Outside the hourglass

Might also be helpful if rules would work like common sense dictates.

Just sayin'...

Ankha wrote:

Mewcat wrote:

As I have said before, none of this really matters. Every vtes event is basically house rules since the head judge almost certainly doesnt know the rules.

That's why it's useful to ask questions, and show the answer to those who don't know (even if they are judges).

Yeah I agree. Problem is vtes takes long enough as is and I'm not gonna spend more than a minute arguing with a judge. Also doing so undermines the whole system. The judge is the final authority and I accepted that when I joined event.

If you build a deck that uses a very unclear combo it would be VERY beneficial to run the combo here beforehand so during the tournament you could easily refer to the discussion.

Granted, plenty of problems rise when other players play their cards and how those cards interact with your cards so you can't really preplan that... :/

Probably the best thing to do if your deck relies on some odd interaction is give the judge the relevant information before hand. Saves time and respects the other players. Of course you can easily see problems that can crop up that wont be helped like this. That's where the 1 minute house rules thing is best.

jamesatzephyr wrote:

The practical upshot of this is that pre-range with damage in it can get quite weird. But the alternatives are largely more annoying. You end up having to do things like say: You can only play damage prevention in damage prevention, which gets weird for Skin of Night (treating agg as normal) and similar damage-ish cards. Or you allow damage prevention and damage-related cards, but that gets tricky to delineate.

Those are not the only two options. One could also clean up the core timing rules so that the game is only in one phase at a time. Just rule that a prevent phase interrupts the current phase instead of extending it, i.e. the game leaves the pre-range phase until the damage is resolved. So one would not have to rule based on effects, but only based on timing: effects that could be played in a prevent phase would be effects specifically made for that phase (e.g. prevent, Skin of Night) and effects that can be played at any time during combat (e.g. Barrens, Infernal Pursuit.)

Of course, that requires acknowledging the pre-range step as a combat phase, but since pretty much all decks that want to fight play in that phase (Signpost, Crows, Stick, Concealed, Trap,...), that should be done anyway. Same for the end-of-round step where every combat deck plays, if only for Taste. Not so sure for the Grapple phase, since there is really only 1 card to play in that phase.