{"id":1206,"date":"2024-09-26T12:31:21","date_gmt":"2024-09-26T19:31:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/?p=1206"},"modified":"2024-09-26T21:15:46","modified_gmt":"2024-09-27T04:15:46","slug":"policy-update-for-duskmourn","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/2024\/09\/26\/policy-update-for-duskmourn\/","title":{"rendered":"Policy Update for Duskmourn"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

IPG<\/a> | MTR<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

We’ve got some nice quality-of-life improvements, including two changes to the missed trigger rules, changes to a deck problem upgrade, and revisiting a ruling from a prior decade. None of that sounds remotely spooky, right? Just don’t split the party.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Who Died and Made You Aristotle?<\/h3>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We have two separate additions to the Missed Trigger rules. The first is the answer to a deeply philosophical question: “If a trigger is missed, did it trigger at all?” For years, the answer didn’t have a lot of relevance, but with the modern “this only triggers once\/twice per turn” template, counting can be complicated.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer is that the trigger did indeed trigger. The tree falling in the woods still makes a sound, even if nobody is around to hear it. This is both the pragmatic answer – the opponent may have known about it and shouldn’t have that uncertainty – and the one that keeps abuse potential to a minimum. We don’t want somebody “missing” their trigger in the hopes that they can get it later in the turn where it’s better for them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rewriting History<\/h3>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The second update to Missed Triggers is a little radical, as it’s rewriting the game rules a bit to make for smoother rulings. Putting a counter on a Saga is a game action. It feels like it should be a trigger, sounds like a trigger, and there’s a trigger immediately afterwards (performing whatever effect is associated with the new saga chapter), but the action itself is not a trigger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That creates some odd situations, because it makes the action “unmissable” in the sense that it should be handled as a Game Rule Violation, where this much better way of handling it is right over here. But one of the reasons that it took so long to make this change was the question of why it wasn’t a trigger in the first place. What arcane corner of the rules had someone in the design\/rules\/templating elite cabal noticed that caused them to make the decision? Weere they consciously trying to keep it out of the Missed Trigger rules? Without that understanding, we weren’t confident that making a tweak here wouldn’t trip some odd problem.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The answer came back that it wasn’t anything above and that they’d be happy for us to treat that game action as a trigger, and so we shall. You can miss a saga action now, and have it handled just like a missed trigger.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your Question is Invalid<\/h3>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the lines that has been iterated on a ton of times in the IPG is the “invalid number of cards” deck problem upgrade. There’s been lots of debate about what “invalid” means, with multiple conflicting interpretations floating around out there. The latest version will, fingers crossed, put the ambiguity to rest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Actually explaining the philosophy of the upgrade is pretty easy. We don’t want people running fewer cards in their deck, as that is hard to notice and increases the odds you’ll draw the other ones. But what does “fewer” mean? Well, that changes according to what game it is, and how many cards you registered. For example, if I’m running 62\/13, then in game 2, sideboard to 60\/15, is that “fewer”? Obviously not! But we couldn’t use “legal” (a previous attempt), because running 60 in the first game should be upgraded. Plus, sideboards have maximum size rules while decks have minimum size rules. Combine that with different rules for when you could sideboard, and eventually you end up with something technically correct – “invalid” – but not intuitive enough.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The new version solves this problem by creating two definitions; one for pre-sideboard games and one for post-sideboard games, then uses precise language to explain the two. For pre-sideboard games, it’s fewer than the decklist. For post-sideboard games, we look to the game rules instead.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Speaking of Invalid<\/h3>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The partial fix for card-in-the-wrong zone is another section that’s gotten many rewrites over the years. In particular, the current iteration wasn’t symmetrical, because it didn’t handle the idea of a creature with non-lethal damage being put into a graveyard, even while it did handle a creature with lethal damage not going to a graveyard. That was originally intentional – bringing cards back to the battlefield later in the turn is likely to be disruptive – but it’s not intuitive, and several judges asked questions about it. A couple of proposals were floated that I thought were too broad, but had interesting potential to play with. What were we actually trying to accomplish with this particular fix? It’s there so we don’t rewind huge chunks of the game when we realize that a card in the graveyard should be exiled, but it philosophically should apply to other cards moving around incorrectly. But we don’t want to see situations like the classic Wrath of God for 3W suddenly being a partial fix\u2026 wait, we have technology for that. So now the rule broadly applies to cards changing zones incorrectly, but only if the zone change itself was the error, not something prior. If the root cause is something else, the partial fix doesn’t apply.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The remaining caveats are still there, and I want to specifically highlight that it still needs to be a minimally disruptive fix. Bringing things back to the battlefield is often not minimally disruptive, so handle with care!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Dark Souls<\/h3>\n\n\n

<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Cavern of Souls ruling is\u2026 sufficient years in the past to make use feel very old. It’s one of the very few times that the philosophy of the rules came into conflict with the philosophy of card design. That conflict was so unusual that it prompted an article on the Magic website discussing the philosophies at play and why this one was going to be ruled unusually. Cavern of Souls faded out of Standard, and all was good.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But it’s been ahem<\/em> years, Cavern of Souls has been reprinted, Delighted Halfling is here, and the article is gone so we can’t even point new judges to it. They’re deriving the old, problematic ruling from core philosophies and we can’t blame them for that! We had the choice of writing a whole new article and getting it up somewhere very public, hoping that it would buy us another gulp<\/em> years, or we could try for a fix. And someone proposed an elegant fix.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The thing about shortcuts in Magic is that the formal defaults defined are usually reinforcements of our principles. But they can also be used to highlight exceptions! And so we have, with a new shortcut that says when a player has a card with multiple mana abilities, default to the most narrowly-applicable one. Delighted Halflings can remain delighted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Wrapping Up<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

That’s it for Duskmourn. Tread lightly and pay no attention to the ghouls that make up the high-level judges of Judge Foundry, led by the mostly-not-dead Brook Gardner-Durbin, who I want to thank for their helpful suggestions and concerns. Stay safe! Where did I put all the cute animals again?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

IPG | MTR We’ve got some nice quality-of-life improvements, including two changes to the missed trigger rules, changes to a deck problem upgrade, and revisiting a ruling from a prior decade. None of that sounds remotely spooky, right? Just don’t split the party. Who Died and Made You Aristotle? We have two separate additions to […]<\/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-1206","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\/1206","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=1206"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1216,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206\/revisions\/1216"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1206"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/telliott\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=1206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}