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Rules Q&A » Post: How to calculate requirement fulfillment

How to calculate requirement fulfillment

Sept. 23, 2015 03:21:45 PM

Miao Bai
Judge (Level 2 (Judge Academy))

USA - Pacific West

How to calculate requirement fulfillment

In previous topic, there was something talked about the requirement of blocking.
Original post: http://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/topic/20723/
While reading this, I'm not very clear about the conclusion in this topic, for the legal blocking way, which is mentioned as the maximum requirement could be fulfilled.
How to calculate the requirement fulfillment?
Just using the same scenario mentioned in the post, a 2/2 bear with Lure and 2 2/2 zombies, got buffed by Joraga Invocation, are attacking while defending players have 4 1/1 soldiers, how does the result come of the blocking way 2 block bear, 2 block zombies each is the maximum?

My first calculation here is start from attacking creatures. There are 4 requirements, bear has ‘must be blocked’ and ‘all creature able to block it must do so’, and zombies have ‘must be blocked’. And this final blocking way fulfill 3 of them, which are all the ‘must be blocked’ requirements, and did not fulfill the requirement of the bear must be blocked by all creatures. so here the result is 3/4. In this case, if I block with only 1 soldier to bear, leave 1 soldier not blocking also has the 3/4.

My second calculation is based on blocking creatures, that all soldiers have ‘must block bear’ and ‘must block a non-blocked creature if able’. Then as long as they are all declared as blockers, any of the blocking way would fulfill 4/8 requirements only.

My last calculation also start from attacking creature, but have 7 requirements instead of 4. Bear has 4 ‘must be blocked by soldier’ which mapping to 4 of the blocking creatures, and all three creatures have ‘must be blocked’. In this case, any of the blocking ‘bear blocked by 2, zombie each blocked by 1’, ‘bear blocked by 3, one zombie blocked by 1’ and ‘bear blocked by 4’ fulfill 5/7 of requirements.

So how do we determine the final result?

Thanks
Miao

Sept. 28, 2015 02:16:02 PM

Nathan Long
Forum Moderator
Judge (Level 2 (Judge Foundry))

USA - Southwest

How to calculate requirement fulfillment

So, in researching this question, we discovered my previous response was incorrect. This is going to be the correction to that. Lure actually creates X requirements (where X is the number of creatures the defending player controls). So this is the list of all of the requirements that apply to this situation:

  • Soldier 1 must block the Bear.
  • Soldier 2 must block the Bear.
  • Soldier 3 must block the Bear.
  • Soldier 4 must block the Bear.
  • Bear must be blocked.
  • Zombie 1 must be blocked.
  • Zombie 2 must be blocked.

Normally, it isn't going to be possible to fulfill all of those requirements. At most, we're going to be able to fulfill five of the requirements, as long as you follow these guidelines: all Soldiers must block, the Lured Bear has to be blocked by at least one Soldier, and the Zombies can't be blocked by more than one creature. So these are some possible blocks:

  • The four Soldiers block the Bear.

  • Three Soldiers block the Bear, one Soldier blocks a Zombie.

  • Two Soldiers block the Bear, one Soldier blocks a Zombie, one Soldier blocks the other Zombie.

Each of those options will fulfill five of the seven requirements, which is the maximum number in this case.

Nathan Long
Wizards.Com Boards NetRep

Edited Nathan Long (Sept. 28, 2015 02:16:15 PM)