<\/p>Andrew and Nicholas are playing a match in a Competitive REL event.<\/p>\n
Andrew begins casting Gitaxian Probe<\/a> by announcing to Nicholas, “Probe\u00a0you, paying 2 life”. Nicholas points out that he controls Thalia,\u00a0Guardian of Thraben<\/a>. Although Andrew has several untapped lands whichcould produce the mana necessary to cast the Gitaxian Probe, he does\u00a0not wish to use them. Nicholas does not want to let Andrew “take back”\u00a0the Probe at this point, and believes Andrew has committed to casting\u00a0it.<\/p>\n How would you — the judge — resolve this situation?<\/p>\n Have any infractions been committed here? If so, what are the\u00a0penalties and associated fixes you’d apply?<\/p>\n [expand title=”View Answer”]<\/p>\n Here is the game rule that’s important to\u00a0how we approach this situation:<\/p>\n Comprehensive Rules 117.3c Activating mana abilities is not mandatory, even if paying a cost is.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n This also hits an important philosophical point: we generally will\u00a0never force players to take actions they don’t want to take, though\u00a0more than a few opponents will try to argue that we should (most\u00a0commonly this comes in the form of “judge, my creature’s an illegal\u00a0target for his removal spell, make him hit one of his own creatures\u00a0with it!”). So even though Andrew *could* tap a land to produce mana\u00a0to pay for the additional cost imposed by Thalia, he’s not required\u00a0to, and we certainly can’t and won’t *force* him to. So what do we do\u00a0if he refuses?<\/p>\n First of all, the casting of Gitaxian Probe is illegal, and we turn to\u00a0rule 717.1, which tells us how to handle that. The entire attempt to\u00a0cast Gitaxian Probe is reversed, including any payments made (so if\u00a0Andrew has already marked the life payment, we need to undo that and\u00a0return him to his original life total).<\/p>\n Second… Andrew receives a Warning for Game Play Error — Game Rule Violation.<\/p>\n This was a hot topic in the discussion, but the need to issue the\u00a0infraction is clear. \u00a0Regardless of whether it came about due to an\u00a0inability to generate the correct mana or an unwillingness to do so,\u00a0Andrew has attempted to cast a spell by paying less than the total\u00a0cost, and that is absolutely GRV. Nicholas, of course, will not\u00a0receive Failure to Maintain Game State, since he pointed out the\u00a0additional cost immediately.<\/p>\n It’s also worth pointing out that this “rewind” does *not* require the\u00a0permission of the Head Judge. In this case, we’re following the\u00a0procedure specified by the Comprehensive Rules, rather than applying\u00a0the rewind remedy from the IPG. This comes from the fact that a judge\u00a0is present at the moment it’s happening, rather than coming in later\u00a0(say, on Nicholas’ turn when he suddenly remembers his Thalia).<\/p>\n And although there was some debate over exactly where we are — which\u00a0step of casting, or possibly just after illegally completing casting\u00a0— please bear in mind that while it’s sometimes interesting for\u00a0judges to debate, that’s not always a useful real-world metric, since\u00a0most players know very, very little about the technical intricacies of\u00a0how a spell actually gets cast, which often makes such discussion\u00a0fruitless in real-world situations.<\/p>\n [\/expand]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Andrew and Nicholas are playing a match in a Competitive REL event. Andrew begins casting by announcing to Nicholas, “Probe\u00a0you, paying 2 life”. Nicholas points out that he controls . Although Andrew has several untapped lands whichcould produce the mana necessary to cast the Gitaxian Probe, he does\u00a0not wish to use them. Nicholas does not […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":13,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[7,10,17],"language":[56],"class_list":["post-346","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-silver","tag-competitive-rel","tag-grv","tag-ipg","language-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/knowledgepool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/knowledgepool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/knowledgepool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/knowledgepool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/13"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/knowledgepool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=346"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/knowledgepool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":418,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/knowledgepool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/346\/revisions\/418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/knowledgepool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=346"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/knowledgepool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=346"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/knowledgepool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=346"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/knowledgepool\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=346"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/p>\n\n