Magic: The Gathering Gets Tournament Rules Updates

Earlier today, Wizards of the Coast announced the banning "Bridge from Below" in the Modern format but that's not the only change they announced. The publisher of Magic: The Gathering has also made updates to its tournament rules

Here are the changes they made:

Section 2.5 (End-of-Match Procedure): Clarification added that if the active player merely indicates they would like to pass the turn, this is sufficient to move to turn zero for the opponent.

Section 3.8 (Game Markers): The information on tokens has been moved to section 4.7 (Game Layout).

Section 4.1 (Player Communication): Two updates here. First, the amount of mana floating in a mana pool has been changed from "derived" information to "status" information. Second. "status" information may not be misrepresented by a player.

Section 4.2 (Tournament Shortcuts): The "X-spell" shortcut has been removed now that floating mana is now status information.

Section 4.7 (Game Layout): The rules for token representation have been move to this section (from section 3.8).

Section 6.3 (Standard Format Deck Construction): Clarification added about snow-covered basic lands. While snow-covered basic lands are not legal in Standard, language has been added to make sure that players are not penalized. Snow-covered basic lands should be treated as the non-snow equivalent and should be replaced when discovered (without penalty).

It's good to see that they've made these changes to improve clarifications and take out the penalty for having snow-covered basic lands in Standard format.

You can check out the full Tournament Rules document here.

What do you think about these rules updates and the recent banning in Modern?

Share your thoughts in the comments section below.

Core Set 2020 is set to be released on July 12, 2019. Core Set 2020 is also coming to Magic Arenaon July 2, with the preorder bundle for the set available now. The Core Set 2020 bundle in Arena includes a mythic rare Planeswalker card for Chandra as a bonus.

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