Subject: Cards overruling rules???? (was Re: [G-TECH] Yawgmoth's Will) Date: Mon, 2 Nov 1998 05:39:37 GMT From: fred_sXYXYX@netcom.com (Frederick Scott) Newsgroups: rec.games.trading-cards.magic.strategy (TO REPLY VIA E-MAIL, STRIP 'XYXYX' FROM THE ADDRESS) Seth Jaffee writes: >> >Um... it does- it says right on the card "cards put into your graveyard >> >this turn are removed from the game instead." >> > >> >If that doesn't clearly state that you should remove a DR from the game >> >_instead_ of putting it in the graveyard, >> >> Er... then it never went to the graveyard, and shouldn't be removed >> from the game yet. The wording is funny: it translates precisely as >> >> "If this card is put in your graveyard, don't put it in your >> graveyard. Instead, remove it from the game." > >Well, what I am arguing is that whoever "translated" it the way you just >said shouldn't have. Is there some reason a card can't "replace" words in >the rules ("after resolving, spell cards are put in the graveyard" would >change to "after resolving, spell cards are removed from the game") rather >than having to translate into artificial language of rules mock-ups (that >should probably have been handled differently in the first place)? I think you've put your finger on the whole dilemma in writing rules and rulings for Magic. The *myth* is: "If a card contradicts the existing rules, the card takes priority." In truth, that concept doesn't work because the game designers don't provide a means of determining a preference between two cards that modify the rules in apparently contradictory ways. So cards don't really change the real rules. They may seem to, particularly when a card is first released and does something no previous card has ever done before. But what, in fact, happens is that the rules team starts fielding questions about how new card X interacts with other cards and their game effects. So the team immediately starts writing and issuing new game rules about the new game mechanic, within whose framework card X must operate. From then on, players who are aware of these rules can immediately know how card X and any cards using the same mechanic in the future work. Trouble is, these ruels are released to the public first through netreps and perhaps The Duelist, then get thrown into the rulings compendiums, official and non-official, and only much later get codified into the formal, real rules. So Yawgmoth's Will can't really just "modify" or "rewrite" the rules about placing cards in graveyards or it would inevitably run up against some other card that would seem to contradict it in some way. Instead, it has to stay within the framework of a set of ad hoc rules that got dribbled out over time to deal with cards that divert other cards from one zone to another. And the mechanistic result of applying this little-known mechanism, as happens all too often, differs from the result which was intuitive to anyone (most of us!) who don't make a point of staying on top of the hundreds of these things that come out every year. Every time this happens, the game gets a little more complex, opaque, and unknowable. Knowledge of more of the card interactions becomes arcane, known only to the scholars rather than to the general body of players. To me, it would be a lot better if they just dropped this, cards-overrule- the-rule-text myth. They should create all the mechanisms around which they write cards ahead of time, explicitly, so there need be no necessity (except when a mistake happens) of creating them on the fly where they're only accessible to the wired. If they want to create a card which uses a completely new mechanism, they should wait until the either the next edition of the basic game set or the next standalone edition is released. Either of these will have new rulebooks available in the starter decks where they can spell out all the technical details in black and white and everyone can look up what they don't have memorized. Admittedly, this would mean the expansion designers would be constricted about what they could create. When someone comes up with some completely new thing a card could do, they couldn't just stick it in. They'd have to wait until a new rulebook set got issued and put it in some subsequent expansion instead. But I suspect it wouldn't be as difficult a limitation to deal with as all that, and the trouble it would save everyone involved, I'd think it would be a worthwhile change. Fred