So this is a little different to my usual sort of article but I thought I would shoot out a quick summary of the changes to the floor rules.

You can read them yourself here but let me give you a quick summary.

Clarifications

Slow play

Shuffle procedure

Tardiness

Punishments for offenses

Slow play

Slow play basically boils down to what you would expect broken down into 3 levels – minor, moderate and severe.

Minor is things like taking too long to think or constantly changing your mind about attack paterns, the honest stuff that everyone will probably do a few times.

Moderate is checking game states constantly when there has been no changes.

Sever is deliberately doing nothing.

Shuffling

Your opponent may now shuffle your deck after your initial shuffle (Before they were only entitled to cut).

Riffle shuffling is pretty risky now as if your opponent or the judge thinks you took a peak at your deck or marked any cards you could be in trouble.

not new but I would take this time to remind you that a pile shuffle is not sufficient at randomising a deck and should only be used in conjuction with other methods.

Being late

This is broken down into 2 categories, common and severe

Common is little things like getting to your table a minute or 2 after the round starts or being late to submit decklists or match slips. Be wary even though it sounds soft this can be issued with a warning or even a match loss.

Severe tardiness is a biggy. A severe tardiness is clearly defined as showing up to the table 5 minutes after a round has started. This is an immediate match loss.

Punishments

This one is mostly for judges but it basically boils down to being how to deliver a warning and when to upgrade the offense from a level 1 to a level 2. Basically each offense raises the level but judges can decide to start at level 2 if they feel the offense was serious.

New stuff and overhauls

Judgement

Judges can now call out an infraction in any game that they see. Before this change judges were supposed to operate on an “accepted gamestate” basis, basically meaning if a player didn’t catch it; you can’t do anything. Now judges can step in if they see any infraction.

This is a really good thing and should hopefully reduce cheating or at least scare of some of the sneakier ones.

Team stuff

I can be forgiven for not going into detail here right?

It’s mostly just clarification of the formats and some rules on how players are allowed to communicate, nothing too big considering team league is dead this year.

Information infractions

Better get good at your arithmatic

You can now be given a gameloss for presenting your opponent with false information such as power or shield values, this is pretty big so please be careful especially if you play a clan like Neo-nectar where it can be hard to keep track of numbers.

Please note this only applies to cases where you will get an advantage over your opponent, if you state too low a number the game state is accepted as is.

Also take caution that a more sly opponent might try and take advantage of this so dig out your math books and get practicing.]

Sequencing cards (basically stacking)

This one baffles me

This will get you a warning of course when they say sequencing they are walking a fine line, what they mean is breaking up clumps of triggers etc or “weaving” them through your deck.

This should not be tolerated at all and I fully expect judges to take this into their own hands a little but be aware that this is still something they can be picked up for and even though level 2 is only a warning enough warnings can lead to a DQ.

Wrapping up

There you have it the extent of the changes, sorry for the lack of images but there isn’t a whole lot I can put here. Please let me know if I got anything wrong and I’ll be sure to fix it and as always –

Thanks for reading