I can promise you I'm arguing in good faith. I'm also under no illusion that I am arguing with anyone capable of instating change, nor do I expect that change. I'm debating design and aesthetic principles because those are interesting to me.

right, but Nirvana fallacies. just because you can't be perfect (and I agree you can't) doesn't mean you can't be better, and it doesn't mean that sloppy, half-assed solutions are as good as anything else.

sure.

Waylay is just as silly, Chaos Orb says "mono artifact" which instructs players to look up what that means, and Wiitigo literally can't function without the fix, and thanks to the Mitotic Slime principle most players will play it right anyway.

Plant is a fair point though. it was my recollection that all old walls had the (walls can't attack.) reminder text, which would at least inform people looking at the card that something was up, but that does not appear to be the case. and I think I can agree that they shouldn't make it so all walls that weren't printed with Defender can now suddenly attack. that seems like a bad road to walk down.

there is still a difference, though: they've never printed a wall without Defender. someone can casually mention at some point that all walls have Defender and you can just remember that. you have a rule. a rule you can apply unambiguously across the board. if you see a wall without Defender, you'll know that it must be from before whenever they made the switch. with lands that sac on etb, though, there is no such rule. you have to memorize exactly when the switch was made so you can tell which ones of the identical-looking cards work one way and which work the other. actually, you can't even do that, because Karoo was printed before Vale but works like Catacomb. (which, by the way, is also "really old" by now. Weatherlight and Planeshift were 3 and a half years apart, about 15 years ago.) so you literally have to memorize the list of cards this errata applies to, rather than just understanding them as an easily identifiable class like Walls.

there's also the difference that a lot of design work has been done around the fact that walls can't attack. things like rolling stones, for instance. are there any cards that are designed around the assumption that lands that sacrifice on etb unless you pay a cost don't actually ever enter the battlefield unless you pay?

the Wall solution is ugly, but I agree with you that all the other solutions there are uglier. I don't think that's true of Vale.

sure, but that's happened. Master of Arms and Kill-Suit Cultist lost inherent design-vision functionality with rules changes. Chain of Acid got to kill a whole new card type that its designers had never dreamed of. fundamentally changing intended functionality isn't, in and of itself, a dealbreaker, and I think preserving it takes a back seat to preserving clear player intuition. the only difference here is that player intuition makes it an incredibly powerful card, but Legacy loses nothing by banning it and Vintage is all about playing broken stuff so adding one more puzzle piece doesn't hurt it.

in this context there's no such thing as objectively right or wrong, their policy is "things work the way we say they do", and I don't have any authority through which to obligate them. like I said I'm arguing aesthetic and design theory and I think they made a bad decision.

bury has nothing to do with timing. bull elephant, for instance, uses bury but is a triggered ability.

seeing "bury" makes me have to figure out what "bury" means, but it doesn't give me any heads-up about any other changes. and given how obvious what "bury" means since there's a zone called the graveyard, it's unlikely seeing it will even make me look anything up. and, again, Karoo.

then why not change cards entirely? why not make ancestral recall cost so it doesn't have to be banned in Legacy or restricted in Vintage? why not make black lotus cost and only add one mana? why have a B/R list at all if you can just errata things so they do what you wish they would because everyone can just check a website?

whether or not people can, the fact, and you and I both know this is a fact, is that a lot of people won't. which means there's a lot of value in cards doing what they say they do. you don't have to stick with the old wording, but at least stick with a logically reasonable interpretation of it.

But the problem with simply applying a "logically reasonable interpretation" of Lotus Vale's text is that there isn't just one: depending on the philosophy we employ to parse that text, we could arrive at many different interpretations, all of which are equally logical and reasonable. To put it bluntly, deciding to preserve Lotus Vale's functionality through a rules change is neither illogical, nor unreasonable. Additionally, choosing not to preserve the functionality of other cards (cards that have considerably less potential to suddenly do Super Nutty Things) does not make the Lotus Vale decision less reasonable, or less logical. Different cards, different decisions.

they're not equally logical. one says "this behaves the same way that everything else with pretty much this wording does" and the others, well, don't. the others rely on pre-existing knowledge of the history of the rules in order to even occur to you, but if you have that, odds are you know the correct answer about how it functions no matter what it does.

