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September Magic Rules Changes

By Trick Jarrett ⋅ September 30, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment ⋅

Mark Got­tlieb has finally been able to post the rules updates that come with the release of Zendikar, and it’s got some siz­able changes. To save you all the trou­ble of read­ing the long and multi-page updates, let me give you the high­lights in the form of the all-powerful bul­let point list.

These changes will go into effect on Octo­ber 2nd, 2009

From the Introduction

• Van­guard and Plane­chase are being added to the com­pre­hen­sive rules. It also struck me while read­ing this that they use the ‘Com­mand zone’ just like EDH.
• Van­guard cards are being added to Gath­erer, both the orig­i­nal printed forms, and the online Van­guard cards.
• Elder Dragon High­lander is being added to the com­pre­hen­sive rules but Wiz­ards is NOT tak­ing the for­mat over, instead it will remain in the hands of the group who have been over­see­ing it and Got­tlieb will keep the com­pre­hen­sive rules up to date with their changes. This poses a very inter­est­ing pos­si­bil­ity for other casual for­mats to earn recog­ni­tion and acceptance.
• Exo­dus got a lot of atten­tion as it is the next Vin­tage set to go live on Magic Online, so the cards from that set got a lot of ten­der lov­ing care in prepa­ra­tion for it.
• Next Update will come in Jan­u­ary of 2010.

Van­guard Spe­cific Notes

• Van­guard cards will be get­ting tem­plate updates
• They are renam­ing the open­ing mod­i­fiers from ‘Start­ing Life’ to ‘Life Mod­i­fier’ and ‘Start­ing & Max Hand Size’ to ‘Hand Mod­i­fier’ as these bet­ter reflect the mod­i­fy­ing num­bers present on the cards.
• They are renam­ing all of the Online Van­guard cards, instead of ‘Avatar — Akroma, Angle of Wrath’ it will be ‘Akroma, Angel of Wrath Avatar’ — no real func­tional change here, just clean­ing up.
• There are a cou­ple of Van­guard cards which are get­ting their text cleaned up but won’t affect their func­tion­al­ity in any way.

Func­tional Ora­cle Changes

This is a list of changes to card word­ings which have an actual effect on how they behave and what they do. Usu­ally these are older cards being mas­saged to work with rules changes, some­times these are house clean­ing changes for old cards which have been overlooked.

• Par­al­lax Cards — They are revert­ing some pre­vi­ous changes that were made which lim­ited some crazy func­tion­al­ity on the three Par­al­lax cards, Par­al­lax Tide, Par­al­lax Wave and Par­al­lax Nexus are all affected by this.
• Flag­bear­ers — These are three cards which forced your oppo­nent to tar­get them (or a spe­cific crea­ture of yours) rather than other crea­tures you might con­trol. They were mod­i­fied to be more pow­er­ful and also force abil­i­ties and copies of spells to tar­get them, these changes are being undone. Affected Cards: Coali­tion Honor Guard, Coali­tion Flag and Stan­dard Bearer
• Exo­dus Keeper Cycle — These are Exo­dus cards that are all get­ting errata (re-wordings) but the errata is not uni­form among them. The errata fixes a para­dox in the rules about tar­get­ing of play­ers. Affected Cards: Keeper of the Light, Keeper of the Mind, Keeper of the Dead, Keeper of the Flame, and Keeper of the Beasts
• Exo­dus Oath Cycle — These are also get­ting errata for a para­dox cre­ated by their rules text inter­act­ing with the mod­ern Magic rules. They are being given errata to allow them to func­tion prop­erly, but again the errata is not uni­form. Affected Cards: Oath of Mages, Oath of Lieges, Oath of Schol­ars, Oath of Ghouls, Oath of Druids.
• Mirage’s Insta-chantments — These were a set of enchant­ments which could be cast as though they were enchant­ments, and they did dif­fer­ent things depend­ing on how they were cast. These are all get­ting reworded. Gottlieb’s arti­cle makes it clear that these are quite a headache for the rules man­ager. He clar­i­fies that these spells do not have flash, but they are cast as though they did.
• Bar­rel­ing Attack — It is being mod­i­fied to allow you to cast it before block­ers are declared where the pre­vi­ous Ora­cle word­ing made it a post-blocker com­bat trick.
• Bounty of the Hunt — Errata on this card is tied to the way it func­tions and the way dam­age comes off of crea­tures. It was cleaned up and made to be fairly easy to interpret.
• Cun­ning — Again the way Cun­ning is printed could pos­si­bly still cause a crea­ture to die from com­bat dam­age only later in the turn, it is being fixed to pre­vent this.
• Dralnu, Lich Lord — Chang­ing the crea­ture type to “Zom­bie Wizard”
• Equipoise — This got some mas­sag­ing but no real func­tional change, more clar­i­fi­ca­tion and stream­lin­ing for Magic Online.
• Errant Min­ion & Power Leak — As these cards are fairly sim­i­lar, they are being synced up in word­ing and it is being mod­i­fied for the player to pay more than just 2 mana.
• Fluc­tu­a­tor — It is being reworded that is based on other sim­i­lar cards, and being opened up slightly to not just tar­get cycling costs.
• Illu­sion­ary Mask — This is fix­ing the behav­ior of the Mask since the pre­vi­ous Ora­cle update, not too big of a change. It has no effect on Mas­ters Edi­tion 3 as the card was pro­grammed to work properly.
• Invoke Prej­u­dice — It is being reworded, remov­ing the nonar­ti­fact lim­i­ta­tion. This change could pos­si­bly lead to shenanigans…
• Mas­ter of the Hunt — Reword­ing to allow the cre­ated ‘Wolves of the Hunt’ tokens to band only with each other, not other wolves.
• Mogg Assas­sin — A clean­ing up of the word­ing. It now tar­gets the oppo­nent and the oppo­nent tar­gets your creature.
• Penance — Fix­ing Ora­cle word­ing to bet­ter match the spells intended effect.
• Sol­devi Sen­try — Fix­ing the card’s behav­ior to work as intended.
• The Mael­strom — This is a fix for one of the Planeswalk planes. It is clar­i­fy­ing the cause of the ‘oth­er­wise’ clause to make clear that if it is not a per­ma­nent then you put it on the bot­tom of your library.
• Wall of Nets — Fixed word­ing, no major change.
• Ydwen Efreet — Clar­i­fy­ing the behav­ior on the coin flip to get slightly closer to the orig­i­nal intended behavior.

