Hey judges! I'm excited to announce a website that I've been working on for a while: Rulesguru.net. It's designed as a database of rules questions to be used for running a judge class, putting together a presentation, brushing up on your rules knowledge, or anything else you might need sample questions for. Questions range all the way from “what does haste mean” to the hardest corner cases, and you can filter them by format, topic, difficulty, and more, making it easy to find the exact kind of questions you need for your specific application.

Additionally, anyone can easily submit their own question in less than a minute, which will be reviewed for accuracy and then added to the site. (No account creation or complex formatting required.)

The site is currently a work in progress, so please let me know if you notice anything that you think could be improved. (Please only reply to this post if your question pertains to other people as well. Otherwise you can email me, send me a message on Facebook, or use the contact form on the site.) Please check it out and let me know what you think!

Edited Isaac King (Oct. 2, 2018 07:27:01 PM)

Hey Isaac, this looks real handy and something I was looking for for my judgelings. I submitted a new question, but is there a way for me to check if the question was already in the database?

Edited Jan Jaap Vermeire (Oct. 3, 2018 04:46:04 AM)

It is always nice to see new initiatives taken and I do not want to sound mean but what exactly are the differences with the judge booth?

It looks very similar but maybe I am missing something.

I like how it references the CR for most of the rulings, but this does seem similar to judge booth. From my quick peek, though, it seems like this has more difficult questions and corner cases involving older cards, while judge booth has a lot more interactions from standard or recent standard.

Originally posted by Jan Jaap Vermeire:

Hey Isaac, this looks real handy and something I was looking for for my judgelings. I submitted a new question, but is there a way for me to check if the question was already in the database?

Not at the moment. Duplicate questions aren't a big concern at the moment given the small size of the question pool, and if that ends up being the case I can remove the duplicate myself.

Originally posted by Théo CHENG:

what exactly are the differences with the judge booth? It looks very similar but maybe I am missing something.

The Judge Booth is a project that interacts with players at events in order to get them interested in the rules and/or judging. Rulesguru has no such physical component, it's just a database of questions. If you're referring to just its website, the Judge Booth is oriented towards players and is designed specifically for use at the aforementioned physical booths, so the questions are mostly limited to recent cards and simple interactions, and the answers are explained in casual language without rules baggage. Rulesguru is intended as a judge-oriented database of as many questions as possible, so it has a much larger question pool, more extensive categorization options, and the answers provide specific rules quotes as to why they are what they are.

Edited Isaac King (Oct. 3, 2018 09:41:46 AM)

I didn't realize Judge Booth had a physical component.

I'll probably use both websites, depending on who I'm directing them to.

It sounds like an interesting project but what does this offer that https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic-the-gathering does not?

Originally posted by Tim Boura:

It sounds like an interesting project but what does this offer that https://boardgames.stackexchange.com/questions/tagged/magic-the-gathering does not?

Hi Tim. I'm not quite sure how to answer that. The two sites serve different purposes and have different features.

This looks like a great resource! I recall Matt Johnson created something similar a while back (http://simulations.matthew.ath.cx/), but yours appears to have many more questions in the pool.

I've been working on a number of updates to Rulesguru over the past few weeks, and with the last of them finally done I wanted to update people on what's been improved:


* Added the ability to search for questions that include a specific card. Shahrazad questions for days!

* Added the ability to exclude specific tags, rules, or cards from your search parameters. Tired of layers questions? Well now you don't have to see them. :)

* Templates! These don't mean anything for most users, but they're a huge improvement for submitting and maintaining questions. The site can now dynamically generate a list of cards matching certain rules whenever a question needs to be displayed, allowing cards from new expansions to be added to the database without any human involvement.

* Reminder text and ability words are now removed from the oracle text displays, making wordy cards much cleaner to read.

* Sped up question generation on the server and improved how the website handles loading questions, so you should see far fewer of those pesky “failed to load question” errors when on a slow internet connection.

* Fixed some display issues that were cropping up on various browsers and screen resolutions.

* Added food mode.

* Several other bug fixes and improvements.


I'm always open to feedback and suggestions, so please don't hesitate to let me know if you see anything that could be improved. Enjoy!