No it's not a bug. You can't target planeswalkers, you have to target the player and then you can redirect the damage. That's why Witchbane protects them.

This. A planeswalker is not a creature or a player.

Modern GPT. Game 2, turn 4 vs. a UW deck. I'm on the draw. Villain plays land before and after combat. I don't catch it until end of turn. Judge comes over and rules that its too late to back things up because villain played a creature and drew a card in 2nd Main. He gives us both warning and play continues.

I win anyways.

Professor Ben, bringing it home.

I don't play live, but is this really how the rules work? Don't catch your opponent cheating soon enough, you get penalised?

My friend here from Stockholm beasting the PT, go Joel woooo

You can't take chips out of an opponent's stack if you notice a hand was misread after the pot was pushed either.

If you could back up for any state, you allow people to freeroll by allowing accidental cheating, then waiting to say something until after it's too late to fix reasonably. Instead, it's the responsibility of both players to maintain the game state.

This is not a good analogy. Reading the board for showdown happens once per hand at a clear and predetermined time, and all players involved have complete control of whether play proceeds. You can hold onto your hole cards until the right conclusion is reached, and there are 3-11 people watching to make sure it happens right, one of whom is paid to do just that. The board state in poker is significantly less complex than in Magic.

You can't even respond to an opponent's land drop, so you could easily play two lands, use one of them to cast a spell in a single motion with playing it and I'm sure you'd have a high success rate of getting half an Explore. And then if your opponent wants to complain he will be punished for it. Sometimes I think about playing live, then I hear about stuff like this.

well after some testing I take this back, Gloom Surgeon is incredible and completely shuts down aggro

deck is very weak to control now, though...he top 16'd but I want to know how well the deck held up against Esper and RWU

The first sentence is a good explanation of why Magic is harder to adjudicate than poker. The second is true of Magic also; I'm sure if your opponent just started doing stuff without letting you respond, a smart judge wouldn't just warn you both. Also, warnings go on a record, so if this guy gets warned like this all the time, it may escalate to a ban at some point (since it indicates that he's habitually doing it).

Again, I doubt "warn them both" would be the result in a case like this. My experience with judges is that they generally know and respect the difference between brain farts and cheats, and playing two lands at the same time is dramatically more likely to be the latter. Playing land 1 in first main, then land 2 in second main is something else entirely. And if your opponent goes "land, cast X" in second main and you call a judge instead of letting it resolve, I'd lay signficant odds that the result is, at minimum, giving your opponent a warning and backing up the spell they tried to cast. It's also significant that Ben's opponent drew a card. I suspect if it were just casting a creature and saying go, and Ben noticed before untapping, it might have still been backed up, but I'm less sure about that.

This kind of blows my mind, seems like a really easy mistake to fix. The rules are there to protect the integrity of the game state, this ruling just flies in the face of it.

I always get an appeal to the head judge if I don't like a ruling though... years ago (as in, I was playing Prosbloom) I had an opponent try to misdirect (or was it deflection? I forget) my Vampiric Tutor to himself. I knew this wasn't possible, so a judge was called - the judge ruled it could be directed, and that my opponent would be the one to pay the two life, but he would get to search for a card and put it on top.

I knew the judge was wrong but I was too young to realize I should get an appeal, so I went with it and play continued. The judge came back 5 minutes later or so and informed me that I was correct and that he was sorry, but obviously by that point the game state was well beyond repair. Given that the tutor kept me from digging up a crucial combo piece, it likely cost me the game.

Meh. One of the same reasons I prefer online poker to live is the same that makes me prefer MtGO: If there is some kind of human error that costs me a game or a pot, at least it's my own error (although I have seen moderators offer incorrect splits at the final table for the Sunday Million more than once, and need to be corrected by the players).

It's not necessarily easy to fix once villain drew a card. What if he needed that mana to draw that card? If he had other cards in hand, how do you prove which card he drew? I am not a judge, but that's my educated guess as to the reason it couldn't be backed up.

Also, Wrecking Ogre is so ridiculous. Every time I draft one, there's at least one game that I totally pull out of my ass that I otherwise had no right winning.

The "where the **** did that come from?" win of the day though goes to....

I'm at 14 and my opponent only has a 3/3 Consuming Apparition, so I swing with my team for big damage, then play Ruination Wurm to ensure lethal the next turn. My opponent untaps, casts Grisly Spectacle on my wurm, putting seven cards in the yard from the wreckage, plus the wurm, plus four more from the Apparition trigger, letting him turn his now 15/15 sideways for the win.

