This question/discussion is motivated by a question a player asked on social media recently regarding the delayed zone-change trigger on prized amalgam and its ability to be “missed” (ie missed and thereby lost). Several judges, including me, responded by explaining that delayed zone-change triggers are non-expiring and pointing out a couple cases where this non-expiration is important (Aetherling and Geist of Saint Traft were specific examples that were mentioned).

In reflecting on this discussion and past discussions that I've had in the judge community about this bit of policy, I had a thought that I wanted to bring up for discussion. (so here I am)

I have a proposed adjustment to the current “delayed-zone-change trigger” policy that I think still accomplishes the goals of the current of policy, but without the few awkward card interactions caused by cards like Prized Amalgam.

Bold for visibility, change in italics:
A delayed triggered ability that changes the zone of one or more objects defined when the ability was created. For this trigger, the opponent chooses whether to resolve the ability the next time a player would get priority or when a player would get priority at the start of the next phase. The opponent may choose not to resolve this ability if the ability was not created by an effect that also changed the zone of those objects.

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My reasoning in favor of this proposed change:

According to the AIPG, delayed zone-change triggers generally appear either to clean up temporary effects (temporary token creation and keywords like Dash and Unearth fall into this camp), and often are essential to a card's working the way it is intended to work (primarily flicker effects with a duration, such as found on Aetherling or Eerie Interlude). There's also a few cards like prized amalgam and the Hour of Devastation Gods that employ a delayed zone-change trigger specifically for recursion purposes, and it is this last group of cards that current policy seems least suited to deal with. As I understand it, current policy is set up so that these triggers never expire (to prevent gaining an advantage from the first group by making a temporary effect “permanent” if enough time passes) and that they are always resolved (so that cards in the second group will continue to work the way they are intended, since they tend to happen repeatedly and it would be very harsh to give the opponent the option to “force” these triggers to remain missed).

Intuitively, it seems like the “recursion-type” should fall into the general class of “missable” triggers except for the templating that makes them particular about when they try to accomplish the recursion. Players generally like the “opponent chooses” part of current missed trigger policy and tend to be understanding of the exceptions, but allowing these powerful recursion triggers to never be lost can be confusing and frustrating because it isn't clear why these triggers should work differently from a trigger like that on Arclight Phoenix.

My thinking is that, outside of some bizarre corner-cases, we would only need to mandate the resolution of the delayed trigger in the case of flicker-like effects. All of the other examples that I could find of cleaning up temporary effects would be considered generally detrimental, and so I think we could safely rely on the opponent to insist on resolving them rather than mandating it in policy. In exchange, we now explicitly carve out the exception for effects that are meant to be “change the zone of \object\, then later change the zone again,” which are the one group of these triggers where we don't want to trust the opponent to resolve the trigger, since the later zone-change would generally be considered beneficial.

This would allow us to preserve the general expectation of “opponent chooses whether the trigger happens” in a greater number of cases. There is a small gain in complexity for judges since we have what amounts to an “exception within an exception,” but I think that the complexity increase is small relative to the intuitive appeal of allowing players to at some point lose these recursion abilities like other “normal” triggers. In short, I think this change would bring the game more in line with how players expect the game to play out.

I recognize that the IPG can never and will never cover all corner-cases, but I think that, since the cards that seem to cause trouble (prized amalgam and the Scarab God in particular) are and were mainstays in competitive decks, this interaction seems to fall outside of corner-case land and is worth considering.

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I'd love to hear thoughts and feedback. Is there a consideration I've overlooked? Is there some other reason why we want these recursion abilities to never expire or be lost? Is this just a really bad idea? Is there a better way to accomplish what I'm trying to accomplish?

Edited Andrew Keeler (Jan. 16, 2019 07:33:58 PM)