'Can I tap Lake of the Dead to sacrifice multiple swamps and add 4 times as much black mana???'

Also, Edacade's extremely valid point.

We're not dodging the question: we rightfully refuse to be cornered into a binary answer, where the actual and correct answer is neither yes or no.

Take a closer look at your own question: 'just from the printed text' is the unacceptable part, as it tries to corner the askee into an unacceptable choice. As has been explained (quite many times now), printed text is BUT ONE of the aspects which are weighted in when errataeing a card; other considerations must be taken into account, which is why those frightfully similar cards (but NOT identical, mind you) received the errata they received.

Sorry, but 'because I say so' is a totally sufficient response (albeit frustrating) when it comes from the people who owns the game. That's how life actually works, ya know.

We didn't lose Lotus Vale. We just didn't gain a Black Lotus land.

We did lose Kill-Suit Cultist, but I don't think that's something easily fixed. The design relies on damage-on-the-stack, so even if they did cobble together some text to let it work again, it wouldn't have that clever design anymore. And for actual gameplay value, if we assume the ability is only there to deal with the blocker, it's just a Typhoid Rats with two drawbacks.



I'm not sure I see your point about this example. Are you saying that my position implies that Chains should get errata to exclude planeswalkers? I don't believe it does.

I think Chain of Acid is still more or less the same card it was originally. Being able to kill planeswalkers makes it more powerful and more versatile, yes, but I don't think that's anywhere near the level of "turn a niche mana-fixing land into a Black Lotus". Green is allowed to kill planeswalkers via the "non-creature permanent" wording, so this isn't a color-pie bend. And I think it would unimaginable for them to go through all pre-Lorwyn Magic cards and decide which of them need "non-planeswalker" errata and which don't. The idea that a card that predated planeswalkers was designed not to interact with planeswalkers doesn't make sense to me.



Even in Mirage, it would be able to gain you life via Auspicious Ancestor or let you pay to draw a card via Merfolk Seer. But even if those didn't exist, it wouldn't be a good argument, any more than "Flash is only designed to bring cards from Visions and earlier onto the battlefield".

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

If you notice it at all, yes. Though you might also not know that it means anything (the counterparts, "Poly" and "Continuous" don't do anything to change the functionality).



If the reprinting is the key issue, I wonder where you stand on the errata to Fractured Loyalty and, generally speaking, to errata made to fix errors and misprints.



But couldn't there also be people who are staunchly in the other camp? People who've played since Weatherlight or earlier and know how Lotus Vale has always worked and who would, if someone shows them something to indicate that it can be used as a Black Lotus, insist that they must somehow be mistaken?

I can certainly agree that the various rules and templating changes can create a lot of confusion and I sympathize over the tensions this creates in playgroups.

I'm not saying your position implies anything, since your position seems to be "there's a lot of factors", and how you choose to apply those factors is going to change from case to case. my point is that a card gaining functionality through rules changes is a thing that's happened. there's precedent, so the idea that it must be avoided at all costs is false.

it's not that it was designed not to interact with planeswalkers. it was just not designed to interact with them. Vale wasn't designed to not to be a black lotus land, it just wasn't designed to be one.

huh, I'd known that ETB effects became a thing in Visions, but I had forgotten that LTB effects predated them. anyway, that's not the same argument. whether or not the creature had been printed yet is a quantitative difference. whether or not you can get value from it without paying the rest of the cost is a qualitative one. Flash was designed to be scout's warning.

anyway I'm not really convinced that's a strong argument because it could be just as easily applied to, say, illusions of grandeur, which was never supposed to change control until whoops let's just print **** donate. that's different in that pulling off stuff like that was the explicit intent of Donate, whereas Protean Hulk was never supposed to do anything with Flash (in fact, it didn't when it was printed) but I'll concede it's not the strongest case.

yeah but making that distinction means knowing that "Poly Artifact" and "Continuous Artifact" are the same as just "Artifact" but not knowing what "Mono Artifact" means. and given that the primary thing we see before card types is "Legendary", I think people are used to assuming that things before card types have rules implications.

what's wrong with Fractured Loyalty? the only difference I can see is that they changed the "enchanted creature" to "that creature", but a) I don't see any rules issue with the original wording, can you explain? and b) I think that those sentences parse identically anyway, so I don't think anyone will have problems with it.

on fixing errors... that's complicated, but I'm probably gonna come down on the side of "if it's obviously a mistake, like Walking Atlas, just go ahead and fix it." I didn't even notice that Oboro Envoy lasted indefinitely until it was pointed out to me. I know this doesn't line up with the Vale argument, but as you say there are multiple factors involved, and I think in these cases most people are going to read it at first as if it does what it was supposed to anyway so it's not as big a deal.

sure. my case has never been that such people don't exist, just that I believe such people are in the minority. also, they have to be people who've played since Weatherlight or earlier but are unaware of the 6th-edition rules change, and that group is inherently growing smaller and smaller as time passes.

"Enchanted creature" would mean the currently enchanted one, whereas "that creature" would mean the one that was enchanted at the time the ability triggered. The distinction matters when you move the Aura in response to the triggered ability. Guilty Conscience had the same issue and fix.

I'm not sure when those errata were issued or what reasoning was given, but it looks to have been done prior to Ravnica: City of Guilds.

I mentioned that only to bring up an issue related to the topic of this thread. And I agree that it's complicated.



That's a fair point, and your arguments do make a lot of sense when talking about people discovering Magic's history independently of those old-timers. If I just now found out about Magic and just started looking through Gatherer, I'd certainly both be baffled why the cards are worded so differently and why particular cards have the errata they have.

huh, good to know. although I do need to point out that Loyalty has nothing to do with damage, but I know what you meant.