I’ll catch you up to speed: Myr Superion is currently bugged on MTGO. Normally, you can only cast the card when using mana generated by creatures, as opposed to lands. Currently, you can cast the card with any mana. This turns it into a two-mana colorless 5/6. We normally need to work harder for our Tarmogoyfs, so you can see why this would be an issue. Great. Now we can move on.
My goal here isn’t to point out how awful MTGO is. At this point in time, that should be self evident. Wizards has shown complete disdain for their customers in the 14 years since it’s launch, with service and quality that has been a decade behind the curve at every iteration. Any Magic player continuing to give money to Wizards through MTGO at this point should be ashamed of themselves. It’s not worth discussing that today though. The Myr Superion bug shouldn’t exist in the first place, but it does, so here we are.
What is worth discussing is how Wizards has handled this incident. With Myr Superion bugged beyond belief, the inability to fix it in a timely manner, and a MOCS three days away, they chose to make an announcement that players who cast Superion in an illegal fashion will face consequences, the details of which have not yet been made clear. It has also not been made clear how this will be enforced - will Wizards run a report after the event to find everyone who played Superion? Are they relying on players to report their opponents? What happens if I get paired against a player who is casting Superion against me, and that player defeats me? Will I end up knocked out of the tournament because Wizards failed to act quickly enough against someone they deem in violation of the rules?
Even with Wizards’ declaration in place I wouldn’t feel safe dedicating my time to this event, given that I have no idea if I’ll end up knocked out by a player doing things they aren’t allowed to be doing. If you do decide to play in the MOCS this weekend, keep in mind that the governing body you’re trusting to make sure you don’t get completely hosed by Superion is the same governing body that allowed this humongous bug (and atrocious software) to exist in the first place.
Superion’s bug is strictly and expressly Wizards’ fault; nobody else’s. They’ve chosen to address this by handing out a dictate that if you do this thing which is allowed within the current constructs of the game, you will be punished. One wonders why they wouldn’t simply reschedule the event instead. Clearly there are no “good” options in a scenario like this, but is moving the event and turning off all pay-to-play Modern events less ideal than policing a competitive-level tournament for people breaking this rule? Wizards has failed their customers miserably with their software, and rather than take the responsibility and fallout for that, they’ve chosen to shift the burden to the playerbase, warning us all not to capitalize on their mistake. From a business perspective, this is about as bad a reaction as it could be, probably second only to ignoring the bug entirely.
While the initial conversation that led to this post was about how Wizards is handling the problem, it’s not what I find the most compelling argument about the situation. Through their own negligence a major problem has arisen, and they’re placing the burden of this problem on the shoulders of the players, not themselves. Further investigation of this is really just a question of how much salt they’ve decided to pour into the wound they opened.
Instead, I’d like to address another, deeper topic hidden beneath the incompetency: should you be able to cast Myr Superion with basic lands this weekend?
From a practical perspective, the answer to “should I do it this weekend” is no. You may or may not be found out by Wizards, and if you are, there will be some level of punitive action. It’s not ideal.
How about from a higher level perspective? There is a bug in the game. A card is castable in a fashion it was not meant to be.
Should I be allowed to take advantage of this?
An issue of this type is hardly new to video games. Bugs and glitches of this nature have been out there since games were first developed. Awesome Games Done Quick (AGDQ) is a large, multi-day fundraising effort based on these glitches.
Competitive games aren’t immune. Plenty of games, be they fighters ala Street Fighter, FPSs ala Counter Strike, or MOBAs ala League of Legends have dealt with these same problems. Frequently (though not universally), the response from the developers is hands off. Yes, we know there’s a problem. No, we can’t fix it in time for [event]. Yes, you’re all going to have to play with that glitch in effect. A character’s sweep attack having too many invincibility frames or a gun reloading too quickly is simply a component of that tournament. It’s not ideal, of course, but how would a Street Fighter tournament react to a character having an attack that is too strong? Tell people not to use that kick? Not to use that character? It’s an ugly situation all around, but “everyone needs to live with it” is a common response.
An argument some Magic players will make is that regardless of what MTGO does or does not allow, there is a superseding set of rules that make this a non-issue. Under the oracle rules which govern Magic played with paper cards, Myr Superion can’t be cast using mana from lands. MTGO is Magic. Therefore, Myr Superion can’t be cast on MTGO using mana from lands. Yes, you can technically do it, in that the software allows you to perform that action, but it’s still against the rules of the game, so you shouldn’t be allowed to.
Since there’s no question under this argument that players shouldn’t be allowed to cast Superion with lands, it’s not unreasonable for Wizards to tell players not to do that in the MOCS. After all, it’s the same rules we play under when we show up to FNM or a GP, so why should it be any different online? This just happens to be one real life rule that didn’t transition perfectly to the digital realm, where it would be ideally be enforced by MTGO’s code.
Here’s the rub: MTGO (Magic: the Gathering Online) and MTGP (Magic: the Gathering Paper) are not the same game.
If that is true, then the rules that apply to MTGP do not necessarily apply to MTGO, since they are different games.
If MTGO is not beholden to the rules of MTGP, then it must use its own rules, which we will understand to be what the software does and does not allow, as would be the case with all video games, e.g. Street Fighter or Counter Strike.
If MTGO allows something to happen, it is not against the rules.
Therefore, if MTGO allows Myr Superion to be cast from basic lands, then players should be allowed to do it. If this is unintended, then the onus is on Wizards to change the rules (i.e. update the software).
