Protection, complexity-wise, is fine. It's the basic test of whether or not an individual has put any effort whatsoever into learning how the game works. If you've ever picked up an instruction pamphlet or rule book of MTG, you know how Protection works. Barring that, the first time you ask an experienced player how Protection works, you learn the DEBT acronym and now understand it. Boom, done.
It's also not exactly a gamebreaking mechanic. In any format, there exists efficient means of destroying all creatures, which ignores protection. And color fixing has never been easier in this game, which makes protection from a specific color or two relatively simple to play around.
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that protection doesnt work outside of the battlefield
Like almost all abilities in the game?
For most mechanics theres no reason at all why they "should" have any meaning beside of combat or on the battlefield.
If something is flying, its just flying.
Protection however is an ability that very well "could" work outside of the battlefield, but its simply decided it does not.
Something like "Changeling" and other type mechanics still work outside of the battlefield, so theres plenty of room to assume protection could aswell.
Especially for stuff like "can you reanimate a protection from black creature ?" it isnt obvisious at all, and it became really nasty together with Animate Dead , which had plenty of rules changes being an Aura and protection over the years.
In the end you have to run into the rules problems to actually understand them.
And a mechanic that you only learn by making mistakes is a very bad mechanic for the game.
Reason enough WotC also decided to dump protection and make it a "very rare" mechanic. (theres just 5 cards in standard with protection and most of them are combat tricks and Goblin Piledriver is just a reprint).
None of those things are corner cases. A corner case is something like how Harvest Mage interacted with the mana-production rule in Commander (which was just removed this month). Someone simply not understanding what an ability does does not a corner case make.
From my understanding a corner case is something that happens rarely, a kind of interaction that is phrone to produce rules questions as protection does many things at once.
Protection is quite a source of such problems. Can you target a trigger from Goblin Piledriver with Stifle ? Yes you can.
If the rules do not explain an interaction clearly at all, you have simply a mistake.
None of those things are corner cases. A corner case is something like how Harvest Mage interacted with the mana-production rule in Commander (which was just removed this month). Someone simply not understanding what an ability does does not a corner case make.
From my understanding a corner case is something that happens rarely, a kind of interaction that is phrone to produce rules questions as protection does many things at once.
Protection is quite a source of such problems. Can you target a trigger from Goblin Piledriver with Stifle ? Yes you can.
If the rules do not explain an interaction clearly at all, you have simply a mistake.
Do the rules NOT explain that interaction clearly? Protection has four clearly-defined effects in DEBT. None of those would prevent an ability from being Stifle'd.
Seriously, protection is not that hard to understand. It's about a billion times more simple than basic concepts of MTG like the Stack, steps/phases of a turn, etc. I'm all for ease-of-use to be a major design theory behind the printing of magic cards, but at a certain point avoiding stuff like Protection is catering to people who have no business playing a game with anything even remotely approaching complexity.
I've been playing Magic since I was eleven, and I've known exactly how Protection works since then, because one of the first things I ever did when I picked the game up was tracking down the instructions and reading them. Are we no longer able to expect basic effort on the part of new players to learn how the game works?
Edit: Ironically, the reminder text on Piledriver explicitly states what Protection does, making confusion even less likely.
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What i stated is simply that protection is phrone to mistakes as its "not" clear to a newbie what it does, and the reason is, the mechanic doesnt explain itself.
Protection is a mechanic that simply does too much things packed together under the banner of "protection".
Does it NEED a rules change ? Absolutely not. Its fixed by simply not printing anymore cards.
COULD it have a rules change to be more intuitive (which changes the mechanic) ? Yes.
What i stated is simply that protection is phrone to mistakes as its "not" clear to a newbie what it does, and the reason is, the mechanic doesnt explain itself.
Protection is a mechanic that simply does too much things packed together under the banner of "protection".
Does it NEED a rules change ? Absolutely not. Its fixed by simply not printing anymore cards.
