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Stealth rule change announced in the Foundations mechanics article: no more choosing blocker order (magic.wizards.com)

submitted 4 hours ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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The announcement of this rule change with examples are at the bottom of the article. To summarize:

In the current rules, if you attack with a creature and it gets multi-blocked, once your opponent locks in their blocks, you choose the order of blockers immediately. During the combat damage step, you must assign enough (big asterisk on "enough") damage on the first creature before you can assign damage on the next.

Starting with Foundations, you don't choose an order for the blockers. During the combat damage step, you will just distribute damage however you want.

This weakens multi-blocking as a defensive option.

We will one day speak of blocker order like we do damage on the stack.

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 hours ago (1 children)

Genuinely curious how this applies to Trample then. Are we able to, say, give Torbran trample, kill a 3/3 blocker with a single damage, and reserve a point of damage to do three to the player?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 hours ago

Current complete rules prevent this

Once all those blocking creatures are assigned lethal damage, any excess damage is assigned

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 hours ago

This is probably one of those cases where most players were already doing it this way anyhow, because they weren't aware of the actual rule (which I'd have to say is not intuitive).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 hours ago

Wow I never would have expected this change, or that this was even something WotC was discussing. This feels like a massive change and really hurts defending players.

Their justification is essentially:

[Blocking order is] somewhat unintuitive, adds a fair bit of rules baggage, and losing it means more interesting decisions and less double-dipping if you know the tricks.

Not sure how it’s any more or less intuitive or how it adds any more rules baggage than the new rule creates, they just hand wave these things and gloss over the reasoning. Curious how it develops but off the cuff not really happy about this change.