Magic The Gathering - Malaysia

Looks like there's going to be major tournament policies changes coming along with the Magic 2010 Core Set Rules Changes, though unlike the M10 Rules Changes, the new tournament policies will be affecting our Malaysian National Championships 2009.


Scott Larabee, Nick Sephton, Falko Goerres, George Michelogiannakis, and Jason Ness - judges who substantially contributed to the new MTR .

Judges worldwide received email from Level 5 Judge Toby Elliott announcing major revisions to the Magic tournament documents not too long ago. The changes will come into effect on the 1st of July.

You can find the new documents here.

More below!

Official Announcement on MagicTheGathering.com available here.

1) Graveyard order - just as with Simultaneous Mulligans, we’re adapting a technique that is already used in casual circles to make tournament Magic a little easier to play. The last time Wizards printed a card that cared about the order of your graveyard was over 10 years ago, in the form of Stronghold’s Volrath’s Shapeshifter, and R&D has been very clear that they don’t want to use this as an explorable design space. As a result, as long as they’re playing in formats with cards from Urza’s Saga and on, we no longer care how the players order their graveyard.

2) Cosmetic changes - Just as “removed from game” has changed into Exile, so has much of our terminology been tweaked. The holy trinity of documents you remember - the Penalty Guide, the Universal Tournament Rules and the Magic Floor Rules - have been merged and reconfigured into two documents: the Magic Tournament Rules and the Magic Infraction Procedure Guide. Both documents are devoted solely to Magic, and have been divided into information that players should generally be expected to know (the MTR) and information more geared towards judges (the PG).

Lots of changes cascade from this. Communication is now part of the MTR. Deck/Warband Errors become Deck Errors. Card-Game Specific Rulings move into the main body (which has an impact on what upgrade path infractions are on). Everything is renumbered. Just as with “cast”, “exile” and “Battlefield”, the changes are mostly cosmetic - an organizational shift to make the documents easier to read.

The MTR is particularly worth highlighting. Two years in the making, a ton of judges have made substantial contributions to it. Space prevents me from highlighting all the judges who were involved, but special mention must go to George Michelogiannakis, Falko Goerres, Nick Sephton and Jason Ness, all of whom contributed large sections or took a full whack at the document at one time or another. All your tournament policies should be in here, but they’re cleaner, easier to read, and polished up from years of questions.

3) Mana burn has confused new players for years. Drawing Extra Cards has been a source of similar pain for judges. If I evoke Mulldrifter without blue mana, it’s a Game Rule Violation, but casting Counsel of the Soratami without blue mana is Drawing Extra Cards? If I take the actions on Cruel Ultimatum out of order, which is it? If I activate Jace to have us both draw a card, and it’s the second activation this turn, who gets a penalty?

We spent a lot of time debating options on these and similar questions, and eventually produced a much narrower definition for Drawing Extra Cards: If you are told to draw cards, and draw too many, it’s Drawing Extra Cards. Otherwise it’s a GRV. This is partly to reflect the fact that it can be very hard for an opponent to notice how many cards you’ve drawn and we were able to do this because we’ve been reasonably happy with the success of the GRV backup approach to dealing with the extra drawn card and believe it can be applied more widely.

4) In a rule that will only affect a small number of people, but might have a substantial impact on them, we’re extending Out-of-order sequencing to also cover Professional REL. Initially some of the philosophy was experimental, and we saw it as an opportunity to differentiate the highest level of play. However, pros use out-of-order sequencing just as everyone else does. It’s hard to imagine an Elf mirror at PT Berlin that didn’t involved substantial use of the approaches defined in (former) section 52.

There’s still a lot of work to be done in explaining the application and use of the section, and I’d suggest it’s a good topic for multiple articles (hint, hint), but we believe that the basic philosophies are sound enough to apply at all levels.

5) When I alluded to parallels with the M10 rules changes, I’ll bet everyone immediately wondered what our version of Rule 5 would be. And here it is: players may now look at outside notes between games.

The impetus for this change arose out of some painful questions about sideboards. Are sideboard cards with a dot on them considered marked? What if the dots are differently colored? What if it’s ordered? If my friend looks through my limited sideboard and shuffles a couple cards I might want to play to the top, is that Outside Assistance? (Remarkably, under some interpretations, the answer to all of the above was ‘yes’). In trying to find solutions that worked, the idea of simply not worrying between games came up and turned out to be an elegant solution.

Like the M10 rule 5, I suspect it will turn out to generate a lot more noise than actual impact. The good players realize that sideboarding is a fine art and can’t be brute-forced by a set of notes; even more so they may seek to exploit players who are locked into previously determined plans. Most people didn’t have that hard a time memorizing the sideboarding for basic matchups, so the incremental advantage is small. Players are, of course, still held to the same between-game time- limits.

Related to this, there are new guidelines on acceptable card modifications, and we’re not going to worry as much about minor strategic information. If a player has altered a Tinker to show a Darksteel Colossus emerging, or written “Smash with Me!” on a Goblin Piledriver, odds are fairly high that they didn’t need the help in game. Obviously, writing out ste-by-step combo guides on cards is still out, and the Head Judge has ultimate authority over where the line is.

6) A recurring theme that arises with marked or lost cards is what to do if the player can’t find a replacement. In the past, this has been a death sentence - they haven’t been allowed to continue in the tournament without unmarked versions of the cards. In the interests of enabling them to continue, we’re going to allow them to replace those cards on their decklist with basic lands. Once they do so, it locks in - they can’t go back to the old list even if they find replacement cards later. This is a tradeoff between a very small potential strategic hole and a huge customer service benefit.

7) Finally, speaking of customer service, we’re going to test a new approach to spectators intervening at Regular and Competitive REL. At the moment, a spectator who sees an error should find a judge and let them know, but often they can’t do it fast enough for the judge to be able to do anything other than assess a penalty. Now, spectators will be allowed to ask the players to pause while they find a judge, though that is all they are allowed to do - no indicating to the players what the problem is. This is still in the experimental stages, but we are hopeful that the benefits of not allowing the game to get too far ahead will outweigh the occasional match that gets stopped due to a false positive.

There are lots of smaller changes throughout the documents, and I’d encourage people to look through them to find the other tweaks. A big thanks to the Policy Committee, and the L4 judges, who spent a lot of time discussing and improving these changes. I hope everyone will find these changes helpful in their judging, and would love to hear any feedback or suggestions for improvements.