It's ok because the MTR says it's ok: “Derived information is information to which all players are entitled access, but opponents are not obliged to assist in determining and may require some skill or calculation to determine”. Even if the opponent opts to “assist” that doesn't mean they're going to do all the work.

But more importantly, this is the only real way we can work the game from a philosophical standpoint. Off the top of my head, if someone asks about a card, here's a list of points of information that I can come up with:

- Full card name
- Mana cost
- Converted mana cost
- Colour(s)
- Care type(s), supertype(s), subtype(s)
- The entire rules text as printed and/or per Oracle text
- Power and toughness

And that's before any game effects might be in play, and excludes all the information that silverbordered cards care about.

It would be very unfair to expect someone to cover all of the above information in response to the question “what does that do?”.

So if we don't expect someone to cover everything, we need to figure out what we DO expect them to answer with. So how do we define a clear line? I don't think any of us could come up with a list that wouldn't immediately have multiple issues.

And so the line that was decided on was “say what you like, but don't lie”. We rely on the player asking the question to either ask the right question, or just read the card itself. At all levels, we encourage players to ask Judges for Oracle text. At Competitive, the onus is on the player asking the question to either know what to ask for, and if they get it wrong, they take the consequences. It's part of the deal they sign up for when playing for a big prize in a Competitive environment. At Regular, Derived info is considered Free, so the issue doesn't arise.

Disclaimer: I'm assuming you intend this as a discussion topic. If you wanted an official answer, my mistake. I am not an official source.


“What is that card” is pretty ambiguous. You may intend it to mean "what is a complete list of [card]'s abilities“, but other people may understand it differently. Name, mana cost, power and toughness, card type, etc are all relevant information- how should your opponent know that you didn't want those too? Requiring players to list the entire oracle text of a card every time there's a query about it would lead to tedious answers with lots of unnecessary information and a lot of ”I'm not going to tell you, please call a judge" for fear of making a mistake and getting a penalty. While allowing the sort of angle shoot that you described is a little awkward, there's no other good way to construct the policy while still allowing natural communication between the players, especially when one of them may not be fluent in the language of the other. Players are always allowed to call a judge to request oracle text (or look it up on their phone at Regular REL), which avoids the potential issues with asking the opponent.

Edited Isaac King (March 26, 2019 05:12:50 AM)

Something I'm shamelessly copying from a thing I said in a previous
discussion about this:
Situation 1:
AP casts Eternal Witness.
NAP: “What is that?”
AP: “When it comes out, I get a card back from my graveyard.” <- this is
good, and we want to encourage it.

Situation 2:
AP attacks with Eternal Witness.
NAP: “What is that?”
AP: “A 2/1.” <- this is good, and we want to encourage it.

Situation 3:
AP has a Cavern of Souls naming Human, and uses it to cast Eternal Witness.
NAP: “What is that?”
AP: “It's a human.” <- this is good, and we want to encourage it.


If we want to allow all these partial answers, we need to allow partial
information. In situation 3, the answer “When it comes out, I get a card
back from my graveyard.” has to also be allowed. It also might be exactly
the information NAP is looking for. If an answer you gave last turn or
last match is suddenly not good and gets you a penalty and it is the same
accurate info, that's bad policy.

The only real solution to allowing all three of these good and accurate
answers is to allow partial truths all the time about derived information.
The rule is “you can give partial information, but can't lie”, and that's
about the best line we have ever come up with for consistent handling of
different situations.

In your Vampire Nighthawk situation, they might not even be lying - they
might believe the opponent only cares “do you have something that can block
me” - if AP has a 6/6 flyer and NAP is at 6, the Nighthawk player might
think they are asking in order to see if they should cast a removal spell
or not. It could be bluffing or it could be them trying to give the
information they believe is relevant to the other player, and it is quite
difficult to tell the difference.

—
Rob McKenzie
Magic Judge Level III
Judge Regional Coordinator USA-North
Minnesota


On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 5:14 AM Isaac King <

I think the main problem in the scenario I described is that the NAP is obviously saying something purely in order to make AP fall into a trap, making him do a wrong deduction based on the trust Magic opponents usually have.