COULD it have a rules change to be more intuitive (which changes the mechanic) ? Yes.
Yeah, I know you know what Protection does. I assume as much for everybody until proven otherwise.
But why restrict design space for future sets over this issue? Part of what makes Magic great is its complexity. Are we supposed to be fearful of pushing the boundaries of that complexity in order to cater to people who can't be bothered to figure out how some mechanics work?
Yes, Protection does a lot of stuff at once. It may very well be the most complex keyword ability in the game. Does that make it a bad mechanic?
Take the Castling maneuver in Chess, for example. It's arguably the most unintuitive, complex, and easily botched move in the game. While every other move in Chess is fairly straightforward in terms of what you can and cannot do, Castling is weird. You're moving two pieces at the same time, unlike any other move in the game. Neither piece could have moved at any point in the game previously, and the game has no built-in means of policing that element. You can't do it while in check, or while moving through check. The king moves exactly two spaces in either direction, which is odd when castling queenside because there's an extra space and many new players assume the king simply moves all the way to the rook.
Would anybody in their right mind suggest that Castling is unhealthy for Chess? No. And while it may be a weird move, it's fairly trivial to understand once it has been explained carefully or read up on in a rules book.
Protection is like that, in my opinion. It may very well be the most complex keyword in MTG. Does that make it bad? No experienced player will ever misunderstand Protection, and no new player should take more than a couple minutes to figure out how it works. That seems fine by me.
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What i stated is simply that protection is phrone to mistakes as its "not" clear to a newbie what it does, and the reason is, the mechanic doesnt explain itself.
Protection is a mechanic that simply does too much things packed together under the banner of "protection".
Does it NEED a rules change ? Absolutely not. Its fixed by simply not printing anymore cards.
COULD it have a rules change to be more intuitive (which changes the mechanic) ? Yes.
Yeah, I know you know what Protection does. I assume as much for everybody until proven otherwise.
But why restrict design space for future sets over this issue? Part of what makes Magic great is its complexity. Are we supposed to be fearful of pushing the boundaries of that complexity in order to cater to people who can't be bothered to figure out how some mechanics work?
Yes, Protection does a lot of stuff at once. It may very well be the most complex keyword ability in the game. Does that make it a bad mechanic?
Take the Castling maneuver in Chess, for example. It's arguably the most unintuitive, complex, and easily botched move in the game. While every other move in Chess is fairly straightforward in terms of what you can and cannot do, Castling is weird. You're moving two pieces at the same time, unlike any other move in the game. Neither piece could have moved at any point in the game previously, and the game has no built-in means of policing that element. You can't do it while in check, or while moving through check. The king moves exactly two spaces in either direction, which is odd when castling queenside because there's an extra space and many new players assume the king simply moves all the way to the rook.
Would anybody in their right mind suggest that Castling is unhealthy for Chess? No. And while it may be a weird move, it's fairly trivial to understand once it has been explained carefully or read up on in a rules book.
Protection is like that, in my opinion. It may very well be the most complex keyword in MTG. Does that make it bad? No experienced player will ever misunderstand Protection, and no new player should take more than a couple minutes to figure out how it works. That seems fine by me.
I feel quite certain that if new changes were still being added to chess people would ask, maybe even expect, castling to be removed. Though as it hasn't changed much sense the middle ages and much less sense it was standardized in the early 19th century it doesn't seem fair or even rational to compare the two.
I feel quite certain that if new changes were still being added to chess people would ask, maybe even expect, castling to be removed.
Really? Why? Because it's so hard to grasp how castling works? Anybody can learn how to do it in a couple of minutes.
Though as it hasn't changed much sense the middle ages and much less sense it was standardized in the early 19th century it doesn't seem fair or even rational to compare the two.
