In advance of Grand Prix New Jersey Drew Levin wrote an excellent article on Legacy rules interactions on the 12th. A great deal of useful information is contained within, and I highly recommend reading it. Important topics covered include things like Delve and Thalia, Bridge from Below triggers, and Engineered Explosives and basically anything else.
One particular section of the article struck me in a different way though. It was this line that caused me consternation:
Failing to follow the first step is technically legal and also a classic scummy thing to do, so feel free to run that if you're not plagued by pesky things like "moral compunction."
This line was written in reference to this situation:
If you want to cast Stifle, it will be after they tap their Aether Vial and before they show you if they have a creature or what it is. If they activate Aether Vial and show you their creature in one fell swoop when you prefer to Stifle their activation, you should do the following:
- Try your absolute hardest to not see what their creature is
Your opponent controls Aether Vial. They tap it and immediately place a creature into play from their hand with no delay to wait for a response from you. Drew argues that you should try not to look at the creature they put into play, and that while it is technically legal to do so, it would be “scummy” and immoral. I take issue with this point.
Before delving into this particular instance, let’s take a quick moment to understand morality and ethics, which I will use fairly interchangeably throughout.
Laws and rules exist as a framework for what you can and cannot do. Laws are black and white. They are a line drawn in the sand that details exactly what is allowed and what is not allowed. There is still room for discussion within these laws - hence, lawyers - but the end goal is to markedly delineate between acceptable and forbidden.
Laws cover what you can and cannot do. Morals and ethics govern what you should and shouldn’t do. Here’s an easy example. You can spout heinously racist and sexist rhetoric, as it is your right as someone living in America. However, you definitely shouldn’t do these things. Yes, it’s legal. Yes, it’s within the rules of the system. But there is moral compulsion not to do so. Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Morality is inherently subjective. It governs the grey areas between illegal and inoffensive. There is nothing objectively moral or immoral. Decisions about complex morality questions often made in light of context and subtlety. This lack of objectivity is obvious in everyday political discourse on topics such as the death penalty and abortion, where there is no clear consensus about right and wrong. We all have our own ways of developing our moral code, and as such we approach topics with different sets of morals, the end result being that we arrive at different conclusions on some topics. This is important, so I’ll repeat it - morality is subjective.
With that out of the way, let’s take a look at proper behavior in a few different situations relating to Magic.
Situation 1: You’re shuffling your opponent’s deck prior to a match at a GP. You accidentally drop a card onto the table from their deck face-up. Looking at this card would almost universally be considered unethical. You made a mistake (or took an action intended to appear as a mistake) and are now attempting to profit from it by gaining information you shouldn’t have. You’ve gained advantageous information through your own action, whether on accident or purpose. Looking at the dropped card is unethical at best and cheating at worst. In fact, it has its own ruling - 2.2. Game Play Error — Looking at Extra Cards. You took the action, you made the mistake, and the responsibility is on you to avoid gaining an advantage because of that mistake. Don’t look at cards you drop from your opponent’s deck.
Situation 2: Your opponent accidentally drops a card onto the floor. Is it immoral to look underneath the table to see what that card is?
Looking under the table with the intent to gain information you shouldn’t have access to is sure to have consensus as a scummy thing to do. Your opponent made a mistake with their physical manipulation of the cards, but by default their mistake doesn’t provide you with additional information. Sitting as you are in your chair, you can’t see the face-up card on the floor. It requires you to make a conscious decision to change your physical posture to see the card. The necessity of voluntary agency on your part has intentionality that the later situations will not. You don’t have to “opt-out” of the information, but rather “opt-in” with your actions. I would hope that most players would consider this unethical.
Situation 3: Your opponent is shuffling his own deck and accidentally drops a card face-up onto the table. Is it immoral to look?
This situation differs from the first because it is no longer your action that provided the information, but rather your opponent’s. He made a mistake so you have no liability in the matter. You are within the rules of the game to look at the card. Doing so is technically legal, but I think most would agree it’s not the most moral thing to do.
Consider a twist to the situation: your opponent has a neurological disorder that results in his or her having shaky hands. Should you gain free information because your opponent has a physical disorder that occasionally results in them flashing you a card they didn’t want to? I would hope there’s a clear consensus that your opponent shouldn’t be penalized for having physical difficulty manipulating their cards.
