Thank you for that clarification, Segoth, that is exactly what I was looking for. That is a very good exception to know about.
To bring it back around to the original question, the specific rules we are looking for are 120.3 and 120.3a:
Quote from Comprehensive Rules »
120.3. If there are no cards in a player’s library and an effect offers that player the choice to draw a card, that player can choose to do so. However, if an effect says that a player can’t draw cards and another effect offers that player the choice to draw a card, that player can’t choose to do so.
120.3a The same principles apply if the player who’s making the choice is not the player who would draw the card. If the latter player has no cards in his or her library, the choice can be taken. If an effect says that the latter player can’t draw a card, the choice can’t be taken.
Your first thought was correct, if an effect states a player can't draw cards (or in this case only one maximum) then the opponent can't choose to have them do so. Drawing three cards is actually considered a cost, in this case the cost can't be paid so it defaults to the second option.
My main concern with that answer is that the gather rulings specifically says the opponent can choose to have you draw three cards when your library has less than three cards in it (and cause you to lose as a SBA). Wouldn't that also fall under the "can't be paid" rule?
9/20/2016 If you have fewer than three cards in your library, the opponent may choose to have you draw three cards. If so, you’ll lose the game as state-based actions are performed.
Aside from the integrated rule of "Whenever a creature deals combat damage to the monarch, its controller becomes the monarch" which is always in effect.
Question asked, question answered. Locking this before we get more off-topic comments.
-MadMage
But hold on, did you read my creature has FLASH? I declared, priority me, he says ok, priority him back over to me, I flash in the creature, I need to know exactly why this doesn't work, like I said I was playin a level 1 judge and this happened. I want to make sure I understand why this works or doesn't work that's why I want a higher judge, cuz maybe this isn't something level 1 judges know about specifically,
Okay, reading again things sound ambiguous. Are you attempting to cast Heron's Grace Champion before you declare attackers, or after you declare attackers?
If it is after declaring attackers then yes, you gain priority in the "declare attackers" step (and also declare blockers step) and have an opportunity to cast a spell with flash.
If it is before declaring attackers then this falls under the shortcut philosophy I explained above. when you say "declare attackers phase" to your opponent, Officially that means "I would like to skip ahead until you (the non-active player) have priority in the beginning of combat step." If the opponent accepts that shortcut and then passes priority back, then you have missed your opportunity to cast any spells before declaring attackers. If you want to cast a spell or activate/trigger an ability in the beginning of combat step, you need to explicitly acknowledge it, something like "Cast Heron's Grace in the beginning of combat step?"
Edit: Also, the above shortcut stuff is specifically for Competitive Rules Enforcement Level, aka Premiere tournaments. Normal LGS events like Friday Night Magic or drafts are usually held at Regular REL which has more relaxed rules regarding these things, but ultimately it is up to the Head Judge on how such situations are handled.
specifically asking for only high-ranking judges to respond to a question is generally frowned upon. The right answer is the right answer, whether it's from Toby Elliott or someone else.
As part of the Magic Tournament Rules there are a set of established shortcuts. One of these shortcuts is the following:
A statement such as "I'm ready for combat" or "Declare attackers?" offers to keep passing priority until an opponent has priority in the beginning of combat step. Opponents are assumed to be acting then unless they specify otherwise.
In practice, pretty much any general statement about going to combat phase is considered to fall under this shortcut, including phrases like "beginning of combat?" The philosophy here is that they do not want the Active Player to be able to "trick" the Non-active player into acting during the main phase instead of the beginning of combat step, since it is so incredibly rare that the Non-Active Player actually wants to act at that point.
If the Active Player wants to take action in the Beginning of Combat step, they need to explicitly state as such: "Move to beginning of combat so I can cast a spell there" or "Move to combat phase, my Surrak, the Hunt Caller triggers."
For further information on the philosophy of why this shortcut works this way, there is an Article on the MagicJudges.org written by Kevin Desprez, Level 3 (former Level 5) Judge: [O]fficial: Attacking, blocking and shortcuts
the "you may exile Iname, Life Aspect" portion of the triggered ability is considered a cost, which means that you can't choose to (try to) pay it because by the time the ability resolves the token doesn't exist anymore. It is similar to trying to pay 2 life while at 1, or tapping a creature that's already tapped (to pay a cost).
