I rather talk about watching the Miracles player who has tap all his mana to keep his Mentor tokens alive, that can not attack under Bridge but wants them to sac to my Stax...
We are so off topic.
What if the chess clock is only started if a player has to think for more than 10 seconds after receiving priority. For as long as players keep making their moves within 10 seconds after receiving priority, the clock is not started - it doesn't run for either player. Each player gets 10-15 minutes of personal 'tanking time' to use for the entire match. A player who runs out of time will have to keep making moves within 10 seconds, or lose the game/match at a judge's discretion.
So you want a chess clock *and* a ten-second hourglass timer that tells you when to use the chess clock? Are you just totally incapable of imagining how these idiotic chess clock proposals would work in practice? Or the smartphone suggestion! What happens at a GP where a hundred people don't have a smart phone? Does the TO have to bring a big box full of smart phones to hand out to people who didn't bring one? Or are we just going to require you to have the app on your own smartphone in order to register?
"I'm willing to imagine a TES where Past in Flames replaces Ill-Gotten Gains entirely, and we just don't play Diminishing Returns." - me, 29/09/2011
Founding member of Team Scrubbad: Legacy Legends
I understand, but that doesn't mean we can't modify the chess clock system in such a way so that it works for Magic. Cartesian's post above is a suggestion of one possible modification. We should try to creatively figure out a solution for implementing an MTGO style clock system, instead of merely settling for something less fair.
Actually I was thinking that players could simply count to ten in the back of their head.
It doesn't have to be exactly 10 seconds. And judges would be there to look out for any systematic attempts to abuse the rule, just as they are there now to watch for slow play.
I don't think that I am the one lacking imagination here.
I feel like this could be a fair option if each match had a judge that was timing priority and the punishment was universal (this is currently not the case at some competitive REL events, as Jullian Knab alludes to in his original post). You are right though; the best option in the current system is to simply have more rigourous enforcement by players and judges.
It doesn't have to be a clock, necessarily - players could well be allotted "tanks" to figure out more complex turns. Once every tanking time is spent, gotta keep up the pace. This is used in a Japanese Go tournament called the NHK Cup: In the NHK Cup tournament, starting at the beginning of the game, players have 30 seconds to make each move, but have 10 extended thinking periods of one minute.
The more classical Japanese use a timing system in Go that gives people N "chunks". When you get your turn, a chunk starts counting down. If you spend a chunk completely, you lose it. If you play under, you keep it. The more you tank, the more your potential to tank declines until you end up playing only on overtime and have to play fast or lose on time.
The clocks themselves aren't necessary, per se, but a regulated number of clearly long "tanks" might do good? That way keeping ordinary play reasonably snappy would be frowned upon less and the thinking needed for solving complex gamestates recognized by the rules.
Originally Posted by Lemnear
"I'm willing to imagine a TES where Past in Flames replaces Ill-Gotten Gains entirely, and we just don't play Diminishing Returns." - me, 29/09/2011
Founding member of Team Scrubbad: Legacy Legends
How are you tracking whether a thinking period counts as a long tank or not? Clocks again?
"I'm willing to imagine a TES where Past in Flames replaces Ill-Gotten Gains entirely, and we just don't play Diminishing Returns." - me, 29/09/2011
Founding member of Team Scrubbad: Legacy Legends
I have noticed, as the board state increases with Stax, the time I eat up is disproportionate to my opponent. They have no options, but they will make me play it out anyway. No joke, a turn on the late game is often this:
Untap,
Tabernacle on the stack
Smokestack on the stack
Tangle Wire on the stack
Activate Trading Post, make a Goat.
Tap Goat, Gods' Eye and Crucible
Sac Goat, Gods' Eye, make a token
Tap Metalworker, pay all Tabernacle triggers.
Move to draw.