Just for a moment set aside the first point, that MTGO and MTGP aren’t the same game. The rest is a slightly fuzzy logic structure, and I’m sure you could pick apart any one of these lines if you went after it feverishly. They’re basically “as we understand it” arguments. They’re not the point of all of this though; that distinction belongs to the first claim.
MTGO and MTGP aren’t the same game.
Once we come to understand this, everything else should make sense. How can I make that claim?
For MTGO and MTGP to be the same game, they need to follow the same set of rules. Not just similar rules, mind you, but the same rules. Given that games are essentially nothing but a set of rules which we all agree to abide by, a difference in rules is a fundamental difference.
Of course, MTGO and MTGP are strikingly similar games. They are alike in 99.95% of ways. However, there are key differences. If you feel that they look too similar to somehow be different games, consider the game Xhess. It’s played using chess pieces, and it’s played on a chessboard. Players follow the same rules as chess, and the pieces have the same movement restrictions. However, there is a rule that at the start of the game, a player may swap the position of their king with any of their other pieces. Xhess looks a lot like chess, but any chess player would tell you that it is decidedly not the same game.
How are MTGO and MTGP different games? Let’s start with the most obvious one, the clock.
In MTGP, players are expected to play at a reasonable pace. If they don’t, they receive slow play warnings. Receive two in one game and you receive a game loss, and possibly a disqualification if the judges think you’re cheating. There is no turn clock as their is in chess (or Xhess) though. The sum total of seconds that your priorities take are not measured against the sum total of seconds that your opponent takes. If I’m playing a complicated deck with many triggers and actions every turn, and you’re playing a deck with 20 lands and 40 Lava Axes, I’m going to spend a lot more time doing things and being the active player than you are. That doesn’t matter though. As long as I’m progressing the game state and making decisions in a timely manner, it’s completely within the rules that I take up 40 minutes of our 50 minute round clock.
Compare this to MTGO, where there is a clear clock each player plays with. We both have the same amount of time, and if one of us uses all of it, we lose. That’s it. No questions. It doesn’t matter if I’m up a game and half a turn away from winning the second; if my 25 minutes runs out 2 seconds quicker than my opponent’s, I lose.
Every deck in MTGO has an invisible restriction placed on it: the sum total of the actions required for you to win two games cannot exceed 25 minutes. If they do, you lose the game. The repercussions of this are dramatic. Consider Mindslaver and Academy Ruins. I can set up a “Slaver lock” under which my opponent never once has the ability to take a meaningful action again, a condition that virtually always leads to a game win in MTGP. Yet, in MTGO, it is definitely not a foregone conclusion that the Slaver locked player will lose. If I’ve got 15 creatures on the battlefield that all have lifelink and there’s no removal in my deck, you may find it exceedingly difficult to kill me fast enough, in spite of controlling my turns, even though you’re basically guaranteed to win the game so long as enough draw steps occur. Similarly, your method of success could be simply to let your Slaver-locked opponent draw themselves out, while you shuffle your graveyard back in with Elixir of Immortality. This is a scenario that in MTGP is a victory for the player with Mindslaver, yet is a loss for that same person in MTGO.
Priority clocks place a dramatic set of conditions on MTGO that do not exist in MTGP. Some decks are made more viable, and others are made less so. How meaningful this is in daily constructed Magic is irrelevant; it’s a question of whether MTGO and MTGP are the same game. There is a clear and distinct difference in the way players can win and lose the game between the two. That, very blatantly, demonstrates that they are not the same game.
Continuing from this, we also see that MTGO does not permit infinite loops, while MTGP does. If I stick a Splinter Twin on a Deceiver Exarch in MTGP, I can demonstrate my knowledge of how the loop works, and declare that I have an arbitrary number of hasty Deceiver Exarchs. I can then declare them all attacking, and force my opponent to either have an answer to a million billion faeries or lose. I don’t need any significant physical representation of this; simply pointing a Splinter Twin at a Deceiver Exarch in play is sufficient.
The rules of tournament MTGP state that if a player can demonstrate knowledge of how to perform an infinite loop, they are allowed to repeat said loop as many times as they wish so long as their opponent doesn’t have any interaction. This is used in a wide swath of tournament viable decks in every format.
MTGO, however, does not allow for this. There is no way to demonstrate knowledge of a loop and perform it as many times as you wish. Can you make infinite Deceiver Exarchs? Great. Start clicking buddy. The inability to do this means that, once again, some decks are significantly weaker than others. This ties directly into the first point, since it’s not uncommon for you to be unable to kill your opponent even though you’re capable, simply because you can’t perform the loop quick enough within the allotted time. An opponent at 100,000 life is absolutely beatable with Splinter Twin in MTGP, yet in MTGO there is no possible way to win that game. (Of course, actually performing the loop to get to 100,000 life is similarly unlikely.)
The clock and the infinite loops are hardly the only ways in which MTGO and MTGP are distinctly different, but they are certainly two of the most glaring examples. These differences constitute material rules gaps between MTGO and MTGP, and as such, can’t be considered the same game. Since they are not the same game, MTGO cannot be expected to be governed by the stated rules of MTGP, and as such, is responsible for its own implementation of rules, which is expressed via the allowed functionality of the software.
Paper Magic and MTGO are not the same game, and as such, you can’t expect one to be governed by the rules of the other.
If MTGO lets you cast Myr Superion with mana made from basic lands, then dammit, you should be allowed to do that.
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