Mulling Over Marnie

Alright, let’s sit down and take a look at Marnie (SSH, 169).

"Each player shuffles their hand and puts it on the bottom of their deck. If either player put any cards on
the bottom of their deck in this way, you draw 5 cards, and your opponent draws 4 cards."

What happens if a player sees the word 'shuffle', sees the word 'hand', sees the word 'deck',
and proceeds to do the unthinkable? What if they shuffle their hand into their deck?

Let's look at the Penalty Guidelines while we consider our approach.

This is a Gameplay Error. Minor Gameplay Errors 'have little to no effect on the progress of
the game, and can be fixed or rewound completely with little effort'. It's quite clear that, in
most situations, this scenario does not fit the definition of Minor Gameplay Error. If the cards
that have been shuffled away are only known to one of the players, we cannot use public
information to fix or rewind the shuffle. If we can't fix or rewind the shuffle, then one of the
players is going to have potential access to cards that they shouldn't until the game's next
natural shuffle happens - so 'little to no effect on the progress of the game' also doesn't fit.

Okay, so we've discarded Minor. Let's look at Major Gameplay Errors, which result in some
'irreversible confusion to the game state that cannot be completely rewound or otherwise
offset through corrective action.' Sounds good so far - as far as gameplay errors can sound
good, that is. Reading on: 'Errors that result in a player gaining illicit access to knowledge or
cards, that require a substantial level of involvement by a judge to rectify, or that have
remained unnoticed for long enough to have influenced gameplay may be classified as
major.' Straightaway, we see that 'gaining illicit access to knowledge or cards' is given as an
umbrella example, and it certainly applies in our situation.

Let's take a look down the named examples given under Gameplay Error Major.

"Shuffling your deck mid-game without the use of a card effect."

This looks relevant. A player cannot arbitrarily alter the order of their deck at any point in
the game - a card effect must specify if and when they may do so.

That's happened here, but it's not the full story.

Usually, if a player shuffles a random deck, that random order of the deck is changed into a
different, but equally random, order. BUT. Marnie has in effect 'locked' a specific number of
cards into a certain position in the deck - at the bottom. This part of the deck is not
randomly ordered. If a player shuffles the deck at this point, that order is lost, and those
cards are 'released' from their relative purgatory at the bottom of the deck. Now, the player
has gone from having had no chance of drawing those cards in the actions that immediately
follow, to some chance. How big that chance is varies depending on the size of the deck and
the number of cards that were in the hand. However, it's safe to say that, in most cases,
there is a potential advantage here over and above simply shuffling a completely random
deck.

Alright, so, are there any other examples here that more accurately describe this potential
advantage? Well, the answer is... kind of.

"Failing to set up Prize cards at the beginning of the game. Discovered after a search of the deck."

This example deals with a player having illicit access to a set of cards. The Prize cards are
supposed to be set aside, not available to the player during draws or searches. This sounds
a lot like those cards that should have been inaccessible at the bottom of the deck.
However, there's a bit of a problem here - the Prize cards are drawn from the top of a
random deck and in no specific order, which makes this error somewhat fixable, in that we
can (up to a point) take random cards out of the deck and stick them in a random order off
to the side.

There is the matter of the player having access to an additional 6 cards up to this point of
course, and indeed, the more actions are completed in the game, the greater the potential
for advantage grows as the player dives in and out of their deck looking for specific cards,
any one of which has an equal chance of having been one of those 6 cards that should have
been set aside at the start of the game. This is why the penalty increases in severity after a
deck search is performed, and can quickly arrive at a Game Loss. But the point is that there
is a window of time where the confusion caused to the game state can be rewound and/or
offset by corrective action - and that window is where the error is classed as Major.

But here, with our specific, non-random, supposed-to-be-inaccessible cards shuffled into the
deck, what can we do?

Let's look at Gameplay Error Severe, errors that 'that irreparably break the game state'.
Here, we come across:

"Shuffling the hand, Prize cards, or discard pile into the deck without the use of a card effect."

Two of these scenarios deal with a set of cards that are usually known only to one player.
The third, the discard pile, often contains many cards that players may not be reasonably
and reliably expected to keep track of, despite their being public knowledge. They deal with
scenarios in which it is either impossible or prohibitively difficult to rewind the error, and the
potential advantage to be gained by one player is too much a threat to the integrity of the
game.

We could spend some time here looking at semantics. Should we consider those 'locked'
cards to be the hand of the player, and therefore that the player has shuffled their hand into
their deck? Or do those cards legitimately belong in the deck at this point in proceedings,
and therefore did the player “just” shuffle their deck without the use of a card effect?

And…does it matter?
One of the problems judges usually encounter when faced with a player who has shuffled
away their hand is that, for the game to continue, the hand - those exact cards - must be
reconstructed somehow. True, we don't need to rebuild a hand here, and as Marnie has
been played, there's no doubt that those cards belong in the deck. However, to fix this issue,
those cards, however many there were, must be identified and put on the bottom of the
deck. It's not reconstructing the hand, but it is reconstructing a specific set of cards, of
which no public knowledge exists (unless by some miracle there's Lavender Town in play or
something). That sounds like the hand in concept.

The effects of the error are also comparable - we can't recreate the hand without the
knowledge of the cards that were shuffled away. Each degree of error in our trying to fix
such a problem invariably grants more and more potential for advantage to one party. And
the game state is still broken.

So then, we’ve looked at the examples in the penalty guidelines, and examined the
similarities and differences as they compare to the scenario with Marnie. If you've followed
the exercise this far, I hope that you have in your mind an idea of how you would rule if this
situation presented itself at your next event. In which examples were the effects on the
game state most similar? If the penalty associated with one example were to be applied
here, would the game state be comparably restored? Does the integrity of the game remain
intact?

Gameplay Error Severe appears the most appropriate classification to me. However, I invite
you to consider the above, alongside any compounding or mitigating factors at play, before
you make your decision regarding each unique scenario in front of you. - IE GAME LOSS

Houndoom
Q. Can I use Houndoom's "Single Strike Roar" Ability if all four Single Strike Energy cards are
in play or in the discard pile?
A. No you cannot. Since the location of all four Single Strike Energy cards are known, there's
no way Single Strike Roar would be able to find one during a deck search.

Source: TPCi Rules Team (2021-03-25)

“Defending pokemon = pokemon being attacked”

“Opponent’s active pokemon = pokemon in the active being attacked”
These are important because if pokemon are swapped out the new active pokemon IS NOT the
defending pokemon from last turn