Ask the Judge, 05/26/2006: Feature Friday

Well, this was supposed to be a Regionals report, but, alas, I have nothing interesting to report. I had a great staff and they did their usual amazing job. Instead, as the fourth and final leg of the Feature Friday relay that Seamus has set up for us, I'll have to pick my own topic...

"Ruling by Intent" Does Not Mean "Correcting Players' Bad Decisions"

Before you read this article, you should read Justus Ronnau's original Ruling by Intent article. I should point out that I'm not trying to contradict anything in Justus's article, but merely point out how it has been misinterpreted by many judges.

Because I'm sure many of you didn't read the article, despite the handy link, I'll quote what Justus lists as the top two reasons to utilize Ruling by Intent.

For ruling by intent to be the correct call, two conditions must be met:

1. The intention of the player at the time when he could legally have made the decision must be clear.
2. A player may gain no advantage because of his sloppy play.

Let's consider an example. A attacks B with a 3/3 creature, and B blocks it with his own 3/3 creature. A then plays Shining Shoal with X = 3 and announces his own 3/3 as the target. B allows this to resolve and then A says he's redirecting the damage to B. B then points out that the target is what the damage is being redirected to, not the original source of damage. A asserts that he clearly didn't mean to redirect damage to his own creature. A judge is summoned.

There are two statements here about Player A's intent, both of which are true:

• A intended to redirect 3 damage dealt by B's creature from A's creature to B.
• A intended to target B with the Shining Shoal.

However, applying these two intentions to Ruling by Intent leads to two different results. So which to use? The answer is whichever states the action A wanted to take. Note that the first statement doesn't state anything about the action A wanted to take, only the ends A wanted to achieve. But A needs to know the means to these ends. His chosen means—targeting B with the Shining Shoal—do not accomplish his desired end. This means the player made a mistake, and it is not one the judge should be correcting for the player.

Some of you out there (if you bothered to read Justus's article) may be wondering. "How is this different from the Harrow case? He wanted to search for the lands, but he didn't realize that letting the spell resolve without searching for them would make him fail to accomplish this."

The distinction is relatively simple. In the Harrow case, the player clearly intended to search for the lands during Harrow's resolution. This is a means, not an end. The end is having more lands in play. This is how the parallel differs. The player must know what is required to get to do what he wants.

To illustrate this point further, consider the following story. A player was playing a deck with Shuriken. He'd read about his deck on the Internet, and knew of the "Shuriken trick." So, he sat down in the first couple rounds and announced he was performing the Shuriken trick. His opponents allowed this to occur. Only in round 3, when an opponent had no idea what the trick was, was a judge called. The player had no idea what the trick was, only the net effect of it. I asked him to express exactly what abilities the player was using, targeting what and when, etc., and the player was unable to do so, so I didn't allow "the Shuriken trick" as a valid shortcut without an explanation from the player as to what it meant.

In summary, Ruling by Intent is a tool to use when a player knows what he or she wants to do, but makes a slight error in performing it. It is not to be used for assisting a player in achieveing ends that they either do not know or have forgotten the means to achieve them. Hopefully this article will help judges (and players) decipher further appropriate and inappropriate cases to use Ruling by Intent, which is a key tool for judges—as long as it's used correctly.

Bonus "Article"—Unofficial Summary of Comp Rules and Oracle Changes

Most of the Dissension changes were small, and I won't bog you down with details. However, interesting bits follow:

409.1a: Activated abilities that are being played from a hidden zone have the card revealed at this point in the process of playing them. This clarifies how everything, from the Cycling of old to newer stuff like Transmute and Forecast, work in terms of the opponent's ability to verify what you're doing at any given point in the process.

410.9: This section actually has quite a few changes; mainly to handle the case when blocking creatures are blocking via a method other than being declared as a blocker during the appropriate time in the Declare Blockers step. For example, look at Flash Foliage. This section indicates whether effects like "When CARDNAME becomes blocked" or "When CARDNAME becomes blocked by a creature" trigger at these times.

510 is perhaps the biggest change, and yet is still more or less free of substance (pun intended... sorry). The idea is a "status". Tapped or untapped? Flipped or not? These define how the permanents are normally and what happens when effects do things like copy the object (no status is copied), put the object into play (returns to default status unless the effect putting into play states otherwise), and that sort of thing.

Oh, and "Enchant opponent" now exists. Exciting, no? [Questionable. -Seamus]

I also want to highlight some of the more interesting errata, and the purpose behind them. This, too, is not by any means an exhaustive list.

Getting rid of drawing specific cards: Aladdin's Lamp, Zur's Weirding
These cards' old Oracle wordings caused you to draw a specific card. However, because of the very specific definition of draw, specifying what card should be drawn can cause rules problems in certain situations when you don't manage to draw that card (for example, the state-based effect related to failing to draw a card, and other effects that might replace a card draw with something else), so these were reworded so the draw doesn't tell you which card to draw, but the intended card is on top of the library, so it works out the same.

Two Headed Giant: Awakening, Chaos Moon, Concerted Effort, Discordant Spirit, Sun Droplet, Timesifter, Traveling Plague, Verdant Force
These cards used to trigger on "each player's upkeep" and now trigger "each upkeep", or something very similar to this. The older wording was originally used to emphasize that the ability triggered on both players' turns, not just the object's controller's. However, a player's upkeep begins, in a sense, twice each turn in 2HG, once for each player whose turn it is. Note that cards that refer to the player in the effect (such as Woebringer Demon) didn't receive the errata and trigger twice each turn in 2HG, once for each player.

Anyway, that's all for me for now. Stay tuned as our relay begins all over again with Seamus, and I'll be back in a few weeks.

--
Lee Sharpe
lee DOT sharpe AT gmail DOT com
DCI Level 3 Judge