About

The Name of the Rule is a rules-focused blog run by Simon Matthee.

After close to nine years of actual judging and some more years of being nominally certified, I officially retired toward the end of 2022. With other distractions like playing and collecting similarly left behind, I have more time than ever to focus on my favorite aspect of Magic: its rules system, especially the game rules based around the Comprehensive Rules (CR).

In this never-ending pursuit of complete understanding, I like to view myself as a thorough thinker, but I am abysmal at writing anything down;1 as soon as I solve a scenario to my own satisfaction, I jump straight to the next one. I hope to finally get out of this habit by starting this blog. Besides serving as a memory aid for myself, publishing my discoveries online will also force me to be even more thorough in my reasoning.

My second goal for this blog is to preserve some of the rules’ history. In late 2022, Wizards of the Coast (WotC) removed practically all articles from their website, including the rules managers’ update bulletins for new CR releases; in a similar vein, new update bulletins have mostly stopped coming out. While copies of the older update bulletins can still be found on the Wayback Machine and newer changes to the CR are often so minimal they don’t really warrant an update bulletin, making this content more accessible and filling in the blanks seems worthwhile to me. These documents provide insight into the evolution of the rules and their design intent, making them the closest analogue we have to the annotated Magic Tournament Rules and the annotated Infraction Procedure Guide. And yet they seem all but forgotten, even by longtime community members and WotC employees.

While The Name of the Rule is hosted on blogs.magicjudges.org, I won’t guarantee that each post will have practical value for a judge. As a rules enthusiast, I seldom care about the relevancy of a discovery. On rare occasions, I might involve the Magic Tournament Rules, but tournament policy is not a priority of my studies. Still, I think learning more about the CR is always valuable, as each new set might bring an obscure topic to the light of the metagame.2 Most of the time, a judge can simply wait a day and dozens of articles, videos, and podcasts will appear, each explaining the newly discovered combo more or less accurately; but sometimes, a judge works at the tournament where the topic has its premiere, and being already familiar with the issue (or at least remembering that a source for detailed information on the issue exists) will help in making a good ruling.

  1. When thinking of reviews, this seems to be a well-known phenomenon in the judge community. ↩︎
  2. For example, the details of activating mana abilities while casting a spell or activating another ability were mostly relegated to Skyshroud Elf shenanigans in conference presentations; then Krark-Clan Ironworks became a top-tier Modern deck and these details became highly relevant to understand the deck’s game plan. In 2024, Nadu, Winged Wisdom put a spotlight on the issue of sameness of abilities, followed by Kaito, Bane of Nightmares and enter-the-battlefield replacement effects. ↩︎