Restricting our compassion to only those with neurological disorders would be shortsighted. How about severe anxiety? Perhaps they’ve just got a lot of adrenaline running through their system? Whatever the reason, they had an accident during physical manipulation of their cards, and you don’t deserve free information by virtue of sitting there. Sometimes it happens and you see it and there’s nothing you can do about it, but if you can avoid seeing the card, you should make the effort not to.
Situation 4: Your Elves opponent casts Cabal Therapy. They tap the black mana, put the card on the table, and say “Cabal Therapy for Golgari Charm.” They’ve run together the casting of Cabal Therapy and the resolution of the Therapy. Is it unethical to back them up to casting the Cabal Therapy, then cast the Golgari Charm in your hand with Cabal Therapy on the stack?
Drew discusses this point in his article, and while his opinion is not explicitly stated, it certainly seems that you are well within your rights, both within the legal framework and moral framework, to cast the Charm.
That's because your opponent is still allowed to respond to your free-information Cabal Therapy, and now they can do so with the knowledge that you would be forced to name your announced card if they don't respond. If they have a Brainstorm, then they know to cast it or lose it. If they don't, they can let your Cabal Therapy miss.
Your opponent, whether because they don’t understand their own card or because they jumped the gun, has made a mistake. Unlike scenario three, this isn’t a fault in dexterity but rather a mistake in judgment or a lack of rules knowledge. These types of errors are incredibly common in Magic, and completely legitimate ways to win games. Once you start trying to decide what errors of judgment are ok to capitalize on and which aren’t, the game of figuring out what is ethical spirals out of control. Should you not attack for lethal because your opponent failed to count your on-board power when taking his or her turn? Should you back your opponent up because they attempted to counter an Abrupt Decay? Of course not. These are mistakes we as disciplined players train ourselves not to make, and to capitalize on when our opponents make them. Once your opponent is making errors within the context of the game, arguing that something is unethical becomes untenable.
Naming a card as you cast Cabal Therapy isn’t an accident, it’s an error. Games of Magic are won and lost on errors. It isn’t immoral to capitalize on your opponent’s error.
Situation 5: You have a Stifle in hand and a blue mana up. You set your hand down face-down on the table, say “your turn,” and then pick up your water bottle as your opponent begins his turn. After drawing his card for the turn, he drops a Lord of Atlantis onto the table, and with two splayed hands taps his team and his Aether Vial. The entire process takes under a second. Should you or should you not look at the card he put onto the table?
We arrive at the situation Drew takes issue with. Examined closely, it’s very similar to situation four. Your opponent ran together actions in the game - technically breaking the rules - without giving you a fair opportunity to respond. There is no agency on your part here. You aren’t choosing to act in a way that gains you advantageous information. You aren’t mind-tricking him into telling you something he doesn’t need to. You simply passed the turn and put a water bottle up to your mouth while your opponent jumped through multiple phases and blew through a trigger. Every mistake that occurred was his. Should you go out of your way to deny yourself useful information - “opt-out” - that your opponent willingly handed to you through violations of the game state?
The difference between situations two and three and four and five is that the first two were predicated on an accident. They didn’t break any rules and they didn’t judge a situation improperly. An accident occurred outside the confine of the game. Situations four and five were not accidents, but mistakes. The opponent made a conscious decision to do something that broke the rules of the game. Once they have taken a voluntary action that breaks the rules, they have shouldered liability for the fallout of that error. In these situations, that fallout is you getting to know something you wouldn’t normally. You can’t be held morally responsible for the actions your opponents take, and it’s unfair to ask you to deny yourself information your opponent handed you on a silver platter because of their own carelessness.
I must stress that all of these situations are in the context of competitive environments, such as a PTQ or GP. I can’t count the number of times I’ve had opponents make these sorts of mistakes (and far worse) at FNMs and I went out of my way not to look, or to point out that no, you can’t counter that, or to make decisions as if I didn’t already know some key piece of information they inadvertently supplied to me. The goal at store events isn’t to crush people, but foster an environment of enjoyment and learning. I wouldn’t begrudge anyone for capitalizing on cards named in haste with a Cabal Therapy at Sunday Legacy, although I am unlikely to do it myself. At a GP though? The rules enforcement level and the expectation of play from opponents is higher. You have an obligation to be moral, but you shouldn’t be afraid to capitalize on mistakes either.
No comments:
Post a Comment