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In Magic the Gathering Competitive/Professional REL, there are four categories of information: status, free, derived, and private. Under which category of information do timestamps fall?

If timestamp ordering is private information, then if two of Player A's objects with competing static abilities enter the battlefield simultaneously, Player B cannot find out which will take precedence until they actually affect the gamestate. Player A could also lie about which order has been chosen.

The same applies if timestamp ordering is derived information, except that Player A could not directly lie, but could refuse to communicate the order. For all practical purposes, these two possibilities imply that Player A does not actually have to make a choice at the time the objects enter the battlefield. This one also raises the question, "derived from what, exactly?"

If timestamp ordering is free information or status information, then Player B, while resolving Inquisition of Kozilek, can ask Player A for the timestamp ordering of each card in Player A's hand. It isn't unthinkable that the temporal order of cards in hand could be identified in this way; in Hearthstone, the hand is always ordered with cards to the left being older, and it doesn't break the game. However, the problem is that Player A is unlikely to remember the order in which each card was drawn in many circumstances.

None of these possibilities are obviously intuitive. They all feel a bit weird. In what category of information are timestamps?

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    What do you mean by timestamp on cards in the hand? The order they were drawn? Timestamps are set by the order permanents entered the battlefield, and as cards in the hand aren't permanents on the battlefield, they have no timestamps.
    – Andrew
    Jul 14, 2022 at 20:10
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    That's not true. According to rule 613.7d, "An object receives a timestamp at the time it enters a zone." So technically, any object in any zone has a timestamp. It rarely comes up outside of the battlefield, but one example I could find is Torrent of Lava. Its timestamp order with other objects can affect the existence of the ability it grants.
    – murgatroid99 ♦
    Jul 14, 2022 at 23:28

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There is a simple answer here that resolves all of the conflicts: timestamps are free information if and only if it makes a difference to the current game state. Otherwise, it is private.

The Magic tournament rules specify that free information includes "Details of current game actions and past game actions that still affect the game state". Any time timestamps are relevant to the game state, they are the result of a previous game action, which makes them details of previous game actions, so they must be public information in that case. Otherwise, timestamps are not included in the quoted category, so they are not free information, and since they do not fit any category of derived information, they must be private.

Rule 613.3 says

Within layers 2–6, apply effects from characteristic-defining abilities first (see rule 604.3), then all other effects in timestamp order (see rule 613.7). Note that dependency may alter the order in which effects are applied within a layer. (See rule 613.8.)

So, the timestamp of an object only matters if the object has a static ability that affects a layer that another active continuous effect also affects. Static abilities never function in the hand, so the timestamp of a card in hand never matters, so that information is private.

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  • The logic here seems to classify timestamps as actions via the rationale that they result from previous actions. While convenient for the question at hand, surely timestamps are themselves part of the gamestate as opposed to being actions, right? Otherwise we would have to classify creatures on the battlefield as actions instead of components of the gamestate on the basis that entering the battlefield is an action.
    – user10478
    Jul 14, 2022 at 16:41
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    No, that's not what I'm saying at all. The category I'm saying they are in is "Details of...past game actions". If an action simultaneously updated the timestamps of multiple objects, the choice of the order of those timestamps is made during that action and is therefore part of that category. For all other timestamps, the relative order of other actions is also part of that category.
    – murgatroid99 ♦
    Jul 14, 2022 at 16:48
  • Okay, still when you categorize them as details of past game actions, I think this meaningfully differs from my conception. I've always imagined a timestamp as a sort of "quasi-object" similar to a counter, associated with another object or quasi-object similar to how a counter exists "on" another object or quasi-object.
    – user10478
    Jul 14, 2022 at 17:31
  • Two gamestates identical up to the number of counters in play are not the same gamestate. I assumed two gamestates identical up to different timestamp order were similarly not the same gamestate, but it sounds like you're saying they are (otherwise all timestamp information would be relevant to the gamestate).
    – user10478
    Jul 14, 2022 at 17:31
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    Timestamps are, fundamentally, a total ordering on continuous effects, and a separate total ordering on objects and counters. Beyond that, it's not really useful to try to figure out what kind of thing a timestamp is. What matters is that that ordering is always the direct consequence of some details of previous game actions. As for their effect on game state, your "all or nothing" approach just doesn't really work. Timestamps sometimes differentiate game states, if they are timestamps of continuous effects in the same layer, or of objects or counters that create those continuous effects.
    – murgatroid99 ♦
    Jul 14, 2022 at 17:44

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