Functional Oracle Changes
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What is Oracle? |
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Magic is a game made up of over 10,000 interchangeable pieces—the cards. Over the years, we've felt the need to update the wordings of older cards, whether because we've introduced a new keyword, or a card was printed with a mistake, or we have a clearer wording for what a card does, etc. Rather than sneak into your room at night and change your cards with a magic marker, we keep a database of the "modern wordings" (what the cards would say if we printed them today) of every tournament-legal card ever printed. These wordings are considered the official wordings of the cards, and accurately reflect their functions.
You can access a card's Oracle wording by looking it up in Gatherer.
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Balduvian Warlord & False Orders
These cards didn't handle situations that could arise with Flash Foliage or Ætherplasm, in which a creature is put into play blocking. They're getting their wordings adjusted to handle a) the case in which they target a creature put into play blocking, and b) the case in which they target a creature that's blocking a creature that's also being blocked by a creature put into play blocking. (If the preceding sentence was gibberish, that means your brain is working normally. Please ignore these two cards and move on with your day.)
New Balduvian Warlord wording:
{oT}: Remove target blocking creature from combat. Creatures it was blocking that hadn't become blocked by another creature this combat become unblocked, then it blocks an attacking creature of your choice. Play this ability only during the declare blockers step.
New False Orders wording:
Play False Orders only during the declare blockers step.
Remove target creature defending player controls from combat. Creatures it was blocking that hadn't become blocked by another creature this combat become unblocked. You may have it block an attacking creature of your choice.
Chaosphere & Dense Canopy
Poor Chaosphere. All it's trying to do is turn the game upside-down. In a normal game, flying creatures can block everything, and ground creatures can block half (just the ground creatures). In a Chaosphere game, ground creatures can block everything, and flying creatures can block half (just the flying creatures). It wants to make flying = nonflying and vice versa, but that's easier said than done.
Over the years, as the Giant Spider wordings changed, so did Chaosphere's wordings... and its two static abilities would tend to interfere with one another. A few years ago, in response to Chaosphere having the slight problem of not working at all, it radically changed from setting up game rules ("Creatures with flying can't block creatures without flying") to granting creatures abilities ("Creatures with flying have 'This creature can't block creatures without flying'"). When reach was introduced, the second ability became simple ("Creatures without flying have reach"). But what of the first ability? The spliced-text method is no longer necessary (reach solved that), so the first ability is going back to setting up a game rule. It's a little different than it used to be; it's copying the wording seen on Cloud Sprite, for example. It's a little strange that Chaosphere's two abilities won't be parallel, but I think the end result is easier to process.
New Chaosphere wording:
Creatures with flying can block only creatures with flying.
Creatures without flying have reach. (They can block creatures with flying.)
Dense Canopy is just half of Chaosphere, so it does what Chaosphere does.
New Dense Canopy wording:
Creatures with flying can block only creatures with flying.
Fastbond
Its first ability is being lined up with other similar abilities like Rites of Flourishing and Azusa, Lost but Seeking: "You may play [number] additional lands on each of your turns." The only difference is that in this case, [number] is "any number of" rather than, say, two. That's not a functional change.
The second ability might be a functional change, though. Its current wording says "Whenever you play a land other than the first land of the turn, Fastbond deals 1 damage to you." Note the "the" in there. Now think about a Two-Headed Giant game. What happens if your teammate plays a land before you do? I don't even know, which means this wording is no good.
New Oracle wording:
You may play any number of additional lands on each of your turns.
Whenever you play a land, if it wasn't the first land you played this turn, Fastbond deals 1 damage to you.
Flooded Woodlands & Reclamation
As printed, these cards set up a game rule. They were changed so they grant abilities to creatures. Since it's not necessary here (doing that changes the creatures' interactions with Humble, for example), they're going back to a game rule wording that's based on Ghostly Prison.
New Flooded Woodlands wording:
Green creatures can't attack unless their controller sacrifices a land for each green creature he or she controls that's attacking.
New Reclamation wording:
Black creatures can't attack unless their controller sacrifices a land for each black creature he or she controls that's attacking.
Technically, those wordings don't need the color word at the front, but I think having them there makes the cards clearer.
Fork
Originally, Fork itself turned into a copy of some other spell... except that "Fork remains red." Those kinds of shenanigans no longer work (by the time Fork turns itself into another spell, it's already resolved), so now it makes a copy like Twincast does... except that copy "copies Fork's color."
Now, that's a weird line of text that probably doesn't behave as expected. A copy effect doesn't copy something's current state—it copies its original values, unless they've been modified by some other copy effect. So even if Fork was hit with Purelace, for example, the copy that it makes would still be red, not white. Because that's how the current card works, Fork's wording is changing to just stipulate that the copy is red. This is a functional change with regard to Sleight of Mind.
