I’m trying to make it a habit of summarizing the rules changes that are of interest to players. These are obviously not technical descriptions – see the full MIPG/MTR for those – but should give you the information you need to play in Magic tournaments without getting into trouble or finding yourself at a big disadvantage.

I’m not going to cover changes that are designed for judges. The fact that the Cheating infractions have been rejiggered to be clearer, or that Player Communication Violation has been renamed, should not affect your behavior or play. Continue to not cheat and communicate clearly!

So, what’s going on?

1) Based on extensive feedback from the community over the past few months, we’re adjusting the rules for Missed Triggers. In summary:

• You cannot choose to ignore your triggers (doing so remains Cheating).
• Your opponent is not required to remind you if they don’t want to.
• You have until a trigger requires a decision or visibly affects the game to remember and demonstrate awareness of it, after which point it becomes missed.
• Once a trigger is missed, whether or not it happens is up to the opponent.

Note that only the third rule has changed. We hope this’ll lead to triggers actually being missed cleanly, and not ‘gotcha’ moments. So, for example, if you attack with a Knight of Infamy (2/1, Exalted), the trigger is only missed if you let something take 2 damage or tell the opponent to take 2. As the opponent, you need to assume that it’s a 3/2 until you’re told otherwise, at which point, hey, bonus.

You also need to assume that triggers are still on the stack until the opponent takes an action that they couldn’t legally do if it was. No using verbal trickery to try to clear the stack, and sometimes you may need to acknowledge the existence or effect of a trigger before the controller does.

There’s obviously a lot of fiddly bits to give the judges technical definitions to make this work (and if you’re feeling strong, a whole lot more details) and there’s a bunch of internal plumbing to make things like delayed triggers intuitive, but if you know the above, you’ve got like 95% of it.

2) The rule that says you don’t have to remind your opponent about triggered abilities is being extended to Regular REL, bringing the actual rules at all RELs into sync. Of course, the Competitive REL remedy that makes you lose the trigger if you missed it isn’t coming along for the ride. In general, if the controller notices it within a reasonable time frame, and it’s not too disruptive, we’ll resolve the trigger, just like we do now. But, it’s all on the controller to remember, now.

3) At GPs, you may see more judges in red shirts. These extras are “appeals judges”. They’re high-level judges who have been empowered with final authority on appeals, as though they were the head judge.

That’s the major changes for Gatecrash. As always, we’ll continue to revise policies to make Magic tournaments as fun and fair as humanly possible, and we welcome all your feedback and ideas through the various social media channels and major websites.

The complete Magic Tournament Rules (which is stuff you might need to know) can be found at http://www.wizards.com/wpn/Document.aspx?x=Magic_The_Gathering_Tournament_Rules

The complete Magic Infraction Procedure Guide (which is stuff for judges, but might be interesting) can be found at http://www.wizards.com/wpn/Document.aspx?x=Magic_The_Gathering_Infraction_Procedure_Guide