MTG Magic The Gathering Ask A Judge - 「 B L U E M O N D A Y 」

KAVU

PREDATOR

Is an Horse an athlete?

Only if that horse is Seabiscuit.

Sorry for what probably sounds like a noob question but if I have any kind of infinite combo on my turn that my opponents has no response, say Saheeli and Felidar, can I legally just sit there and do that ad infinitum until my opponent concedes?

You cannot. For something like that, the proper course of action is to demonstrate one iteration of the loop (to prove that you know how it actually works, step-by-step, and to prove that it is repeatable), then propose a shortcut; you need to tell me exactly how many loops that shortcut will be, and the end result of it all.

So for Copycat, show me that you -2 Saheeli to make a copy of Felidar, Felidar blinks Saheeli, and you're ready to repeat. Each loop is +1 cat, so you can say "Repeat 5000 times, I have 5000 cats with haste". You've told me the number of loops and the end state we're shortcutting to. If your opponent wants to interrupt this loop somewhere, they may (say "In response to the trigger, shock your Saheeli"), but they can't just decline your shortcut outright. So if they have no response, you just demonstrate the loop, shortcut through however many thousand iterations of it you want, and then swing out.

Thanks, I figured it'd be something like that. I buddy recently made this deck and we were wondering exactly if he would just tell me how many times the loop would resolve.

Yeah. Tons of the MTR is written specifically to translate the way the CR says the game goes, into the way people will actually play.

What exactly do I have to say to move to the phase in which Toolcraft Exemplar's trigger would be put on the stack?

"Move to combat, Toolcraft Exemplar triggers?" or something like that. Just make it clear that you're needing to stop in the Beginning of Combat step for that trigger.

I end my main phase.

There's an argument there that you miss your trigger, because that's normally a way to move straight to Declare Attackers and you haven't acknowledged your trigger.

Really? But i didn't propose a shortcut. I just ended my main phase.
Rules are rules i guess.

MTR is fucky, that's why I asked my original question. There was a big controversy about it.

I'm assuming there's no point in otherwise moving to the 'beginning of combat step' if nothing would trigger, beyond niche uses of it clearing floating mana and/or preventing further sorcery-speed things.

Yeah, things are fucky with Beginning of Combat because right now there's basically no way for you to move from your Precombat Main Phase to your Beginning of Combat Step unless you have an actual reason to be acting there (Your opponent currently has floating mana, you have a spell you can only cast then, you have a trigger there, etc), and you verbalize that.

That shortcut 'rule' was put in place because back in the day, people would create (and abuse) ambiguity as to what step we were in, and there was hardly ever a reason to be acting in BOC instead of the main phase.

Several high-level judges have expressed a sense of "This is how this works, but we understand that's weird and fucky" now that it frequently DOES matter where you're acting, so it seems like they're looking at the shortcut rules and trying to refine them.

>Sorcery speed things
Which only you would be doing, because it's your turn. Basically the only time you would actually be WANTING priority in the BOC step is if there's floating mana in your opponent's pool, you have a spell you can only cast there, or you have a trigger.

What if my opponent wants priority in beginning of combat?

They get it. When you say something like "Combat?" or "Declare attackers?" or whatever, what you're ACTUALLY doing (per the MTR) is proposing a shortcut that ends with your opponent having priority in your Beginning of Combat Step.

Say both me and my opponent have 1 health and are both holding bolts.
Can either player win without responding to the other player's bolt?
In other words, is there any way to avoid the "game of chicken"?

What was the official ruling on Kalitas and anger of the gods type effects?

can you clearly explain last best information and when it wold be used? I had an issuse awhile ago with an experiment one and an elvolve trigger

There isn't. Whichever player blinks first (in this case, 'casts their bolt') seals their death because the opponent just responds with their own. Without introducing other elements into this, if you both know there's a bolt in each other's hand, it's just gonna be "Draw go" until that changes.