I am perfectly OK with giving only a part of the characteristics, of course we don't expect players to give them all. But here, the difference is that the formulation implicitly says "It's a 2/1 flying and that's really all that is relevant for you. You can make your attack decision with those information only“ and that's why I really don't like it.

Let's clarify the situation. AP is in his declare attackers step, declaring his attackers. It seems clear to me (and most probably to his opponent too) that he seeks all characteristics relevant for a potential combat. It seems weird to encourage this kind of trap.

Quick question. If AP were to say instead ”What are this card's abilities ?“ and NAP were to say ”It has flying“ would it still be OK ? He just did the same, giving partial information.

To sum it up, I'm perfectly OK with giving only a part of the characteristics of a card. What disturbs me is giving partially a part of one specific characteristic. This is most likely to happen with types and abilities (e.g telling your opponent that is casting and selecting targets for his Ashes to Ashes that your Artifact Creature is ”A creature“)

What I'm pointing out is that even if this rules has obviously been made for very good reasons, which you all mentionned, a player could really do bad things by playing ”with the rule“ and not ”by the rule“. And this, IMHO should be mitigated.

I'll make a last example to make it clear :

AP has Fiery Cannonade in hand. NAP has 7 creatures with toughness 2 or less, and 5 of them are pirates. AP asks ”Which of your creatures are pirates ?“ And NAP points out 2 of his creatures and says ”This one is a pirate, and this one too". - To me, there is no difference, he just gave partial information about the subtypes of his creatures.

Edited Maxime Eychenne (March 26, 2019 11:25:18 AM)

Originally posted by Maxime Eychenne:

I think the main problem in the scenario I described is that the NAP is obviously saying something purely in order to make AP fall into a trap, making him do a wrong deduction based on the trust Magic opponents usually have.

I've highlight the key part of where I think we're seeing things differently. To you, it's obvious what is being asked. To the defending player it may not be. To the casually watching judge it may not be. We aren't really able to tell what is “obvious” or not. Imagine a judge stepped in and said “you're getting a warning because you didn't say it had deathtouch” and both players said “but that doesn't matter, i only needed to know if it has flying or not”? Or they said “we both know it has deathtouch - it has been mentioned several times already this game”.

The other piece that's worth pointing out in the quoted text is the mention of “trust”. A player who blindly trusts their opponents all the time is going to wind up with a problem sooner rather than later. Your opponent is trying to beat you. They don't have your best interests at heart. It's competitive - there's a prize on the line. Don't trust the opponent - trust yourself to read the cards :)

All of these examples (including the pirate one) can be avoided if a player just reads the cards.

I agree with Mark, the bar for “obviousness” is not clear at all.

Using my Eternal Witness situations:
Situation 3:
AP has a Cavern of Souls naming Human, and uses it to cast Eternal Witness.
NAP: “What is that?”
AP: “When it comes out, I get a card back from my graveyard.”

You intervene. AP says “Well, human is printed right on the card, he knows
it's going to be countered. I was letting him know what it does when it
resolves so he can exile cards from my graveyard if he wants.”

Is this a penalty? Is this cheating?


The “no lying, but incomplete info is fine” fits best with how people
actually play and encourages people to communicate sanely. The
“obviousness” test gets weird fast when stacked up against how people
actually play Magic.

—
Rob McKenzie
Magic Judge Level III
Judge Regional Coordinator USA-North
Minnesota


On Tue, Mar 26, 2019 at 11:46 AM Mark Mc Govern <

The thing that disturbs me the most is that we can not backup the game when obnoxious traps like this one is set up. I get your point, determining “obviousness” is really hard, plus it depends on the context of the game so it would be impossible to write guidelines about it even if we wanted to.

But the fact that we can not say “Okay, he clearly cast this Fiery Cannonade because you did not tell him the information he needed to make the decision, so we'll backup the game” feels wrong. The only mistake of the Cannonade player is to have considered as partial truth being the full truth.

