{"id":559,"date":"2016-12-28T08:29:00","date_gmt":"2016-12-28T08:29:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/?p=559"},"modified":"2017-01-27T07:58:11","modified_gmt":"2017-01-27T07:58:11","slug":"communication-in-magic-tournaments-part-iii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/2016\/12\/28\/communication-in-magic-tournaments-part-iii\/","title":{"rendered":"Communication in Magic Tournaments \u2013 Part III"},"content":{"rendered":"
Read part one here<\/a>,\u00a0read part two here<\/a>.<\/em><\/div>\n

\"Written<\/a>

Written by Salvatore La Terra
\nLevel 3, Italy<\/p><\/div>\u00a0Welcome to our series of articles on communication rules. In this article, we wrap up the series talking about the shortcuts we take when describing to our opponent our line of play.<\/span><\/p>\n

I\u2019ll be brief<\/span><\/h1>\n

I think I already said that Magic is a complicated game. Well, I take it back: Magic is a <\/span>very <\/span><\/i>complicated game. Playing the game described in the Comprehensive Rules is an exercise in patience – try to play a game in Magic Online putting a stop at every phase and step and without using function keys if you want to see for yourself!<\/span><\/p>\n

For example, here\u2019s a typical first turn in a game:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority in my upkeep.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority, the step ends.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI play a land in my first main phase, then I pass priority.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority, the phase ends.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority in my beginning of combat step.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority, the step ends.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI declare a null attack.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority in my declare attackers step.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority, the step ends.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority in my end of combat step.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority, the step ends.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority in my second main phase.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority, the phase ends.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority, in my end of turn step.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pass priority, the turn ends.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

What a fun game, uh? Typically<\/span>\u2014 and thankfully! \u2014<\/span>a real first turn goes on like:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPlay my land, go.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOk.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

We have just used a <\/span>tournament shortcut<\/span><\/i>. Since shortcut are designed to allow us to skip a part of the information we exchange and take it for granted, they present a very high risk of misunderstanding. For this reason, some shortcuts have been defined and assigned a meaning.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cGo.\u201d, \u201cYour turn.\u201d, \u201cPass.\u201d<\/span><\/h2>\n

You are passing priority until you reach your end of turn step, then you\u2019re passing priority there. Your opponent can play something, but if he or she doesn\u2019t you can\u2019t do anything anymore: your turn immediately proceeds to the cleanup step, you discard to seven if necessary and your turn ends.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cCombat?\u201d, \u201cAttack.\u201d, \u201cI\u2019d like to declare attackers.\u201d<\/span><\/h2>\n

You are passing priority until you reach your beginning of combat step, then you\u2019re passing priority there. If your opponent doesn\u2019t wish to play anything, the game immediately passes to the declare attackers step, which means you must declare attackers, unless there\u2019s a triggered ability waiting to resolve, for example the one from <\/span>Toolcraft Exemplar<\/a> or <\/span>Goblin Rabblemaster<\/a>. In this case, the ability will resolve and you will receive priority again in your beginning of combat step.<\/span><\/p>\n

This is certainly the most delicate shortcut of all, and the one that will result in the most disagreements between players. After you invoke this shortcut, <\/span>you won\u2019t be able to animate your lands or crew your Vehicles<\/span><\/i>, unless your opponent plays anything in your beginning of combat step or there\u2019s a pending ability to resolve. If your opponent does play something, for example a <\/span>Cryptic Command<\/a> to tap your team before you have a chance to attack, you\u2019ll have the chance to do something (for example, activate your <\/span>Mutavault<\/a> that\u2019s still untapped, since it wasn\u2019t a creature when Cryptic Command resolved), but you are still stuck in combat, so you can\u2019t juggle Equipment around or cast a creature with haste and attack with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

Before this shortcut existed, players would attempt to do this:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019d like to attack.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI tap your <\/span><\/i>Goblin Piker<\/a><\/i> with my <\/span><\/i>Icy Manipulator<\/a><\/i>.\u201d<\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cAh, you haven\u2019t said we\u2019re changing phase: <\/span><\/i>BALL LIGHTNING<\/i><\/a>!\u201d <\/span><\/i><\/span><\/p>\n

We really don\u2019t like this trick anymore. If your plan is to have your opponent play something in a different phase than the one he or she intends to, trust me: change your plan. The judge <\/span>will<\/span><\/i> rule against you.<\/span><\/p>\n

(Historical note: before the <\/span>Sixth Edition<\/span><\/i> rule change, this trick was legal – actually, it was not a trick at all, it was the way the game worked back then, as there was no beginning of combat step: you would say you wanted to attack, and your opponent could either allow you to tap your creatures or interrupt you to cast something, which left you in your main phase. However, this is not the game we\u2019re playing anymore.)<\/span><\/p>\n

This shortcut has come under great scrutiny in the judge community in the past months. You are welcome to read what <\/span>Kevin Deprez<\/span><\/a> and <\/span>Toby Elliott<\/span><\/a> (two very experienced judges) have to say on this topic, but let me put this in layman\u2019s terms: <\/span>activate your Vehicles in your main phase<\/b>. Doing things at the very last time is a tenet that\u2019s burned in the brain of many Magic players, and it\u2019s usually correct, except when it isn\u2019t. There\u2019s nothing to gain from trying to animate your stuff in combat, and plenty to lose – namely, a whole combat phase.<\/span><\/p>\n