Relevant Rules:
117.12. Some spells, activated abilities, and triggered abilities read, “[Do something]. If [a player]
[does or doesn’t], [effect].” or “[A player] may [do something]. If [that player] [does or doesn’t],
[effect].” The action [do something] is a cost, paid when the spell or ability resolves. The “If [a
player] [does or doesn’t]” clause checks whether the player chose to pay an optional cost or started
to pay a mandatory cost, regardless of what events actually occurred
117.3. A player can’t pay a cost unless he or she has the necessary resources to pay it fully. For
example, a player with only 1 life can’t pay a cost of 2 life, and a permanent that’s already tapped
can’t be tapped to pay a cost. See rule 202, “Mana Cost and Color,” and rule 602, “Activating
Activated Abilities.”
It is not so much that it would have been impossible to reuse the flip mechanic. It's more that the limitations of the mechanic, mainly aesthetically, would have cramped a lot of design space for the cards. In the october 2011 article Mark shows an example of a vanilla Werewolf as a flip card:
The card is already cramped, and it doesn't have anything but the basic werewolf abilities. No flavor text, a lot of the details in the artwork is lost, it even loses a creature type to make room for the P/T indicator.
Because the Fiery Confluence effectively says "deal 1 damage to all creatures. deal 1 damage to all creatures. deal 1 damage to all creatures." the Fungus Sliver ability will trigger three times for each sliver, eventually giving them all three +1/+1 counters.
It is important to note, however, that these counters are not added immediately. If you have any slivers that have a toughness of 3 or less, they will have the 3 damage marked and die to State-Based Actions before their triggers resolve.
Bloodmad Vampire will have two separate madness abilities, one for 1R and a second one for 2R. Functionally this means you choose which cost you want when you discard the card.
So I'm trying to work this out in my head. I went back to your original response and was wondering what you meant by on top of the stack. Do you mean on top as if that spell is going to resolve first, or on top as if that spell is going to resolve second?
If I'm understanding you correctly I need to stack my triggers so that Ruinous Path resolves first, and then for my Spell Queller ETB trigger, choose to exile Languish, in order to get the result of the Languish permanently exiled?
So basically this whole situation is contingent on me setting up the triggers this way, and my opponent choosing Spell Queller? (And it seems like they would only do so if they are unaware of the rules).
That is more or less correct. The key is that in order for the targets spell to be permanently exiled your Spell Queller has to leave the battlefield again before the ETB trigger on the stack resolves. In your example, that most likely occurs from your opponent choosing to cast the Ruinous Path, and then choosing to target your Spell Queller with it. This means they need to be able to cast the Ruinous Path, which requires the "Leaves the Battlefield" trigger to resolve first, before the ETB trigger.
Realize that you can't cast Panglacial Wurm for B. (Who would've thought that?)
Undo the casting. Realize that you don't know where to put your Panglacial Wurm. Doesn't matter since you'll end up shuffling anyway for the fetch, right?
Wrong. As you're still searching, decide to cast your otherPanglacial Wurm. (Because why wouldn't you have two?)
I would say that the aforementioned "shuffle the deck again with Panglacial Wurm" method should work here: Just remove the second wurm from the deck before the shuffle to make sure you keep track of it (they'll be moving it to the stack anyway). The main problem seems to be that they "should" know what the top card is before they casts the second wurm and doing the shuffle messes with that. It is not ideal, but then these super-contrived situations are designed to break the rules so a "best fit but not ideal" solution is fine.
A better solution if you (the judge) are called to the situation early might be to replace the Panglacial Wurm with a placeholder card when you go to cast it. It would have to be a card that clearly doesn't belong in the deck, like a basic land match, or a card that is not legal in the format, or simply a DFC Checklist card with "PANGLACIAL WURM" written on it. This way you can shuffle Colossus into the deck and keep track of where the Wurm should be without having to shuffle the deck again if you fail to cast it.
And of course if the situation devolves into attempting to cast multiple wurms to try and fish for an ideal top-card to mill, that starts getting into Slow Play territory very quickly.
Triggered abilities cannot actually be triggered in the middle of a spell, they trigger when State-Based Actions are checked after the spell finishes resolving.
Essence Flux causes the Spell Queller to leave the battlefield and then enter the battlefield during resolution, so both abilities will trigger after the spell resolves.