Sure, Chess doesn't really change, unlike Magic. But the point of my comparison was to show that even the "most complex" individual rule of a complicated game needn't take more than a few minutes to learn. Does any advocate for the removal of Protection from MTG actually fail to grasp how the ability works? Who is this large, unlearned mass of people for whom Protection is such an impossibly difficult concept to grasp? You learn a single four-letter acronym, then apply it as needed.
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Really? Why? Because it's so hard to grasp how castling works? Anybody can learn how to do it in a couple of minutes.
The question isnt if you can learn something quickly, as if someone actually explains it to you, EVERYONE can learn the rules of magic, theres nothing particular rocket science, but theres still rules that simply matter very rarely or are not intuitive at all (layer system is not intuitive, but you need some kind of order, so people usually play by intuition and if the layers do the job right, the intuitive play is most likely right, so even this, probably the most complex part of magic rules can be broken down to be as intuitive as it can be [maybe it can be even better]).
However, if something isnt intuitive, you have to question if it should be in the game, especially if all it adds is complexity and nothing else.
I mean imagine chess would have 100 extra "special" moves of combinations of figures on specific fields or even in specific turns (like on turn 10 you can do 2 moves with your tower, we call it "the full moon rising" whatever move).
Would certainly make the game even more complex and everyone "can" learn the rules, but it adds complexity for the sake of complexity and it doesnt really contribute to make the game better.
Protection is similiar to that.
If it would be exactly what the name implies, it would just "protect" a creature from the color, so it can still be targeted, but the effects simply wont do anything to the creature (kinda like replace anything from that color with "instead does nothing").
You could change the rules to make that work, and people that know what the "old" protection does would need to relearn, but in the end it could be worth the effort. The easier way is ofcourse to just keep it on old cards and print new ones that use your new mechanic of choice under a different name.
They could have changed shroud to hexproof, but instead they decided to make a new ability and just do not use old shroud anymore.
Sure, you can re-write protection to "ignore all effects from the protected quality", either as a new rule for Protection or as a new ability to replace Protection, but you'd still need to go in and specifically qualify what that means. If your pro-black creature attacks, can my black creature block it and not deal damage, or can I not block at all? Is your pro-blue creature restricted by my Propaganda? Can I Thoughtseize your pro-black creature? If I cast Biorhythm, do you consider pro-green creatures when adjusting your life total? If you grant your Llanowar Elves protection from green, can it still generate green mana? Does the existence of Progenitus utterly destroy the space-time continuum? Is your pro-white creature affected by your Honor of the Pure? Can you Retether and add a white aura onto a pro-white creature? Can you Retether and add a non-white aura to a pro-white creature? See, you'd need to actually add definitions to what Protection or New Protection does in order to clarify these points. And, once you have done so, what have you accomplished?
Protection, as it is currently written, leaves no room from debate. A four-letter acronym clearly and concisely defines what protection from a quality does, and anybody can have a perfect understanding of the ability within minutes.
I challenge you to offer up an alternative to Protection that's easier to understand. If that proves impossible, as I expect it might be, I'd be curious to hear about any tangible and enduring problem that the existence of Protection has caused. Yes, it's an ability that requires clarification on occasion. Is Magic supposed to be simple enough to pick up immediately without any instruction or research?
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I think if Protection was such a big issue, there would be a great outcry to do something about the ability. The fact that there is no such outcry means that the player base in general is fine with it the way it is, and acknowledges how powerful it is as an ability. There are a grand total of 5 cards in standard right now that grant or intrinsically have any sort of protection, which is a drastic downscaling from many previous sets. There were only 7 cards that granted or had any sort in Theros block.
Using Shroud to Hexproof is not a great example to begin with because if a creature had shroud, it has to have some other real bonus to play it in order for it to really see any use. Nimble Mongoose is perhaps the shroud creature that sees the most play whatsoever. Hexproof is by a long shot a more dangerous ability since its controller can buff or equip the creature and the opposing player can do nothing outside of sweeper effects, wraths, or edicts.
