Right now the rule is that you can use substitute cards for double-faced and meld cards. The rule is also that if a card gets marked during play (perhaps someone spills water), the head judge can issue a substitute card. There’s a third rule for “pringle” foils but I’m not sure exactly how that one works.
But if you show up with a card that’s already worn (“marked” through wear and play), you don’t get a substitute card, you get punished.
Sleeves are super expensive. Not so much for the wallet today but for the environment (and hospitals) of tomorrow. The environmental impact in plastic pollution of a sleeve is about half a cent per year which compounded over the five hundred years it’ll last adds up to six figures.
Allow substitute cards for all cards not just DFC. You’d still have to bring the real card.
Right now there’s a rule that decks need to be sufficiently randomized after each game action that shuffles your deck like a fetch or tutor. Yes, at the feature table if you crack two fetches you are expected to shuffle after each.
Shuffling a normal deck takes seven through ten good mashes. (A “Battle of Wits” deck takes much more.) A good mash is one where the interleaving sections are roughly equal amounts of 1 cards and 2 cards. If they’re all 1 cards, that’s a Faro shuffle which is cheating. A bad mash is one where I miss entirely or half the deck or get huge clumps where almost every clump is 15 cards or so. So when I mash or riffle shuffle, I don’t count these bad mashes.
You’re also expected to finish your mid-game shuffles in under forty seconds.
You get punished for not shuffling and you get punished for shuffling.
There’s such an underappreciation for what sufficiently random actually entails and how difficult it is to achieve that. It means that all permutations are equally likely.
At lower levels of play it’s usually courteous and encouraged to “shortcut”. Fetch now, shuffle during downtime. Usually, but not always. Some people get mad and at the feature table (watching the pro tour on TV) I’ve seen judges insist on shuffling right away. Sometimes even at FNM that happens.
My “fix” here would be to formalize and extend this shortcut. Legalize having the deck in a “dirty” state (90° sideways and placed offset). You can fetch or tutor from a dirty state but if you cast a card draw spell drawing multiple cards, you have to shuffle the deck to put it back into the “clean” state.
If I really got my wish through and this is gonna sound so far beyond the pale to what’s legal today, I’d also allow to have one random card pulled from the deck (cut a few times and have the opponent pull the card—much faster than sufficiently randomizing the entire deck) and placed on top of the deck, in a “clean” portrait orentation astride the sideways/landscape “dirty” deck, for cards that lets you look at the top card. Like when you want to combine multiple fetches with Lantern of Insight, for example.
If there’s ever a format where they have cards that “look at the second-most card from your library” type cards then we can extend the rule to have up to four “clean” cards on a “dirty” deck. Hopefully that won’t be necessary. Five or more feels like “ugh just shuffle instead”.
Until this rule is fixed here’s my temporary “solution”. Before the game and after fetching myself, shuffle normally i.e. thoroughly. But for opponent’s fetches, a mindset shift: It is now no longer my job to randomize the deck. I only need to destroy any information gleaned by them while they fetched. Three full cuts (not in the middle but rather randomly at roughly a 25:75 split), followed by a kenchi and then one mash. Fast, and while it does not ensure that all permutations are equally likely it makes it so that the cards they saw were on top, or on the bottom, or clumped, or separated could now be anywhere. The three full cuts is the best part. It moves the “top” and “bottom” to a now random location.
Right now a card like Mutable Explorer can’t put a real Mutavault card into play. You have to buy or make a token version.
These cards would’ve been a great way to get to play with older cards that might be a li’l under- or overpowered right now in a recosted way or a new, different flavor. Like maybe it’s not worth it to put your iconic War Mammoths into play but a sorcery that puts three of them into play at once might be fun. Or use a real Ancestral Recall as the prepared counter for Emeritus of Ideation.
Absolutely do always allow homemade tokens or just glass beads and print cheap token versions like the Mutavault token. But also allow cards to be usable as tokens or counters if they are differentiated some way like with a different sleeve for example.