Gatecrash Triggers to Watch Out For

The full visual spoiler is out, so it’s time for a quick spin through Gatecrash to look for generally detrimental triggers. Keymaster Rogue Leyline Phantom Spark Trooper That’s it! I’d watch out for Spark Trooper, but things should be pretty clean. Given that there’s a hundred triggers in the set (thanks David Lyford-Smith!), only having […]

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Bob Fear

There’s lots of talk about the new trigger policy. That’s good, as it helps us triangulate to what the players are happy with, which is the main goal. As should be obvious from various somewhat contradictory desires (“I like not having to point out opponent triggers, but I don’t want to look like a jerk”) […]

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Trample

Trample is kind of a pain. Its a set of rules where the ‘obvious’ play doesn’t interact well with the physical representation of the game. Remembering to trample over isn’t a skill we’re interested in testing, but we don’t want to see that damage resurface out of nowhere after strategic decisions may have been made […]

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Horsemyths

I had some good conversations over the past few weekends with Patrick Chapin (congrats on the induction, Pat!) about the rules for infinity in Magic and, specifically, how they interacted with the Four Horsemen deck. I’m not going to hash out the reasons for the existence of the non-determinate looping rules – there’s an excellent […]

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The Jackie Lee DQ

Normally, judges are discouraged from commenting on DQs for a few reasons. It can affect an ongoing investigation, and we don’t have a lot of interest in escalating what may be a he-said-she-said situation. In this situation, though, the investigation has concluded, and we can talk about it based entirely on what Jackie wrote in […]

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