There is no case for protection being that complicated. As has been stated above, the stack and phases are more complicated in the ways with which they can be interacted. Protection is very cut and dry. Not everything in a game has to be designed so that every individual can understand why things work the way they do. What is intuitive to one person may not be to the next, so that is very subjective.
Take the Castling maneuver in Chess, for example. It's arguably the most unintuitive, complex, and easily botched move in the game. While every other move in Chess is fairly straightforward in terms of what you can and cannot do, Castling is weird. You're moving two pieces at the same time, unlike any other move in the game. Neither piece could have moved at any point in the game previously, and the game has no built-in means of policing that element. You can't do it while in check, or while moving through check. The king moves exactly two spaces in either direction, which is odd when castling queenside because there's an extra space and many new players assume the king simply moves all the way to the rook.
Personally, I think En Passant is more unintuitive than Castling.
Sure, you can re-write protection to "ignore all effects from the protected quality", either as a new rule for Protection or as a new ability to replace Protection, but you'd still need to go in and specifically qualify what that means. If your pro-black creature attacks, can my black creature block it and not deal damage, or can I not block at all? Is your pro-blue creature restricted by my Propaganda? Can I Thoughtseize your pro-black creature? If I cast Biorhythm, do you consider pro-green creatures when adjusting your life total? If you grant your Llanowar Elves protection from green, can it still generate green mana? Does the existence of Progenitus utterly destroy the space-time continuum? Is your pro-white creature affected by your Honor of the Pure? Can you Retether and add a white aura onto a pro-white creature? Can you Retether and add a non-white aura to a pro-white creature? See, you'd need to actually add definitions to what Protection or New Protection does in order to clarify these points. And, once you have done so, what have you accomplished?
You missed the best one. What happens if White Knight attacks into Black Knight? Do their protection abilities cancel out? Does their protection cancel out the canceling out of their protection because they're protected from the source that is protected from them?
I feel like my avatar has never been more appropriate.
I feel that every doubt can be solved the same way I did when I was 13: look it up, first hit will be DEBT and print it out until everyone you know also knows it.
And if you find that protection is a difficult concept, how about a flying creature being given flying again? Does it fly higher?
How about first strike twice? Is that double strike? If double strike kills the creature on the first swing, will the second hit the player? How about trample and blinking blockers?
Take the Castling maneuver in Chess, for example. It's arguably the most unintuitive, complex, and easily botched move in the game. While every other move in Chess is fairly straightforward in terms of what you can and cannot do, Castling is weird. You're moving two pieces at the same time, unlike any other move in the game. Neither piece could have moved at any point in the game previously, and the game has no built-in means of policing that element. You can't do it while in check, or while moving through check. The king moves exactly two spaces in either direction, which is odd when castling queenside because there's an extra space and many new players assume the king simply moves all the way to the rook.
Personally, I think En Passant is more unintuitive than Castling.
Perhaps more unintuitive, but probably less complex.
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Another rules change I would like to see is Blood Moon removing supertypes and subtypes from lands. Right now, with Blood Moon, Dryad Arbor is a 1/1 Mountain Dryad, and Darksteel Citadel is an Artifact Land-Mountain. This is not intuitive. They should both just be Mountains, not creatures or artifacts. The latter actually comes up pretty often when playing vs. Affinity.
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Another rules change I would like to see is Blood Moon removing supertypes and subtypes from lands. Right now, with Blood Moon, Dryad Arbor is a 1/1 Mountain Dryad, and Darksteel Citadel is an Artifact Land-Mountain. This is not intuitive. They should both just be Mountains, not creatures or artifacts. The latter actually comes up pretty often when playing vs. Affinity.
Bloodmoon isn't intuitive to begin with. In no other place in magic does changing a subtype remove the abilities of the object. Making something a samurai doesn't cause it to lose flanking. Blightsteel doesn't lose infect if it becomes a squirrel. It's not even as if lands with the basic land subtypes can't have abilities, we saw this in lorwyn-shadowmoor block. But if you change a lands subtype, poof. It loses its abilities.
