Ruling — Magic: The Gathering

You asked

How do I take my turn?

Answered counted as answered

Asked with: Magic: The Gatheringbg-463-en-1e

Each turn proceeds in the same sequence:[1]

1. Untap step: You untap all your tapped permanents.[1] No one can cast spells or activate abilities during this step.[1]

2. Upkeep step: Players can cast instants and activate abilities.[1]

3. Draw step: You draw a card from your library.[1] (The player who goes first skips the draw step on his or her first turn).[1]

4. Main phase: Players can cast instants and activate abilities.[1] You can play a land during this phase, but you can only play one land during your turn.[1] You can also cast any number of sorceries, instants, creatures, artifacts, enchantments, and planeswalkers, and you can activate abilities.[1]

5. Combat phase:

* Beginning of combat step: This is your opponent's last chance to cast spells or activate abilities that stop your creatures from attacking.[1]

* Declare attackers step: You decide which, if any, of your untapped creatures will attack and which player or planeswalker they will attack.[1] You tap the attacking creatures.[2][1]

* Declare blockers step: Your opponent decides which, if any, of his or her untapped creatures will block your attacking creatures, then they do so.[1] If multiple creatures block a single attacker, you order the blockers to show which is first in line for damage, which is second, and so on.[1]

* Combat damage step: Each creature—both attackers and blockers—deals damage equal to its power.[2] If one of your attacking creatures is blocked by multiple creatures, you decide how to divide its combat damage among them.[2] You must assign at least enough damage to the first blocking creature in line to destroy it before you can assign damage to the next one in line, and so on.[2]

* End of combat step: Players can then cast instants and activate abilities.[1]

6. Post-combat/Final steps: Players can cast instants and activate abilities.[1]

During any part of the turn, if you enter a new step or phase, any triggered abilities that happen during that step or phase trigger and are put on the stack.[1] The active player gets to cast spells and activate abilities, then the other player does.[1] When both players in a row decline to do anything and nothing is waiting to resolve, the game moves to the next step or phase.[1] At the end of each of your turns, you must discard down to seven cards if you have more than seven in your hand.[3]

[1] RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook · p.17 · Section 3: Playing a Game · A. Untap step · B. Upkeep step · C. draw step · 2. M P · A. beGinninG of combat step · …

[2] RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook · p.13 · A  B

[3] RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook · p.8 · L · L · H · T S · B · G