They absolutely are equally logical. Both "similarly-worded cards should be have similarly" and "a card's historical functionality should be preserved" are premises, not established unarguable truisms. You happen to like the former, and I happen to like the latter, but the conclusions we draw from those premises are equally valid.

Great Wall & Shield Wall are interesting cases, wouldn't you say?
Joust apart, they actually printed a lot of non-defender walls: Mistform Ultimus, Avian Changeling, Changeling Sentinel, etc.
From an objective point of vue, the only thing we can actually establish here is how immensely pointless this whole discussion is. Please go on, I'm having a slow news week.

I'm not arguing that, because there's no perfect Oracle text, we shouldn't even bother trying to make it better. That would be the nirvana fallacy. Instead, I'm saying that by making the text better according to one metric will make it worse according to another, equally valid metric. There needs to be a willingness to make the text worse in one particular way in order to make it better overall.

Karoo enters the battlefield tapped, so it already can't be tapped for mana in response to its triggered ability, with no errata necessary.

...I feel like you're using a much more formal definition of "logic" than is appropriate in this context. I'm talking about how a player picking up a card is likely to parse it. when you look at a card, do you think "should I evaluate this from the standpoint of a desire for similarly-worded cards to behave similarly or should I preferentially value preserving historical functionality?" because I know I don't. I think "what do these words mean?" perhaps I should have said "intuitive" rather than "logical", but I have to assume you knew what I meant because the other possible interpretation is just absurd.

technically speaking, neither of those can attack.
Ultimus originally had rules text spelling out its ability to attack, and I think context makes changeling clearly different than actual walls when it comes to intuitive readings.

from a judge's perspective, possibly. from a designer's, though, it's valuable to debate these sorts of things because they have broader applications. if you're just trying to interpret existing cards, this isn't meaningful, but if you're interested in creating things of your own, then debating pros and cons of aesthetic and functional design choices is incredibly useful.

yeah, I'll concede that. except for the "equally valid" part. I'll grant that there are other valid metrics, but I see no evidence on which to grant that they are equal.

sure, but it has a whole bunch of other interactions that behave differently, and those will seem weird and wrong once you learn the rule "old enough cards lands that sac on etb unless you pay a cost don't actually etb unless that cost is payed." sure, you need to involve a second card, but there are a lot of second cards that treat Karoo and Vale differently.

The rule is more "old enough cards that that are sacrificed on entering the battlefield unless you pay a cost and that also have an ability that could be activated in response to the triggered ability have errata to prevent this." If you know that rule, you can see which cards have the errata and which don't. You then only have to know that the Lairs aren't "old enough".

I do think it's awkward that the Vale and such have a replacement effect now instead of a triggered ability and that they don't enter the battlefield at all if the cost isn't paid. In practice, though, I don't think this really matters. A player isn't actually going to play the land unless they can pay the cost, so the hypothetical situation of someone playing a Lotus Vale just to trigger landfall abilities, only to discover that that that doesn't work, isn't at all realistic. If they just wanted the landfall trigger and didn't intend to actually keep the land, they could just play almost any other land instead.

that's a much more convoluted rule than "walls can't attack" but I suppose if you know that, as well as where the cut-off is, (again, the Lairs are actually really close temporally to Vale.) it's consistently enforced.

what about the hypothetical situation of them playing Lotus Vale to tap it for mana?

Temporally, there's not a big gap between when the Lairs were printed and when the Vale was printed, but the Sixth Edition rules overhaul that came between the two makes all the difference.

The card was designed as a niche way to combine three lands (including itself) into one, while providing a sort of mana fixing. Just adding Lotus Vales to a mana base otherwise consisting of only basic lands can potentially give you enough mana fixing to get either or on your third turn, no matter which basic lands you drew (though you wouldn't be able to get different colors of mana anymore). And it makes your Ley Druid more effective.

If you actually use it like that, the errata is largely invisible. You're still sacrificing the two untapped lands, and you're still getting the three mana from it. The weirdness will only really come up in edge and corner cases. I know that, as a rules Melvin, those are very easy for me to come up with, but that doesn't mean they're like to actually occur in a game. In almost all cases where a Vale is entering the battlefield, its cost is going to be paid.