If players were to widely use this trick, they would lack confidence in each other at a point that would become ridiculous, we would be called for ridiculous things such has “He did tell me that these two creatures are pirates so I asked him for the other, which he didn't answered, so I asked him the name of the cards, which he gave because he's required to do it, and now I come to you to get the Oracle text for these 5 cards, more especially their creature subtypes”.

That would be completely ridiculous. I really feel it would be better to discourage these kinds of traps, laid on purpose in order to trick the opponent. Of course I'm a judge, and I will apply the rules as they are written even if I don't like them, but I still think this could lead to dangerous behaviour if it were vastly known by players.

Edited Maxime Eychenne (March 26, 2019 04:16:27 PM)

Originally posted by Maxime Eychenne:

If players were to widely use this trick, they would lack confidence in each other at a point that would become ridiculous, we would be called for ridiculous things such has “He did tell me that these two creatures are pirates so I asked him for the other, which he didn't answered, so I asked him the name of the cards, which he gave because he's required to do it, and now I come to you to get the Oracle text for these 5 cards, more especially their creature subtypes”.

A couple thoughts:
1) At Regular REL, all derived information is considered free, so players are forbidden from running these kinds of angle-shots. So this is only relevant at Competitive and above where we already aggressively tell players to call a judge if they have a question, because their opponent is under no obligation to help them make the correct decision and may try to mislead them.

2) The ridiculousness you cite is actually a great reason why players may not want to run this kind of thing too much. Imagine if I have a Tarmogoyf in play and refuse to tell you its power and toughness. You are now well within your rights to methodically inquire as to the identity of every card in my graveyard, every card in play (they might be providing a p/t altering effect), every past effect that might still be relevant, as well as calling a judge for oracle text for every one of them as necessary. Since I presumably came to the event to play Magic, having to spend several minutes watching you do mental math (and it likely isn't slow play, because I'm making you jump through the hoop of doing it) is not fun for me, so the more I do it, the more everyone else is going to be annoyed with me. Most of the time there's little benefit to refusing a specific request for derived information other than just being annoying, so I likely gain very little advantage by doing so. There's also the element of the social contract to consider. If I gain a reputation for playing “hardball” with derived information, then other players are quickly going to label me as “scummy” and not want to involve me in their play groups.

3) Policy is written for general situations, not edge cases. In general, not needing to give the full oracle text of cards is a good thing (as Rob has pointed out) so policy allows for partial answers. There are rare situations where I may try to exploit that policy as you describe, but that situation requires A) a situation where a specific piece of derived information to be relevant, B) my ability to gain a significant advantage by answering deceptively, C) you asking a question in a way that allows me to answer deceptively, and D) you not noticing that the answer that I gave isn't entirely accurate. That's a lot of things that would need to go my way, and I don't have control over many of them.

4) Education is a funny thing. For every player that we end up teaching that they can be deceptive, we also teach several others that some players will try to be deceptive and how to protect themselves.

Originally posted by Andrew Keeler:

At Regular REL … players are forbidden from running these kinds of angle-shots. So this is only relevant at Competitive and above

And this distinction results in a fair number of “feel-bads”, as players migrate from Regular REL to their first Competitive REL events. That's an unfortunate consequence of handling Derived info differently at Regular REL - but with the huge upside (IMO) of helping players learn the subtleties of the game at Regular, then even more learning at Comp REL.

Originally posted by Andrew Keeler:

Education is a funny thing. For every player that we end up teaching that they can be deceptive, we also teach several others that some players will try to be deceptive and how to protect themselves.

Very well put, Andrew.

d:^D

Note - my initial ‘O’ post had a rather large typo, where I said we allowed bluffing about Derived Info at Regular REL; I've edited that post in the thread, but I'm sending this followup message to correct the previous e-mail some received:

At Competitive REL, we allow bluffing about Derived Information. At Regular REL, Derived is treated like Free, so the bluffing is very limited.

Sorry for the confusion!

d:^D