replies to 8 June 2001

Taeruko Question.

Now that we know what Taeruko is going to be in Gold, will we have to use the MRP in the Koteis between now and then?

The MRP of a card has always gone into effect the day the set that the MRP is in is officially released, though the Koteis usually all get run under the same rules and card sets. It will depend on when they start.

Rulings and opinion (And a bit on "reveal")

P.S. Now that we have finally have broken through the barrier of nerfing cards because they appear too powerful, there are a bunch of other cards that people on this list would like to talk about.

You are grossly exaggerating the issue. Intent-based rulings are not a new thing. In fact, they were the *standard* in its early days. (Remember how Yogo Junzo's Army couldn't play the Alliance event? Anyone?) It's happened innumerable times and has caused weakenings far more severe than Snow Crane Tattoo has suffered. We haven't "broken through" any "barrier". Oh, and people have been petitioning to ban/restrict/reword particular cards/Strongholds/Clans for ages. They didn't wait for me to set an example.

Snow Crane Tattoo vs. "Reveal"

Jeff,

So will we have a Most Recent Printing on the card

If it's ever reprinted, probably.

or a change in the official rulebooks on this issue in the future?

On what issue? It's a clarification/corrigendum on a single card, not a sweeping generality.

To see my responses to the rest of your issues, keep reading.

Snow Crane Tattoo vs. "Reveal"

I'm all for intent based rulings, being internally consistent, and designers doing their jobs. I don't mind if Snow Crane Tattoo applies only to duels. I'm glad Jeff made that ruling. Now I want him to make another intent based ruling concerning a tattoo card and I think it is one that a majority of the playing populace will agree about. Dragon Tattoo. Being able to add Zero tokens as an ability is silly and I'm sure was never the intent of the card.

I guess I'm just looking for consistency at least when it comes to ruling on tattoos.

Why just tattoos?

Don't rule one literally and then another by designer intent. Does anyone else agree?

As Zen and Vaughn can both tell you, the trend over the last, oh, year or so has been decidedly more to the literal side of the balance than it has been the rest of the time the game has been on the market. It was a conscious decision on my part, as the game's playership grew and as the ruling archive's length continued to follow a nondecreasing curve. If nothing else, it minimizes the chance that Zen will have to someday fully retract his famous statement about whether or not the cards are trying to fool you. ("Not." -- ZF) In fact, two of the biggest recent disruptions in player harmony -- the Bushi Dojo/Farmlands ruling and the Going Home Bowed issue -- were results of swinging towards "do what the rules say" and away from "do what feels more correct".

"Always go with intent" isn't acceptible because then nobody will know how everything works. "Always go literally" doesn't work either, for any of the reasons I'll enumerate now:

Sometimes, the wording is genuinely ambiguous. Going by intent is clearly the best choice in these situations.

Sometimes the card is unambiguous but poorly phrased, and its stated effect is just ungodly powerful. Touching the Void, please take a bow.

Sometimes, the literal interpretation is one that I don't believe was correctly caught and examined well enough by the playtest teams. Snow Crane Tattoo falls squarely into this box. Playtesters, particularly regular ones, have the same tunnel vision that the designers themselves do, albeit to a lesser extent: far too often they subconsciously second-guess the intent (usually correctly!) and test only that aspect of the card. That's not a slight to the professionalism of any of them -- that's just a natural result of working too closely with the same thing for extended periods. It's one of the things I had tried to reduce during my stay with Wizards, but Snow Crane Tattoo predates that setup. I assert that the intent of Snow Crane Tattoo is quite evident. This, in combination with the significant increase in power of its literal interpretation over its intended one, is what prompted me to rule the way I have.

Read that last sentence carefully! It's not how strong I think the literal interpretation *is* that matters, it's how much stronger it is *relative to what I believe was tested*.

Finally, there's the case of "yes, they're different, but not enough to be concerned about." The literal interpretation gets chosen here, easily. Look around this category and you'll see Dragon Tattoo. Adding a "minimum of 1 token" stipulation would not stop it from being an automatic Ring of Air all by itself. You could still add one token three times. Voila. Furthermore, with forthcoming MRPs to both Finding the Harmony and the Ring of Air in Gold Edition, it will no longer be either possible or desirable to play an indefinite number of Rings off one Dragon Tattoo even with its current interpretation.

Errata?

This is specifically for Jeff Alexander, but anyone can chime in.

I was looking at the errata on your site, and was wondering if it is current? The date on there is February 2000, and am curious if any updates have been done since then.

My own site is quite out of date...I really should dismantle it one of these months. Zen's has the current archive and errata lists.