You will get to choose the order in which these abilities go on the stack, and therefore the order in which they resolve.
You must choose the target of the "Enters the Battlefield Trigger" as you place it on the stack, which is before the "Leaves the Battlefield" trigger resolves. You will not be able to select the Ruinous Path.
When the "Leaves the Battlefield" trigger resolves, your opponent will have the option of casting Ruinous Path for free, and will be able to target your Spell Queller since it is on the battlefield (barring some other interaction). Perhaps important to note here is that they will not be able cast it for its Awaken cost, because they are already using an alternative casting cost.
Whether or not Languish is permanently Exiled depends on what order you put the abilities on the stack. If you order it so that the ETB resolves first then you will Exile Languish, then the LTB trigger will let them cast Ruinous Path to kill your Queller, which triggers a new LTB trigger to bring the Languish Back. If you order it so that the ETB resolves last, then the first LTB trigger resolves and they (edit: will have the option to cast the Ruinous Path, and if so have the option to target the Queller in order to) kill the Queller, which puts the new LTB trigger on the stack BUT you haven't exiled the spell yet so the trigger does nothing, and then the ETB trigger resolves and exiles the Languish.
TL;DR - order the triggers to resolve the "Leaves the Battlefield" trigger first if you want to (potentially) permanently exile the Languish. This requires them to kill your Spell Queller before the ETB trigger resolves, though.
edit: Added some clarification above to the description of what happens if the LTB trigger resolves before the ETB trigger to make it clearer that the trick relies on the opponent using the Ruinous path to kill the Spell Queller.
the judge at your LGS is wrong in two separate ways.
First, he is wrong about the ordering. when you activate an ability, you choose targets before you determine and pay costs. the intuitive way to explain this is that with some cards (like fireball) the cost changes based on what targets you choose, and abilities are the same way (though I can't think of an example offhand). The more detailed way to explain this is to simply refer to the Comprehensive rules, specifically section 602.2
602.2
To activate an ability is to put it onto the stack and pay its costs, so that it will eventually resolve and have its effect. Only an object’s controller (or its owner, if it doesn’t have a controller) can activate its activated ability unless the object specifically says otherwise. Activating an ability follows the steps listed below, in order. If, at any point during the activation of an ability, a player is unable to comply with any of those steps, the activation is illegal; the game returns to the moment before that ability started to be activated (see rule 717, “Handling Illegal Actions”). Announcements and payments can’t be altered after they’ve been made.
Determining the targets of an ability is the third step, 601.2c, while paying costs is the eighth step, 601.2h. Also worth noting is that determining the legality of the ability/targets is the fifth step, 601.2e, which means that even though the enchantment leaves the field before the ability technically finishes activating, it is still on the field when legality is determined.
the Second way in which he is wrong is that if you activate an ability with an illegal target, you are not forced to continue activating the ability and select a legal target. The specific rule is 601.2e, as referenced above:
601.2e
The game checks to see if the proposed spell can legally be cast. If the proposed spell is illegal, the game returns to the moment before the casting of that spell was proposed (see rule 717, “Handling Illegal Actions”).
So yeah, point the judge towards the Comprehensive rules to try and show him the correct procedure. It's probably best to be respectful about this though, because pride is a real thing and having a mistake pointed out can make even good people defensive.
EDIT: It might be important to understand that the steps for activating an ability (which is section 602.2) directly reference the steps for casting a spell (which is section 601.2), so when the rules in that section talk about "casting a spell" know that they also apply to "activating an ability." This is explicitly explained in Rule 602.2b, for reference.
Grapple with the Past was a clear MVP, fueling Delirium and bringing threats back at the same time. When I wasn't mana screwed I was consistently hitting Delirium by turn 4 or 5, largely off the back of these two cards.
The two Thraben Foulbloods probably did 60-80% of all the damage I dealt. Aggressive to begin with, they got ridiculous when I could turn on delirium so quickly.
I was also happy with the Midnight Scavengers. Even when they weren't engaging in Meld shenanigans (which only occurred once in 11 games), being able to grab a creature out of the GY helped keep pressure up. I expect they will be popular in black decks even when you don't get Graf Rats.
conversely, I never really felt happy with Abundant Maw. I kept it in the deck because it felt like one of the few late-game threats in my colors, and the life-drain was a way to push finishing damage through if the game stalled out, but it just never really felt good. I think part of it was the 4 toughness, which while good in general felt weak on what was supposed to be my finisher.
