PRODUCTS MTG ARENA PLAY MAGIC LEARN MTG NEWS LOCATOR CARD DATABASE ACCOUNTS

News / Announcements

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FOUNDATIONS UPDATE

BULLETIN
Announcements Nov 14, 2024

Jess Dunks Eric Levine

Hello, everyone!

Magic: The Gathering Foundations brings with it some housekeeping in the rules and card-text arena. There
were some non-functional updates to card templates, as well as the removal of something called "damage
assignment order" from the declare blockers step.

Let's dive into the changes!

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FOUNDATIONS COMPREHENSIVE RULES CHANGES

This is a summary of the rule changes planned to come to Magic with the release of Magic: The Gathering
Foundations. The o cial rules can be found on our rules page. If there should be a discrepancy between
this summary and the o cial rules, the o cial rules take precedence.

NEW AND UPDATED RULES

DAMAGE ASSIGNMENT ORDER
509.2–3, VARIOUS REFERENCES THROUGHOUT
We've removed a complex concept known as "combat damage assignment order" from the game. This
means that now, in the combat damage step, an attacking creature's controller can divide that creature's
combat damage as they choose among all the creatures blocking it. For example, if an attacking 3/3
creature has two creatures blocking it, the 3/3 creature's controller can assign all 3 damage to either of the
two blockers, or they can assign 2 damage to one blocker and 1 damage to the other. It doesn't matter
what the toughness of either blocking creature is or whether that amount of damage is enough to kill either
of them. (Note that this doesn't change how trample works. You still need to assign lethal damage to all
blockers before trampling over them.) For many players, this matches their intuition about how combat
damage should work, and it matches how most players already communicate about combat damage
outside of some very speci c situations.

How is this di erent?

Here, I'll talk about some nuts-and-bolts details of the change. If you're new to Magic or not concerned
about rules that don't apply anymore, I suggest skipping down to the "Why did we change it?" section
below.

Combat damage assignment used to be determined through a rather complicated multistep process.
Previously, if one or more creatures were assigned to block an attacking creature, that creature's controller
assigned an order to the creatures that blocked it. This happened during the declare blockers step, well
before any combat damage was actually assigned. Then, during the combat damage step, the attacking
creature had to assign its damage to the rst creature in that order—damage couldn't be assigned to the
second creature until lethal damage had been assigned to the rst. Similarly, damage couldn't be assigned
to a third creature in that order until lethal damage had been assigned to the second. And so on. In
addition, in rare situations where a single creature blocked multiple attacking creatures, the defending
player had to follow these same steps, assigning an order to the blocked creatures which would later
govern how the blocking creature's damage was assigned. There were also some rules covering other weird
cases, such as where in the damage assignment order you put a token created by Brimaz, King of Oreskos's
third ability.

With the new rules, players don't make any decisions about assigning combat damage during the declare
blockers step. Instead, once the combat damage step begins, each attacking creature assigns combat
damage among all creatures blocking it, divided as its controller sees t at that time. Lethal damage has no
bearing on how players may assign combat damage (with the sole exception being that an attacking
creature with trample still needs to assign lethal damage to all blockers before it can trample over).

Why did we change it?

Despite applying, technically, to all combats that involve blocking creatures, damage assignment order was
relevant only in a small fraction of combat interactions. Even in those cases, it usually wasn't discussed by
players unless the defending player needed to know the order to best use a potential combat trick. This
means that players were unlikely to ever learn about damage assignment order until something occurred in
game that made it relevant, and that was almost always when they were about to get blown out by their
opponent knowing the rules they didn't. Even worse, the opponent asking makes it seem like there is a
clear right answer that you might get wrong. While we want players to feel rewarded for understanding
complex rules interactions, we don't want players to walk themselves into traps because they didn't know
something obscure about the game's basic turn structure. We're, of course, aware that this shifts some
amount of advantage from the blocker to the attacker in double-blocking situations, but we've been
playtesting with these new rules for quite a while now, and we're con dent that it's an overall better Magic
experience which o ers plenty of strategic choices for both players.

