Pokémon TCG: Sword and Shield—Brilliant Stars

Marnie and Shuffling the Hand into Deck

Kooper Koushiro

New Member
Marnie brings the new action of bottom-decking the hand and drawing straight from the top, a new middle ground between discard-draw and shuffle-draw. Since players have been accustomed to opponent's card effects that reset their hand being a shuffle-draw (Judge, N, Reset Stamp, etc.) ever since Imposter Professor Oak in Base Set, there will inevitably be many cases where a player incorrectly shuffles their hand into their deck rather than place it at the bottom.

Normally when a player shuffles their hand into their deck when they should not, it is a Game Play Error: Severe and almost certainly a Game Loss for the irreparable game state. Unlike every other case of this penalty, with Marnie the player's hand was going to end up in the deck, and they would be drawing a new hand. Obviously, there is the major difference of being unable to redraw cards already in hand (barring a low deck+hand size) and destroying any effects that had manipulated the top card of a player's deck.

Is there any room for leniency in shuffling the hand in with Marnie being anything less than a Game Loss, perhaps at a Tier 1 event at least?
 
Well, it's a bit more complicated than that.
The actual action is more like a GPE - Major since the hand is going into the deck as part of the action.
However, since the cards are supposed to be on the bottom of the deck and not accessible to the draw, Organized Play has issued guidance that the damage to the game state is usually more severe and this error should "usually" get the Severe Penalty of Game Loss.
I say "usually" because the guidance does include the direction to look at the specific case in hand, and size of hand and size of deck can certainly be taken into account.
If you are a Professor, you can read the advice from Organized Play directly, here: https://forums.pokemon.com/showthread.php?1682-Mulling-Over-Marnie
 
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