We have not even hit my first main phase yet, this game is over, I am playing only because my opponent is choosing to make me. I do not accept that because my board state becomes more and more complex (Stax makes for some fucking crazy board states) and my opponent wishes to watch me play it out in place of scooping that I should start being punished.
At this point you, as the opponent have two choices. Accept now I am going to have a lot to do, I am going to eat time, and I am going to try and kill you or, conced. I am not a total ass. My deck has the combo of Metalworker, Staff and Factory so I can kill you in a turn. I also have tutors in the form of Inventor’s Fair. My deck is made to lock you, then kill you. Not fuck around. But if you want me to prove I have it, you have to give me what I am owed in that choice. That is the time to make the mechanical actions that my deck will force upon us both and the chance to plan and think around an ever increasing complex situation.
Now, you can argue that, and I am sympathetic to it, I made my bed I should sleep in it. But slow play is a contextual thing. Taking a minute or two to get though my Upkeep is a situation created by the board. If my opponent has plays, I have to walk him though each trigger, answer questions and explain the stack interactions at times. He is not slow playing any more than I am, but he will take far longer for his upkeep than I will. That's not his fault. It's contextual.
The only real option is to have a judge make the calls. Because the real reason that a clock works online is that all the triggers are stacked for you. Go look at that upkeep again and think how long that would take online. Now think how long it would take in real life. A few mouse clicks is much faster than having to move your hands around, tapping things and picking up cards, finding tokens, the add in shuffling and the speed that's handled online... The side effect is my decks combo kill doesn't work online. Because loops are not handled well there.
There is so much nuance in this game, a human being is often a much better judge of a situation then a clock is. Until Watson can watch every game and judge each on its merit, we should just fall back on the system we have. Teach judges to watch for this issue and punish it accordingly.
It's your choice to play stax. The fact that you eat up more time than the other player benefits you because you are playing against a person who will have less turns than people who play another match. That means, less turns to draw into things like ancient grudge, hurkyll's recall or shattering spree.
Mechanical actions, when taken quickly, are not slow play. I am not tanking on my upkeep triggers.
A clock in paper is not comparable to online. Triggers are not handled the same, physical movements need to be made, shuffling can not be handled with a click, I myself, with my left hand, need help for that action in Comp REL.
I sort of like the idea of the NHK Go 'tank', which would be plenty covered in your Stax example - you've taken a full minute to correctly resolve your triggers and activations, in as efficient a way as poosible. However, at no point are you likely to run into that tank.
The core issue with that idea is that some decks (such as Turbo Eldrazi) have hyper-complex lines of play to navigate early on. And such a clocking system would punish deck transferrence (that is, learning a new deck to the levels at which you could play your favorite decks)..
Sounds like better judging is still the best solution.
I have trouble shuffling quickly; that would count against me with a clock, and it wouldn't have anything to do with my ability to play the game or my intention (read: lack thereof) to stall. I don't waste people's time when I'm playing cards, but I'm not going to smash-shuffle twice and assume that's good enough just to save time. There's a number of problems with implementing a variety of other solutions that, themselves, wouldn't really address the original poster's point, and I think they're getting to the point that they would take more effort to implement than it would take judges and players to address the problem themselves.
Sometimes I get the feeling that there's an element of box-ticking to judging a big event. That's not necessarily a problem, but it gets weird sometimes. Round 8 at Worcester (I scrubbed out!) I was paired against one of my friends from the local, and we were joshing each other and hamming it up—generally having a good time. At least two judges came and watched the match to make sure we weren't being intimidating or deriding each other, and we told them all the same thing, which is that we knew each other and were just kicking back at the end of a rough tournament. Every judge who did this stuck around for an inordinately long time to make sure some form of harassment wasn't in the offing. Priorities, team.
And how the hell did an Eldrazi player take more than ten seconds to make a decision? I think that deck's awesome, but it's pretty much chillin' at the bottom of the complexity scale with All Spells.
All Spells Primer under construction: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e...Tl7utWpLo0/pub
PM me if you want to contribute!
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