OTHER RULES CHANGES

508.4A–B
While vetting the combat rules for the above change, we noticed that rule 508.4a was slightly incomplete.
This is the rule that tells you what happens if an e ect attempts to put a creature onto the battle eld
attacking a player or permanent that can't currently be attacked (such as a player who has left the game). It
didn't explicitly cover the cases where an e ect is trying to put a creature onto the battle eld attacking a
planeswalker that is no longer controlled by a defending player or a battle that is no longer protected by a
defending player. Now it covers them. Like the rest of these cases, that creature still enters the battle eld
but isn't considered an attacking creature. Rule 508.4b is about an e ect that causes a creature already on
the battle eld to be attacking a certain player or permanent, and it received a similar update.

611.2B
This is the rule that tells you how to handle e ects that have a duration of "for as long as …" Normally,
these cases are pretty straightforward—if the duration never starts, or if it ends before the e ect would be
applied, the e ect isn't applied. For example, if you cast Sower of Temptation and it gets destroyed in
response to its triggered ability, you won't gain control of the target creature as that ability resolves. The
only change here is that this rule now explicitly handles the rare case where the duration for a continuous
e ect starts during the resolution of the spell or ability which created that e ect. As an example, you put the
rst ability of Xolatoyac, the Smiling Flood onto the stack targeting a land that already has a ood counter
on it. If another e ect removes the existing ood counter before Xolatoyac's ability resolves, the previous
wording of 611.2b could have been read to mean that Xolatoyac's ability doesn't make that land an Island
on resolution even though the ability itself puts a ood counter on the land. The new wording makes it
clearer that the land does indeed become an Island and that similar e ects work as players would expect
them to.

700.9
This is the rule that de nes what "modi ed" means. When this mechanic was introduced, only creatures
could be considered modi ed, and this rule re ected that. However, this didn't quite match the design
intent for all cards; Modern Horizons 3's Pearl-Ear, Imperial Advisor refers to a "modi ed permanent," which
was misleading with how this rule worked. We decided to go ahead and modify this rule (see what I did
there?) to allow Pearl-Ear to work the way its text implies it does. Now, any permanent is considered
modi ed if it has a counter on it, is equipped with an Equipment, or is enchanted by an Aura with the same
controller. This doesn't change the function of any cards from Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty that refer to
modi ed creatures, though it does make a corner case more intuitive: if Orochi Merge-Keeper stops being a
creature, it can still be modi ed.

MAGIC: THE GATHERING FOUNDATIONS ORACLE CHANGES

As you've likely already seen on many Magic: The Gathering Foundations cards, we're making a clarity-focused
change to card templating: we're cutting down on the usage of card names within rules text, replacing them
with phrases like "this creature," "this Equipment," "this card," and so on. There are a few exceptions, with
legendary permanents being the most obvious one—it's important to keep the names of legendary
permanents in their text boxes because they're just so much fun to read and say! That said, you won't see
this change in the Oracle text of previously released cards quite yet; you can expect to see past cards
updated this way starting with the release of Aetherdrift.

Let's move on to changes we did actually make in Oracle with this release!

CLARITY UPDATE: TOP OR BOTTOM

E ects that instruct players to put cards on the top or bottom of their library can create some confusion
about which player makes the choice of top or bottom. We've updated the templates of several cards to
make it much easier to understand who's picking between those options. This change is non-functional.
Misleading Motes from Wilds of Eldraine is a great example of this change:

Old text:

Target creature's owner puts it on the top or bottom of their library.

New text:

Target creature's owner puts it on their choice of the top or bottom of their
library.

CLARITY UPDATE: SACRIFICING

In a similar vein, e ects that instruct players to sacri ce permanents can cause confusion about who's
choosing what will be sacri ced. We've updated the templates of several cards to eliminate this confusion.
This change is non-functional. For example, let's go all the way back to Odyssey and look at one of my
favorite cards, Innocent Blood:

Old text:

Each player sacrifices a creature.

