Originally posted by Mark Brown:
Lyle Waldman
In particular, regarding the Pyro Ascension example, again a direct quote from IPG, page 8, section 2.1:
I'm not sure why you are quoting a section of the missed trigger additional remedy which relates to a default action. Pyromancer Ascension, there is no default action.
So a “may” trigger with a void option (i.e. "you may do X, "-type effects) no longer have the void option as the default? Hm, I'll have to remember that one. I recall learning that somewhere, but upon trying to find a quote to prove it, I was unable to find it in CR, MTR, or IPG.
Lyle Waldman
Your claim was that we should allow the OOOS because “why would a player not want to add the counter?”.
I think you misread Toby's posting, he didn't say that we should allow the OoOS because a player would never not want to add the counter, he said that we never assume a player will always make the optimal choice because that would lead to a judge ruling that players would never not want to add the counter. A huge difference.
To quote Toby:
What information could you gain from the Probe that would make you change your mind on the Ascension trigger?
Perhaps it wasn't what he meant, but this reads to me as “the player will always want to either add or not add the counter, regardless of what he drew from Probe”. As Toby continued to say:
There are certainly triggers for which this could be relevant, but I can't think of anything that isn't a crazy corner here.
As far as I'm concerned, if a crazy corner case exists, then we can't make a blanket statement. So long as we can't make a blanket statement (i.e. “in every single possible case of all possible combinations of game states, it is blatantly obvious that a choice will occur”), any ruling by a judge stating “it's OOOS because obviously…” is simply a bad call. The reason is simply that it's not obvious; the players might be seeing something that we're not. I'm willing to admit that Todd Anderson (and LSV, and Matt Sperling, and PVDDR, and the other pros who have come out against the trigger rules) probably sees lines of play that I would miss in a million years, and I'm not prepared to say that a choice is “obvious” knowing that there are lines of play I might miss. As a result, I'm not comfortable making a ruling under the assumption that something is “obvious”, and I don't think anyone else should be comfortable with that either.