New Oracle wording:
Copy target instant or sorcery spell, except that the copy is red. You may choose new targets for the copy.
Frenetic Efreet
This card got power-level errata when Chance Encounter was printed in Odyssey. Frenetic Efreet lets you play its activated ability as many times as you want in response to itself (since the cost is just 
). When the first such ability resolved, you'd flip a coin and Frenetic Efreet would go away (either to the graveyard or the phased-out zone). According to Frenetic Efreet's original wording, all the rest of the abilities would still resolve, causing you to flip a coin each time. Nothing would happen to Frenetic Efreet (it's gone by now), but you'd get the easy opportunity to win lots of irrelevant coin flips and put plenty of luck counters on Chance Encounter, allowing you to win the game when your next upkeep started. To combat this combo, and the otherwise pointless free coin-flipping this card facilitated, Frenetic Efreet got errata stating that you flipped the coin only if it was in play.
In keeping with our current policy regarding power-level errata, the Efreet is going back to its printed functionality. If this proves to be broken (and it ain't no Flash), it'll be addressed with bannings and/or restrictions.
New Oracle wording:
Flying
{o0}: Flip a coin. If you win the flip, Frenetic Efreet phases out. If you lose the flip, sacrifice Frenetic Efreet.
Hull Breach
In the last update, Hull Breach was changed to a "Choose one or both" wording like Branching Bolt. This was listed in the "Nonfunctional Change" section because I was under the impression that all I did was streamline its wording. I was wrong.
With the printed wording, if you want to destroy both an artifact and an enchantment, they're destroyed at the same time. With the new wording, if you want to destroy both an artifact and an enchantment, they're destroyed sequentially. (Think about Primal Command: First one chosen mode happens, then the other chosen mode happens.) This could matter if the artifact has an ability that would trigger when the enchantment is destroyed, for example. Since this change was unintended and unwarranted, it's going back to how it was printed.
New Oracle wording:
Choose one — Destroy target artifact; or destroy target enchantment; or destroy target artifact and target enchantment.
Liquid Fire
This card has always been a problem child. The intent is that it can deal 5 damage to a creature, or 4 to a creature and 1 to its controller, or 3 and 2, or 2 and 3, or 1 and 4, or even 0 damage to a creature and 5 to its controller. That's what it wants to do, anyway.
Where it runs afoul of the system is that it's the only card that tries to divide damage between something that's targeted (the creature) and something that's not targeted (its controller). This required changing rule 409.1e (the rule that says that effects like damage or counters are divided when a spell or ability is put on the stack, not when it resolves) to include nontargeted things. But that's not really true; it's true about Liquid Fire and nothing else. Everything else that divides its effects is fully targeted. Everything else that divides its effects among things that aren't targeted wants to do so when it resolves.
To make matters worse, the same rule says that each recipient of a divided effect must receive at least one of whatever's being divided. So the 0/5 and 5/0 split is illegal.
Ideally, Liquid Fire should meet the following criteria:
1) Allow a 0/5 or 5/0 split.
2) Divide the damage when the spell is played. (Dividing on resolution is miserable; if you don't know how much damage is coming at your creature, you won't know if you need to regenerate it, or boost its toughness, or what.)
3) Not screw up the rule for other effects that want to distribute things on resolution. (I'm looking at Forgotten Ancient, for example, even though it doesn't use the word "distribute.")
This leads to a weird wording, but at least the spell will work like you think.
New Oracle wording:
As an additional cost to play Liquid Fire, choose a number between 0 and 5.
Liquid Fire deals X damage to target creature and 5 minus X damage to that creature's controller, where X is the chosen number.
Ogre Enforcer
This card's Oracle wording, which prevents damage, is vastly different from its printed functionality, which doesn't. If Ogre Enforcer blocks my 1/1 with lifelink, I should gain 1 life. If it blocks my 1/1 with deathtouch, it should be destroyed as a result of the deathtouch ability. If it blocks my 1/1 with wither, it should get a -1/-1 counter. I think the card changed because, at some point, the Oracle team shied away from the unique "can't be destroyed" functionality. However, we have "can't be destroyed" technology now (buried within "indestructible"), so we should be able to restore the original functionality.
There's another discrepancy between the printed card and the Oracle wording. I believe the printed card tracks accumulated damage from a single source. If Shivan Hellkite deals 1 damage to Ogre Enforcer, then another 1, then another 1, then another 1, the Ogre should be destroyed. That obviously isn't how the Oracle wording works, which requires all 4 damage to be dealt at once. We can fix that too.
New Oracle wording:
Ogre Enforcer can't be destroyed by lethal damage unless it's been dealt lethal damage by a single source.
Spoils of Evil
As printed, this targeted an opponent. That's being restored.
New Oracle wording:
For each artifact or creature card in target opponent's graveyard, add {o1} to your mana pool and you gain 1 life.