11

Settle The Wreckage says:

Exile all attacking creatures target player controls. That player may search his or her library for that many basic land cards, put those cards onto the battlefield tapped, then shuffle his or her library.

I recently got this played against me on Magic Online, however I had just scryed a card I wanted to the top of my library and I didn't need any more land. As a result I did not want to look for land or shuffle my library.

Magic online didn't give me any choice here though and shuffled my Negate away from me. Is that correct? By my reading of the card the entire second clause is a "may" so I should have had the option not to?

4
  • re "Magic online didn't give me any choices": it must have given you some kind of choice - did it just present you with the contents of your library and ask which lands (if any) you wanted? Nov 28, 2017 at 18:45
  • @BenjaminCosman Yes. Exactly that :)
    – Tim B
    Nov 28, 2017 at 19:38
  • Please report this bug, if it happened during a match which required entry fees you can file for compensation. MTGO already has support for "may search" (see: Path to Exile). It appears that @Rainbolt has already mentioned this, but it doesn't hurt to file again. And you can still file for comp even if it's a known bug.
    – malnourish
    Nov 29, 2017 at 15:24
  • @IanElletson Yeah I would report it but it seems it's already a known issue. Fortunately I still won my match (the opponent didn't draw 2nd sun so I didn't need the negate as urgently as I thought I might!) and it was just a friendly anyway. I mostly asked the question because it is rare for magic online to get the rules wrong and I also play that deck in paper so wanted to make sure my understanding was correct.
    – Tim B
    Nov 29, 2017 at 15:37

1 Answer 1

11

You shouldn't have had to shuffle your library.

This is actually a known bug in Magic Online. It is listed here as "Settle the Wreckage does not give the targeted player the option to not search their library."

As for the rule itself... unfortunately there's no card ruling on Gatherer, but the rules of grammar should make this clear. If the card's intent were that the "may" applies only to searching the library, and not to the shuffling part, then the shuffling would have to stand alone as an instruction outside of the "may". It would look like this:

That player [may search his or her library for that many basic land cards, put those cards onto the battlefield tapped, then] shuffle his or her library.

The problem here is that "shuffle" would have to be "shuffles" for that to be grammatically correct. If the card did say "then shuffles his or her library", then it would be reasonably to interpret that as a separate instruction apart from the "may".

So the only way for it to be grammatically correct is if it's:

That player may [search his or her library for that many basic land cards, put those cards onto the battlefield tapped, then shuffle his or her library.]

1
  • There are a lot of examples of "Then that player shuffles his or her library." - separate instruction, separate sentence - on existing cards, though none following a "may" ability like this one. That would presumably be the templating if Settle the Wreckage were intended to force a shuffle, though.
    – Cascabel
    Nov 30, 2017 at 0:27

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .