Par for the Course

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Abby is in playing a Sealed Grand Prix trial, which you are head judging. Abby has four cards in her hand and casts Courser of Kruphix. She reveals a Charging Badger on top of her library. She then casts Divination, drawing the Charging Badger and the next card on top of her library. She then reveals the new top card of her library, which is an Island. At this point, her opponent Nora stops the game and calls you to the table, saying Abby didn’t reveal the second card she drew from Divination.

What do you do?

Judges, feel free to discuss this scenario on Judge Apps!

Answer
Good work to everyone this week who correctly identified the penalty and infraction for this situation. It is indeed a Warning for a Game Rules Violation for Abby with no penalty for Nora.

IPG 2.5 states
An error that an opponent can’t verify the legality of should have its penalty upgraded. These errors involve misplaying hidden information, such as the morph ability or failing to reveal a card to prove that a choice made was legal.
Although not revealing the second card drawn with Divination does involve an error with hidden information, this information is not required to “verify the legality” of drawing that card. Thus, we do not upgrade here and treat the error as we would any other ordinary GRV.

This leaves us to determine what is the appropriate fix, if any. In this case, the error occurred when the top card of Abby’s library was not revealed prior to drawing the second card for Divination. No partial fixes apply here, so we are left to determine whether a rewind makes sense. We actually have a split opinion among the judges on the Knowledge Pool team this week, so I will be presenting explanations for both performing the rewind and not doing so. We leave it as an exercise for the reader to determine which of these is most appropriate in your real events.

Mechanically, it is simple to rewind to the point of the error by placing a random card from Abby’s hand back on top of her library, and continuing with the correct series of actions: revealing that card, then drawing it. Setting aside the Charging Badger before revealing a random card – while quite tempting! – isn’t supported by policy. We do not take Nora’s notes into consideration when determining which random card to place back on top. This means we may place the Charging Badger back on top and reveal it again. This same principle would apply had the Courser been in play for several turns and a large proportion of Abby’s hand were known. The card placed back on the deck will always be fully random.

The complete randomness of the returned card is what leads those in the “no rewind” camp to their opinion. Randomly revealing an already known card will likely be unsatisfactory or confusing, especially for Nora. If you have to go through contortions to figure out how to make a rewind work, the first thing you need to consider is “maybe I shouldn’t be rewinding here.”

In a real event, it will be up to you to determine whether you feel the players will be best served by rewinding a completely random card or none at all.

Thanks everyone for participating, and we’ll be back tomorrow with a new scenario.