On the other hand, if the errata were reverted, it would just be a Black Lotus for a land drop. The functionality as a niche mana-fixing land-merging card would be completely overshadowed by that new functionality that it was never designed to have. At that point, its text might as well say "When Lotus Vale enters the battlefield, sacrifice it and add three mana of any one color to your mana pool."

So I think the current text is much less disruptive to the card working how it should work than the printed text.

On the other hand, if you're only looking at how a player who only sees the printed text will interpret it, then yes, they'd probably think they could tap it for mana in response to the ability. I just disagree that that should be prioritized. Old cards have all sorts for weird templating, so taking them at face value isn't a good idea. And if they did prioritize just the printed text, we'd get a lot of downright silly results.

Showing up at a tournament with what you think is a killer deck only to find out your key card doesn't work like you think would certainly be a disaster, but I don't think it's likely to happen. It would require enough exposure to old cards to find Lotus Vale but not enough to tip them off that old cards' texts aren't always reliable; enough knowledge of the available resources to look up banned/restricted lists in order to make a legal deck but not enough to look up Oracle texts; enough power-level-gauging ability to assess that "Black Lotus for a land drop is really good" but not enough to assess that "Black Lotus for a land drop would probably be banned/restricted"; and enough skill in their playgroup to provide the necessary playtesting to hone their deck but not enough for someone to point out that the card doesn't work like they thought. In other words, it's more likely that they'd learn the card's Oracle text before the stakes get that high.

If someone isn't actually aiming for a tournament, then it does become more likely that they'd remain oblivious to the Oracle text. Some people at a kitchen table might all be playing wrong. But as long as they're having fun, that's okay. In any case, there's no need to change the Oracle text for the benefit of people who never look up Oracle texts.

Vale (Weatherlight: 1997) and Dreadnought (Mirage: 1996) are from the same block, so that argument doesn't hold water IMHO. Incidentally the very first actual block, yes, but still the point stands, no rule changes.

Also I have noticed a trend here of people mentioning things like Wiitgo when I explicitly clarified my position on them. Errata is fine. Functionality retaining errata is fine. What isn't fine is to give it to some and not to others. Two cards with the same printed text should not have different functionality, end of.

So bring back Time Vault's errata, bring back Palinchron's errata. Change Ancestral Recall's mana cost to . "Less disruptive" is a terrible measure of if you should use errata or not because there is no end to the madness.

sure, but you can't expect someone who started playing in Innistrad to know that. even if they know about the Sixth Edition rules reset, it's unlikely they can place it exactly on a timeline and tell you which sets came before or after.

sure, but in most cases that hasn't been the priority. Cultist doesn't work the way it should work anymore, nor does Master, nor does Chain. why should it be the driving force here?

see, that's the thing: in most cases the wackiness is obvious. if you look at Wiitigo, it's pretty clear it's not supposed to die before the trigger, so people will assume that it doesn't. it's not clear with Lotus Vale that it's not supposed to be available to produce mana until after you've paid the cost, because it's not like that would make it non-functional. sure, they could look at it and realize that's broken, but it's likely they know Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall, and all their pals exist, which means that it's not fair to expect them to assume that being broken means they're interpreting it wrong.

fine then, let's look at a less broken version of the same problem, because it's no clearer with heart of yavimaya. if I have no forests why can't I play it for the pump, then sacrifice it? or if I only have one swamp, why can't I make it a ritual with Lake of the Dead if I'm willing to lose the lake? how am I supposed to guess those interactions?

I disagree. people disagreeing on what cards do can be a major source of conflict in casual play. I remember when I started at my high school getting into a huge fight about whether Onslaught could target tapped creatures. that sort of thing isn't good, and mitigating it by having the people who know the rules agree with the people who don't is valuable. you're assuming playgroups function with one set of rules knowledge, but I can tell you from experience that's not the case.

If they're only playing with cards from Innistrad onwards, there's no problem. If they do start using old cards, then I think they should start informing themselves either on the Oracle texts of the particular cards or on the general trends.



Kill-Suit Cultist was certainly made weaker from the removal of damage-on-the-stack. However, its ability isn't restricted to its own damage, so in the majority of possible uses, it still works.

