Abel is playing in a Modern GPT against Nick. Abel taps 2 swamps and 2 forests, declares ‘Cast Garruk Wildspeaker’, and puts a card from his hand into play. He then says ‘plus 1’, untaps both swamps, and passes the turn. After Nick draws for turn, he is evaluating the board state and notices that the card in play is Garruk Relentless, not Garruk Wildspeaker. The players call for a judge, and when you arrive you verify that there is in fact a Garruk Wildspeaker in Abel’s hand, and he simply put down the wrong card. How do you handle the situation?

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

[expand title=”View Answer”]Abel has committed GPE-Game Rule Violation for not putting the spell he declared onto the stack. He should be given a warning, Nick will receive a warning for Failure to Maintain Game State, and the game will be rewound to the moment before Abel declared Garruk.

(This includes returning a card at random from Nick’s hand to the top of his library, retapping anything he untapped in his untap step, retapping the 2 swamps Abel untapped, untapping the 2 forests and 2 swamps Abel used to pay for his spell, and returning the incorrect Garruk to his hand.)

A few things to note here:
1) A few people mentioned simply swapping the Garruk in play for the one in hand. In doing so you would be applying a partial fix to this situation. There are only four partial fixes outlined in the IPG, and this falls under none of them. Therefore you would be deviating from the policy that guides us, which we only may do in the case of significant and exceptional circumstances or when a situation has no policy available. Neither of those apply here. The bottom line; don’t do this!

2) The root infraction in this case is when Abel put the wrong card on the stack, not when he untapped his lands. This is solidified further when he immediately ‘activates’ Garruk Wildspeaker’s +1 ability. Rewinding to the land untap would be only a partial rewind, which we don’t do.[/expand]