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We’re here to talk to you about what’s been happening in May, what you can expect to see in June, and how you can get involved with both!
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Commander Banlist Changes
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Since we last spoke to you in April, five cards have become unbanned in Commander: Gifts Ungiven; Sway of the Stars; Braids, Cabal Minion; Coalition Victory; and Panoptic Mirror. All of said unbanned cards have been moved into the Game Changers list, so don’t expect to see them a whole lot until you reach bracket three or above, but keep an eye out for them there. In particular, do take a look at Panoptic Mirror- it’s a weird card at the best of times, and has a number of interesting interactions with Modal Double Faced Cards and Split Cards of many varieties. If you’ve got any fun questions about how it works, or just want to test your fellow officials’ prowess, feel free to ask in the EU North Discord!
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As part of that same announcement, the Commander Format Panel has committed to no further changes to the banlist for the rest of 2025, unless something new becomes universally hated and needs to be emergency banned, so look forward to a stable Commander banlist, at least for the time being!
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Magic Tournament Rules Changes
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With the release of Tarkir: Dragonstorm, we also got a small quantity of MTR changes. Two of these were largely nonfunctional: rendering a player’s Start Your Engines! speed status information, meaning that you have to represent it accurately to your opponent when asked and state whenever it changes; and making clear that you’re only committing Bribery if you offer your opponent an out-of-game reward for in-game behaviour- saying “I’ll sac this if you sac that” was previously very technically bribery, and now explicitly isn’t. The last change is slightly more interesting, however- the word “reveal” has been removed from MTR 3.13, to help distinguish the act of sharing information with other players from the magic keyword action of Revealing. As a part of this change, it is now expressly the case that if you have access to hidden information of any kind during a game, you may share it with whoever you like- so sharing your hand with your teammate in two-headed giant is now totally okay; as is sharing another player’s hand with someone else after you’ve Gitaxian Probed them in commander. Information wants to be shared, after all!
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May Workshop Alert!
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This month’s UKMO Workshop is going to be on Customer Service, hosted by Winter this Sunday, the 25th of May, on the EU North Judging discord server, starting at 1pm. If you want to join in, please do come along!
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Treasurer Solicitation
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In sadder news, UKMO’s Treasurer, David Lyford-Tilley, has stepped down from his position since we last spoke with you all. We here in the committee want to take this opportunity to thank David for his hard work getting UKMO up and running smoothly over the past year.
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This leaves us with a hole to fill among the directors of UKMO, however. If you believe that you would make a good Treasurer for UKMO and wish to help out, please do send an email to executive@magicofficials.uk (or reply to this email) telling us that (and why you think you’d be a good fit for the role), and we’ll be in contact. Likewise, feel free to get in contact if you want more details on what the role entails and what the expectations are.
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Get Involved!
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It’s no secret that UKMO is behind where we want to be right now in terms of several key parts of what we’re offering to our membership. In particular, we are very aware that many of you are looking forward to us launching our Competitive REL Judging Certification. There’s many reasons that this (and several other streams of UKMO’s value proposition) have ended up delayed from what we’ve hoped for, and rest assured that we are working on the problems that we can, but a big one is bandwidth. At present, the bulk of the work being done to bring UKMO to life is happening among the committee, and at the end of the day we’re not-many-people applying what time we can to it, and there’s a lot of overhead of organisation to getting the actual work done.
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This is where you all come in. Many hands make light work, and we’ve got a number of places where folks being able to offer even small amounts of their time would make a world of difference for bringing these things you’ve been looking forward to into the world. Right now, the biggest places where volunteer help would be useful is in putting together testing materials for both the Regular REL Certification and the long-awaited Competitive REL Certification. We’re looking for people to help out with all of writing, editing and testing questions in both the rules and policy sections of both certifications, so feel free to give us a shout even if you don’t have any specific questions in mind. Additionally, if you think you can teach people a useful magic officiation skill and would be willing to run a workshop on it, send us an email at executive@magicofficials.uk and we’d love to talk to you about getting you into the workshop schedule. Likewise, if you have any expertise in the realm of Swag And Merch, we’d love to chat with you too.
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UKMO is privileged to have a community as engaged and enthusiastic as you all are, and we want to help channel that enthusiasm towards bringing as much value to all of you as we can. Right now, we’re struggling to get some parts of that value proposition off the ground, and your patience and assistance is appreciated in this. It’s our sincere hope that soon we will be able to build self-sustaining momentum, but right now, we need your help to get there.
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