{"id":1174,"date":"2023-09-06T08:57:30","date_gmt":"2023-09-06T15:57:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/?p=1174"},"modified":"2023-09-06T08:57:30","modified_gmt":"2023-09-06T15:57:30","slug":"policy-update-for-wilds-of-eldraine","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/2023\/09\/06\/policy-update-for-wilds-of-eldraine\/","title":{"rendered":"Policy Update for Wilds of Eldraine"},"content":{"rendered":"

[cets_callout_box style=’yellow’ align=’right’ title=’The New Docs’]IPG<\/a> | MTR<\/a>
\n[\/cets_callout_box]<\/p>\n

Hey everyone, is this thing on?<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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!) <\/p>\n

It Is Pitch Black. You are Likely to Be Eaten By a Werewolf.<\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Your Cool Idea For a Magic Card Remains Not Actually a Magic Card<\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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<\/a>. 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.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

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. <\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Quick Hits<\/h1>\n

* Speaking of Status Information, the Ring tempts us to add that there.
\n* 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.
\n* 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.
\n* 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.<\/p>\n

That’s All For Now<\/h1>\n

<\/p>\n

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! <\/p>\n

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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[cets_callout_box style=’yellow’ align=’right’ title=’The New Docs’]IPG | MTR [\/cets_callout_box] 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":26,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"language":[9],"class_list":["post-1174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-policy","language-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/26"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1174"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1186,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1174\/revisions\/1186"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1174"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=1174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}