It's your opponent's choice which one to apply.

"last best information" is not a thing.

"Last KNOWN information" is when the game needs to know something about an object that's no longer in the zone it's expected to be in. Since it can't just look at the card as it exists in that zone, it looks back in time to how that card last existed in that zone. So say you had an Experiment One with no counters, and played a 2/2 creature. If your opponent Doom Blades the 2/2 in response to Evolve, your Experiment evolves because LKI says "That was a 2/2". If they hit it with Disfigure instead, it would NOT evolve, because LKI says "That was a 0/0"

What if I say "get a zombie" and my opponent says ok

One thing that has always messed me up is how 'whenever another creature dies' abilities interact with boardwipes and similar simultaneous kills

So let's say there's 3 other creatures and a Sangromancer. Wrath of God happens. Does Sangromancer get to suck 9 life, or since it's dead at the same time, does no life get gained?

Then your opponent just made a stupid but legal choice. As long as you're not telling them that you HAVE to get a Zombie, and are instead just letting them make an incorrect (but legal) play, you're fine. They have all the power in the world to say "No, because I'm choosing to have Anger's effect exile them". Superior knowledge of the rules is considered a skill that we want to reward.

Things that enter or leave the field simultaneously "see" each other do it, so Sangriamancer would trigger 3 times.

What do you have to do to get judge promos?

So, in days past you used to get them one of three-ish ways. The most common by far was to work a large event like a GP or the Pro Tour; you'd get a packet of foils as a "thank you" from Wizards. You could also get a 'smaller' packet for attending a Judge Conference (as a combination of 'incentive' and 'recoup for cost of travel), and finally it was possible to get some "attaboy" foils for doing some above-and-beyond stuff, though that was rare.

A few years back, that changed- nobody outside of WOTC is 100% sure why, but there's a lot of theories. Either way, it ended promos at GPs and the PT. What replaced it was the system we use now: Exemplar. We get about 4-ish Exemplar "Waves" per year, each lasting a few months. Every L2 and L3 gets some number of recognition 'slots' they can use; Regional Coordinators get a few extra. We use these to recognize specific judges who we think have done dope shit- we call out Exemplary behavior that we feel should be recognized and proudly displayed.

At the end of each wave, a committee goes over the recognitions to make sure they meet the criteria (IE, no 'this for that' bullshit, no "thanks for letting me sleep on your couch that one time" crud), and once everything's all good, they publish them on the JudgeApps site for everyone to see. Recognized individuals also receive between 1 and 3 copies of the current wave of Judge foils, depending on the recognitions.

wow that sucks now, so most of those L1s get jack I'm guessing.

The opposite, honestly. The Exemplar system is by no means perfect, but it definitely gets foils to a wider number of people. See, under the old system you'd only get foils for going to a conference (which weren't always within reasonable distance for a lot of people, so the idea of spending 4+ hours on the road each way and maybe having to get a hotel room just so you could get 200 bucks of foils frequently made it so you had to sell those foils to break even), or working a GP. Now, back then L1s at a GP were slightly more common, but sort of the same deal: it was far from a guarantee you'd get on staff, a lot of people would end up having to sell their foils to recoup some of the costs of GETTING to the GP, and if you were an L1 that was more focused on something other than "The path to L2", you were screwed.

Now, especially with shit like Slack, it's a lot easier for us to point out "Hey, Jack Johnson over in Anytown has been kicking major ass by holding Judge Classes every month", or directly recognizing someone on one of our Projects for taking on extra work to keep things rolling, etc.

The system could be better (a lot of 'high visibility' judges get FLOODED with recognitions, while less-visible ones might flounder, and there's some people who fall into the weird grey area of "Lots of people WANT to recognize them, but assume that what they're doing is so obviously great that someone else will get them"), but it's a lot better than not having foils at all, and I personally think it's a better system than we used to have. It just needs more refining.

BED.