Let’s start with a disclaimer.  I wasn’t in Austin, certainly wasn’t in Rome, and everything I have to go off of in this topic is second hand information.  That said, I’m just as knowledgeable in the subject as most pundits are about politics and Steve Phillips is about baseball personnel, so why not state my mind?

October 18 – Austin, TX

Wizards Coverage
Brian Kibler (playing Zoo) is playing Evangelos Papatsarouchas (playing Hypergenesis combo) in the quarterfinals of Pro Tour Austin.  The day before, Kibler had lost to Papatsarouchas in two straight games.  Kibler loses the first two games of the best of five quarterfinals as well before equaling the match up in games three and four.  Game five hinged around a pivotal Hypergenesis resolution, with Papatsarouchas putting Progenitus and Angel of Despair into play, while Kibler put three Meddling Mages into play, setting them on removal spells (Putrefy and Firespout).

Angel of Despair – 5WB
Creature – Angel
Flying
When Angel of Despair comes into play, destroy target permanent.
5/5

The important point of reference here, of course, is that Angel of Despair’s comes into play trigger is not an option.  Neither player did anything about the trigger, and the game moved on.  Kibler cast Baneslayer Angel the following turn and then Path to Exile the turn after to eliminate the Angel of Despair, outracing the 10/10 protection from everything monster for the win.  According to the coverage, both players realized after the game that Angel of Despair’s trigger was mandatory.  Nothing happens, it’s far too late to roll the game back, and Kibler goes on to win Pro Tour Austin.

November 19 – Rome, Italy

Wizards Coverage
Charles Gindy of the US is playing Antoine Menard of France in round six of Worlds.  Both players are 2-3 and need a win to help out their national team going into the first of two team rounds on the first day.  Gindy is playing Master of the Wild Hunt and has some number of creatures in play, including at least two Wolves.

Master of the Wild Hunt – 2GG
Creature – Human Shaman
At the beginning of your upkeep, put a 2/2 green Wolf creature token onto the battlefield.
T: Tap all untapped Wolf creatures you control. Each Wolf tapped this way deals damage equal to its power to target creature. That creature deals damage equal to its power divided as its controller chooses among any number of those Wolves.
3/3

Here’s where things get murky.  The official report says “Gindy controlled a Master of the Wild Hunt, along with a pair of Wolf tokens, one a 2/2, and the other a 3/3 thanks to a counter from Oran-Rief the Vastwood. Gindy activated his Master of the Wild Hunt, targeting one of [Menard]’s creatures, in order to kill it. [Gindy's] Wolves were tapped, and [Menard]’s creature was killed by the 5 damage from Master of the Wild Hunt’s ability, but [Menard] did not assign damage back to either Wolf.”  In his interview with Bill Stark of TheStarkingtonPost.com, US National Team member Todd Anderson said that Gindy knew that the damage had to be assigned by Menard, but thought that if Menard did nothing, then the damage would be assigned in the most beneficial way possible for Gindy.  It’s both players’ responsibility to maintain a proper game state, and Gindy should have alerted Menard that there was damage to be assigned back, which would have likely killed one of the Wolves.  There have also been reports that perhaps even the judges missed the game state.  Tim Aten posted on his Facebook that only the 3/3 Wolf was untapped when Master of the Wild Hunt was activated, leaving only one legal choice for Menard.  The match ended and according to Wizards and Anderson, Gindy asked Menard why he hadn’t assigned damage to kill one of the Wolf tokens.  Menard then called a judge over.  With the actual game state in question long since past and in such disarray, the judges took Gindy’s statements at face value – Gindy knew the damage needed to be assigned and did not tell his opponent, which irreparably altered the game state in Gindy’s favor.  To raise to a level of disqualification for fraud, the judges had to have found that Gindy did this intentionally.

On the surface, these situations seem similar.  The game state was misrepresented, whether intentionally or unintentionally, and the end result is one player benefited because of the misrepresentation.  Brian Kibler would have likely lost his match had a permanent been destroyed by Angel of Despair’s triggered ability.  Charles Gindy may have lost had his Wolf token traded with Antoine Menard’s 2/2.  One player was disqualified for his actions, the other had no punishment levied against them.  So what were the differences?

  • Gindy showed understanding of the game state immediately after the match was over, Kibler did not. He asked Menard why Menard hadn’t killed one of his tokens.  Whether he knew this at the time he played the ability (as Todd Anderson suggested) or became aware of it as the match progressed, Gindy knew a mistake had been made.  He may not have believed it was a mistake, but he knew what had happened, and he had a responsibility to stop the game once he became aware of it and let judges correct it.  According to an interview with TheStarkingtonPost.com, Brian Kibler was not aware that Angel of Despair was a mandatory trigger until Wizards coverage reporter Josh Bennett asked him post-match what the Angel had destroyed.  Kibler was aware of the missed trigger, but believed it to be optional.  Ultimately, if it hadn’t been a quarterfinal match at a Pro Tour and didn’t have coverage, we would have never known what happened.
  • Gindy made all parties aware of the misrepresented game state after the match; an outside party made the parties aware of the misrepresented game state in the Kibler match. Magic players at the PTQ level and above, myself included, often say a lot about the match after the mattch, whether it be to educate the opponent better about their deck and cardpool to try and improve your tiebreakers later on, to genuinely help other players, or to show yourself to be smarter/better than your opponent (Still had all these!).  Gindy talked, Kibler shut up.  Does that make one person’s actions more or less dubious than the other’s?  That’s a matter of opinion.  Gindy gave the judges at Worlds a reason to disqualify him, however, while Kibler did not.
  • Kibler’s match had a large audience; Gindy’s did not. It’s a lot easier to believe someone is making an honest mistake when his opponent, a table judge, a coverage writer, and an audience either make the same honest mistake, or choose not to report it.  Spectators are allowed to stop a game if they see an error in the game state.  Were all of these people watching this match just turning a blind eye so that Kibler could win?  It seems very unlikely.  On the other side of the coin, Gindy’s match was not featured and while there certainly were spectators, there is no way that they matched the numbers of Kibler’s match, and it is a lot more likely that those spectators had an interest in the match, one side or the other.  It is much harder for a judge crew coming into the situation after the fact and cold to get an eyewitness report of the events that can be evaluated as unbiased in that situation.  All they had to reliably go on were Gindy’s words and actions.

I don’t know whether or not disqualifying Charles Gindy was the right decision.  We can take away from both these situations the need to read the cards and call a judge, even if the end result is not beneficial to you.  It takes a lot of courage and conviction to make the decision to call a judge over when you might receive a penalty or the game state may be corrected to benefit your opponent, but the events in Rome yesterday show that the risks for not doing so greatly outweigh the risk taken to make things right.

P.S.: If Menard would have just run some Vampire Nighthawks, he would have known to kill those Wolves, whether there were one or two of them, and we wouldn’t be in this situation.  That guy does EVERYTHING.

(Edited to properly attribute information from Tim Aten.)