Probably the most surprising card for me was Collective Brutality. I mainly included it as just a removal spell, and didn't escalate it for the first 2/3rds of the night, but then I escalated it once to Duress the opponent, and it had a huge impact on that game. I think I escalated it to duress two or three more times after that, and it never felt like a mistake. It helps that I was fueling delirium at the same time, but don't underestimate the value of escalating this card.
DRay563, keep in mind that fix is from the Infraction Procedure Guideline (IPG) which is meant to be used in Competitive REL. The question specifically asks about a "Judging at Regular" (JAR) fix.
In this case, this seems like a combination of "drawing extra cards" and the catch-all "in-game error:" The player drew a card they were supposed to be scrying then cast it, when they shouldn't have had it in the first place. The JAR prescribes the following fixes for drawing extra cards and general in-game errors.
A player accidentally draws has more cards than he or she was supposed to
If the identity of the card(s) were known to all players, return them to their proper location. Otherwise, determine how many extra cards have been drawn, take that many cards at random from the player’s hand and place them on top of the library. Don't shuffle the library after doing this! If the extra cards were drawn while drawing an opening hand, shuffle the extra cards back into the deck instead and allow the player to continue making mulligan decisions with the remaining cards.
A player makes an in-game error not mentioned above
This will cover the bulk of player errors, and usually the least disruptive option is to leave the game as it is after fixing anything that is currently illegal (e.g. an Aura enchanting an illegal permanent). If the error involved a player forgetting to draw or discard cards, have them perform the appropriate action now. Otherwise, if the error was caught quickly and rewinding is relatively easy, you may undo all the actions back to the point that the illegal action happened. This can include returning random cards from the hand to the library to undo card draws (though don't shuffle the library if you do this), untapping permanents and undoing combat. This can be very disruptive where lots of decisions have been made or hidden information has been revealed since the illegal action, so don't go crazy with this!
So let's go over what happened:
The player was supposed to Scry 3, but instead Drew 3. This is "accidentally drawing extra cards" and would be fixed by randomly selecting 3 cards from the player's hand and putting them on top of the player's deck.
The player then cast one of those three cards. Technically this is not breaking any rules, but it is an indirect result of a rules violation, and more importantly occurs after the above error, so if the judge chooses to rewind the game to the first error this would be rewound as well.
(TL;DR part)
If nothing else happened between the initial error of drawing the three cards instead of scrying them and when you caught the error during the casting of Time Walk, the solution seems rather straightforward:
First, rewind the game to the point of error: this means the time walk would be returned to the player's hand and the mana spent on it untapped. If anything else occurred, it would be undone as well.
Next the judge randomly selects three cards from the player's hand and puts them on top of their deck. (Edit: if both sides agree the Time Walk was definitely one of the three illegally drawn cards I would probably specifically pull that from the hand as one of the three selected cards, but that's stretching things a bit.)
Personally I would not allow the player to finish scrying at this point (that feels too open to abuse, and arguably the player already scryed all the cards to the top), but I think that is a gray area open to the judge's interpretation of the situation.
The game would then resume from that point after the judge gives all the players a friendly reminder to please pay attention to what they're doing, especially when handling cards in their library.
To bring it back around to the original question, the specific rules we are looking for are 120.3 and 120.3a:
My main concern with that answer is that the gather rulings specifically says the opponent can choose to have you draw three cards when your library has less than three cards in it (and cause you to lose as a SBA). Wouldn't that also fall under the "can't be paid" rule?
Question asked, question answered. Locking this before we get more off-topic comments.
-MadMage
Okay, reading again things sound ambiguous. Are you attempting to cast Heron's Grace Champion before you declare attackers, or after you declare attackers?
Edit: Also, the above shortcut stuff is specifically for Competitive Rules Enforcement Level, aka Premiere tournaments. Normal LGS events like Friday Night Magic or drafts are usually held at Regular REL which has more relaxed rules regarding these things, but ultimately it is up to the Head Judge on how such situations are handled.
