Policy Update for Wilds of Eldraine

| telliott
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Hey everyone, is this thing on?

It’s been a while, and I’m sure a lot of folks were wondering what happened. Obviously tournaments shut down during the pandemic, with lots of uncertainty around when they might finally return. When they did… it turned out that policy handled (almost) everything that happened in the interim pretty well. We kept waiting for the other shoe to drop and it didn’t, but it meant we didn’t have a lot of reason to put out an update.

But there eventually were two things that did need some attention, and a few other odds and ends that we threw in that hadn’t justified an update release on their own (along with one that came up while we were preparing the update!)

It Is Pitch Black. You are Likely to Be Eaten By a Werewolf.

We dodged a couple of pretty problematic sets during the pandemic. Ikoria brought us mutate and companion right as everything shut down, but that was mostly going to be rules headaches and some tweaking to make companion work with the deckbuilding rules; the latter probably gets tweaked over time and the former doesn’t look to be relevant for constructed at this point. But then we got Midnight Hunt and a candidate for the most problematic tournament mechanic of all time in Day/Night.

Day/Night presents some unique challenges that make it hard to work with current policy. The mechanic itself is disconnected from the permanents that care about it, and can change even when no permanents with the keyword are on the battlefield. It changes on nothing happening. It looks like status information, but it has no controller. The closest precedent we have to this is turn number, and Magic has been very careful to keep that to only caring about the first few turns. So players can be quick to forget about it, then it suddenly becomes relevant and nobody has been paying attention.

After trying to wedge it into various places that either required way too much rewriting, or resulted in far too many penalties for things the players were not individually responsible for, we went the other way. And so there’s an entire new communication section devoted to Day/Night, which basically treats it as a Communication Policy Violation but without an underlying penalty.

But that wasn’t enough, because we’re still left without clear guidance on how to fix it if you and the players genuinely can’t decide if it’s Day or Night. There we have to apply a little simple logic – no spells are cast more often in a turn than two spells, and two spells tends to be more memorable. So if you can’t figure out what happened, it’s most likely night and we should go with that. Note that it’s not just a catchall default; only use it when you really can’t figure it out.

Your Cool Idea For a Magic Card Remains Not Actually a Magic Card

The other big change we saw over the pandemic was Wizards really freeing up what Magic cards look like, especially with the Secret Lairs. This is great when you are looking for sweet new treatments of your favorite Magic cards, and not so great when you have to define what constitutes a card that’s legal to play. Traditionally, the main indicator has been the back of a Magic card, but that was already pretty tenuous with the various forms of double-faced cards, and got even more tenuous with the introduction of the Ulamog cereal box and the foils with a copy of the same card on each side. Plus, we had Mystery Booster “playtest” cards, which were legal in sanctioned draft, and a whole bunch of Gavin’s Unknown “cards” floating around. New wrinkles appeared constantly.

Trying to define it by what was legal proved to be challenging. We tried bifurcating for a while and leaning on separate definitions for pre- and post- the black bar on the bottom. But that didn’t work; throwback cards often omit the bottom. The hardest card of all turned out to be Optimus Prime, Inspiring Leader. In a world where cereal Ulamog exists, what makes this card illegal? It’s the existence of a single word – Heroes – in small print on the bottom of the card. Thankfully, the odds of anyone ever bringing one of these to a tournament were vanishingly small.

So we went back to the drawing board. What if we started by defining anything that was a Magic card as legal, then pulled out the things that weren’t? That actually works pretty well – almost everything that isn’t legal anywhere has a gold border. We pulled out Heroes of the Realm cards though there was debate over whether those counted as publicly released. All the playtest cards were fine for limited, and Un-cards needed their usual call out, but that was – we think – it.

It’s important to call out that there’s not intended to be any functional change here, aside from legalizing a few Secret Lair cards that didn’t quite work in the old definition. Given the many, many printings of cards out there, it is possible that we accidentally made something legal that obviously should not be. Assume that it’s still illegal and let us know so we can close the hole.

While we were in there, we cleared up the questions around the cards where they’re messing around with the names in some of the wackier Secret Lairs. As everyone has been doing all along, they’re the same card; now there’s some rules support for that. And all that stuff we said about everyone having Dungeons all the time? Well, that’s true for all the other tokens too, really, so we just made that generic. Note that this does not apply to substitute cards, which continue to require the official version.