I agree that Master of Arms lost its main functionality and is pretty much useless now. Maybe it would be better if it got back its damage-preventing errata.

As for Chain of Acid, though, I disagree. It was made to destroy any non-creature permanent, and it still does that. The set of affected cards just expanded, but that happens each time a new set is released. And there are are still plenty of non-creature, non-planeswalker cards you might want to destroy, so it's also not the case the card is now an entirely different design ("Destroy target planeswalker. [...]").

I also think that, in general, losing some functionality is a lot less disruptive than gaining unintended functionality. If one card becomes useless, that's one card rendered unviable (if it even was viable before). If a card becomes overpowered, though, that's potentially a lot more other cards rendered unviable, until it gets banned, at which points the card becomes even worse than just unviable.



It's not just that it's broken. It's also that it isn't banned or restricted, isn't actually played in tournaments, and only costs $6.

I agree that a lot of the wackiness is obvious (though in Wiitigo defense, I'll note that Force of Savagery exists), if you're well-grounded in how cards normally work and how badly-worded old cards are. But if you're naïve about this (like that hypothetical started-with-Innistrad player), you're not going to pick up on that. Also, really old cards are both written in a very different language (even such basic rules as "target" to indicate a target or a colon to indicate an activated ability aren't consistently used there) and much more likely to actually be wacky.



I strongly feel that Lotus Vale and Scorched Ruins should keep their errata. I'm much more ambivalent about those other cards. However, if only some of them had the errata, even the already-complicated "old enough cards that that are sacrificed on entering the battlefield unless you pay a cost and that also have an ability that could be activated in response to the triggered ability have errata to prevent this" rule wouldn't be specific enough.



That's not what I'm saying. There exist authorities on how the rules and cards actually work. If there's disagreement about how Lotus Vale works, they can look up the Oracle text on Gatherer and find a conclusive answer. And in a playgroup, there's probably going to be someone who's aware of this and can resolve the dispute. And if there isn't such a person in the group, or if the people in the group don't actually accept the Oracle text as an authority, then it really doesn't matter what the Oracle text says.

it's pretty common for players to pick up older cards from other players. sure, they "should" look up what the cards do, but do you think they're going to?

no, Cultist's design intent was clearly to give you a means of mitigating its must-attack ability by killing its blocker through damage-on-the-stack rules. it still has a function, but it's not the intended one.

green has a long history of destroying artifacts, enchantments, and lands. at some point, someone noticed that that list comprised all the non-creature permanents and thought "hey let's just say that instead", but it was never supposed to be more than a variant on Creeping Mold. and comparing adding a new type to adding more of old types is facetious. distinctions between types are important: this is why red can destroy artifacts but not enchantments, despite the two being basically the same thing. Planeswalkers aren't just slightly-different enchantments, they're their own thing and Chain was never meant to interact with that thing.

also I'm gonna pre-empt a comparison to Negate, which I think is different, because Negate was never meant to be combining a set of things blue did, it was taking a thing blue did and adding a restriction. Chain targeted three types because those were the three types Green could deal with.

so then why un-errata Flash? why remove the from-hand restriction on the freetrips?

more importantly, why does it matter whether or not Lotus Vale is viable?

you're not gonna pick up on it, but you also may not even notice the problem in the first place. there's a thing I like to refer to as the Mitotic Slime principle: basically, even if you think you know what the rules are, you're going to assume that your cards, well, work. Slime is a classic example, in that many new players believe that tokens never go to the graveyard, but they'll still play tokens with "goes-to-graveyard" triggers correctly because why else would they have them? a new player is going to play Wiitigo and put 6 counters on it, because why on earth would it have that ability if that didn't work? they won't know that they should be parsing it differently because it's old and old cards are wacky, they'll just parse it differently because otherwise it's incoherent. that's not the case with Vale.

sure, but those wordings are, if not accurate, at least intuitive. and when they're not, like Ice Cauldron, they punch you in the face with how unintuitive they are, encouraging you to look it up. Lotus Vale does none of that. no part of it says it behaves oddly, and no part of it indicates that there are confusing things going on beneath the hood.