Edit: Also, you're confusing types with super types.
Artifact, land and creature are all types. Legendary and world are supertypes. Not changing the types is the only intuitive thing about blood moon. It turns them into mountains, a subtype. Altering anything else about the card is the silly bit.
Another rules change I would like to see is Blood Moon removing supertypes and subtypes from lands. Right now, with Blood Moon, Dryad Arbor is a 1/1 Mountain Dryad, and Darksteel Citadel is an Artifact Land-Mountain. This is not intuitive. They should both just be Mountains, not creatures or artifacts. The latter actually comes up pretty often when playing vs. Affinity.
Bloodmoon isn't intuitive to begin with. In no other place in magic does changing a subtype remove the abilities of the object. Making something a samurai doesn't cause it to lose flanking. Blightsteel doesn't lose infect if it becomes a squirrel. It's not even as if lands with the basic land subtypes can't have abilities, we saw this in lorwyn-shadowmoor block. But if you change a lands subtype, poof. It loses its abilities.
Edit: Also, you're confusing types with super types.
Artifact, land and creature are all types. Legendary and world are supertypes. Not changing the types is the only intuitive thing about blood moon. It turns them into mountains, a subtype. Altering anything else about the card is the silly bit.
What's worse, is that urborg, tomb of yawgmoth has essentially the same wording as blood moon does, except for the "in addition to it's other types" part.
The odd part is, that "in addition to it's other types" gives lands their other abilities back, even if they didn't actually have any other types to begin with. I.E. sunpetal grove
The odd part is, that "in addition to it's other types" gives lands their other abilities back, even if they didn't actually have any other types to begin with. I.E. sunpetal grove
The rule makes sense when you consider the purpose of the cards. Things like Blood Moon and Spreading Seas are supposed to be hosers, while Urborg is supposed to be an enabler. You would run into other intuitiveness issues if a subtype-replacing effect that tries to be a hoser card removed the inherent abilities of Temple Garden that it gets from its basic land types while leaving Sunpetal Grove's abilities intact. (Both of them are getting flooded, why is there a difference?)
In theory, they could clear this up by having the hoser cards say that they remove abilities, but this doesn't produce the intended outcome with the way the layer system currently works. Since you apply type-changing effects before you apply explicit ability-removing effects, making Spreading Seas say "enchanted land loses all abilities and is an Island" would leave the land unable to do anything. They'd have to either say "Enchanted land is an Island, loses all abilities, and gains 'T: Add U to your mana pool.'" or rework the layer system to make this sort of errata functional.
The rule that always struck me as unintuitive is that any effect that sets an object's types causes it to lose any other types it had previously unless it says otherwise - except for effects that make something an artifact creature. That specific effect retains the other types without having to say so. As far as I can tell, the only reason why the rule is this way is so they wouldn't have to errata all the cards over the years that had this type of effect. Instead we have Oracle errata on Darksteel Mutation because they intended for the creature to lose its other types.
In theory, they could clear this up by having the hoser cards say that they remove abilities, but this doesn't produce the intended outcome with the way the layer system currently works. Since you apply type-changing effects before you apply explicit ability-removing effects, making Spreading Seas say "enchanted land loses all abilities and is an Island" would leave the land unable to do anything. They'd have to either say "Enchanted land is an Island, loses all abilities, and gains 'T: Add U to your mana pool.'" or rework the layer system to make this sort of errata functional.
Bloodmoon isn't intuitive to begin with. In no other place in magic does changing a subtype remove the abilities of the object.
Perhaps, but it is not Blood Moon that isn't intuitive, it is the rule that gives the six basic lands an innate quality related to their identity. Blood Moon is just a card that put's a spotlight on that rule.
