My missed trigger article and Pyreheart Wolf Problems
So, first off I think “gotcha” is the wrong way to look at this.
Nobody seems to mind the idea that if you just plain forget your trigger, it's gone. We've been doing that, in one form or another, for years. What people seem to mind is how we handle cases of poor communication, where there is awareness of the trigger but no effective communication of its existence or resolution. The whole “gotcha” discussion boils down to the cases of “well, I know that you have this trigger, and you know you have this trigger, and I know that you know that you have this trigger, but you still won't get the trigger unless you do X, and I'll call a judge if you don't.”
And it's important to note that those cases aren't terribly common. With Pyreheart Wolf, I don't think anybody plans to knowingly allow an illegal block without saying something, for example. So interrupting the attempt to declare blockers should be perfectly fine (and I'd argue that under the IPG as currently written, it is perfectly fine, and if judges think it isn't then that's a point of education to work on). Similarly, most of the time someone who casts a Craterhoof Behemoth is going to be doing something – whether tallying up their creatures, or figuring out just how much total trampling power they've got – that makes the trigger's existence clear. This is just how real games of Magic naturally play out most of the time, and moving policy in that direction is what we ought to aim for.
So what about those cases where somebody is aware of the trigger but doesn't do anything to demonstrate that? We have two questions to answer here:
1. Whose responsibility is it if there's poor communication about something going onto the stack or resolving?
2. Where can we draw a line that enforces that responsibility appropriately?
For (1), it used to be the opponent's responsibility; opponents were just supposed to notice the “obvious” triggers, like exalted, and you could take advantage of an opponent who didn't. Now it's the controller's responsibility; you're supposed to communicate, in some fashion, about even the most “obvious” trigger, and an opponent can take advantage of you if you don't.
That's a major shift in responsibility. Is it the right place to put the responsibility? Well, it's certainly consistent with everything else that uses the stack (exception for silver-bordered land, where Cheatyface puts responsibility on the opponent). And generally, if we want the game to go smoothly, we should put the responsibility for ensuring that on the person who's likely to benefit from it happening (i.e., the controller of the trigger, who has an interest in seeing it resolve correctly). So on both counts, this is probably the right way to do it.
But (2) is where it gets tricky: where do we put the line, such that past that line an opponent can know, absolutely, whether or not the trigger has happened? We want to avoid a couple of pitfalls here: first, we don't want to turn Magic into a game of reflexes (as it unfortunately was, in some ways, with lapsing triggers). But we also don't want to let an ambiguous situation go on too long, since that way lie even worse problems.
So we need some kind of middle ground: give people a little bit of time to do the bare-minimum communication, since we're all human and we want to play at a natural pace. But not too much time, since we don't want to be arguing further down the line about whether the trigger happened.
The current IPG's line basically boils down to looking at whether the controller of the trigger has done something that indicates the game has moved on past the trigger. And that's not bad, as lines in the sand go. It means that if you start trying to declare blockers, and I point out my Pyreheart Wolf, then Pyreheart Wolf's trigger isn't missed, so that's the most-often-cited card solved right there. Craterhoof Behemoth is trickier, for the specific case where you just go straight into declaring attackers without any acknowledgement of the trigger first. I'm not sure whether that's acceptable collateral damage (since it's really not any kind of huge burden to just point to the Behemoth or whatever before you start turning things sideways) in order to get basically everything else in Standard to work naturally, but it's worth thinking about.
The big issue seems to be arguments about how technical the IPG's definition is, or how it interacts with other bits of policy like out-of-order sequencing. Personally I'd like to keep the IPG as non-technical as possible here; even the current language is getting a bit too strict. If the goal (and I think this is the goal) really is for a trigger to be missed once it's clear the controller has done something that shows the game's moved on, then just let that be the definition; trying to codify it in terms of “active” priority passes, or an opponent trying to bait out “what's on the stack” without actually saying that, or whatever, just removes the ability to use common sense and moves us into games of words and reflexes rather than games of cards and skill. OoOS also shouldn't get thrown out the window (and isn't, currently, which is perhaps another point of education).
And speaking of opponents trying to find out if you've missed without bringing up the trigger: I don't really worry too much about that, and treat it as an irrelevant aside to the real discussion. You don't have a responsibility to point out someone else's trigger, but that's not the same as having a right to always play in a way that doesn't remind someone else about a trigger. And getting a common-sense line drawn in the IPG removes most of that anyway, since it'll be obvious when a trigger's missed or not, without feeling like you need to carefully word your questions to avoid reminding someone about a trigger.