IPG | MTR

The good news is that there’s not much to talk about this quarter. Policy seems to be in a pretty healthy place.

There’s only one new line in policy that’s really worth highlighting:

If the player received confirmation from his or her opponent before drawing the card (including confirming the number of cards when greater than one), the infraction is not Drawing Extra Cards.

If all you came here for was important policy changes, you can stop reading now. Thanks for swinging by.

Drawing Extra Cards is an infraction we’ve spent lots of time poking at. Fundamentally, while the potential for advantage is high, a Game Loss is a pretty severe penalty for an accidental infraction. Two reasons that it’s this way are that it can be difficult to spot, and it can often occur before the opponent has a chance to prevent it. This is why we’ve traditionally focused on errors-before-the-draw. Those can (and should) theoretically be caught by the opponent. This new policy is a logical extension to that. By confirming that they’re allowed to draw a card, it eliminates both those reasons for the upgraded penalty, and we’re looking forward to seeing how well this works in practice. As a bonus, this encourages players to communicate about their actions, without requiring it. Just get some sort of acknowledgement from your opponent that you’re about to draw, or otherwise put a card into your hand, and it may help you avoid a nasty situation.

The rest is pretty small stuff. Improper Draw at Start of Game got a tweak to make the infraction clearer. All missed card draws in GRV happen now, not just the one for your turn. That lined it up with the discard rule, so they got merged. The GRV fix for handling objects in the wrong zone got clarified, as it was being stretched to cover interactions that were never intended. It only applies to objects already changing zones. The rules for sideboards have been updated to reflect that sideboards can be less than fifteen cards, and to not require 1-for-1 sideboard swaps.

We also fixed up the language about when you can drop from a tournament and that it’s OK from the DCI’s perspective to walk away from sealed or draft with the product you’re currently (legally) holding. It’s not a policy change; it’s been that way for about 5 years now, but there’s never been any real need to make it clearer since it never came up. Then Modern Masters got released and suddenly a lot of people cared. Since we were making a small change to drop policy anyway – you no longer get a first round match loss, you just don’t get Planeswalker participation points for that event – we took the opportunity to clean it all up.

That’s it! As I said, we’re pretty happy with how things are going at the moment, thanks to the amazing job that judges around the world are doing, from the local stores to the floors of GP Las Vegas. You all rock.