The Blood Moon/Urborg interaction is not intuitive, but then any issue that requires you pick apart the layer system is way more labyrinthine than it should be. It is necessary, but most players don't have an innate how of how it works.
Take the Castling maneuver in Chess, for example. It's arguably the most unintuitive, complex, and easily botched move in the game. While every other move in Chess is fairly straightforward in terms of what you can and cannot do, Castling is weird. You're moving two pieces at the same time, unlike any other move in the game. Neither piece could have moved at any point in the game previously, and the game has no built-in means of policing that element. You can't do it while in check, or while moving through check. The king moves exactly two spaces in either direction, which is odd when castling queenside because there's an extra space and many new players assume the king simply moves all the way to the rook.
Personally, I think En Passant is more unintuitive than Castling.
Perhaps more unintuitive, but probably less complex.
En passant makes perfect sense once you learn that it was added after pawns gained the ability to move two squares on their first move.
Take the Castling maneuver in Chess, for example. It's arguably the most unintuitive, complex, and easily botched move in the game. While every other move in Chess is fairly straightforward in terms of what you can and cannot do, Castling is weird. You're moving two pieces at the same time, unlike any other move in the game. Neither piece could have moved at any point in the game previously, and the game has no built-in means of policing that element. You can't do it while in check, or while moving through check. The king moves exactly two spaces in either direction, which is odd when castling queenside because there's an extra space and many new players assume the king simply moves all the way to the rook.
Personally, I think En Passant is more unintuitive than Castling.
Perhaps more unintuitive, but probably less complex.
En passant makes perfect sense once you learn that it was added after pawns gained the ability to move two squares on their first move.
I had to look up what En passant was and then had to think how anyone could think anything other than it being added after pawns gained the ability to move two squares(it doesn't make perfect sense as the double move seemed like a perfect way of by passing enemy pawns that have moved in). I honestly think this may take the cake as most unintuitive corner rule that the majority of people playing the game never knew.
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Like almost all abilities in the game?
It's also not exactly a gamebreaking mechanic. In any format, there exists efficient means of destroying all creatures, which ignores protection. And color fixing has never been easier in this game, which makes protection from a specific color or two relatively simple to play around.
For most mechanics theres no reason at all why they "should" have any meaning beside of combat or on the battlefield.
If something is flying, its just flying.
Protection however is an ability that very well "could" work outside of the battlefield, but its simply decided it does not.
Something like "Changeling" and other type mechanics still work outside of the battlefield, so theres plenty of room to assume protection could aswell.
Especially for stuff like "can you reanimate a protection from black creature ?" it isnt obvisious at all, and it became really nasty together with Animate Dead , which had plenty of rules changes being an Aura and protection over the years.
In the end you have to run into the rules problems to actually understand them.
And a mechanic that you only learn by making mistakes is a very bad mechanic for the game.
Reason enough WotC also decided to dump protection and make it a "very rare" mechanic. (theres just 5 cards in standard with protection and most of them are combat tricks and Goblin Piledriver is just a reprint).
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From my understanding a corner case is something that happens rarely, a kind of interaction that is phrone to produce rules questions as protection does many things at once.
Protection is quite a source of such problems. Can you target a trigger from Goblin Piledriver with Stifle ? Yes you can.
If the rules do not explain an interaction clearly at all, you have simply a mistake.
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Do the rules NOT explain that interaction clearly? Protection has four clearly-defined effects in DEBT. None of those would prevent an ability from being Stifle'd.
Seriously, protection is not that hard to understand. It's about a billion times more simple than basic concepts of MTG like the Stack, steps/phases of a turn, etc. I'm all for ease-of-use to be a major design theory behind the printing of magic cards, but at a certain point avoiding stuff like Protection is catering to people who have no business playing a game with anything even remotely approaching complexity.
