Ask the Judge, 04/21/2006: Feature Friday

Whew!

Between my trip to France, the flu I brought home from that otherwise excellent trip, and the impressive pileup of work that accumulated while I was out, I've had hardly a moment to catch my breath, let alone think about Magic (though I did manage to pick up a few packs in Avignon). I've little choice but to do so now, of course, as I'm going to be up bright and early tomorrow to run a Prerelease. This is sort of my life these days: manic intervals of work and travel puncuated by the occasional tournament.

Shortly before I left I had the opportunity to work my first (non-Prerelease) Two-Headed Giant tournament (Champs), which was great. The format is... sluggish, but the extra ten minutes each round helped keep the number of draws reasonable. It was great watching teams work together and I expect turnout for these events to grow. While the communication policy is very liberal, we did have a few issues. There were a few people who seemed ready to just take their partner's hand and play the game solo, which isn't cool. Make suggestions, point, nod, smile... but please don't be tapping lands that aren't in front of you*.

At the end of the day, I had a tense situation when I ruled that a team had declared their blockers, despite neither team having absolutely explicitly asserted the game state. The other team, believing that blockers were declared, cast a combat trick that would end the game. When I am called to a situation like this, there are a few lines of investigation that I use to determine (95% of the time) how I am going to rule.

First, in the absence of an explicit verbal cue, were there clear non-verbal clues from either or both teams that the game was to proceed? If you put a blocker in front of an attacking creature, and then play a spell, that's (by the letter of the rules) a sign that the game has moved on. In practice, this isn't an absolute rule. If a player was vigilant about being clear that they were not done declaring blockers, I might let them get away with taking an action that would technically have to wait, like indicating that the blocker they'd just declared would be regenerating.

Another kind of signal of the game progressing is silence. A pause is often used as an indication of 'would you like to do anything?' This can be tricky, because the experience of time—and the perception of the length of a pause—is highly subjective, and can be massively distorted by stress or adrenaline. The pause for thought that takes 20-30 seconds by the wall clock can seem like an instant to the thinker and an eternity to the player waiting. This is one of the reasons that I often refer to my watch when concerned about slow play. So pauses can be tough or misleading, but they are a valuable clue to where people thought the game was at when a problem occured.

In this case, my job got easy when a floor judge informed me that the partner of the defending player who claimed that they weren't done declaring blockers had said, after the trick came out, "We should have blocked differently." The player confirmed it, and after reviewing the rest of the situation, the decision was fairly easy. At least three of the four players thought that the game had progressed, and the fourth should have recognized that fact sooner, and corrected it if he disagreed. It's often not this clear, and none of the guidelines that could be suggested can be set in stone. You have to look at what people said and did; the extent to which extra information was revealed; and you have to make sure that everyone had a chance to step in and slow things down.

This situation and my subsequent trip to France (despite a distinct lack of card-slinging on my part) reminded me of one of my favorite things about the Pro Tour: watching players work through the lack of a common language. It's remarkable to observe that players who cannot speak to one another often have less difficulty with maintaining a correct gamestate than those who can. This isn't always the case, of course; I've handled a number of situations where only the intervention of judges fluent in the languages of the players (another great benefit of the Tour) could resolve a situation, and I might even say that the bad situations involving language-free players can be strikingly worse than the situations I deal with involving only English speakers. But by and large, players use a small but elegant set of signs and are careful to indicate when they are continuing to think or take an action, precisely so that a game doesn't move on before they're ready. Table judging one of the finals matches at PT Seattle a couple years ago, Japanese player Jin Okamoto and Dutch pro Kamiel Cornelissen played an the easiest match I've ever had to track (Pro Tour table judges track a lot of information: life totals, damage sources, land drops, etc, at the same time that they watch for rules violations and try to prevent them before they happen). The pace of play was not at all slow, but there was never any question of whether damage was on the stack, who had priority, when blockers were declared.

At some level, this degree of clarity comes from knowing the rules of the game in more detail than that of your casual player. But it's probably not more rules knowledge than most Friday Night Magic players have. I would love to see every match conducted with this kind of care. I can't begin to estimate how many times I've been called over to a match and had to ask both players to slow down and take a bit of care to check in with one another occasionally. I'm sure that some players do it on purpose, but I'm also certain that it can easily cost them a game if the judge's ruling doesn't go their way.

I'll be back again next week, and after that we may have some fresh Feature Friday faces to share with you. Until then, have a great weekend at the prerelease; stop by and say hi if you happen to be at the Portland event.

Seamus

* I'm not really trying to suggest that you occupy your partner's seat here.