The New Docs IPG | MTR



There’s a whole lot of text changing the IPG and MTR this time, but there’s only one significant functional update. A lot of the change is removing the gendered pronouns. Yay! Thanks, Chicago Manual of Style!

What We Talk About When We Talk About Magic

In keeping with the theme of Dominaria, let’s talk about some history!

The communication rules have been a section that we’ve historically avoided messing with. It took a lot of work between 2007 and 2009 (or so) to get them just right, and after that flurry of updates, we’ve mostly left them alone.

The reason we’ve left them alone is that they’ve been remarkably good at providing a structure in which it’s easy to drop in new pieces of information, even to things that would never have been anticipated when they were written. For example, making the City’s Blessing free information was a simple matter of adjusting the definition slightly. Futureproofing is something we strive for, and the communication rules are one of the best examples.

But providing an answer isn’t the same as providing the best answer. While the rules we had for City’s Blessing were unambiguous, it wasn’t optimal that the event could happen, not need announcing, then persist even as the conditions changed. You could not look at the board and derive the status of a permanent with Ascend. Ideally, there’d be a way to know this, but the Communication rules didn’t provide that.

What if we added a fourth type of information? Something that wasn’t just free when asked, but that you had to volunteer and represent. We haven’t had anything like this in the past… wait, didn’t we just do some work on the section about life totals? That describes them!

So we’re tearing out the whole Tracked Totals section and introducing a new type of communication information to go with free, derived and private: status! Status information is metadata about a player, including their life total, all the counters that are attached to them, and any continuous effects that apply to them. Those must all be physically represented, and when a change is made to any of them, it must be announced.

Since we were building out a more comprehensive communications section, we also took the opportunity to include in-game non-verbal communication. The current rules existed to specify a coverage layout designed to minimize confusion. That was successful and we’re merging it into the Communication section and extending it to all Competitive and Professional Rules Enforcement Level matches of Magic. Now you can expect the layout of your game to match what you’re used to seeing on coverage.

Once we had all the potential communication problems grouped together, it makes sense to handle them all in a similar fashion. Before, 4.1 was the only section covered by CPV, but there’s other pieces where it makes sense to issue infractions due to communications failures. CPV now covers the entire section. It might actually be CPV!

But that would have problems as-is (you could get a warning for laying out your board incorrectly), so we’ve also revamped CPV. The solution was already present in the remedy, which only applied when the judge believed that the violation of section 4 directly led to a play decision that wouldn’t have been otherwise made. We made that the definition instead, which really focuses on what’s important here. If everything is clear and both players are acting on mutually-understood information (both active and passive), then we’re not going to worry if there’s technically a violation. You should feel free to step in and encourage people to make things clearer, though!

Problems With Emcee

Not the card. Un-season is behind us.

We had most of the communications changes ready to go a couple months ago and were ready to roll out a midseason update so that we could have it apply to Rivals of Ixalan draft. But we couldn’t!

A while back, banlist announcements were decoupled from the quarterly document updates and didn’t have specific dates associated with them. That’s good! However, that meant that an announcement could come without any warning. That’s bad! So a section got added to the MTR that said any updates would have a four week announcement before the update. This was a good idea in theory, but that placed the same requirements on any MTR update. A pre-announcement would make things worse (“In four weeks, we’ll be doing an MTR update to the communication policy”) and not make a whole lot of sense. We debated just ignoring the rule, but that would set a bad precedent. So we lived with it and fixed the MTR. Now, only banlist announcements need a four-week lead announcement, and other parts of the MTR can be updated as needed.

Foiled Again

Kess, Dissident Mage is seeing some Legacy play. Unfortunately, some of the foil printings are warped too much to be used in a tournament. This happens with foils sometimes. Normally this wouldn’t be a problem, as you’d just use a non-foil version. But Kess doesn’t have one.

As the number of foil-only cards increases, the odds of similar situations arising also increases (and this update also features the rules needed to make the buy-a-box promo legal). As a result we’re extending the proxy policy to also apply to situations where the card is only available in foil. This is the only extension. Cards that have a non-foil printing cannot be proxied.

Quick Hits

There’s a couple of tiny tweaks to deck and decklist infractions. Judge’s discovering an error only applies during a deckcheck. The intent was never that a judge or opponent finding a card on the floor would get a penalty upgraded, so that part has been adjusted to reflect discovery of cards in the deck. The language around “about to be revealed” also got a little more explicit to explain it better.

With the hybrid Saturdays for limited GPs, the question came up on when penalties reset – each day, or after the cut? The decision was made to reset after a cut in a multi-day tournament.

Spectators aren’t allowed to pause a match at Professional REL. Coverage team members are technically spectators, but it’s a bit silly that people whose job it is to watch the game can’t ask them to pause. We’ve carved out a special exception to allow this.

Now that you can Bolt Jace, we don’t need a planeswalker damage redirection shortcut.

Block Constructed is no longer an officially supported format. If you miss Masques Block Constructed, it’s still available as a casual format.

The End of the Saga

That’s it for this update. As always, thanks to all the people who contributed suggestions, including Toby Hazes, David Larrea, Florian Horn and the GPHJs. I’m looking forward to what people find in the new approach to communication, but as always, we’re happy to hear suggestions on any section.