I've been playing Magic since I was eleven, and I've known exactly how Protection works since then, because one of the first things I ever did when I picked the game up was tracking down the instructions and reading them. Are we no longer able to expect basic effort on the part of new players to learn how the game works?
Edit: Ironically, the reminder text on Piledriver explicitly states what Protection does, making confusion even less likely.
Theres no arguing what protection does or not.
What i stated is simply that protection is phrone to mistakes as its "not" clear to a newbie what it does, and the reason is, the mechanic doesnt explain itself.
Protection is a mechanic that simply does too much things packed together under the banner of "protection".
Does it NEED a rules change ? Absolutely not. Its fixed by simply not printing anymore cards.
COULD it have a rules change to be more intuitive (which changes the mechanic) ? Yes.
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Yeah, I know you know what Protection does. I assume as much for everybody until proven otherwise.
But why restrict design space for future sets over this issue? Part of what makes Magic great is its complexity. Are we supposed to be fearful of pushing the boundaries of that complexity in order to cater to people who can't be bothered to figure out how some mechanics work?
Yes, Protection does a lot of stuff at once. It may very well be the most complex keyword ability in the game. Does that make it a bad mechanic?
Take the Castling maneuver in Chess, for example. It's arguably the most unintuitive, complex, and easily botched move in the game. While every other move in Chess is fairly straightforward in terms of what you can and cannot do, Castling is weird. You're moving two pieces at the same time, unlike any other move in the game. Neither piece could have moved at any point in the game previously, and the game has no built-in means of policing that element. You can't do it while in check, or while moving through check. The king moves exactly two spaces in either direction, which is odd when castling queenside because there's an extra space and many new players assume the king simply moves all the way to the rook.
Would anybody in their right mind suggest that Castling is unhealthy for Chess? No. And while it may be a weird move, it's fairly trivial to understand once it has been explained carefully or read up on in a rules book.
Protection is like that, in my opinion. It may very well be the most complex keyword in MTG. Does that make it bad? No experienced player will ever misunderstand Protection, and no new player should take more than a couple minutes to figure out how it works. That seems fine by me.
Really? Why? Because it's so hard to grasp how castling works? Anybody can learn how to do it in a couple of minutes.
Sure, Chess doesn't really change, unlike Magic. But the point of my comparison was to show that even the "most complex" individual rule of a complicated game needn't take more than a few minutes to learn. Does any advocate for the removal of Protection from MTG actually fail to grasp how the ability works? Who is this large, unlearned mass of people for whom Protection is such an impossibly difficult concept to grasp? You learn a single four-letter acronym, then apply it as needed.
The question isnt if you can learn something quickly, as if someone actually explains it to you, EVERYONE can learn the rules of magic, theres nothing particular rocket science, but theres still rules that simply matter very rarely or are not intuitive at all (layer system is not intuitive, but you need some kind of order, so people usually play by intuition and if the layers do the job right, the intuitive play is most likely right, so even this, probably the most complex part of magic rules can be broken down to be as intuitive as it can be [maybe it can be even better]).
However, if something isnt intuitive, you have to question if it should be in the game, especially if all it adds is complexity and nothing else.
I mean imagine chess would have 100 extra "special" moves of combinations of figures on specific fields or even in specific turns (like on turn 10 you can do 2 moves with your tower, we call it "the full moon rising" whatever move).
Would certainly make the game even more complex and everyone "can" learn the rules, but it adds complexity for the sake of complexity and it doesnt really contribute to make the game better.
Protection is similiar to that.
If it would be exactly what the name implies, it would just "protect" a creature from the color, so it can still be targeted, but the effects simply wont do anything to the creature (kinda like replace anything from that color with "instead does nothing").
You could change the rules to make that work, and people that know what the "old" protection does would need to relearn, but in the end it could be worth the effort. The easier way is ofcourse to just keep it on old cards and print new ones that use your new mechanic of choice under a different name.
They could have changed shroud to hexproof, but instead they decided to make a new ability and just do not use old shroud anymore.
