Apologies for not reading the entire thread in advance of replying, so I may be repeating something already said. I was pointed to this thread by someone else, and thought it might be worth presenting this information:

How is the Sidisi case different from the Dark Confidant case? We know that Bob is considered beneficial, even though part of the trigger involves a detrimental effect (losing life). Sidisi seems the same to me: she provides a generally beneficial effect (making free 2/2s) at the cost of a generally detrimental effect (milling yourself).

Let's consider a different but equivalent wording of Sidisi to more closely model the Bob comparison. I posit that the following card is functionally equivalent to Sidisi within probably 95% accuracy:

Disidi, Blood Tyrant - 1BUG
Creature - Naga Shaman
When Disidi ETB, mill the top 3 cards of your deck. If a creature card was milled this way, put a 2/2 Zombie into play.
Whenever a creature card is put into your GY from your deck, except as a result of Disidi's first ability, put a 2/2 Zombie into play.
3/3

The first trigger is functionally equivalent to Sidisi, except in the case that Sidisi is killed with her ETB trigger on the stack. It's also very close to Bob in the sense that you get both a detrimental and a beneficial effect at the same time, and thus, like Bob, should be considered generally beneficial. Since it's functionally equivalent to Sidisi “in general”, thus Sidisi's trigger should also be beneficial.

I realize that people often post without reading the entire thread in the
Knowledge Pool forum. This makes sense, given that forum's goal as an
educational tool – reading other posts answering that week's question can
actively damage someone's opportunity to form their own opinion.

However, I question whether that approach is considerate or appropriate in
other forums, such as this one. I'd like to think that thoughtful
conversations are at the heart of what we do here, and listening fully to
what each participant has to say is a critical component of any
discussion. Skipping the majority of a thread not only damages that
implicit agreement among participants on a theoretical level, but will
often produce actual undesirable results, such as repeating what someone
has proposed, or re-hashing a point that has already been laid to rest.

Apologies for de-railing the discussion somewhat. In the interest of being
on topic, let me just take a moment to reinforce a critical value of
judging, which is consistency. Promoting consistency across tournaments is
one of the reasons the IPG exists in the first place. Ideally, every judge
would issue the same ruling on a particular situation anywhere in the
world. While we can't always live up to that ideal, following the accepted
guidance for tricky situations is an important component of that. So, even
if you think that Sidisi ought to have a non-detrimental trigger, please
don't go about deviating from policy. :)

Edited Paul Baranay (Oct. 15, 2014 05:47:59 PM)

Originally posted by Talin Salway:

I think this might actually be an underlying disagreement in this conversation. Is self-mill denying resources, or creating resources? The only resource being depleted is the number of cards in the library - which in 99 games out of 100 is never an issue. Graveyard recursion effects are so common that it's not hard to see cards in graveyard as a resource to be sought out - Emrakul's trigger is considered usually detrimental, as the assumption is that otherwise a player could make use of those effects.

Think about a card that said this: “At the beginning of your upkeep, mill yourself for 20.” Would you consider that generally detrimental? Sure, you could get a lot of resources to play with, but now you're on a serious clock. What if the number's 10? 5? 3?

See the rabbit hole we're falling into? As players we can make subjective calls on things like this, but from a rules perspective, vanilla self-mill effects have to be generally detrimental, or there'd be no way to track when a player kept forgetting the same effect in a case where it really mattered. In the same vein, shuffling untargeted cards back into your library has to be generally detrimental, as even though it could be helping you not be decked, in the -general- sense it's denying you a resource and you aren't likely to see that particular card again soon.

And let's also remind ourselves that intentionally missing a trigger for an advantage is still Cheating, be it generally detrimental or not. Because that kind of thing is difficult to sniff out in practice, we have to track the kinds of triggers that can be most obviously abused when missed. That means giving warnings where it sometimes feels odd to do so, for the sake of consistency. I've worked with a lot of L1's who were giving out warnings to players for missing triggers that were obviously beneficial, because they didn't quite grasp that aspect of the IPG. The players didn't revolt. Judges were educated, everything was cool. This is also cool.

Edited Aaron Huntsman (Oct. 15, 2014 05:42:03 PM)

So, even
if you think that Sidisi *ought* to have a detrimental trigger, please
don't go about deviating from policy.

do you mean “ought to have a non-detrimental trigger”? As I understand it, the missed trigger guide currently states that Sidisi's first trigger is usually detrimental, which (as far as I know), is the closest thing to a hard and fast policy on the subject of detrimental triggers.

Think about a card that said this: “At the beginning of your upkeep, mill yourself for 20.” Would you consider that generally detrimental? Sure, you could get a lot of resources to play with, but now you're on a serious clock. What if the number's 10? 5? 3?

But by the same argument, a trigger for drawing cards is usually not detrimental, but a card that said “At the beginning of your upkeep, draw 100 cards” would usually be bad for the player who played it.

Edited Talin Salway (Oct. 15, 2014 05:48:30 PM)

Talin: Thanks for the catch; I a word. (See what I did there…) Edited my
original post.

Aaron, I have a couple of problems with that argument. First, it applies
equally well in the other direction: milling one card is almost universally
beneficial, so is two cards, etc. So where do we draw the line? Why not
call all self mill beneficial? Also, I can say with reasonable confidence
that a card that mills it's controller for 20 cards would be played for
that ability, not in spite of that ability. For example, see balustrade spy
in the oops all spells deck.
On Oct 15, 2014 2:37 PM, “Aaron Huntsman” <

Originally posted by Talin Salway:

But by the same argument, a trigger for drawing cards is usually not detrimental, but a card that said “At the beginning of your upkeep, draw 100 cards” would usually be bad for the player who played it.

