Level Two - Lesson 16
Master Event Document - Deck & Decklist Error
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Hello there!
Welcome back to the level two lessons for the Star Wars™: Unlimited Judge Program!
As always, I’m your host Jonah, and this lesson is going to be the first of two looking at decks, decklists, and deck legality. Deck and decklist issues are some of the more objective calls, but they’re also frequently very impactful, and consequently, when a judge gets involved, the outcome is similarly significant.
As with the other lessons, this covers the Master Event Document with regard to competitive tier events - particularly those with decklists submitted. For casual-tier events, without decklists, follow the policy outlined in the level one Master Event Document overview.
As always with policy, this is an area that is continually being refined, and will grow and evolve as play also continues to evolve. This does make it a bit of a challenge to both learn and teach, so this is likely a lesson that will similarly evolve over time.
When is a Deck a Deck?
Let’s answer the question - when is a deck actually a deck, for the purposes of a tournament?
To start - some extreme examples. A player shows up to a local competitive event, but they’re missing a couple of cards that a friend is going to loan them. Before the event starts, they’re waiting for their friend to arrive. Does it matter that they don’t have the cards?
In between rounds, a player checks out a vendor at a large tournament, and sees that they have some hyperspace treatments of a card that they haven’t yet upgraded. They buy those cards, sleeve them up, add them to the deck and then take out the originals. Did they commit a deck error?
Let’s get a bit more moderate. During a round, while sideboarding, a player removes six cards, but doesn’t add any, then begins to shuffle. At this moment in time do they have an illegal deck?
The answer to all of these is no.
A set of cards is just a pile of cards until a player presents it for a match. A player presenting a deck is them implicitly saying “These are the cards that I intend to play for this match”. Any time before the player their deck, it isn’t their deck for the purposes of the match, the tournament or penalties.
This policy exists because of these examples - in the first, the player has plenty of time to get the cards from their friend and add them to their deck before the event begins, or even change their decklist if they don’t get the cards. For the second, the player never plays an illegal deck - they didn’t even have an opponent at the time the deck had excess cards. With the last example, the player may just be idly shuffling while thinking about what to bring in, or has temporarily forgotten.
Furthermore, in between rounds a player may not have finished de-sideboarding - maybe their match was a very close loss, and they are taking time to recover, or perhaps they wanted to go grab food before their next round and wanted to get in line as quickly as possible. The cards they’re carrying, while they will have a strong resemblance to their deck, don’t count as their deck, because they’ve not been presented for an ongoing match.
Furthermore, a player may play games between rounds, testing different configurations of their deck - at that point, the cards are a different deck that they’re playing with, not a tournament object.
Unless a player has presented a deck, it’s just a pile of cards.
What Else Is A Deck?
What about the sideboard, you ask? In an ideal world, players present their sideboard (facedown) at the beginning of the match and indicate that that set of cards is their sideboard. However, if a player does not do so, and takes out a set of cards, it is likely that the removed cards are the sideboard.
If a player does not remove the sideboard from their deckbox at the beginning of the match all cards they can access while access their intended sideboard are considered to be a part of the sideboard. This is something that we’ll discuss in depth during the following lesson on deck checks, but this means that deck boxes that can contain two decks, but only have one cover can cause issues for players. A deck box that can contain two decks but has separate covers for each container avoids this issue.
The reason this policy exists is because during sideboarding, both players are focused primarily on their side of the table, and are much less likely to be observing their opponent closely. Players do sometimes sleeve and unsleeve cards, or go rooting around in their deckbox for sideboard cards, so those actions aren’t necessarily going to raise alarm bells. This means that a player who has additional unregistered cards in their deckbox has an opportunity for malicious action, and it’s important to strongly disincentivize that player behavior.
An exception to this policy is any promos that are distributed as part of the event are not included. Some players may show up to an event with only one deckbox, no binder or anything else to securely hold their cards, and we want players to be able to protect their cards.
What Are Decklists?
Decklists are a list of cards that a player has chosen to register for the event - they must play every round with the registered deck and sideboard, and begin each match with their deck as submitted for their maindeck - no preboarding is allowed.
A decklist should include the player’s name (so that we can associate the list with a player for performing deck checks), their leader, base, and maindeck. Most decklists will also contain a sideboard, and it’s encouraged to have players include their SWU ID if you’re not using a tool that links the decklist to a player profile, to help disambiguate players with the same name.
Speaking of entities with the same name - it’s important for players to clearly and unambiguously identify each card that they’re playing. Registering “Chewbacca” doesn’t clearly identify a card in Unlimited, as there are several different versions of the character. The best way to identify uniques is with their subtitle, but including set code and card number can also uniquely identify cards.