Works.
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Protection, as it is currently written, leaves no room from debate. A four-letter acronym clearly and concisely defines what protection from a quality does, and anybody can have a perfect understanding of the ability within minutes.
I challenge you to offer up an alternative to Protection that's easier to understand. If that proves impossible, as I expect it might be, I'd be curious to hear about any tangible and enduring problem that the existence of Protection has caused. Yes, it's an ability that requires clarification on occasion. Is Magic supposed to be simple enough to pick up immediately without any instruction or research?
Using Shroud to Hexproof is not a great example to begin with because if a creature had shroud, it has to have some other real bonus to play it in order for it to really see any use. Nimble Mongoose is perhaps the shroud creature that sees the most play whatsoever. Hexproof is by a long shot a more dangerous ability since its controller can buff or equip the creature and the opposing player can do nothing outside of sweeper effects, wraths, or edicts.
There is no case for protection being that complicated. As has been stated above, the stack and phases are more complicated in the ways with which they can be interacted. Protection is very cut and dry. Not everything in a game has to be designed so that every individual can understand why things work the way they do. What is intuitive to one person may not be to the next, so that is very subjective.
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You missed the best one. What happens if White Knight attacks into Black Knight? Do their protection abilities cancel out? Does their protection cancel out the canceling out of their protection because they're protected from the source that is protected from them?
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And if you find that protection is a difficult concept, how about a flying creature being given flying again? Does it fly higher?
How about first strike twice? Is that double strike? If double strike kills the creature on the first swing, will the second hit the player? How about trample and blinking blockers?
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Perhaps more unintuitive, but probably less complex.
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Bloodmoon isn't intuitive to begin with. In no other place in magic does changing a subtype remove the abilities of the object. Making something a samurai doesn't cause it to lose flanking. Blightsteel doesn't lose infect if it becomes a squirrel. It's not even as if lands with the basic land subtypes can't have abilities, we saw this in lorwyn-shadowmoor block. But if you change a lands subtype, poof. It loses its abilities.
Edit: Also, you're confusing types with super types.
Artifact, land and creature are all types. Legendary and world are supertypes. Not changing the types is the only intuitive thing about blood moon. It turns them into mountains, a subtype. Altering anything else about the card is the silly bit.
What's worse, is that urborg, tomb of yawgmoth has essentially the same wording as blood moon does, except for the "in addition to it's other types" part.
The odd part is, that "in addition to it's other types" gives lands their other abilities back, even if they didn't actually have any other types to begin with. I.E. sunpetal grove
In theory, they could clear this up by having the hoser cards say that they remove abilities, but this doesn't produce the intended outcome with the way the layer system currently works. Since you apply type-changing effects before you apply explicit ability-removing effects, making Spreading Seas say "enchanted land loses all abilities and is an Island" would leave the land unable to do anything. They'd have to either say "Enchanted land is an Island, loses all abilities, and gains 'T: Add U to your mana pool.'" or rework the layer system to make this sort of errata functional.
The rule that always struck me as unintuitive is that any effect that sets an object's types causes it to lose any other types it had previously unless it says otherwise - except for effects that make something an artifact creature. That specific effect retains the other types without having to say so. As far as I can tell, the only reason why the rule is this way is so they wouldn't have to errata all the cards over the years that had this type of effect. Instead we have Oracle errata on Darksteel Mutation because they intended for the creature to lose its other types.
Perhaps, but it is not Blood Moon that isn't intuitive, it is the rule that gives the six basic lands an innate quality related to their identity. Blood Moon is just a card that put's a spotlight on that rule.
The Blood Moon/Urborg interaction is not intuitive, but then any issue that requires you pick apart the layer system is way more labyrinthine than it should be. It is necessary, but most players don't have an innate how of how it works.
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En passant makes perfect sense once you learn that it was added after pawns gained the ability to move two squares on their first move.