Quick Hits

* Speaking of Status Information, the Ring tempts us to add that there.
* The link in the IPG for information on how to handle a disqualification has been out of date for some time, so we finally fixed that.
* There’s now extremely limited support for backing up in Missed Trigger. It’s only for triggers where the first time you know that it has been missed is when a subsequent action is performed, and only that action. This will be useful for Chalice of the Void and a few other situations.
* As we were preparing this update, there was a ruling that caused some confusion about missing cards in a deck being found in the middle of the resolution of the spell. There was a nice simple fix where the opponent gets to decide (now or when the spell finishes resolving) that makes the situation less ambiguous, so we snuck it in.

That’s All For Now

So, the big question – will it be a couple years before the next update? I can confidently say no, but less confidently that we’ll return to the prepandemic schedule. Fewer Competitive REL tournaments mean that fewer issues are being raised as consistent problems. The fact that everything more or less held up during a multi-year hiatus suggests that maybe we don’t need quite the cadence of updates we had previously. Or maybe future releases mean that we do – in a game like Magic, change is a constant!

What doesn’t change is that updates happen because of contributions from judges who see problems and make suggestions for how they can be improved. Special thanks to Isaac King, Joe Klopchic and Joseph Steet for their suggestions and the discussions that ensued. And if you see something that you think needs a tweak, feel free to reach out (easiest way is tobyelliott on Twitter, though I’ll check in on the comments below). If you’re going to be in Vegas, come find me in the hall; no, not Worlds, I’ll be floating around the main hall, which means I’m likely to have time to chat!

30 thoughts on “Policy Update for Wilds of Eldraine”

  1. Hi Toby!

    Small clarification about Day/Night and CPV:
    1) if we can backup till to the point when the change was relevant, we do so and change from Day to Night or viceversa;
    2) If we can’t perform a backup but we are sure about being Day or Night, we simply switch the designation now and let the player continue the game;
    3) If 1 and 2 are not possible, it becomes Night.

    Did I get it right?
    Thanks in advance!
    Jacopo

  2. Its may be worth a carve out for oversized and undersized cards in the authorized cards section.

    Previously, the “magic back” requirement covered most of these, but that’s gone now. Obviously Marked Cards still applies, but there are double-faced non-standard sized promo cards which are *technically legal* with a substitute card.

    1. So I thought about oversized cards (and the undersized ones), and my conclusion was that they didn’t even count as Magic cards. We can add a note about an official size if this is actually causing problems.

      1. For whatever it’s worth, this did cause a bit of a stink in pokemon in recebt memory, a player playing with an oversized deck got all sorts of coverage, and the subsequent rules change. I feel like this is a when and not an if.

      3. Sliver Queen. Is it a time bomb?

        Like…
        Would people get really mad if they spend a bunch of money, then a judge ruling crashes the market on the oversized, then the internet is on fire for a few days?

        Or if that’s a risk is there nothing that prevents the internet from catching fire?

      4. As I said, I don’t think they’re actual Magic cards, and anyone willing to do this would have no justification for getting mad.

      5. The argument I would make is that the “genuine Magic cards” clause is restricted by “released by Wizards of the Coast,” and indeed, these promotional oversized cards were released by Wizards, as much as GP promos of the correct size would be.

        The true oversized cards aren’t really an issue, but Wizards now releases (or has released, I haven’t paid attention) a Commander deck with one of the extra-thick “Display Commanders” that’s a DFC, there is a legitimate chance someone might try to use it in a constructed tournament.

        We call them “oversized cards” or “giant cards” and they have Magic on them. They are Magic Cards, by the English definition, because there isn’t anywhere that says “only cards that are this size, thickness, weight are Magic cards.”

    2. On that topic, there are also the new thick commanders, who are normal size but thick.

  4. How do you define action? And how do you define subsequent?

    For example–if I cast Lightning Bolt on a Mon’s Goblin Raider, then cast Lightning Bolt on the opponent

    *Damage is dealt
    *We move to state based effects, we see a creature with damage equal to or more than their hitpoints
    *We move that creature to the graveyard
    *We move back to state based effects
    *You announce you are casting a spell
    *You choose targets
    *You pay costs
    *You resolve the new spell

    Which of those are considered real actions? And which actions do we ignore when deciding which was a subsequent action?

