Taking a little break from the Return to Ravnica previews, we’ll do our normal Tournament Tuesday tip.
NOTE: All of this only matters at Competitive REL and higher—stuff like PTQs and GPTs and GPs—and it won’t go into effect until October 1st. At your local FNM and at the Return to Ravnica prerelease this weekend, you’re still required to point out your opponent’s triggers, and they’ll still happen even if you’d prefer they didn’t, just as they have for a long time now. And at any Competitive or Professional REL events you may play in between now and the end of the month, the current IPG’s Lapsing Triggers policy is still in effect.
We’ve got a big change today: the “Lapsing” triggers change from earlier this year has been repealed entirely (though some of the basic tenets of the philosophy behind that policy remain). It was a little bit clunky, and the gurus on high have come up with a new solution that works much more simply and much more elegantly.
The big thing you need to know is that all of your triggers must be announced now. In the past, there was a category of ‘invisible’ triggers, which were triggers that required no choice to be made and didn’t affect the visual representation of the game. A perfect example of this would be Exalted, or Goldnight Commander. Previously, even if you didn’t notice your trigger, it was assumed to have happened; this is no longer the case. You must announce, or at least acknowledge your triggers for them to happen. If you whiff on one of them, you’re at the mercy of your opponent.
There’s a few changes on the Judge side, but nothing you players should really fret about. What YOU should care about:
- All of your triggers must be announced. Optional or not, good or bad, ‘visible’ or ‘invisible’, they must be announced in order to happen. Purposely ignoring a trigger you control is still Cheating—Fraud. While you don’t necessarily need to say “I put this trigger on the stack…” you do need to make some acknowledgement that you’re aware of the trigger. Attacking with Geist of Saint Traft and saying “Attack for 6,” or resolving Huntmaster of the Fells and passing turn as you reach for your deck box to grab a wolf token are both acceptable forms of acknowledgement.
- You’re still not required to point out your opponent’s triggers if you would prefer they not happen. If it’s a trigger that you’d like to happen (say, he controls a Demonic Taskmaster and a creature you’d like to die), you can still call the Judge over and have the trigger put on the stack within one turn (this is no longer the extinct “turn cycle,” but the more intuitive “one turn,” which is from the point in the turn where your opponent missed it to that same point in your own turn). This can happen for any trigger, whether or not your opponent received a Warning.
- It’s possible to accidentally whiff a trigger and not get a Warning for it. You only get a Warning if the trigger is ‘generally detrimental’; i.e., something you’d normally prefer not to happen.
Today’s Rules Tip written by
Trevor Nuñez, Level 1 judge from Roswell, NM