Rulings on "primary" type for multiple type cards?
Asked by Temporal_Inept 6 years ago
In tapped out, multiple type cards like Ornithopter are categorized as a creature vice an artifact. Is there a ruling that says when a card has multiple types i.e. enchantment creatures, artifact creatures, enchantment artifacts, creature lands the card has a primary type or is this just a convenience that tapped out uses. The same goes for split cards i.e. a sorcery // instant etc.
I'm asking because I'm working on a program that imports Commander decklists from Cockatrice and analyzes them, creating multiple histograms. One such histogram is types and their percantages. It's currently calculating Ornithopter as both an artifact and a creature which may skew the overall histogram since it's taking 100 cards total but now you have an "additional" card that's not reflected in the total.
FancyTuesday says... #2
In MTG there are supertypes, types, and subtypes, and everything within those categories are equal for a card's treatment under game rules (off the top of my head, I can't think of a case where anything in the type line is truly unequal, it's just how the rules tend to break things up). A card that is an Artifact Creature is both of those things for the purposes of game interactions that name artifacts and creatures, it's not more one than the other and there's no distinction for it being "primarily" one.
For split cards, in every zone except the stack the split card is treated as those two halves combined. You may cast an instant // sorcery card as the instant half of the card and it will an instant, but in your hand/library/graveyard it's an instant and a sorcery.
For the purposes of laying out a UI that breaks down card types I would list artifact creatures as creatures, since their role in the deck is probably to serve as a creature distinct from non-creature artifacts, and maybe use a different colored text for them. Split cards I'd categorize them under their slowest category and highlight the //.
June 12, 2018 12:40 p.m. Edited.
Temporal_Inept says... #3
Sounds like a good rule of thumb(s), I'll incorporate it.
Neotrup says... Accepted answer #1
Rules wise no, there's no primary type on a multitype card.
When generating a decklist though people tend to count Artifact and Creature Lands as Lands, and Artifact and Enchantment Creatures as Creatures. My gut says aftermath cards should get categorized by the half without aftermath. No clue for Artifact Enchantments, but those rarely come up, so just make a call.
June 12, 2018 12:33 p.m.