As part of the Magic Tournament Rules there are a set of established shortcuts. One of these shortcuts is the following:
In practice, pretty much any general statement about going to combat phase is considered to fall under this shortcut, including phrases like "beginning of combat?" The philosophy here is that they do not want the Active Player to be able to "trick" the Non-active player into acting during the main phase instead of the beginning of combat step, since it is so incredibly rare that the Non-Active Player actually wants to act at that point.
If the Active Player wants to take action in the Beginning of Combat step, they need to explicitly state as such: "Move to beginning of combat so I can cast a spell there" or "Move to combat phase, my Surrak, the Hunt Caller triggers."
For further information on the philosophy of why this shortcut works this way, there is an Article on the MagicJudges.org written by Kevin Desprez, Level 3 (former Level 5) Judge: [O]fficial: Attacking, blocking and shortcuts
Relevant Rules:
Every Two Sides has a Story (26 August 2011)
Unanswered Questions: Innistrad (10 October 2011)
Push and Pull (25 April 2016) (section, Prose and Conflicts, Head Designer vs Rules Manager)
"Was the flavor behind flip cards similar to Double-faced cards?" (via Blogatog, Marks' Q&A Tumblr)
It is not so much that it would have been impossible to reuse the flip mechanic. It's more that the limitations of the mechanic, mainly aesthetically, would have cramped a lot of design space for the cards. In the october 2011 article Mark shows an example of a vanilla Werewolf as a flip card:
The card is already cramped, and it doesn't have anything but the basic werewolf abilities. No flavor text, a lot of the details in the artwork is lost, it even loses a creature type to make room for the P/T indicator.
It is important to note, however, that these counters are not added immediately. If you have any slivers that have a toughness of 3 or less, they will have the 3 damage marked and die to State-Based Actions before their triggers resolve.
That is more or less correct. The key is that in order for the targets spell to be permanently exiled your Spell Queller has to leave the battlefield again before the ETB trigger on the stack resolves. In your example, that most likely occurs from your opponent choosing to cast the Ruinous Path, and then choosing to target your Spell Queller with it. This means they need to be able to cast the Ruinous Path, which requires the "Leaves the Battlefield" trigger to resolve first, before the ETB trigger.
I would say that the aforementioned "shuffle the deck again with Panglacial Wurm" method should work here: Just remove the second wurm from the deck before the shuffle to make sure you keep track of it (they'll be moving it to the stack anyway). The main problem seems to be that they "should" know what the top card is before they casts the second wurm and doing the shuffle messes with that. It is not ideal, but then these super-contrived situations are designed to break the rules so a "best fit but not ideal" solution is fine.
A better solution if you (the judge) are called to the situation early might be to replace the Panglacial Wurm with a placeholder card when you go to cast it. It would have to be a card that clearly doesn't belong in the deck, like a basic land match, or a card that is not legal in the format, or simply a DFC Checklist card with "PANGLACIAL WURM" written on it. This way you can shuffle Colossus into the deck and keep track of where the Wurm should be without having to shuffle the deck again if you fail to cast it.
And of course if the situation devolves into attempting to cast multiple wurms to try and fish for an ideal top-card to mill, that starts getting into Slow Play territory very quickly.
Whether or not Languish is permanently Exiled depends on what order you put the abilities on the stack. If you order it so that the ETB resolves first then you will Exile Languish, then the LTB trigger will let them cast Ruinous Path to kill your Queller, which triggers a new LTB trigger to bring the Languish Back. If you order it so that the ETB resolves last, then the first LTB trigger resolves and they (edit: will have the option to cast the Ruinous Path, and if so have the option to target the Queller in order to) kill the Queller, which puts the new LTB trigger on the stack BUT you haven't exiled the spell yet so the trigger does nothing, and then the ETB trigger resolves and exiles the Languish.
TL;DR - order the triggers to resolve the "Leaves the Battlefield" trigger first if you want to (potentially) permanently exile the Languish. This requires them to kill your Spell Queller before the ETB trigger resolves, though.
edit: Added some clarification above to the description of what happens if the LTB trigger resolves before the ETB trigger to make it clearer that the trick relies on the opponent using the Ruinous path to kill the Spell Queller.