yeah, but that's already too complicated and obscure to be a worthwhile rule of thumb. besides, you can just replace it with "old enough cards that are sacrificed on entering the battlefield unless you pay a cost and that also have an ability that could be activated in response to the triggered ability don't have errata to prevent this." that seems equally simple. probably simpler even, because then you don't have to actually say anything at all.

my point is that forcing them to have that fight is a bad thing. I know, I've been that someone who's aware of this. it's not fun, especially when people have been playing it wrong for a long time and are entrenched about it. you can't just say "they'll sort it out" and then wash your hands of it, because sorting it out can be a messy, frustrating process. sure, that'll happen with or without wacky rules, but it'll happen more when things are less clear.

I don't know. But if they're getting the cards from older players, then those older players can help clarify how the cards work.



You may be right about that. But I don't think it's a great loss.



They've continued to print green non-creature destruction after the introduction of planeswalkers, though. So it actually is the case that green can destroy any permanents other than creatures, rather than being able to destroy only artifacts, enchantments, and lands. That's admittedly not a strong argument here, since even if it turned out that destroying planeswalkers was just as forbidden to green as destroying creatures, they still wouldn't give the Chain errata.

I don't think the introduction of a new card type is fundamentally different from creating new cards of existing types. It's a matter of degree. The open-ended nature of Magic means that, even in cases where only a distinct subset of cards were designed to interact with each other, new sets can expand the scope of that set. For example, Brass-Talon Chimera, Iron-Heart Chimera, Lead-Belly Chimera. and Tin-Wing Chimera were only designed to work with each other, and that's how it was for many years. That they also interact with Theros block Chimeras is okay, though.

Also, there are two separate instances of intent involved: even though Chain of Acid wasn't intended to target planeswalkers, planeswalkers were intended to be targetable by anything that can target permanents.



I'm not sure the change to Flash ended up being for the better. But even if I say it was, that's not a counter-example, since those aren't in the same category.

What made Flash as printed become broken isn't a change in the rules or in how the printed text would be interpreted. Instead, it's the introduction of creatures with powerful ETB and LTB abilities. So the wording to keep the creature from even entering the battlefield if you don't pay the cost wasn't there to preserve the original functionality; it was just there to stop powerful interactions. The from-hand restrictions are an even more direct example of that. Those were just post-printing development, which they do have a policy against.

It's about choosing between the different potential Oracle texts that would result from applying different principles, but some potential Oracle texts aren't even on the table.



My point is that if there's errata to stop a card from becoming overpowered as a result of a rules change, that doesn't mean there also needs to be errata to stop cards from becoming weaker as a result of a rules change.



That's an interesting observation about the Slime, and I do agree that it would apply to some of the old cards. Not to all of them, though. If you look at an Alpha artifact, it might be easy to recognize that some say "Mono" on their type line, but that this means the artifact needs to be tapped to use is pretty esoteric knowledge at this point. And while a card with Legends Energy Tap or Alpha Blessing wording would be odd, it wouldn't be impossible.



If everyone agrees that Lotus Vale works as a Black Lotus, there's no conflict.

If everyone agrees that Lotus Vale doesn't work as a Black Lotus, there's no conflict.

If there's initial disagreement about how it works, but they agree that whatever the Oracle text says counts, there's no conflict. Well, someone may be upset at being proven wrong, but changing the Oracle text now would just change who that happens to; it wouldn't eliminate the problem.

If there's initial disagreement about how it works, and they also either won't check the Oracle text or won't accept what the Oracle text says, how does changing the Oracle text remove the conflict?

