We can use Squee vs. Ixalan's Binding as precedent for this, since it was also acknowledged by the Rules Manager as not being intended behaviour before the Comprehensive Rules change.

We should be interpreting the rules as written, rather than as intended. We want to make sure that players get an objective ruling and a consistent experience, and letting the Head Judge decide how the rules should be interpreted sounds like a risky move.

The rules are as such, so you would basically rule against those rules. The Yawgmoth's Will scenario was as you said 20 years ago, that shouldnt be an example on how to handle things.

Requesting “O”

My thoughts are this (not ‘O’, obviously):

As HJ of an event, you are the final arbiter on all rules and policy for the purposes of the tournament. It is perfectly within your power to decide to “patch” an “exploit” in the rules. If you decide to do this, you had best make it abundantly clear that this is what you are doing to be fair to the players' expectations and to make sure that your judge staff rules consistently. HJs already do this sort of thing for ambiguous policy situations like defining what “confirming a draw” means for cards like Narset, Parter of Veils.

Now, should we be doing this sort of “rules patching?” I'm a hard no on that. We live in an age where players have a very high awareness of odd rules interactions from the internet, and may even build decks that are designed to exploit these rules loopholes. Having them get to an event and learn that their otherwise perfectly legitimate deck is being errata-ed by the HJ because the HJ doesn't like the way the rules currently work is extremely unfair to that player. It's important to keep the whole proverb in mind: “The HJ has the power to be wrong, but also the responsibility to be right.” Your job as the HJ is to be right in your rulings, and that means being correct according to the the rules as written, not your personal platonic ideal of how the rules should be.

As an aside, several of the “Other Judge” horror stories that end up online likely fall into this camp of a HJ not liking how the rules work and trying to do something “better.” The fact that a player later complains about the ruling online indicates that, in spite of the judge's noble intentions, the ruling ended up being majorly unfair to one of the players in the game. Treating rulings with this sort of bravado does major damage to the image of the judge program as a whole, since it gives the impression that judges play favorites and aren't well-qualified for the job being entrusted to them. It undermines the apparent integrity of the tournament in the eyes of the players, the TOs, and onlookers to have judges seem to be making the rules up as they go along, especially if their rulings contradict public clarifications of how the rules actually work by WotC staff.

Finally, by my reading that ruling from 20 years ago came up because no one realized that the oracle text of Yawgmoth's Will had been “changed back” until the tournament was about to begin, so the HJ made a provisional ruling in the absence of ‘O’ clarification, and made great efforts to spread awareness as to how this interaction would be ruled. In the case of Spark Double, the “problem” was known and had been upheld as correct even while acknowledging that it was an unintended interaction. This means that there is no ambiguity as to how the interaction “should” work rules-wise, so it should be ruled as such.

Edited Andrew Keeler (June 13, 2019 01:11:24 PM)

As Mark noted, judging was quite different twenty years ago, and I'd be VERY cautious about using anything from back then as precedent.

d:^D

Note that the Spark Double scenario has already been fixed. The CompRules have just been updated with the release of Modern Horizons (here!), and now we have this rule telling us that, while we can perform the “Spark Double entering as a copy of a Spark Double already in the field” loop any number of times, doing so won't result in additional +1/+1 counters.

706.9e Some replacement effects that generate copy effects include an exception that’s an additional effect rather than a modification of the affected object’s characteristics. If another copy effect is applied to that object after applying the copy effect with that exception, the exception’s effect doesn’t happen.
Example: Altered Ego reads, “You may have Altered Ego enter the battlefield as a copy of any creature on the battlefield, except it enters with X additional +1/+1 counters on it.” You choose for it to enter the battlefield as a copy of Clone, which reads “You may have Clone enter the battlefield as a copy of any creature on the battlefield,” for which no creature was chosen as it entered the battlefield. If you then choose a creature to copy as you apply the replacement effect Altered Ego gains by copying Clone, Altered Ego’s replacement effect won’t cause it to enter the battlefield with any +1/+1 counters on it.

Edited Nelson Mendoza Moral (June 14, 2019 06:17:37 AM)