At this point, spectator Sam realizes that the Boon Satyr should not have gone to the graveyard, asks the players to pause their match, and calls you over. Your investigation reveals that neither player knew that the Satyr should have become a creature rather than go to the graveyard. What do you do?
Judges, feel free to discuss this scenario on Judge Apps!
[expand title=”View Answer”]Let’s start with the easy part: There was a general consensus that Alex should receive a Warning for Game Play Error – Game Rule Violation and Nick should receive a Warning for Game Play Error – Failure to Maintain Game State. And that consensus was absolutely correct!
Now, how do we fix it? As with all GRVs, we (the HJ) start by deciding whether backing up to the point of the error would be too disruptive to the game. If we decide that backing up is okay, we would undo each action that occurred up until the point of the error. However, based on the amount of actions and decisions made since the GRV, we believe that it *is* too disruptive to back up. So now we look at whether we can apply a partial fix, and we see:
“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.”
There was some great discussion about whether this partial fix applies here. Many of you believed that it doesn’t. The reasoning was that the Boon Satyr went to the graveyard because it was incorrectly countered on resolution, not because it was simply placed there accidentally. This was an interesting viewpoint, but ultimately erroneous. The Boon Satyr was changing zones, and it was put into the graveyard instead of onto the battlefield. This fits the above partial fix perfectly.
Put the Boon Satyr on the battlefield, issue the appropriate penalties, and remind the characters to play more carefully in the future.
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