Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

Perhaps my answer wasn't clear enough, then, as it's not at all circular. I was trying to explain why it's A, to address Jeff's suggestion.

Saying that policy is A because “there are times where it's strategically correct to let your opponent misunderstand something” is similar to saying that policy is X because “there are times when it's strategically correct to look at your opponent's library while shuffling it”. Just because something would be good strategy doesn't mean we are bound to make the rules allow it.

In a similar vein, one could use your defence of “policy A” to defend not announcing/tracking life totals: if it were allowed by the Player Communication Policy, it would indeed be strategically correct to let your opponent think you were at 4 instead of 3 when they have a Lightning Bolt in their hand.

Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

Another is because we don't want players to have to play the game for their opponents - i.e., having to point out everything they missed. This principle was a factor in the creation and evolution of Missed Trigger policy; we got a lot of negative feedback from players about having to remind their opponents of triggers (ancient history now, but that was a thing).

I was going to say this is irrelevant here, because no one is requiring an opponent to point out the City's Blessing, but then I ran into trouble trying to craft a workable policy change accommodating the City's Blessing.

There are three possible times to acknowledge the City's Blessing:

1) when it happens,
2) later while the player still has ten permanents, or
3) later when the player has fewer than ten permanents.

(1) is awkward to enforce. If we're checking the static version of Ascend, it should continue getting checked, so even if it's initially missed, it should happen later—which brings us to (2).

For (2), if we allow it to be acknowledged later (e.g., when it becomes relevant) and there are still ten permanents, we have the current policy, so we don't need to change anything.

For (3), if we disallow it being acknowledged later when there are fewer than ten permanents, the “best strategy” for the player becomes very strange: they should acknowledge they have the City's Blessing immediately before they would lose their tenth permanent—this gets awkward, regardless of whether it's handled like a missed trigger or a GRV or a CPV.

In fact, if we made this a CPV, imagine this: a player controls ten permanents, then nine, then realises they should have the City's Blessing but the opponent doesn't believe them. So you issue a CPV, but you still have to figure out whether they should have the City's Blessing! So now instead of a puzzle to figure out, you have to issue a penalty and still figure out the puzzle.

TL;DR – I don't think making announcing the City's Blessing mandatory is similar to the problems with the old Missed Trigger policy; but I also do not think it would be easy to craft a good policy around announcing the City's Blessing—mostly because of the combination of it not being a trigger and it lasting forever.

As the Head Judge who made the announcement Scott referenced, I feel my
reasoning may be helpful here.

I was actually inspired by another judge's opening announcement suggestion
(I feel terrible that I don't remember who it was; if you see this, please
take the credit due to you!) to encourage player communication. I didn't
use a script per se, but my announcement followed this vein:

“Magic is a game of skill. When you let ambiguity exist in the game state,
if you need a judge to handle it, you are leaving the outcome of your game
in the hands of policy, or of the judge. The ruling may go well for you,
or it may not, and it may not be in your control. To make sure your games
are decided as much as possible by your skill and not by those other
things, you should communicate as clearly as possible with your opponents
and make sure the game state is as clear as it can be.”

Again, to be clear: I can't say with certainty that I used those exact
words, but that was the gist of the announcement. I believe The City's
Blessing was probably referenced directly as well. The idea was not to
threaten the players that the investigation into the blessing of the city
would not go their way, but to put the Fear of God in them that they should
probably make it clear, just in case. I think it went quite well for the
day, as Scott claimed.

-Justin Miyashiro
L2 Colorado

Originally posted by David Poon:

TL;DR – I don't think making announcing the City's Blessing mandatory is similar to the problems with the old Missed Trigger policy; but I also do not think it would be easy to craft a good policy around announcing the City's Blessing—mostly because of the combination of it not being a trigger and it lasting forever.

My proposed best change is not to make announcing it mandatory, but to make visually representing it mandatory. That way there is no “strat” of waiting until right before you lose 10 to announce. If you have it and don't visually represent, you get a CPV (although I'd want to lessen the upgrade severity of CPV at the same time, for this and also because of Path to Exile shenanigans). In any scenario where a player “should” have it, we're going to have to reconstruct if they don't still have 10, that's inevitable. But as is our policy encourages players to play games of “gotcha” with their opponents, which I feel strongly is not a good place to be.

Scott: You specifically brought up bluffing as something we want to philosophically preserve with policy. Since I've not heard/asked for an explanation of this before, could you lend some insight into where/how we draw the line between “allowable bluffing” and “too detrimental to allow misrepresentation”?

Jeff, I think bluffing is covered by the Player Communication section of the MTR.

Originally posted by I previously asked:

Instead of worrying about what might go wrong, let's redirect this thread towards actual incidents (should any occur), and the lessons learned while solving any problems.

Apparently, that message was missed, so I'm repeating it here. Our policy team doesn't react to our preliminary expectations (fears?) of what might go wrong, but instead evaluates actual events, and then works with Magic's R&D team to craft policy changes, only as necessary.

I understand and respect the concerns and ideas expressed here, but speculation isn't really helping anyone. We've confirmed policy, and even tried to explain why it's valid.

This has devolved into the sort of “but-what-if?!” discussion that's common whenever judges gather; I know how much fun those discussions can be, and don't like to squelch them … but this isn't a small group of like-minded individuals, debating the problems of the universe; this is a forum for communication and education among the thousands of judges, globally.

For all of those reasons, I'm closing this thread, certain that - once actual incidents occur - a new one will open, and take us further down the road.

d:^D