Upper Deck Entertainment Forums

From this thread:

Hi,

I can't quite find out what happens in this instance, so I'm asking here.

Here's the situation:

Players A and B are playing a game.

Random person walks by and states to other random person: "Hey, he has two Nether Fractures, is he purposely bluffing by letting that guy play that card?"

Player B (holding the 2 Nether Fractures in question) turns around and says: "Thanks for telling him what's in my hand!"

Now, the random people involved were not people in the tournament. Rather, they were just passing by. The one person didn't mean to say it so loudly; it's just that the area was noisy, and then for some reason it was quiet when he said it (you know those situations - loud noise, and then suddenly it's quiet and everyone can hear you?).

So as a judge, I deemed this to damage the game state and called that game a draw, gave them a time extension (they were only 10 minutes in) and let them play again. I told the random people not to watch the game and to move to another area.

I know that's not normally what would be done. What is the normal procedure?

Ouch. Situations like that are unfortunate.

The first thing to do, as was said in the other thread, is to investigate to see if the random person making the statement knows anyone in the match or if the statement was purposeful or solicited. Assuming that no malicious intent was involved and the player just didn't know how loud he was ... we do nothing to the gamestate.

Yeah that sucks, but nothing in the gamestate is illegal and none of the players made an error. Explain to the players how unfortunate it was and have them move on.

We certainly take the spectator aside and have a stern talk about interfering in a match, even accidentally. You can certainly award the spectator a Unsporting Conduct infraction, even entering him in the tournament to do so if he has a UDE number. This will, at the least, let us see if he's done this sort of thing in the past and monitor him in the future.  

---

Erik Mock
UD Judge Coordinator
WoW TCG Level 3
Player Management Level 4