Annie attacks with two 1/1 faerie tokens and a Tarmogoyf into Nami’s empty board. Nami, who is at 5 life and has an empty graveyard, is playing a deck heavy in removal. She asks, “I might have to kill that Goyf… What’s in your graveyard?” Annie replies, “Just this enchantment and a land.” Nami then says “Okay, I’ve still got a turn then. I’ll take the damage. I go to one.” “Nope! I win! The enchantment is Bitterblossom!” Annie giggles. Nami calls for a judge.

Both players agree on the sequence of events as described above. What is your ruling? If you are undecided based on this information, what further questions do you need to ask the players?

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

[expand title=”View Answer”]Thanks to everyone for all of your spirited discussion. It’s always great to see our community able to disagree on a problem without escalating past civil reasoning. Let’s take a closer look at the situation. While Annie clearly spoke in a way that gave Nami the impression that Tarmogoyf was a 2/3, she gave no false information to Nami and is under no obligation to assist Nami with determining derived information, such as the card types of all cards in her graveyard. Therefore there is no infraction here. Since Nami has stated that she will take the damage, it is too late for her to react in any way to the attack and she will lose the game due to having 0 life.

This situation or something similar is put before every judge in their learning process. It happened to me and now it has happened for you! If this answer doesn’t sit well with you yet, there are a few things you can do:

First, we always encourage you to talk to your mentor(s) whenever something doesn’t make sense. They have likely been around the block and can explain things in terms that you will understand.

Second, to understand the DCI policy for this situation, take a look back to Eric Shukan’s post (about halfway down page 3 of comments). Put simply, we can’t effectively enforce how questions are interpreted, but we CAN enforce whether statements contain any untrue content. Annie’s statement was true, despite the fact that it didn’t fully answer Nami’s intended question about which card types were in the graveyard.

Finally, when playing matches yourself remember that your opponent wants to win the game too. The best course of action for derived information is frequently to figure it out yourself. If Nami had simply asked to look at Annie’s graveyard, she wouldn’t be in this situation.[/expand]