Some might say that there\u2019s no way to enter your beginning of combat phase and retain priority. That someone would be wrong: you\u2019re more than welcome to do so, <\/span>if you have a reason to do so<\/span><\/i>. For example, if you <\/span>Wasteland<\/a> away your opponent\u2019s only source of white mana, and he or she obviously taps it, you can certainly enter your beginning of combat to have that mana burn away and then crew your precious <\/span>Skysovereign<\/a> with no fear of seeing it sent on a <\/span>Path to Exile<\/a> – <\/span>just say so<\/span><\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI pump <\/span>Nantuko Shade<\/a> four times.\u201d<\/span><\/h2>\n

If you stack a bunch of spells or abilities at the same time, it\u2019s assumed that you put the first one onto the stack, wait for it to resolve, then put the second on the stack, wait for it to resolve, and so on. The old and embarrassing trick of <\/span>\u201cI Shock it in response to all the activations\u201d<\/span><\/i>, that forced us to pump our Shades one painstaking point at a time, is not legal anymore.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span>Persecute<\/a> and I choose black.\u201d, \u201c<\/span>Lightning Bolt<\/b> your Jace.\u201d<\/span><\/h2>\n

Sometimes, especially when we\u2019re playing fast or the choice is obvious, we announce a choice that should be made during resolution at the time we cast a spell (for reference, the only things that are announced as a spell is cast are modes, targets, additional\/alternative costs, and how damage is split among targets). When we do so, we are saying that we launch that spell and, if the opponent has no response, we\u2019ll make that choice. This is not a legal trick:<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cPersecute and I choose black.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cOk, it resolves.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cDiscard all blue cards, please.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

Any choice prematurely made when casting a spell must be abided to if that spell resolves uninterrupted. On the other hand, if our opponent responds to our spell, we\u2019re not bound to follow through with the shortcut we proposed, since it\u2019s been rejected by our opponent.<\/span><\/p>\n

A notable application of this rule is that we can point our burn to opposing planeswalker, and when we do this we mean that we\u2019re targeting our opponent and, in resolution, we\u2019ll decide to redirect the damage to that \u2018walker. If our opponent responds somehow (for example, grants Jace protection from red using <\/span>Faith’s Shield<\/a>), we\u2019re not bound to redirect the damage.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cI cast Persecute.\u201d \u201cColor?\u201d<\/span><\/h2>\n

This shortcut is the mirror image of the previous one. If we ask our opponent to make a choice that\u2019s supposed to happen during resolution, we\u2019re implicitly agreeing to resolve that spell. After our opponent tells us that he\u2019s choosing red, it\u2019s too late to cast <\/span>Brainstorm<\/a> to hide our burn on top of the library.<\/span><\/p>\n

Do it yourself<\/span><\/h2>\n

There are more codified shortcuts, but they\u2019re so seldom invoked that it\u2019s not worth it to talk about them. However, it\u2019s important to note that players are always free to establish new shortcuts to use in their matches. This is usually done tacitly, through normal gameplay, but you can also explicitly describe a complex shortcut. For example , if you\u2019re playing an <\/span>Urzatron<\/span><\/a> deck and you\u2019ve assembled the <\/span>Mindslaver<\/a> + <\/span>Academy Ruins<\/a> combo, you don\u2019t need to go through the motions every time: you can just explain what’s going on, set aside Academy Ruins and enough lands to generate <\/span>, and say that every turn you will put Mindslaver on top of the library, draw it, cast it, activate it and pass.<\/span><\/p>\n

Players are always free to interrupt their opponent\u2019s shortcuts, but they <\/span>can\u2019t <\/span><\/i>do this to force them to waste some more time on the clock. For example, in the previous example you could respond to the ability of Academy Ruins with a <\/span>Surgical Extraction<\/a>; in this case, the rest of the shortcut doesn\u2019t happen, so your opponent will be left with two <\/span>Urza’s Tower<\/a> and <\/span>Urza’s Mine<\/a> untapped.You can interrupt standard shortcuts as well. For example, after your opponent announces that he or she is pumping Nantuko Shade four times, you can say that you want to to <\/span>Char<\/a> it in response to the second activation. In this case, the rest of the shortcut is canceled and rewound: the next two activations never happen and your opponent untaps two lands, so he or she is free to use it for other things, for example to cast <\/span>Altar’s Reap<\/a> and sacrifice the soon-to-be-dead-for-the-second-time Shade.<\/span><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s make another example: you control no creatures, so you just play a land and say \u201cGo\u201d. The game would skip to your end of turn step, but your opponent interrupts your shortcut in your second main phase to activate <\/span>Haunted Dead<\/a> discarding two <\/span>Prized Amalgam<\/a> (which would cause them to return to the battlefield at the end of the current turn). Since he or she has interrupted your shortcut, the game is still in your second main phase, so you could for example cast a <\/span>Rest in Peace<\/a> to get rid of the Amalgams.<\/span><\/p>\n

So long<\/span><\/h1>\n

That\u2019s the end of our tour on communication. We hope these articles will be useful to understand how you can communicate clearly and efficiently, without falling for verbal tricks.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Credits<\/h3>\n

\"Brook<\/a>

Brook Gardner-Durbin
\nReviewer<\/p><\/div>

\"Aruna<\/a>

Aruna Prem Bianzino
\nEditor <\/p><\/div><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What are shortcuts? How do they work? Last in the “communication series”, this article tells us how to use them, what we are allowed to do and what we are not.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":278,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[42,32],"language":[38],"class_list":["post-559","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-rules-and-policies-for-players","tag-communication","tag-imj-magazine","language-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/278"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=559"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":573,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/559\/revisions\/573"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=559"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=559"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/playerexperience\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=559"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}