Non­func­tional Ora­cle Changes

These are changes which have absolutely zero effect on the spell’s behav­ior. These fixes include fix­ing punc­tu­a­tion, adding clauses for clar­i­fi­ca­tion etc. Since there is no effect to dis­cuss I will just list off the cards being affected.

• Inva­sion Dragons
• Aveng­ing Druid
• Ayeasha Tanaka
• Reroute
• Rust
• Charisma
• Debt of Loyalty
• Fade Away
• Flash of Defiance
• Flood­gate
• Prince of Progress
• Flow­stone Flood
• Lim­ited Resources
• Mem­ory Crystal
• Necolo­gia
• Obi­sid­ian Fireheart
• Parox­ysm
• Recon­nais­sance
• Song of Serenity

Com­pre­hen­sive Rule­book Changes

This is where the under­ly­ing rules of Magic get changed. It may be changed for new mechan­ics intro­duced in the new set, or adding new even­tu­al­i­ties for pos­si­bil­i­ties. For this sec­tion I will be tak­ing Gottlieb’s notes and reprint­ing them here, adding notes where needed.

103.3b & 103.3c
The “start­ing the game” pro­ce­dures got these new sub­rules regard­ing the spe­cial pro­ce­dures taken in Van­guard and EDH, respectively.

103.4b
This mul­li­gan rule stated that a player draws a new hand of seven cards the first time he or she takes a mul­li­gan in a mul­ti­player game. But that may not be true in a Van­guard game, since his or her start­ing hand size may not be seven, so the rule has been adjusted accordingly.

103.4d
This new rule cov­ers the alter­nate mul­li­gan rules used in EDH.

112.5
This new rule describes loy­alty abil­i­ties. All sub­se­quent rules in this sec­tion (start­ing with the old 112.5) have been renum­bered. (See the note on sec­tion 606 below.)

112.6k (for­merly 112.5k)
This rule now states that abil­i­ties of van­guard cards (in addi­tion to plane cards) func­tion in the com­mand zone.

115.1, 115.2, 115.2e
These rules are in the sec­tion on pri­or­ity. The first two were changed, and the third was added, to define the sys­tem more accu­rately. The rules had said that play­ers can’t take actions unless they have priority—but that’s not true; player can also take actions if a spell or abil­ity instructs them to (and no one has pri­or­ity at that time).

117.1
This rule cov­ers start­ing life totals. It was bro­ken into a rule (to cover the start­ing life total of 20) and a sub­rule (to cover Two-Headed Giant), then two more sub­rules were added to cover Van­guard and EDH, respectively.

