This past weekend at PT Aether Revolt, there was controversy during a round 8 feature match. As far as I can tell, Player A moved into the combat step (and specifically the declare attackers step) by saying combat, then Player A attempted to crew a vehicle and attack with it. The following judge call and internet uproar brought to light several issues I wish to discuss that I haven't seen talked about in depth.
The official policy is Not Good.
Not Good as opposed to inadequate, or actively bad, or a variety of other negative descriptors. It is possibly borderline inadequate, and has the potential to be actively bad given the right circumstances, but in general I'll say it is Not Good.
The only "official" ruling on it is in the MTR where it states "A statement such as 'I’m ready for combat' or 'Declare attackers?' offers to keep passing priority until an opponent has priority in the beginning of combat step. Opponents are assumed to be acting then unless they specify otherwise." The meaning of this seems clear, but the implications are far reaching. The reasoning behind this is explained in two judge blog posts, here and here. This has been around for almost a year, yet a majority of PT players seemed surprised by this. This is poor communication akin to when the judges before PT Avacyn Restored told the entire tournament Cavern of Souls mana had to be announced to be used, only to be told 30 minutes later that in fact the opposite would be true. The people in charge of making these rulings are not communicating with those making the cards and running the tournaments, nor are they communicating with the players until it is too late (or almost too late).
One issue I have with the blog post is this unilateral statement "No sentence can allow AP to remain in Main Phase one unless NAP agrees to." But in the ruling from the PT, Player A wasn't trying to remain in the main phase! In the other blog post, Toby says "So Why Not Just Have a Phrase That Lets You Explicitly Have Priority in Beginning of Combat? [it is] unnecessary..." I think clearly the PT and the reaction to the ruling have shown it is necessary and natural for such a shortcut exist. As an exercise, here are some things an actively player could say, where do you think the line is between remaining in main phase and passing priority in the beginning of combat?
"I pass priority in my pre-combat main phase"
"I would like to go to the beginning of combat step"
"I would like to go to combat"
"I would like to go to the combat phase"
"Combat?"
"I would like to attack"
"Attack step?"
"Attacks?"
Better question, which one of these are actually classified as shortcuts? I assume "no sentence can allow you to remain in main phase" only applies to shortcuts and not any English sentence, since passing priority as robotic as MTGO surely can't fall under this, but who knows with judges?
The issue they are trying to solve is hardly a real issue. The best example they can give is one from 20 years ago. In today's constructed magic, tap effects are rare, beginning of combat triggers are common, and in limited haste creatures are rare enough this almost never comes up. This "shortcut" they've created only skips one instance of passing priority. If instead of a shortcut any instance of "combat?" was treated simply as passing priority in main phase one what would be the downside? It's far easier to uniformly apply instead of sometimes going straight to declare attackers, and sometimes remaining in beginning of combat depending on triggers and / or opponent responses.
One common justification is "if you communicate clearly, you don't need this shortcut" but that sounds very much like "if you aren't doing anything wrong, you shouldn't worry about the government spying on you." Yes those who make the effort to communicate clearly will not run into issues, but the existence of shortcuts is to reduce the burden of having to be precisely exact to the last detail in all your communication. The way this ruling is applied, its punishing people who communicate less clearly in a way that would encourage burdensome communication in the future.
Kai Budde made a great point in his Facebook post about this. For over 20 years on the PT "combat?" meant one thing, and now it doesn't. It was changed to eliminate some "feel-bads" for beginning / casual. They'd much rather sacrifice nuanced game play at the highest levels so that a new player doesn't quit and continues to buy more cards. It doesn't have to be this way. Player B's feel bad for the reaction his judge call received, Player A's feel bad for the poor ruling when he felt he did nothing wrong, the feel bad of all the people watching and the black eye it puts on the judges who wrote policy and the non response issued by Scott Larabee- was it worth it for those few incredibly rare situations you may have prevented?