New text:

Each player sacrifices a creature of their choice.

MINTHARA, MERCILESS SOUL

Minthara's rst ability needs a little clean-up. She has ward {X}, and X is de ned by how many experience
counters her controller has. However, since ward often provides an instruction to the opponent who caused
the ability to trigger (such as with "Ward—Discard a card"), the word "you" is ambiguous here; it implies that
perhaps X is based on how many experience counters the player paying the ward cost has. Merciless as she
is, Minthara likely resents this implication, and with that in mind, we've made things a bit clearer about
whose experience is relevant.

Old text:

Ward {X}, where X is the number of experience counters you have.

At the beginning of your end step, if a permanent you controlled left the
battlefield this turn, you get an experience counter.

Creatures you control get +1/+0 for each experience counter you have.

New text:

Minthara has ward {X}, where X is the number of experience counters you have.

At the beginning of your end step, if a permanent you controlled left the
battlefield this turn, you get an experience counter.

Creatures you control get +1/+0 for each experience counter you have.

ROCK JOCKEY AND FRIENDS

What, you don't remember Rock Jockey from Scourge? I suppose I can accept that other people don't have
core memories of that Prerelease. (I had two Rock Jockeys in my deck. It didn't go great.) Anyway,
restrictions like the one in Rock Jockey's rst ability … sorry, I'm being told that everyone remembers
Serra Avenger much better. Serra Avenger's rst ability tells you when you can't cast it, but it uses "this
spell' in the text of that ability. This makes colloquial sense, but from a very detailed rules perspective, it's a
bit strange. Since Serra Avenger isn't making it to the stack during those rst three turns, "this spell" isn't
the right way to refer to it. "This card" won't hold up either, since there are plenty of ways for me to cast a
copy of it. That brings us right back to using the card's name in the ability instead. This change is non-
functional and applies to a few cards: Serra Avenger; Jace Reawakened; Rakdos, Lord of Riots; and, of
course, Rock Jockey. I'll use the allegedly more memorable Serra Avenger as our example here. (I'm not
bitter.)

Old text:

You can't cast this spell during your first, second, or third turns of the
game.

Flying, vigilance

New text:

You can't cast Serra Avenger during your first, second, or third turns of the
game.

Flying, vigilance

That's everything for today's update! You can preorder Magic: The Gathering Foundations Beginner Boxes,
Starter Collections, Collector Boosters, and more from your local game store, online retailers like Amazon,
and elsewhere Magic products are sold.

ANNOUNCEMENTS ANNOUNCEMENTS ANNOUNCEMENTS

Statement on Magic: Magic: The The Lord of the

The Gathering Gathering Rings: Tales of
Foundations Foundations Starter Middle-earth™
Artwork for Collection Contents Returns with
Firespitter Whelp Commander
Bundles!
Wizards of the Coast Wizards of the Coast Wizards of the Coast

FIND A STORE FIND COMPANY MAGIC

Articles About Magic: The Gathering

Enter your city or postal code
Club Support Accounts Magic Arena
Digital Books Careers Magic.gg
Formats Support Store & Events Locator
Rules Wizards Play Network Card Database
Military Support A liate Program Secret Lair
Disclosure SpellTable
SOCIAL

BRANDS

Dungeons & Dragons

Duel Masters
Magic: The Gathering

The logo of Wizards of the Coast The Logo of Hasbro ESRB Privacy Certi ed Badge ESRB Teen

DO NOT SELL OR SHARE

TERMS CODE OF CONDUCT PRIVACY POLICY CUSTOMER SUPPORT FAN CONTENT POLICY MY PERSONAL English
INFORMATION

© 1993-2024 Wizards of the Coast LLC, a subsidiary of Hasbro, Inc. All Rights Reserved.