Alfred casts Beacon of Unrest targeting his own Obzedat, Ghost Council, putting the creature onto the battlefield and the Beacon of Unrest in his graveyard. After noting the life total change, he proceeds to his end step and exiles the Obzedat, Ghost Council.
Several turns later, Mr Nigma notices the Beacon of Unrest in the graveyard and calls you over to resolve the situation. During your investigation, you discover that the Obzedat, Ghost Council is still exiled.
What are the most appropriate infractions/penalties/additional fixes?
Judges, feel free to discuss this scenario on Judge Apps!
[expand title=”View Answer”]I’d like to thank everyone for the interesting discussion on this scenario and congrats to everyone who got the correct answers!
One point we would like to cover is the concern that some judges brought up later in the discussion – should we be doing anything about the Obzedat, Ghost Council, given that we were called over for the issue with the Beacon of Unrest? As was noted, unless the players bring up the issue, we should not address it, as we are not going to be giving any penalties regarding the card and don’t (at least initially) believe anyone was intentionally missing the relevant trigger. However, it is highly likely that the topic of the Obzedat would come up during questioning regarding how the Beacon ended up in the graveyard (we would need to establish that it resolved normally, leading us to the card it put onto the battlefield – and that Alfred subsequently exiled – and then failed to bring back).
On with the answers!
Alfred receives a GPE – GRV and Mr Nigma receives a GPE-FTMGS for the Beacon of Unrest being in the graveyard. Examining our Additional Remdies, we encounter “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 we are not within a turn of the error, we do not apply this additional remedy – the Beacon of Unrest stays in Alfred’s graveyard. Note that there is nothing in this scenario that would cause us to deviate and shuffle the Beacon in – we want to handle situations consistently and we do that by adhering to the policy written in the IPG in normal situations such as this one.
Neither player receives a penalty for the Obzedat, Ghost Council still being in exile – it coming back onto the battlefield is not detrimental. Again, we examine our additional remedies to see if there is anything else to do. This leads us to “If the triggered ability specifies a default action associated with a choice made by the controller (usually “If you don’t …” or “… unless”), resolve it choosing the default option. If the triggered ability is a delayed triggered ability that changes the zone of an object, resolve it. For these two types of abilities, the opponent chooses whether to resolve the ability immediately or at the start of the next phase. These abilities do not expire and should be remedied no matter how much time has passed since they should have triggered.” As such, Mr Nigma gets to choose whether the Obzedat, Ghost Council comes back into play on Alfred’s side now or at the beginning of the next phase.[/expand]