss for that game. We don’t apply this to the next game he’d play like we do with a Decklist error. Decklist errors will always result in the Game Loss penalty being assigned, either to the current game or to the next game if we are between rounds. A Deck error only applies during an active game. We have no way of verifying that the game was played with an illegal deck. This is why you should never swoop for a deck check before the players have presented. If they haven’t presented, they haven’t yet committed an infraction, and we aren’t serving the integrity of the tournament by premature swooping.

We instruct the players to continue onto game 2 and advise them to make sure they have legal decks when they present for game 2. Remind the players that counting their sideboards and presenting them before every game would prevent this situation. Presenting the sideboard (face down) is required by the MTR (3.15)

This answer is the same, regardless of the result of Game 1.[/expand]