As we covered last week, there’s been a few changes in the Missed Trigger policy recently. Today we’re gonna cover one that’s had a little confusion even among judges: Zone-change triggers. First, I’ll start off with a link to Toby Elliot’s article about what the trigger changes mean for players, because you guys are players, and frankly he did a far better job of putting these changes into player-speak than I could even attempt in this post:

http://blogs.magicjudges.org/telliott/2013/02/03/gatecrash-policy-changes-for-players/

Second, we’re going to focus on a specific KIND of trigger, and how to handle it: Zone-changing delayed triggers. While the major update to the Trigger policy handles at what point a trigger is considered ‘missed’, it’s pretty much impossible to miss a trigger like the one that exiles Geist of Saint Traft‘s angel token. The IPG tells us under the ‘additional remedies’ portion of the Missed Trigger rules that if the triggered ability that was missed is a delayed trigger that changes the zone of an object, to resolve it when it’s noticed, though the opponent gets to choose whether to resolve it immediately or at the start of the next phase. To put that into player-speak, if a trigger was set up to make something change zones LATER in the game , there’s no real duration on when it is considered ‘missed’. If you space out and forget about the Angel for a couple turns and then realize it during your upkeep 2 turns later, it’s not “Too late, it’s stuck there forever”; it still goes away. You resolve that trigger and put it where it should be (probably right then, unless the opponent really wants to wait until your main phase for that to happen).

Other similar cards to look out for are Thatcher Revolt, Seance, and Sudden Disappearance (yes, even if you exiled your own permanents). In order to make the policy logical for those triggers that are normally bad for you, there is sometimes a benefit for triggers that you wouldn’t like to miss (e.g., returning your Obzedat, Ghost Council that you forgot about earlier). It’s still never OK to purposely “forget” this trigger, knowing it will come back anyway, as that will earn you an early exit from the event.

Today’s Rules Tip written by Trevor Nunez and Josh Stansfield