Summary for Targeting vs Choosing

To start off this week, we started with an incredibly basic question. Can you Vindicate a Progenitus?

• This simple question had an equally simple answer, that being “no you can’t” because among the other things protection does, it stops a card from being targeted by spells and Vindicate specifically says “target” on it.

Having established that, we moved onto the less obvious question; can you vote for, and subsequently kill a Progenitus with Council’s Judgement?

• While the normal use of Council’s Judgement is fairly similar to Vindicate, the wording is very important here. Because Judgement doesn’t specifically use the word “target” it is unaffected by abilities like Protection/Hexproof/Shroud which all care about the word “target” specifically.

Next up we talked about how Targeting vs Choosing make a difference in being able to respond to things. We started with asking, can the activated ability of Spectral Searchlight could be responded to?

• Because Spectral Searchlight uses the word choose, it still qualifies as a mana ability, which means that it can not be responded to. Contrast this to Witch Engine which does say “target” in its ability and as such does not qualify as a mana ability. Because of this it can both be responded to and the choice to player for its ability will be known before it resolves.

In the same vein of when choices are made vs when targets are declared, we looked at the card Abzan Advantage. I asked what happens when a player casts it saying what they like to bolster onto ahead of time, and then the opponent kills that creature with Abzan Advantage still on the stack?

• Luckily for our Abzan Advantage player, Bolster uses the choose wording and not target. As such, any decisions are made on resolution, so when the spell resolves they can bolster onto a different creature, assuming they still have one. In this scenario the player casting Advantage was slightly out of sequence in declaring a creature for Bolster, and while this is a fairly common play pattern for players, the difference is key when these situations come up in how we handle them.

Our last question of the day delved into the IPG for a bit. I asked how we would handle a player who cast Council’s Judgement saying “kill your Batterskull” and then upon confirmation of the spell’s resolution from the opponent says “Ok I vote for your Jace, the Mind Sculptor.” In this scenario what rule, if any had been broken? And more importantly, what was the appropriate board state to arrive at?

• For starters every agreed that we would hold the player casting Council’s Judgement to their original choice and kill the Batterskull. While targeted cards require announcement and locking in on casting, choices are made on resolution. Because of this there is some room for abuse in wording, and as such there is a specific shortcut in MTR 4.1 that covers announcing a choice that would be made later when casting a spell or activating an ability. Announcing a spell in the way our player did is proposing a shortcut that they skip to the resolution of that spell with the choice announced, and as such we hold them to that unless the opponent responds, which they didn’t in this case.
• There was much more discussion that occurred regarding if a penalty should be given here. However, for shortcut violations like this, policy does not support any penalty unless we are looking into cheating (which is possible given that one play definitely seemed to be trying to break shortcut rules to gain an advantage over their opponent). However, assuming no malice, there is no penalty for trying to go against a shortcut you already announced, you just don’t get to do that and the game moves on.

Further reading:
-Targets: CR 114

Related articles:
–Casting a Spell