Hello,

I'm very excited with the new-combo deck, Teferi's Vapors.
(Description you can find here: https://www.mtggoldfish.com/articles/instant-deck-tech-teferi-s-vapors-legacy )

Then, we are now discussing about this kind of deck in our local judge community, following situation;

*AP says “Activate Lethal Vapors for thousand time.”
*NAP says “I'd like to cast Trickbind targeting the first one, so you cannot activate anymore.”
*Then they called a judge.

According to MTR 4.2 exactly literally, AP's declaration will be considered as AP activated once and wait NAP's action, then activate next one, so NAP can interrupt AP's playing with Trickbind.
(MTR 4.2 says

Whenever a player adds an object to the stack, he or she is assumed to be passing priority unless he or she explicitly announces that he or she intends to retain it. If he or she adds a group of objects to the stack without explicitly retaining priority and a player wishes to take an action at a point in the middle, the actions should be reversed up to that point.

However, there is no reasonable reason why AP passes priority between each activation, so this ruling is nonsense at all I think.

I'd like to hear whether my opinion is correct or not, and also to know whether there is chance for MTR to be changed or not.

Nonsense or not, currently the MTR is what it is. If the AP doesn't say they're retaining priority then they're getting trickbinded. Which is the sort of mistake one only makes once and then never again (a similar thing with announcing holding priority has happened to a lot of Modern Ad Nauseam players with Lightning Storm I've heard).

That all said, this is likely all moot since that “combo” deck doesn't actually work, see: https://apps.magicjudges.org/forum/topic/40092/.

@Jeff : You just need to activate Lethal vapor's on your opponent's turn. Since he is the Active Player he'll have to chose a set number of activations and you'll be able to simply activate it more times.

Now to the main question, there's a fairly simple way to not be affected by the shortcut. Addidng that you want to keep priority should solve that. The reason this shortcut exists is to gain time by avoiding the players having to say "Activate Nantuko shade shade once, you do something ? Activate it again, you do something ?" times 20 which would be very long and boring.

Agreed with Jeff. Every once in a while, there'll be some weird or non-intuitive interaction between cards and tournament rules (e.g. Lightning Storm; anything involving Lion's Eye Diamond; the way you can cast Blessed Alliance after combat damage to get rid of that last attacking creature). It's the player's responsibility to know those rules when it comes to Competitive Magic. When it comes to corner cases, it's easier to educate the player about the rules, than it is to change the tournament rules.

Originally posted by Àre Maturana:

@Jeff : You just need to activate Lethal vapor's on your opponent's turn. Since he is the Active Player he'll have to chose a set number of activations and you'll be able to simply activate it more times.

Not to derail, but opponent can always just activate Vapors on the turn you cast it and just never let it get to their turn. So I guess its technically possible but not relevant? Obv there are ways around that but its legacy so any additional loops to jump through start to look not great.

This thread seems to be veering off towards strategy discussions re: making this combo work, or not, and that's not really the purpose of these forums - so I've locked it.

Originally posted by Keiichi Kawazoe:

I'd like to hear whether my opinion is correct or not, and also to know whether there is chance for MTR to be changed or not.

No, and no. While you're correct that players would just assume they're retaining priority, those players who understand the rules better will know to explicitly state that they're retaining priority. As Jeff noted in his original post, those who don't have that advanced knowledge will quickly learn. Also, those who do have advanced knowledge of the rules have earned the advantages they might gain.

The reasoning behind that part of the MTR: cards like Nantuko Shade, where the default is that you do NOT want to retain priority when you say “pump it X times”; instead, each activation is assumed to include a priority pass. The fact that Lethal Vapors doesn't fit the rules as well as the dozens (hundreds?) of cards like Mr. Shade is no reason to change a rule that's worked quite well for over a dozen years.

d:^D

Edited Scott Marshall (Dec. 4, 2017 01:01:05 PM)