In the case of potentially ambiguous card names, it is up to the head judge to determine if a card is unambiguous. For example, a player registering Lieutenant Childsen (as of set four) has uniquely identified a card, as there is only one unit for that character. Similarly “For A Cause” would be enough to identify “For a Cause I Believe In”. However, “Timely” while it previously would have been only Timely Intervention, could now also be Timely Reinforcements, and therefore isn’t unambiguous.
Furthermore, decklists aren’t final until the event requires them to be submitted. If a player submits a decklist before the deadline, and wants to edit their decklist or it is discovered to be illegal, they should not be penalized and should be allowed to edit their decklist. Usually, the deadline for the event is the beginning of round one with decklists either submitted online in advance, or paper lists collected by judges during opening announcements.
Deck Problems: Infraction and Fixes
If it is determined that a player has an illegal deck - they have too many or too few cards or their deck otherwise doesn’t match their decklist (and the decklist is legal), that player will receive a game loss. It is applied to the current game and match. This can sometimes end a match. If it doesn’t end the match, the player who received the loss chooses who starts with the initiative. If players have not taken any game actions (likely because the issue was caught during a beginning-of-round deck check), players are not allowed to sideboard. If the issue is caught during a game, players are allowed to sideboard.
However, if a player calls attention to their own deck error during a game, it’s the first time in the event that they have committed a deck error and the opponent hasn’t made decisions based on seeing erroneous cards (such as sideboard cards while searching the deck), the penalty is downgraded to a warning and the deck is fixed.
Essentially, if a player realizes that they forgot to desideboard, they can call a judge, and receive a warning instead of a game loss.
Let’s go over those criteria a bit more thoroughly.
First, the player has to call attention to it themselves - we want to incentivize and reward players for calling a judge on their own errors. Note that they don’t have to be the one who called a judge - they just need to have been the one to bring it up. If their opponent realizes the problem, but the player calls a judge on themselves - the player wasn’t the one who called attention to it.
Second, this only applies the first time in a tournament when a player commits this error. We want to allow some grace to players to make mistakes - forgetting to desideboard is a very common error, but on the flipside, preboarding can grant a very significant advantage.
Third, the opponent can’t have potentially made decisions based on the erroneous cards. If opponent has resolved an ability that lets them look at cards in their opponent’s deck, and has potentially seen the card in question, they may have made decisions based on that incorrect information, and that’s not something that we can change.
If we meet those criteria, which is relatively easy to do, we can then begin to fix the issue. First, we have the player check their sideboard - players are allowed to look at their sideboard, and checking that will be faster than checking the deck and will help us determine the extent of the issue. If necessary, we can also quickly count the deck (and add all the cards that the player has accessed, to check deck size legality).
If you (or the player) aren’t certain that all issues have been identified after looking at the sideboard, the main deck can also be inspected.
You want to identify whether or not the deck has too many cards, too few cards, or simply the wrong cards in it. Once you’ve made that determination, remove the incorrect cards, add the correct cards, and shuffle the deck, ensuring that the random portion of the deck is preserved, but re-randomized within its section (if eight cards were placed on the bottom of the deck for a U-Wing Reinforcement, those cards should be shuffled and replaced on the bottom of the deck).
If one or more of the erroneous cards were in the player’s hand when the issue was discovered, the player draws a card from their deck to replace it, to ensure that they have the legal number of cards in their deck.
Once the deck has been restored to a legal state, the game can continue and the player receives a warning.
Decklist Problems: Infraction and Fix
Sometimes, a player will submit an illegal decklist. They’ll include too few cards in their main deck, too many in their sideboard, potentially include suspended cards, or maybe just include cards that aren’t unambiguous.
In this case, the decklist is edited to match the player’s deck, and they are issued a game loss. This issue can be discovered at any point after the decklist submission deadline, including in-between rounds. If the issue is discovered during a round, the game loss is applied to that round. If the issue is discovered between rounds, the game loss is issued at the start of the next round.
Decklist issues are relatively straightforward, because they’re most frequently just clerical errors, and with digital decklist entry tools, there’s often some amount of legality checking, to ensure that the player’s decklist is legal for the format it is being registered in, because that can be objectively and automatically verified.
This is just the start though - our next lesson will be a high level overview of deck checks and handling marked cards - some practical examples and ideas to carry with you in the scenarios where you’ll mostly likely be encountering these infractions. If you’re watching this on YouTube, and you want more level two lessons in your feed, go ahead and subscribe. Join us Tuesdays and Fridays on twitch.tv/swu_judges for live broadcasts covering the content of these lessons as they are released, and join the Star Wars: Unlimited Judge Program Discord to join the community in discussion of this and much, much more.
As always, good luck, and have fun.