MTG Magic The Gathering Ask A Judge - 「 T H U R S D A Y ' S C H I L D 」

Good morning and welcome back!

I'm fairly sure the answer is no, but can loam dryad, and other cards with similar abilities, target itself?

Nothing about Loam Dryad's ability targets.

If you're asking if you can tap Loam Dryad alone to activate the ability, no. You can't tap it to satisfy two different costs any more than you can spend one green mana to cast two Loam Dryads.

do enchantments stay on vehicles once they become un-crewed? can they be cast onto vehicles before being crewed?

Only if they can target artifacts (stuff like aether meltdown was made with this in mind). If it specifies enchant creature it needs to be crewed first and will fall off when it goes back to just an artifact.

If the enchantment can legally be attached to a noncreature artifact, sure. If it was an "Enchant Creature" aura, no, it'll fall off because that can't legally be attached to a noncreature permanent.

Ditto for casting. You could cast a Quiet Disrepair on a Vehicle before crewing it, but not a Rancor.

At end of turn, during the discard phase, are cards discarded individually or are they discarded in one instance.

Example: I have Gitrog Frog and a 10 card hand. I discard a creature and 2 lands. Do I draw 2 cards or only one?

There's no such thing as a discard phase. There's a Cleanup Step, which is part of the Ending Phase, and part of the cleanup step is discarding to your maximum hand size. You do this all at once; you don't discard 1 card at a time.

If you ditch 2 lands in your cleanup step to the Gitgud Frog, you'll trigger it once and draw 1 card. Then the game will create a new Cleanup Step after this one (because priority passes had to happen due to your trigger), and you'll discard down to 7.

What CMC cascade will search for on
>Cards that cost less to cast
e.g. Blasphemous Act. There is a ruling on Avatar of Woe that says its CMC is 8 no matter what you pay for it (so I take it that would cascade for a 7 CMC or below) but I have not found an official ruling for any other card
>Cards with X in their cost
Is the CMC determined without X or does it include X. In other words, if I pay 5 plus 2 green for an XGG card do I cascade for 6 and below or 1 and below?

The CMC of a card is the sum of the symbols in the top-right. Period. The only time CMC ever changes is with spells that have a variable (like X spells); for those, X is whatever you declared it to be while the object is on the stack, and is 0 everywhere else.

Blasphemous Act has a CMC of 9, because that's the sum of the symbols in the mana cost. CMC is not 'what you pay'. The CMC on this is 9 whether you're paying 8R, 10R, 2R, or WUBRG to cast it.

>X spells
For that, you declared that X=5, and paid 5GG. It has a CMC of 7, not because you paid 7 mana, but because that's the sum of the symbols. If you said X=4, but paid 5GG because of a Thalia on board, the CMC is 6, because the spell's MANA COST was 4GG.

Do you think the slow-play rule, especially in eternal formats, could be enforced better? If so, how would you change enforcement? What tips do you have for a player who wants to call a judge on a slow-play opponent?

I know GRV is game rule violation, but what does that mean?
How does it happen?
What happens after?

IT absolutely could. One of the common complaints among the Judge program is that overall, we need to be a lot better about calling out Slow Play.

My tip is basically "If you feel like it's edging towards Slow Play, call a Judge". Better to err on the side of caution than be too lenient and before you know it they've eaten up way too much time and it's too late in the round for it to matter.

It means 'someone broke a rule'. Basically it's our catch-all penalty for "Someone did something wrong, and it wasn't one of the above penalties". Examples would be casting a Wrath of God with 3 Islands and a Plains, or casting a Sorcery during combat, etc.

What happens after is that the offending player receives a Warning, the opponent MIGHT get a Warning for Failure to Maintain Game State (unless the error was realized so quickly they wouldn't have had a chance to really notice it), and we have a small handful of 'default fixes' that we check. If none of those apply, we ask the question: Is it more harmful to rewind to immediately before this GRV happened, or to leave things alone? Then, we apply whichever of those solutions is least harmful. Sometimes that's the rewind-and-do-it-right, sometimes too much has happened and all we can do is shrug and remind the players that it's BOTH of their responsibilities to ensure the game is played correctly.

I control both Kalitas, Traitor of Ghet and Rest in Peace. A creature my opponent controls dies and isn't aware that they get to choose whether or not Kalitas or RIP applies, not both/always Kalitas. How should I go about this so that I get the zombie without breaking rules or skirting lines if possible

Should I just put a zombie on the table and say "Kalitas' zombie"?

Just ask them something like "do I get a zombie?"

How do Emblems work? Do they count as permanents (I.E. Can I Vindicate them)?

if thing in the ice transforms during combat does that prevent any combat damage applied to/from creatures getting bounced?

I believe emblems go in the command zone and can't be removed by anything.

Yes it will.

No. Emblems aren't a permanent. They just exist.

What about restarting games with Karn?

Yes, it's gone.

Wait so this means if your entire deck is land and you have 8 cards in hand, gitrog monster kills you during your end step.
Weird.

The generally accepted line (this has come up in Judge chats a lot) is to just put a Zombie out or say "Zombie?" or otherwise make it clear you're trying to put one out.

Knowledge of the rules is a skill that is to be tested and rewarded in competitive play; as long as you're not lying to your opponent about how this interaction works, or trying to force them to do it your way, you're okay. If they know it's their choice, they'll stop you and say "Uh, no. These are gonna be exiled by Rest in Peace because it's my choice". if they don't know, then all you're doing is suggesting a 100% legal end state and they're accepting it because they don't know they have other options; no different than you not pointing out their Reach creature when you attack with a flier and they genuinely forget about it when they say "Well, I can't block it".

Emblems are objects created in the Command Zone. They aren't permanents, and currently the only way to directly affect them is to reset the game with Karn.

Sorta. It STOPS the damage since those creatures aren't on board to deal it, but it's not a 'prevention' for things that care about that.

Correct.

Yep!