Because the oracle text is so far removed from what the card actually says on it that it literally turns it into a different card.

if I give someone a big bag of old junk cards I have lying around to help them kickstart their collection, there's a good chance I don't even know if there's a Vale in there, let alone that I would think to mention the rules change.

sure but is this?

also, as a designer, I disagree, Cultist is a really clever design and it's a little sad that we lost it.

the thing is, card types are meant to be different. they interact differently. look at artifacts and enchantments: there is literally no dividing line between the two for which counterexamples don't exist, even setting aside the damn Heliod's Spear cycle. there are colored artifacts, there are colorless enchantments, there are enchantments that tap, both have been associated with creatures... there's literally no actual hard difference. well, besides the aura/equipment thing, but those aside any artifact could be and enchantment and vice versa with no change in its internal functionality. it's not like making one into a creature, where suddenly it needs P/T and can engage in combat. it's not like making one a land, where it gets a completely different resource system. it's not like making it a planeswalker, where it has loyalty and can be attacked. and it's certainly not like making it an instant or sorcery. and yet it is a fundamental feature of red's color pie that it doesn't get to destroy enchantments, because despite being nonexistent, the difference still matters. it's one of the fundamental granular aspects of the game. creature types, on the other hand, are largely arbitrary. 99% of unblinking bleb's job is done just the same as an Illusion, a Sphinx, a Wizard, a Spirit, or a Dragon. and for the most part lords are made with that sort of modularity in mind: goblin king was never intended to only function with the Goblins printed in Alpha. Chimeras are a slightly weird case, but given that they were messing around the area of creature types, I can't assume they thought it'd be just those forever. in fact I suspect they had visions of revisiting and expanding the cycle.

sure, and I don't mind that Vindicate can blow them up. but Chain wasn't supposed to kill anything. it was supposed to kill a specific subset of things, it just used a slightly cute wording to accomplish that.

I mean, I could easily argue that, since when it came out the best thing you could do without paying the cost was lose 3 life to Moneylender, the existence of those strong ETB/LTB triggers, or ETB/LTB triggers in general, was a fundamental change to the design and thus a workaround for it would be to preserve intended functionality. Flash was never intended to allow for those sorts of shenanigans, but even the tamest ETB triggers didn't exist yet.

I agree with that as a statement.

but if you see "Mono Artifact", you know that you don't know what that means.

on Tap and Blessing, they've both been reprinted with clearer wording since then in sets with larger print runs, and since those are the versions people are most likely to see, they're the ones that should be conformed to. as I mentioned early, the existence of cases where multiple contradictory printed texts doesn't invalidate premises for the rest of the cases. that said, had they not been reprinted, I honestly wouldn't be bothered by making them work the way they say they do, although "super-old cards (and this is literally like first year or two old) use the word 'target' weirdly." isn't a super hard rule to remember, and once you've got it you can work out both Tap and Blessing's intents by intuition.

because your sample is flawed. or, rather, you're assuming that the change won't affect how often each event occurs. I contend that it will: I think players who don't know the current oracle wording are more likely to think it does work as a black lotus than that it doesn't, and players who know the current oracle wording will think it does whatever that wording says. short-term you have a potential increase as people who knew the now-current wording but didn't hear about the new-current one adjust, but that's not a permanent thing: those people will either learn or stop playing as time goes by, and new generations will have a more coherent system.

also, you seem to think that accepting Oracle wordings is a basically-binary thing. either the group, upon encountering a disagreement, immediately all says "yeah let's look it up", or they never will. this is not the case. I'm speaking from experience here.

I spend many hours building decks. Every single card in any deck I play has been carefully selected. I would be a fool not to spent a few seconds looking up their Oracle text.
I believe Adeyke's argument definitively ends the subject: 'There's no need to change the Oracle text for the benefit of people who never look up Oracle texts.'
Those who look at Oracle will find out about Lotus Vale; those who don't are fools we shouldn't care about.

As for Wizards' choices about how card should be errataed, and the fact that they'd make different errata for seemingly similar cards, it's been fully explained that many conflicting aspects are being weighted, leading to results that may appear surprising to the uninformed eye. As we ALL do, you disagree with some cards' erratas. Fine. There's no need to repeat it for the nth time.

Can we move on now?

"Because I say so" is not a sufficient explanation. Again, since people seem to always dodge the question, if I showed you these two cards, just from the printed wording would you think they do the same thing? A simple yes or no, binary answer. And once again, I need to point out that this is not the problem I brought up and never has been. I don't disagree with the errata Lotus Vale has. What I disagree with is that the errata is not applied to every single other card with the exact same printed wording.

No, on account of the fact that the word "bury" is missing from one of them. It clearly doesn't mean sacrifice since the Lake is asking you to sacrifice a swamp, so they can't possibly both do the same thing.