Welcome to Personal Tutor, where we discuss how to maximize our opportunities for player education. Our goal is to transcend the basic answer to create an informative answer that the player will really remember and teaches them something about the rules, rather than just resolving this ruling. You may even find this process helps you come to a better understanding of the rules yourself.

The Scenario:

Ampharos and Natu are playing in an M15 Sealed GPT, when Ampharos calls you to the table.
"So, I'm attacking Natu with my 1/1 Soldier, a 2/2 Zombie, and a 3/3 Beast. Natu declared that he was blocking my Soldier with Elvish Mystic, my Zombie with Generator Servant, and my Beast with Centaur Courser.
"But the Courser is enchanted by Oppressive Rays, and all his land is tapped. So he said that he's going to pay for it by tapping Mystic and sacrificing the Servant. But he already declared them as blockers. So how does that work? Is that legal? Is all my stuff really blocked?“

The Basic Answer:
”That's legal. The Zombie isn't blocked.”

Judging M15 limited is not for the faint of heart! How can we address the core issue that the player doesn't understand? How can we make our explanation of the relevant rule clear, concise, and memorable so that Ampharos and Natu will really learn something?

L1s and Judge Candidates, feel free to give your answers immediately. L2s, please wait a day to add your input. L3+, please wait two days.

You know how when you're casting a spell, you do certain things in a specific order? You announce what you're doing, make all your choices, pay all the costs, and then it's officially cast. Lots of processes in the game work like that, including declaring attackers and blockers. Natu chose which creatures to block with, decided which attackers they would block, and then paid the cost for Centaur Courser. Now the blocks are official, but since Generator Servant left combat before this point in the process, only the Soldier and Beast are actually blocked.

“When you declare blockers, there are a few steps that happen in order, it doesn't all happen at once. First, you announce who is going to block. Then you check any blocking requirements and restrictions, though there aren't any here. Then you check to see if there is a cost to pay. Which there is, because of the Rays. So you get a chance to activate mana abilities to pay for it, you pay the cost, and then the block actually happens.

The rule that blockers must be untapped is checked only once, in the very first step. After that, it's all fair game. The Mystic and Servant's abilities are mana abilities, so they can be activated just in time before the cost is paid and the block happens. The fact that the Mystic gets tapped and the Servant gets sacrificed doesn't matter for the legality of the blocks, because their announcement as blockers was legal when your opponent made it.”

And for the last bit I will point at each pair of attacking/blocking creatures as I explain the end result.

“So your soldier is blocked by your opponent's Mystic, even though it's tapped right now. Your zombie is unblocked because the Servant was sacrificed before the block actually happened, it wasn't there to actually block anymore. And finally, your beast is legally blocked by the Courser because the Rays cost was paid in full.”

Although this response rather blatantly fails the ‘concise’ test :-)

Given the dearth of responses, I have to assume that everyone's explanation starts with a hearty *SIGH*, and the goes on to be too long for them to want to type up.

I'd go with the following, just to keep things short and sweet:

There are a few steps to declaring blockers. Normally you don't need to know all the details, but it's okay to ask a judge whenever something complicated like this comes up.

Those steps are:

Assign all your blocks. This is the only time that blockers must be untapped.

Check if all those blocks are legal.

Pay for any costs.

Then, any any attackers with blockers on them are considered “blocked”.

If there are any double-blocks, the attacker orders those blockers.

That's it. Then you can go on to play combat tricks and you know the rest.

Since this is already a lot of information to process, I'm going to avoid giving examples or annotating too much as I tell them the rules for the first time. I expect that there will be some amount of follow-up, where we might walk through those steps with what just happened in the game.

I didn't want to include any extra information, but couldn't help tacking on “order blockers before casting combat tricks” since too many players are still getting that wrong. It probably should be excluded for brevity.

Here's the most to-the-point version I can produce:

There are a few sub-steps to declaring blockers. It's good to know them, but calling a judge for help is fine.

Those steps are:

1) Assign untapped creatures to attacking creatures.

2) Check if all those blocks are legal.

3) Pay for any costs.

Once you've done that, each attacker either becomes “blocked” if there's still a creature in front of it. Otherwise, it becomes “unblocked”.

Edited Glenn Fisher (Aug. 12, 2014 10:52:22 PM)

Originally posted by Michael Shiver:

You know how when you're casting a spell, you do certain things in a specific order? You announce what you're doing, make all your choices, pay all the costs, and then it's officially cast.

I think you will get a “No, actually I wouldn't know” as an answer from most players if you asked that question =)
Players know how to do the basic version of it, for which the order of the substeps doesn't matter, but once it does (alternative costs vs additional costs vs cost reductions, copying modal spells, etc) they don't really know.

Edited Toby Hazes (Aug. 13, 2014 01:58:06 AM)

Haha, yeah you're probably right about that. So instead, the explanation should start with a statement more like: “Many different processes in the game follow the same basic series of steps: you announce what you're doing, make all the choices, pay all the costs, and then it's finally official and players can start making responses.”

This topic will be closing in just a few hours. We have some great informational responses so far. If anybody can tighten those up into something just a little more concise, this is the time!

Hopefully I'm not too late! ;)

“The rules actually have pretty specific steps for going through the process of blocking, largely to handle weird scenarios like this. In short, it goes like this:

First, declare which creatures are blocking where.

Second, determine if there are any costs to block that way (in this case the Oppressive Rays), then you can activate mana abilities such as the Elvish Mystic and Generator Servant to pay for them.

Finally, the ”this creature is blocked“ status gets determined based on what still remains on the battlefield.

So in short, yes this is all legal, but since the Generator Servant has to leave before that final step, the Zombie token is not going to be blocked.”

This glosses over some of the other steps since they aren't relevant. I'm of the mind that introducing too many details that aren't relevant to the question at hand muddy the waters a bit, but I'm sure a better judge than I could get those details in there too.

This month's Personal Tutor had some really excellent answers. Responses accurately and immediately focused in on the key concept we need to convey here: declaring blockers, like many game actions we commonly fudge our ways through, actually has several steps. And sometimes those steps tell us something important.

What was tricky here was getting it to be compact, since there was a lot of information. Before presenting my solution, let me say that I don't think any of the answers proposed are actually “too long.” Giving a 1-2 minute time extension rarely has any impact on the length of a round, so if you give a minute of explanation, just give a 1 minute extension. Nobody is going to suffer for it unless the players zoned out half way through. (Remember, player attention span is the biggest reason we try to keep it concise!)

So, here we go:

“Blocking technically breaks down into a few steps: Choose untapped blockers, then make sure they are legal, then pay any required costs, then finalize blocks.
When you finalize blocks, the creatures can be tapped, but they have to still be on the battlefield to count as blocking.
So everything's legal, but since Servant was dead when blocks were finalized, the Zombie isn't actually blocked.”

In just a few sentences, we have explained that there is a structure to declaring blockers. We have explained, at high level, what that structure is. And we have given a direct ruling ruling regarding the current board state. All in little bite-sized chunks.

I also hope that this scenario serves as a reminder that education doesn't require Mythic rares, old card templates, and eternal formats. This trio of M15 commons requires rules knowledge that nearly all players and many (probably most) judges will lack the first time they encounter such a situation. If you run up against an unfamiliar rule like this, don't be nervous. Do your best, confer with another judge if one is around, then tell me about how you handled it and how you might do it better next time!

If you would like to suggest a scenario or area of rules or policy about which you would like to see a scenario, or become a member of the Personal Tutor team, please email me through the forum.