🔧 debug — where this ruling came from

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
corpus profile: live
answerer pin (deploy-frozen, attribution only): gemma4:26b think:false 5571076f3d70
timings: search 215 ms · ask 16496 ms · total 16723 ms
single-flight (PR-5): queued 0 ms · generation 16723 ms
retrieval refs (raw) — what the PASSAGE SEARCH returned, not what the answerer read: [{"page": 13, "score": 0.042168, "snippet": "The primary way to win the game is to attack with your creatures. If a creature that's attacking your opponent isn't blocked, it deals damage equal to its power to him or her. It doesn't take that many hits to drop your opponent all the way from 20 life to 0! The middle of each turn is the combat ph", "headingPath": "A  B", "sharpsignalDocId": 163}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.032522, "snippet": "103.1. At the start of a game, the players determine which one of them will choose who takes the first turn. In the first game of a match (including a single-game match), the players may use any mutually agreeable method (flipping a coin, rolling dice, etc.) to do so. In a match of several games, th", "headingPath": "103. Starting the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 172}, {"page": 17, "score": 0.032266, "snippet": "Below are the parts of a turn. Each turn proceeds in the same sequence. Whenever you enter a new step or phase, any triggered abilities that happen during that step or phase trigger and are put on the stack. The active player (the player whose turn it is) gets to cast spells and activate abilities, ", "headingPath": "Section 3: Playing a Game · A. Untap step · B. Upkeep step · C. draw step · 2. M P · A. beGinninG of combat step · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 163}, {"page": 10, "score": 0.032018, "snippet": "103.5d In a multiplayer game using the shared team turns option, first each player on the starting team declares whether that player will take a mulligan, then the players on each other team in turn order do the same. Teammates may consult while making their decisions. Then all mulligans are taken a", "headingPath": "103. Starting the Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 172}, {"page": 16, "score": 0.031754, "snippet": "Now that you know the elements of the game and how to perform the main actions, it's time to walk through a turn. This section describes what happens in each part of a turn. In a typical game, you'll skip many of these parts (for example, nothing usually happens in the 'beginning of combat' step). A", "headingPath": "Section 3: Playing a Game", "sharpsignalDocId": 163}, {"page": 9, "score": 0.031025, "snippet": "To tap a card is to turn it sideways. You do this when you use a land to make mana, when you attack with a creature, or when you activate an ability that has the oT symbol as part of its cost ( oT means 'tap this permanent'). When a permanent is tapped, that usually means it's been used for the turn", "headingPath": "T", "sharpsignalDocId": 163}, {"page": 18, "score": 0.03055, "snippet": "Now it's your opponent's turn. That player untaps his or her permanents and goes from there. After that player is done, it will be your turn again. Keep going until a player is reduced to 0 life. As soon as a player has 0 life, the game ends immediately and the other player wins! UB02_M14", "headingPath": "T N T", "sharpsignalDocId": 163}, {"page": 8, "score": 0.03009, "snippet": "Since the Magic game doesn't have a game board, zones are the areas of play that exist on your table. When the game begins, your deck of cards becomes your library (your draw pile). It's kept face down, and the cards stay in the order they were in at the beginning of the game. No one can look at the", "headingPath": "L · L · H · T S · B · G", "sharpsignalDocId": 163}]
citations (raw) — what the answer cited, chosen from a retrieval this page cannot show: [{"page": 17, "quote": null, "headingPath": "Section 3: Playing a Game · A. Untap step · B. Upkeep step · C. draw step · 2. M P · A. beGinninG of combat step · …", "sharpsignalDocId": 163}, {"page": 13, "quote": null, "headingPath": "A  B", "sharpsignalDocId": 163}, {"page": 8, "quote": null, "headingPath": "L · L · H · T S · B · G", "sharpsignalDocId": 163}]
boost provenance — errata + base rulebook (E2/E3): no registered errata card matched this query; base rulebook doc 163 boosted; rulesage.errata.boost-enabled=true, rulesage.errata.supersedence-enabled=true
base rulebook doc 163 boosted
answered-before recall: this ruling was answered, so past rulings were not offered
similarity threshold in force: 0.55 (rulesage.answered-before.similarity-threshold; the exact-question tier is not gated by it)
debug row retained until: Nov 8, 2026 10:01

retrieval — what the passage search returned

what this block IS: the PASSAGE SEARCH's own results — the same search that fills this page's closest-passages list — and NOT the passages the answerer read. Answering runs its OWN retrieval: a far wider candidate pool, re-ranked down to a final handful, plus floors this search never applies — the base rulebook, surviving errata corrections, and one slot per book on a multi-book read. Each of those armed only if THIS ask sent what it needs: the boost block names the ids it forwarded, and the scope line names the books it read. A document the answer CITES that no row here names is therefore EXPECTED, not a defect: two searches, two candidate pools, two orders. How much wider that pool was is set gateway-side and is NOT REPORTED for this ruling, and neither are the answerer's final rows — so rulesage has nothing of its own to show beside these.

score = the fused retrieval score (reciprocal-rank fusion over the search arms) — NOT a cosine similarity. This ruling ran the THREE-ARM fuse (full-text + vector + the doc-priority boost arm, which carried the base rulebook and/or the errata corrections this query matched), whose arithmetic ceiling is 0.04918 — all three arms ranking the same chunk #1 (ceiling = arms/(k+1) at k=60). The measured healthy band 0.016–0.033 was measured on TWO-arm asks and does not bound this one: its high end is the two-arm ceiling, and a third arm has room above it. A chunk only one arm ranked highly lands near 0.016 (that one arm's #1 vote), so 0.03 here is an excellent hit, not a 3% match.

per-arm ranks (the rank each search arm gave a chunk): NOT DISCLOSED by the gateway. Fusion happens gateway-side and only the FUSED score crosses the wire, so rulesage cannot show them without a gateway change. The rank column below is the FUSED rank (position in the returned list), which is real.

token count per chunk: NOT DISCLOSED — chunk token counts are not reported on the ask path. The character counts below are of the bounded snippet/quote rulesage actually received — a real measurement of what we hold, never an estimate of the chunk.

