Stone of Remembrance

As this card is about to become legal for tournament play and as the judge of one of the first tournaments where this may come up would it be possible to get a definitive ruling on how it interacts in tournament play.

Some interactions are easy in that the deck has to be legal without it and that if used the deck still needs to be at least 40 cards However If someone uses and thus rips a Stone are they allowed to add another one to the deck for the next round(assuming they have more copies)?

Thank you in advance.

Azrael

This is about Stone of Rememberance (promo) 0 gold cost This card does not count towards your minimum deck size. Reaction: After another player's action targets one of your cards, remove this card from the game, then tear it in half: Negate the target's destruction from the action's effects.

preview thread on subject: http://www.alderac.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=59&t=94019&p=1245806&hilit=remembrance#p1245258

To answer the question directly, the Stone can of course be taken out of the deck when destroyed in use, leaving it legal because the Stone does not count toward deck minimum size. However, another copy cannot be added during the tournament, by the floor rules.

Ok, I'm still confused. The card says "remove from game" (which a lot of cards do, but they are still in the deck afterwords) and "tear in half" (which provided you can prevent that from marking the card would still remain in the deck, such as by playing with opaque hard-plastic deck sleeves). I mean, The effects don't explicitly say "remove from deck", and I can find no rules that would actually make it removed from the deck at that point.

Wouldn't that still be illegally removing it from the deck? It doesn't bypass any rules besides maybe one that says "don't tear cards in half during tournaments", and there isn't a rule I can find for what happens when you damage a card during play. So since one can't remove it from the deck, (assuming one cannot justify playing with a torn card for any reason) it is a now illegal card to play. I feel like the fact that it would then be taken out of the deck (which the text does not say to do) isn't addressed in the previous thread, because I can find nowhere in the rules that say "tearing a card in half or otherwise damaging it = removing it from the deck" (edit: prior to the update on oct 19. 2010 I see happened after I posted this. the cashed page on my laptop still has it missing, lol.)

Tournament floor rules have

The Tournament Organizer may allow the player to replace illegal or missing cards in his deck with functionally similar cards legal to the environment in question, so as to continue in the tournament. If this option is offered to one player, it must be offered to all players with an equal or lower number of illegal or missing cards in deck.

Source: http://rules.l5r.com/Floor_Rules#Deck_Legality

So wouldn't that mean its up to the tournament organizer to allow an illegal or missing card (i.e. torn in half card is now illegal in any play environment, or is just missing because its not a card anymore) to be replaced with functionally similar card legal to the environment (i.e. the same card but less torn in half)?

Edit: Also, if the previous thread's ruling is in place, that does that mean we can tear or damage cards beyond the minimum 40 in half mid tournament to get them out of our deck? (provided I haven't overlooked a rule that says 'no tearing cards in half mid-tournament' because its worded in an odd way. I would assume it applies to both accidental damage and intentional damage.)