    1. The “subsequent action” is whatever visible action was taken that indicated the trigger was missed. In the case above, the action is moving the creature to the graveyard.

      1. Consider

        Hypothetical Green Spell
        G
        Gain 2 Life
        Search your library for a land, put it into your hand, then shuffle.

        Player casts this into their own chalice, writes down the two life, then picks up their deck. Can we back up to put the chalice trigger on the stack? A strict reading of what a simple backup is says no, but reasonably it seems that we should be able to.

      2. I think that’s an excessively strict reading of simple backup and this would be fine. Unless it’s something ludicrously complicated, treating “resolve a spell” as an action is pretty safe.

      3. So, would it be correct to state that passing priority is not a subsequent action?

        So if my opponent casts Lightning Bolt, and I told him that I trigger my Chalice of the Void, can they state that since they haven’t made any actions since announcing the casting of Lightning Bolt that they can take back the casting of the spell?

        Right now, when attempting to cast a spell, you can make adjustments as to which lands are tapped to pay for the spell. As such, you can tap/untap lands and artifacts and mana dorks as needed to cast a spell while you’re still attempting to cast it. Currently, it is assumed that once you pass priority, you’ve already made too many actions and hence you cannot take back the lands you’ve tapped.

        If passing priority is no longer a subsequent action, then can you untap your lands when your opponent attempts to counter your spells, and then state that you never had the mana to cast the spell to begin with and hence have to return the spell your cast back to your hand preventing them from countering your spells?

        And if passing priority in that moment does count as a subsequent action, then wouldn’t the act of both players passing priority during a missed chalice trigger mean that multiple Subsequent actions have occurred and hence, we cannot rewind back to when the player initially cast the spell?

      4. I’m not able to connect how you get from triggers not being missed to taking back the casting of a spell. Nothing in the Missed Trigger definition has anything to do with the casting of spells.

      5. I think the concern is over the “random elements” part, not the “single action” part. My understanding of a simple backup is that it doesn’t cover seeing a card from a library, since the way to back that up is by shuffling the library, which is a random element.

  5. So how exactly does the new missed trigger back-up condition work with Chalice of the Void? I think I’m understanding what it’s trying to do, but a game play example would be nice.

    1. A casts a spell into their own Chalice. Tries to resolve it but is stopped by N. Previously we would put the trigger on the stack afterwards, which was pointless. This lets you back up the thing they’re trying to do that indicated that they missed the trigger.

  6. Toby, I’m curious about your thoughts re: Day/Night, and the (common?) scenario in which only one player has cards that can make this status relevant – not completely dissimilar to something like Howling Mine being detrimental for one player, but not the other. (I also think about Monarch in Eternal formats – where you can become the Monarch without ever having seen that mechanic before…)

    Was there discussion about putting more of an onus on the player who brought the “problem” to the match?

    1. Hi Scott!

      Putting onus the player who introduced the mechanic was considered, but it’s honestly more complicated and not worth the additional provisions. The fact that it can change even when there’s no permanent in play as a reminder and due to opponent actions makes it challenging to assign blame (well, except to Wizards for creating the mechanic 😛 ) W

    1. They’re exactly as legal as they were before, which is to say that they are silver-bordered.

  8. Hi Toby,

    While translating the documents, I found an error around the Authorized Cards.

    >Cards that, unaltered, feature gold borders on their front or back, and cards from the “Heroes of the Realm” series (usually denoted by a different card back), are not Authorized Game Cards

    The paragraph says “unaltered” but I believe it must be “altered” or some more concrete definition.
    Is that intentional?

    1. No, this is correct, You can’t take a gold bordered card and alter it to be black bordered and it’s suddenly tournament legal. So, when you consider legality, you have to consider legality of the unaltered version of the card.

      Thanks for doing the translation!

  9. Does this effect the possible tournament playability of alters? (Assuming the paint is not unduly thick, and thus marking the card).

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