fused rank	document	heading	page	fused RRF score	snippet chars
#1	RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook (corpus doc 163)	A  B	p.13	0.042168 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#2	RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Comprehensive Rules (2026-06-19) (corpus doc 172)	103. Starting the Game	p.8	0.032522 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#3	RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook (corpus doc 163)	Section 3: Playing a Game · A. Untap step · B. Upkeep step · C. draw step · 2. M P · A. beGinninG of combat step · …	p.17	0.032266 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#4	RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Comprehensive Rules (2026-06-19) (corpus doc 172)	103. Starting the Game	p.10	0.032018 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#5	RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook (corpus doc 163)	Section 3: Playing a Game	p.16	0.031754 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#6	RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook (corpus doc 163)	T	p.9	0.031025 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300
#7	RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook (corpus doc 163)	T N T	p.18	0.03055 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	289
#8	RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook (corpus doc 163)	L · L · H · T S · B · G	p.8	0.03009 (healthy, below this ruling's 3-arm ceiling 0.04918 (the measured band 0.016–0.033 was taken on two-arm asks and does not bound a 3-arm one))	300

what the answerer read — the passages it actually had in front of it

what this block IS: the passages the ANSWERING read put in front of the answerer, in the order it read them — the other half of the two reads described above, and the one that decides what the answer could possibly say. Each row names the book it came from and where in that book it sits, what it scored when the search arms were fused, which arm carried it there, and whether the re-ranker chose it or a floor guaranteed it a slot. A row here that no passage-search row names is EXPECTED: a far wider pool, re-ranked, with floors the passage search never applies.

the passages the answerer read: NOT RECORDED for this ruling. Any of three things leaves this empty, and they are all different from the answerer having had nothing to read: this ask may never have reached a gateway at all; a multi-book ask keeps each book's own context on that book's own page rather than here; or the gateway build that answered may simply not report it. What this NEVER means is that the answerer read nothing — an answer was composed from passages either way, and their absence here is a gap in what we were told, not in what it read.

chosen chunks — what the answer actually cited

#	document	heading	page	quote chars
[1]	RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook (corpus doc 163)	Section 3: Playing a Game · A. Untap step · B. Upkeep step · C. draw step · 2. M P · A. beGinninG of combat step · …	p.17	no quote on the wire
[2]	RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook (corpus doc 163)	A  B	p.13	no quote on the wire
[3]	RULEBOOK Magic: The Gathering — Magic 2014 Starter Rulebook (corpus doc 163)	L · L · H · T S · B · G	p.8	no quote on the wire

generation — timing and the path taken

timing split: retrieval 215 ms · first delta 12643 ms · total 16723 ms (retrieval and first-delta both measured from the START of gateway work, so first-delta INCLUDES retrieval — do not subtract)
full breakdown: queued 0 ms · retrieval 215 ms · ask 16496 ms · gateway work 16723 ms · total 16723 ms
tokens in (the prompt the answerer read): 3996
tokens out (what the answerer generated): 548
tok/sec: 136.1 tok/sec — 548 output tokens in 4.026 s of generation
live seat (read from the running child): answering — gemma4:26b think:false · num_ctx 32768 (live-verified 55s ago)
stream path: streamed — the gateway pushed at least one accumulated draft
watchdog: first-token watchdog: 30s per arming window (rulesage.table.first-token-watchdog-seconds), re-armed once by the passages frame — so the worst case before a reader falls back to polling is 60s. Whether it actually fired is a BROWSER-side decision that never reaches the server, so it is not recorded here. The stream path above is the server's half of that story: whether a delta was emitted at all.
num_ctx · think posture: both are the CHILD's settings, not rulesage's, and no ask reply carries them — an answer never states which context window or think posture produced it. The live-seat line above reads them from the running child instead, where the gateway can answer for itself; it describes the child NOW, not this ask.

disposition

outcome: ANSWERED — Answered
abstain rationale (n/a — this ruling answered): answered — no abstain rationale applies

setup-shape — why the checklist band did or didn't render

decision: NOT_SETUP_SHAPED — no setup-shape pattern matched this question

errata registry — what the gate above had to match against

this game registers NO errata cards (edition 85), so "no registered errata card matched" above could never have matched one

Errata scope: the gate above matched this ruling's own edition only. When an ask also reads an expansion, that expansion's own registered errata cards stay outside the match — a stated phase-1 limitation, not a failed lookup.