Yes it probably would be. Fortunately that card doesn't exist so we don't have to consider it.

Sam Sherman
Also, I can say with reasonable confidence that a card that mills it's controller for 20 cards would be played for that ability, not in spite of that ability.

Again, that's not the point. We aren't judging how playable a card is or how it's balanced or costed or how it might be abused. The “is this card more playable with/without this ability” line of reasoning has led a lot of people astray. It's a good rule of thumb when there are questions about older cards, but it does not trump the guidelines. Milling has to be detrimental because if it weren't we'd have no ground to step in when a mill is clearly detrimental, which outside of a self-mill deck (which represents a small percentage of all decks) it is going to be.

Edited Aaron Huntsman (Oct. 15, 2014 07:36:15 PM)

Originally posted by Aaron Huntsman:

Talin Salway
But by the same argument, a trigger for drawing cards is usually not detrimental, but a card that said “At the beginning of your upkeep, draw 100 cards” would usually be bad for the player who played it.

Yes it probably would be. Fortunately that card doesn't exist so we don't have to consider it.

Just wondering, what is Forced Fruition considered to be?

Forced Fruition can’t be generally detrimental. The trigger is literally the only thing the card does and it only affects the opponent. If the triggered ability wasn’t there the card would be worthless, a clear sign of a non-detrimental trigger.

Originally posted by Scott Marshall:

Yes, you have to separate the trigger itself from the rest of the card - and there are plenty of examples of that. (You'll see a few in Khans, alone, where one trigger is detrimental, the other is not.)

Which examples did you have in mind? In the missed trigger guide for Khans, there's 3 other cards that have a detrimental trigger and also a not detrimental trigger. For the other Sarkhan, Dragonspeaker and Horde Ambusher, their detrimental triggers are clearly detrimental. Meandering Towershell is just weird. None of them have the situation where the second trigger makes the ‘detrimental’ one not really detrimental.

For that matter, besides Akroan Horse and Sidisi, Brood Tyrant, are there any other examples of cards where a single trigger would be detrimental on its own, but it's actually beneficial (not merely not-detrimental), due to other text on the card? I couldn't find any on the missed trigger guide. Are these cards just weird edge-cases in recent design?

Edited Talin Salway (Oct. 15, 2014 08:44:00 PM)

Originally posted by Talin Salway:

For that matter, besides Akroan Horse and Sidisi, Brood Tyrant, are there any other examples of cards where a single trigger would be detrimental on its own, but it's actually beneficial (not merely not-detrimental), due to other text on the card? I couldn't find any on the missed trigger guide. Are these cards just weird edge-cases in recent design?

I assume you're talking about generally detrimental triggers that you may actually want to remember because of other things on the card - we've established Sidisi's first ability is considered detrimental. Splinterfright was brought up elsewhere. Countryside Crusher, many of the Evoke creatures…and these are just the ones in the guide. The notion has been around for some time.

Self-mill is detrimental because when we talked with R&D, they added it to the list. We said “are you sure?” and they said yes.

Akroan Horse's first ability should be detrimental. Abe's team does a fantastic job with the Trigger Guides, but it's challenging to do them all at once and the occasional wacky one slips through.

Many cards have other abilities that make generally detrimental triggers into a positive; the game of Magic is designed around that. They are still things that we should be watching out for.

If we're actually moving Akroan Horse to being detrimental, that sounds
great to me, since it gives consistency to the detrimental argument, and as
such I'm sure I, and others, can accept the reasoning of Toby's last
sentence. =)

Of course, if R&D ever changes their minds, that would be fine too.
Clearly, this is something to be looked into once in a while.

2014-10-16 4:14 GMT-04:00 Toby Elliott <

Originally posted by Toby Elliott:

Akroan Horse's first ability should be detrimental. Abe's team does a fantastic job with the Trigger Guides, but it's challenging to do them all at once and the occasional wacky one slips through.

Yes I'm glad to hear that too, it also answers my earlier question about the rule of thumb, that means there are simply more scenarios where it unfortunately doesn't apply.

Federico Donner
Forced Fruition can’t be generally detrimental. The trigger is literally the only thing the card does and it only affects the opponent. If the triggered ability wasn’t there the card would be worthless, a clear sign of a non-detrimental trigger.

But that opens up the rabbit's hole that Aaron was talking about, If drawing 1 is detrimental (Master of the Feast) but drawing 7 is, where is the line?

Likewise, we've now established that there are abilities that are desirable / add mana cost but are considered detrimental (self-mill) so there could be a card that does nothing but self-mill, that would also be a card with nothing but a detrimental trigger.
We are taught not to look at the strategical rammifications of cards but follow certain rules: getting milled is bad, drawing cards is good.

So shouldn't that make Forced Fruition a card with just a detrimental trigger?

Edited Toby Hazes (Oct. 16, 2014 10:16:14 AM)

Originally posted by Toby Hazes:

So shouldn't that make Forced Fruition a card with just a detrimental trigger?

I would agree. The controller of Forced Fruition gains an advantage from missing and not reminding the opponent about the trigger, as the opponent is losing out on resources (e.g. the cards the opponent would now have in hand). Yes, it may be the “only thing the card does”, but that is not exactly a clear indicator. There is certainly room for a bit of judgment here, but missing this trigger is something I'd like to track, just as with Master of the Feast.