Whoops.

Someone I grew up on the ptq scene top 8d pt

lol this isnt true. happened in my game the other day where the hands were tabled and was supposed to be chopped but the pot was awarded to one player. they just check the cameras and had the kid ship half the pot back.

I suppose I should have added a "depending on jurisdiction" in there. It was certainly the case in places where I played/dealt years ago.

i'm not much of a mtg player, but couldn't you at least put the land back in his hand and let the rest of it stand? if the player doesn't dispute that he played two lands in a turn, seems weird to just leave him with that advantage. maybe that's too subjective to be a fair ruling though.

Since we are all bragging about others accomplicements in the PT, 3 of my friends got into top 32. :-)

What is the cheapest way to getting started at MODO? I think I might have an account, but havent used it in 5+ years.

I remember having to pay VAT last time I bought tix, which seems silly, but where do I get "used tix" or whatever it should be called?

I think the general idea is that once a game state has been established and play has continued with that establishment, that because that game state has potentially influenced further action, including the decision to make no actions, the game state ought to remain the way it is. This way you do not get players making decisions based on game state B with the assumption that that game state will remain that way (since there is no in-game reason why it should not) only to have it abruptly changed later. This is preferred because both players at one point essentially agreed to enter game state B and so clearly neither had their plans disrupted by a change in game state without having the option to stop it from being changed.

4 Pro Tours in 2014.

I really like Owen's Jund list, but I am afraid that with the lack of aggro decks making top 8 Jund will not be a very good deck to play anymore. Does anybody with some Jund experience in standard (probably last season's standard) have any thoughts on whether or not Jund would be a good deck to start playing in Standard? How was/is its RWU matchup?

Owen stated that the deck has no bad matchups. However, if the format were to turn to pure control (which is, of course, unlikely) then I presume Jund would be a bad choice. What if the format stays wide open, with a variety of aggro, midrange, and control. Will Jund be a good choice all around? It seems possible to have a big sideboard dedicated for the control matchups.

Seriously though, no matter which way you slice it MTGO will probably be a significant money sink.

Pauper decks build pretty cheaply in some cases, but you have to be a bit restrictive in your deck choices, as the Pauper format has turned a few old commons into chase cards in their own right.

I've gotten pretty good value out of buying the Momir Basic starting pack for $10 from the store, for playing low-key casual games of momir when I don't have time for a draft, but that's not really going to "get you started."

I would have suggested the 4 pack sealed as that was a pretty solid way to build a collection while playing some M:tG, but that's gone now.

If you are looking to "go infinite" then start by playing Block Constructed at the beginning of the season (ie. when the first set of the block comes out in the fall, the one after the core set), beginning about 2-3 weeks after the set is released online (those first 2-3 weeks will have cards at inflated prices due to limited supply, but after a few weeks the set will have been drafted enough so that there is ample supply). Buy a block deck, and then play Block Daily Events.

Reinvest your winnings in the other playable rares/mythics of the set (buy the mythics first as they tend to go up in price while the rares tend to go down in price as the set gets drafted more). Repeat this process when the next set of the block comes out, and the one after that. By the time the new core set comes out (M14 is the next one to come out) you should have enough to buy the rares/mythics of the core set (there usually are not very many). Once you have done this, you will have a great collection to start playing Standard.

How do people feel about beckoning apparition? I have seen reitzel talk about playing it in Boros as a battalion enabler that is harder to block and I am watching Melissa Detora play it orzhov as a cheap spell for extort. Though I just can't help but feel like its a very underwhelming card. Thoughts?

Yeah I played Jund for a while pre-rotation. He's right, it does have reasonable matchups across the board. I'd say I was 40-45% against RWU, but I was playing a version without Liliana which must help. I actually switched to Dark Naya because I felt it was like Jund+, being better able to capitalise on Rakdos's Return and also win a long game with Angel of Serenity. With Dark Naya I was 8-1 against RWU in dailies. Obviously there is some variance there, but I felt incredibly favoured because I had access to more and better threats, and fewer dead cards.

I don't know if Dark Naya will have a home post-rotation, but I think Jund is a pretty obvious safe/next-level play in a new format. It has game against aggro and Liliana/RR/Dreadbore against control. Can't be too bad of an idea to sleeve it up. I think Dark Naya preyed best on Jund, non-Tamiyo control, and slower aggro decks. Its worst matchup was mono-red for sure, and Bant Hexproof was not so good either. I can see why it would not be as good a choice for the PT with so many Boros Reckoner aggro decks being popular.