200.1
The parts of a card now include hand mod­i­fier and life mod­i­fier [from Van­guard — Trick].

204.2a, 300.1
The card types now include vanguard.

204.3j
Trap was added to the list of spell types.

204.3k
Ally and Sur­rakar were added to the list of crea­ture types.

204.3n
This new rule was added to cover van­guard sub­types (there are none).

206.2c
Land­fall was added to the list of abil­ity words.

208.2
This rule about loy­alty abil­i­ties was added to the loy­alty sec­tion. (See the note on sec­tion 606 below.)

209
This is a new sec­tion cov­er­ing hand mod­i­fier. The old 209 was renum­bered to 211.

210
This is a new sec­tion cov­er­ing life modifier.

303.4c
This rule now spec­i­fies that if an Aura is also a crea­ture, it first becomes unat­tached from what­ever it was attached to, then is put into the grave­yard, each as a state-based action.

306.5d
This new rule cov­ers loy­alty abil­i­ties. (See the note on sec­tion 606 below.)

306.7
This rule, which used to cover acti­vated abil­i­ties of planeswalk­ers, has been deleted. The sub­se­quent rules in this sec­tion have been renum­bered. (See the note on sec­tion 606 below.)

310
This is the new sec­tion for the van­guard card type.

401.6
This rule had to be mod­i­fied a bit to cover Sphinx of Jwar Isle. Now it cov­ers cards on top of a library that are revealed or can be looked at.

510.1f
This rule was added to state that once a player has made all of his or her com­bat dam­age assign­ments, those assign­ments as a whole are checked to see if they’re legal. If not, they’re redone.

601.2c
This rule got a line added to it to cover the new Flag­bearer abil­ity. Sim­i­lar to the rule regard­ing restric­tions and require­ments when declar­ing attack­ers or block­ers, it basi­cally states that a player chooses tar­gets so the max­i­mum num­ber of “must tar­get” effects are fol­lowed with­out vio­lat­ing any “can’t tar­get” effects.

606
This abil­ity was added to cover “loy­alty abil­i­ties,” which are acti­vated abil­i­ties with loy­alty sym­bols in their costs. Pre­vi­ous rules about planeswalk­ers stated that a player could acti­vate only one of their abil­i­ties per planeswalker per turn, and could do so only at a time he or she could cast a sor­cery. Now these restric­tions are intrin­sic to the abil­i­ties, not intrin­sic to the planeswalker card type.

This was done for two rea­sons. 1) This makes a lot more sense if a planeswalker is granted an acti­vated abil­ity, as with Flame Fusil­lade. Acti­vat­ing that other abil­ity shouldn’t pre­clude acti­vat­ing a loy­alty abil­ity, and shouldn’t have to be done only at a time the player could cast a sor­cery. 2) This closes a loop­hole regard­ing a non-planeswalker (such as Quick­sil­ver Ele­men­tal) that some­how picks up some loy­alty abil­i­ties and goes bonkers.

The rest of the 600 sec­tion (from the old sec­tion 606 through the old sec­tion 615) have all been renumbered.

607.2 (for­merly 606.2), 706.2
These sec­tions were updated with the new kicker terminology.

608.2b (for­merly 607.2b), 608.2g (for­merly 607.2g)
These rules got word­ing tweaks regard­ing objects that aren’t in the zone they’re expected to be in.

613.6f
This rule was added to cover time­stamps of van­guard cards.

702.11d
This rule, in the intim­i­date sec­tion, has been deleted. (Intim­i­date was added to the rule­book before there were any cards with that abil­ity; this rule explained that that there were no cards with intim­i­date yet. But now there are, so the rule is no longer needed.)

710.1
This sec­tion now ref­er­ences Sorin Markov as the other card that can allow a player’s turn to be con­trolled by another player.

902
This sec­tion was added to cover the Van­guard casual variant.

903
This sec­tion was added to cover the Elder Dragon High­lander casual variant.

Glos­sary
New entries were added for:
Elder Dragon High­lander
Hand Mod­i­fier
Life Mod­i­fier
Loy­alty Abil­ity
Vanguard

A new def­i­n­i­tion was added for:
Gen­eral

This con­cludes our overview of the Magic rules changes for Sep­tem­ber 2009. The next update will come in Jan­u­ary of 2010.

Trick Jarrett is the host and founder of ManaNation.com, he writes, edits, covers, and spoils Magic for a living. Playing it whenever he can manage to find the time. He is engaged to a lovely woman who refuses to learn Magic, and they have a cute cocker-spaniel puppy who is all too eager to play Magic.

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