You’ll have to forgive me for reopening old wounds with this one. The Pete, Games Referee discourse is over a month old now and has been largely (but not completely) settled by a nice long explanation from Lorcana’s rules manager Kyle Gorbski. But I’m still thinking about why it became such a point of contention among players in the first place, and more importantly, how we can use this situation to find a deeper understanding of Lorcana’s rules and - as Gorbski calls it - “Policy Philosophy”.
Pete, Games Referee is a new Steel card from Shimmering Skies with the ability Blow The Whistle: When you play this character, opponents can’t play actions until the start of your next turn.
The core of the Pete dilemma is really a thought exercise: If my opponent plays Pete, Games Referee without acknowledging his ability - or as the rules put it, “demonstrate awareness of the trigger”, am I free to play actions on my turn? In other words, does my opponent need to announce that Pete’s ability is in effect as soon as Pete is played or else miss triggering the ability, and if so, how would this be resolved? Do I get to ignore Pete’s ability and play actions anyway?
It’s a pretty interesting problem to consider for the people who have to rule on these situations at a set championship or Disney Lorcana Challenge. Naturally, the discourse initially kicked off in a Discord channel for Lorcana judges (yes they have those) where the conversation centered around identifying and resolving a potential missed trigger with regard to Pete. Once that conversation broke containment and moved to Twitter, it, unfortunately, moved away from being a debate about game states and transformed into an argument about player etiquette, rules lawyering, and common sense.
All the nuance disappeared once the debate moved to social media, go figure.
Cutting through all the hot takes to find out what was really at the heart of the Pete issue was difficult, so I reached out to GooglyGlimmers,a content creator known for sticky googling eyeson Lorcana cards and, perhaps more relevant here, a DLC judge and the community’s most respected expert on the rules. Before people reach out to the developers with their niche questions about the rules, they often ask GooglyGlimmers first.
As he tells me, it’s important to understand that this is a discussion about tournament rules enforcement policy, not the rules of the game. “In a perfect world, where the game is played precisely according to the comprehensive rules documentation, there is no ambiguity - the opponent cannot play actions on the turn after Pete is played.” This is where the argument broke down for a lot of people: Pete’s ability isn’t a “may” ability, so it must trigger. Case closed, anyone saying otherwise is an obnoxious rules lawyer trying to find gaps in the rules to exploit.
We know Pete has a mandatory trigger, but what we’re exploring here is what happens when a player misses a mandatory trigger. This is a thing that happens in Lorcana all the time. Anyone who has ever had an undamagedBeast - Tragic Heroin play and forgotten to draw an extra card at the start of their turn (which is everyone) is guilty of missing a mandatory trigger. It’s easy to identify when you’ve missed Beast’s mandatory trigger too. You have to draw a card during the “set” phase of “ready, set, draw”. If you move on without drawing, you’ve missed this trigger.
Magic: The Gathering has had similar problems in the past that it has largely solved through clever templating. Archon of Valor’s Reach avoids the Pete issue by simply not making it a triggered ability with the words “as [it] enters the battlefield”.
What makes Pete so interesting, and problematic, is that the effect of the trigger (your opponent can’t play actions on their turn) isn’t immediate. We then come back to the original scenario. If I play Pete and don’t acknowledge his ability until after my opponent tries to play an action on their turn, have I missed this mandatory trigger?
As GooglyGlimmers explains “We’re trying to establish the cut-off for where the ability has to be acknowledged before counting as missed. Either we’re requiring acknowledgement at the point that the effect is first resolved (right after being played), or we can satisfy the “awareness of the trigger” requirement by jumping in if the opponent attempts to play an action on the following turn. That is the crux of the debate, and after a couple of days of ever-splintering discourse, we got our semi-official answer from rules manager Gorbski.
I recommend reading the entirety of Gorbski’s statement below, but the most important detail is this line: “In our eyes, the trigger has been acknowledged when it would actually matter to the game state. In general, awareness matters when the effect would matter.” So in this case, when my opponent tries to play an action on their turn after I’ve played Pete, I can announce “no action because Pete”, and that satisfies the condition of showing awareness of the trigger. As long as you demonstrate awareness when it would actually matter, you haven’t missed the trigger.
Gorbski says his team is still looking at how the language of the policy reflects this ruling in the play correction guide (the rules that tells us what to do when the rules get broken), but that this is the confirmed ruling. It’s nice to have an answer and some better insight into philosophy that Gorbski describes as “the reduction of ‘Gotcha!’ style moments”, but of course, this conclusion has also spawned even more questions about what exactly is defined as “affecting the game state”.
“Is a change in character stats affecting the game state right away?” GooglyGlimmers asks. “Or only when something interacts with it in a challenge or questing?” There’s a lot to consider when we talk about the game state and when a trigger actually matters.
What’s most interesting about this ruling is that it will inevitably lead to scenarios where players are making gameplay decisions based on misconceptions or misunderstandings of the game state. The game state may be different between me and my opponent’s minds and we won’t know until someone tries to do something incorrectly.
Lorcana judges like GooglyGlimmers are tasked with resolving all of these issues, but even with Gorbski’s explanation for Pete, they’re still “a little loose on guidance”, according to GooglyGlimmers. And while resolving real-life situations is always inevitably going to be more complex than what can be covered in the play correction guide, GooglyGlimmers says what judges really need is a clearer picture of Ravensburger’s philosophy about how situations like this ought to be untangled. That way when the next Pete comes along, the people who have to resolve conflicts have the confidence to know they’re ruling is consistent across stores and events.
“We know Ravensburger wants to avoid “gotcha moments” arising from the rules, but that’s almost all that we have to go on when it comes to this sort of thing. Hopefully we’ll get more insight from upcoming updates!”