First, he is wrong about the ordering. when you activate an ability, you choose targets before you determine and pay costs. the intuitive way to explain this is that with some cards (like fireball) the cost changes based on what targets you choose, and abilities are the same way (though I can't think of an example offhand). The more detailed way to explain this is to simply refer to the Comprehensive rules, specifically section 602.2
Determining the targets of an ability is the third step, 601.2c, while paying costs is the eighth step, 601.2h. Also worth noting is that determining the legality of the ability/targets is the fifth step, 601.2e, which means that even though the enchantment leaves the field before the ability technically finishes activating, it is still on the field when legality is determined.
the Second way in which he is wrong is that if you activate an ability with an illegal target, you are not forced to continue activating the ability and select a legal target. The specific rule is 601.2e, as referenced above:
So yeah, point the judge towards the Comprehensive rules to try and show him the correct procedure. It's probably best to be respectful about this though, because pride is a real thing and having a mistake pointed out can make even good people defensive.
EDIT: It might be important to understand that the steps for activating an ability (which is section 602.2) directly reference the steps for casting a spell (which is section 601.2), so when the rules in that section talk about "casting a spell" know that they also apply to "activating an ability." This is explicitly explained in Rule 602.2b, for reference.
1 Noose Constrictor
1 Primal Druid
1 Graf Rats
1 Wailing Ghoul
1 Field Creeper
2 Thraben Foulbloods
1 Wicker Witch
1 Backwoods Survivalist
2 Midnight Scavengers
1 Thornhide Wolves
1 Abundant Maw
1 Traverse the Ulvenwald
1 Collective Brutality
1 Murderous Compulsion
1 Rabid Bite
2 Grapple with the Past
1 Murder
1 Autumnal Gloom
1 Gisa's Bidding
1 Wolfkin Bond
8 Forest
9 Swamp
1 Borrowed Grace
1 Dawn Gryff
1 Ironclad Slayer
2 Give No Ground
1 Lunarch Mantle
1 Militant Inquisitor
1 Not Forgotten
1 Spectral Reserves
1 Steadfast Cathar
1 Stern Constable
1 Tenacity
1 Thalia, Heretic Cathar
1 Thalia's Lancers
1 Thraben Inspector
1 Thraben Standard Bearer
Blue
1 Docent of Perfection
1 Fogwalker
2 Laboratory Brute
1 Nagging Thoughts
1 Nebelgast Herald
1 Reckless Scholar
1 Silburlind Snapper
1 Sleep Paralysis
1 Tattered Haunter
1 Turn Aside
2 Wretched Gryff
1 Alms ofthe Vein
1 Behold the Beyond
1 Farbog Revenant
1 Gisa's Bidding
1 Merciless Resolve
1 Strange Augmentation
1 Wailing Ghoul
1 Whispers of Emrakul
Red
1 Alchemist's Greeting
1 Bold Impaler
1 Borrowew Hostility
1 Brazen Wolves
1 Convicted Killer
1 Deranged Whelp
1 Distemper of the Blood
1 Ember-Eye Wolf
1 Furyblade Vampire
1 Galvanic Bombardment
1 Hulking Devil
1 Impetuous Devils
1 Incendiary Flow
1 Otherworldly Outburst
1 Prophetic Ravings
1 Rush of Adrenaline
1 Crossroads Consecrator
1 Howlpack Resurgence
1 Root Out
MultiColored
1 Mercurial Geits
1 Spell Queller
Colorless
1 Cathar's Shield
1 Cryptolith Fragment
1 Slayer's Cleaver
1 True-Faith Censer
In this case, this seems like a combination of "drawing extra cards" and the catch-all "in-game error:" The player drew a card they were supposed to be scrying then cast it, when they shouldn't have had it in the first place. The JAR prescribes the following fixes for drawing extra cards and general in-game errors.
So let's go over what happened:
- The player was supposed to Scry 3, but instead Drew 3. This is "accidentally drawing extra cards" and would be fixed by randomly selecting 3 cards from the player's hand and putting them on top of the player's deck.
- The player then cast one of those three cards. Technically this is not breaking any rules, but it is an indirect result of a rules violation, and more importantly occurs after the above error, so if the judge chooses to rewind the game to the first error this would be rewound as well.
(TL;DR part)If nothing else happened between the initial error of drawing the three cards instead of scrying them and when you caught the error during the casting of Time Walk, the solution seems rather straightforward: