Unnoficial Mtg ask a judge

Magus of the moon, life and limb, urborg and kromus bell out.

What happens?

You lose some friend points.

At the begining of my end step, my oponent unsumon my creature with flash, can I cast it again in that moment?

Do you think that new sets have gotten more or less rulesy in the last few years? Do you get more awkward judge questions at your LGS now or less?

>can I cast it again in that moment?
Yes. What a lot of players don't understand is that if a nonactive player does something when the active player was attempting to skip phases, the active player then gets to do things in that step again.

A case came up at my LGS a couple days ago where I attempted to move to combat with 2 Fathom Fleet Captains down. My opponent responded by saying "before that I'll Push one of them". When I attempted to cast a creature before combat he couldn't wrap his head around what he'd done, claiming that we were in combat. I let him have his way since it was only a friendly (he was trying WAY too hard) but informed him that if he was planning on going to PPTQs, he should read up on how priority works.

Likewise I recommend you read up on priority. It's very logical if that's your gig.

I assume he intended to do it at the beigning of combat, has to be pretty specfifc with those things.

Yeah that's what he intended, but he just assumed that I'd assume he was passing priority.

Thanks. I'll read it up

ive been playing for less than a year and I know the answers to these questions. Can I b a judge now?

Being a judge is a pretty shit deal honestly. You have to deal with actual manbabies who take a children's card game seriously to the point where they'll straight up threaten to get your judge qualification revoked for daring to question their play. Like, who would do that? By all means become the rules guy at your LGS, but becoming a judge is most likely not something you want to do.

Answer this question first, explaining the layers involved:

Urborg is a Mountain, and that's it as far as I can tell. There's no Forests or Saprolings in play so Life and Limb is irrelevant, and Urborg isn't a Swamp so Kromus Bell doesn't do anything to it.

As of the rules chance in September, would an art altered card that covered or removed part of the border be legal in sanctioned play?

There is no card named "treasure", so you can't name them with phithing needle or spyglass. Just like runed halo can't give you protection from spirit or zombie tokens.

Oh and by the way the treasure ability IS a mana ability

If both Fog and Morgul Night are in play, what the hell happens to Wildernesses and Shadow Lands?

Personally I've only been playing since RTR, though I think that, though there are always cards that throw people in a loop and bring more questions (Panharmonicon, the new colourless symbol, morph), most blocks have been fairly straightfoward on their own. Its when cards start hitting eternal formats and getting mixed with cards from lots of sets that things start to get crazy.

To become a judge you need to have an interview, judge two events and pass a written exam, all supervised by an L2. The knowledge you'll need includes layer 7, the steps of casting a spell, JAR, parts of a turn, how combat works and how 2HG works.

I haven't heard about this, what are the details?

That can't happen because of the new link summoning rules.

Here are the classifications of an Authorized Game Card, but that also stipulates, uh, that they're 'unaltered'. It's from the Magic Tournament rules update in September, linked magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/news/september-magic-tournament-rules-release-notes-2017-09-25 here. The change seems to be in response to the borderless basics in the upcoming Unset, but the rules don't seem to specify that, only certain rules about the border of the card, which seemed to matter before?

In general, though, what kind of guidelines can you suggest for card alters? WoTC themselves have printed cards without any rules text, and those are explicitly legal, so does that make it fine for us to do the same? I'm sure we actually need to have the name visible - does the full name have to be visible, or enough to be understood?

>tfw you finally added Yixlid Jailer to your Judge Tower and already have so many situations in which you don't really know what will happen

Right. The rules change seems to be partly because of unhinged lands and partly because of invocations (the previous rules were cards had to have a black or white border, which invocations do not). I would say getting borders removed should be fine, but the final say of whether or not your alter is ok is up to the head judge. The rules for alters are:

The mana cost and name must be visible. For the name I've seen stuff with a tendril or vine crossing the name box, obscuring a letter or two, so that should be fine as long as its still legible overall.

The art must be recognizable and not contain any offensive materials. So maracas on your El Goyfo? Fine. Replacing the whole art with Billy Mays holding a wondermop? Probably not. Goyf surrounded by half naked anime girls? Not gonna happen.

Art can't contain substantial strategic advice. That guy a few years ago who had FACE written on his bolts was cutting it close and not every judge would allow that.

Altered cards can't be recognizable from the back, ie, marked. Thats what they meant in that image you posted. With sleeves on, is the card thicker, or does it feel different? If so, it's not ok.

In the end though the head judge has the final say. If you're worried about it, bring extra, unaltered copies to the tournament, ask the head judge if they can check your alters, and swap them out if they say no.

I've tried to convince my group to try judge tower before, maybe now that I'm actually a judge I'll try again. Any tips for building one?

>I've tried to convince my group to try judge tower before, maybe now that I'm actually a judge I'll try again. Any tips for building one?

The best way to get people playing it is just having a fuckass huge tower and having fun with it. People will flock to it naturally. Market it as being the masochist's Magic.

I've seen several variants of Judge Tower. In our store we play one with open hand, optional Scry/shuffle effects and loss counters. Whenever someone loses, they get a loss counter and start the game immediately again with starting hand as judge level + loss counters, but extra cards for loss counters cap at 2. Our Tower is interaction and permanent based. There are also a lot of graveyard interactions. Death by a Thousand Stings is always a fun card to have for that. But the best thing is to just test out the format and see what you and your group like. Then add and remove cards by talking about it. We had a point when our Tower was really balanced and barely anyone made a mistake anymore because basically every card was kinda known. I fixed that by adding more and more cards and now we're at a very sweet spot where everyone fails miserably and it's extremely fun to watch.

Say I have two bomat couriers on the field. Each with three cards under them, and call to the Netherworld in my hand.

If I activate courier A and discard my hand, can I then activate courier B in response to the madness trigger and end the turn with six cards in hand?

Even without the madness you can hold priority and sacrifice the second delivery bot to end up with 6 cards.

With Call to the Netherworld you can end up with 7 cards in hand.

new player here: I was playing on MTGO and my opponent cast a JourneyToNowhere on my creature, I answered with a Counterspell and for some reason JTN wasn't countered. Please help me understand what happened.

I checked the replay, it was a Pyroblast

And THATS the difference between Pyroblast and Red Elemental Blast

Are there any card interactions where you think the official ruling should be changed?

Brainlet here.

Can I tap Urzas mine for 2 mana. Cast Chromatic Star. Then pay the mana and tap it for its ability and sacrifice it?

Yes, unless you're trying to cast Star and activate it on different steps/phases.

if i have maralen and mindlock orb i assume the following will happen:
no one draws any cards, no one searches for a card either, everyone loses 3 health each turn.
my real question is do they still have to shuffle the library? can i call them out on it if they don't?

I thought as much but wasn't too sure. Thanks.

Just to be sure:
My opponent cannot crack Sentinel Totem or Crook of Condemnation in response to my trying to crack pic related, correct? If he wanted to stop it, he'd have to do it before I had the requisite number of creatures in the graveyard, right?

Also on the subject of alters, does someone blacking out the "ugh" and "k" of every instance of Thought-Knot with pen to make it "Thot-not" violate the "The mana cost and name must be visible" rule if the rest of the card is unaltered? I have a friend who's a real fucking idiot and I want to stop him before he takes them to a real tournament.

Is this game really as wildly inaccessible as it looked the last time I looked into it?

>My opponent cannot crack Sentinel Totem or Crook of Condemnation in response to my trying to crack pic related, correct?
*to stop me from fetching Gift, I meant.

No

Well, it seemed to me that unless you have a bunch of kitchen table friends getting into it at the same time as you, it's extremely newbie hostile but allright.

Depends on format. Look into the various popular ones before you jump in.
Depends on the LGS. Shop around for one that's more laid back. Maybe your city is just full of assholes.

There is a lot more information, resources, videos and streams for MTG than any other paper card game online.

Guys, if he doesn't have friends getting into it or already in and willing to softball, and if he's a typical basement nerd with nonexistent social skills... He's right.

The learning curve/buy in for trying to enter magic without a casual ease-in is not only daunting, it's probably not even worth trying. This isn't GW where you walk into a store and an overeager paid on commission guy crams a starter set down your throat sideways then walks you through painting a space marine.

If you're scared of human contact and meeting new people why even try to get into a paper ccg? Just play heartstone or something.

>The learning curve/buy in for trying to enter magic without a casual ease-in is not only daunting, it's probably not even worth trying.
Entering magic does not mean jumping into every format, and immediately having an encyclopedic knowledge of every card and interaction in the game. Just getting into standard/sealed/draft is a great way to start.
And the buy-in can be extremely cheap, especially if you just want a standard FNM deck.

>Guys, if he doesn't have friends getting into it or already in and willing to softball, and if he's a typical basement nerd with nonexistent social skills... He's right.
I will concede that it's much easier to get into with a casual kitchen table as you learn the rules.

>This isn't GW where you walk into a store and an overeager paid on commission guy crams a starter set down your throat sideways then walks you through painting a space marine.
Some stores will help you get started, especially if you come in when it's dead. Heck a lot of players will help with deck construction if you just have the capacity to ask.