Magic: The Gathering Rules, Tournament Rules, Floor Rules and Penalty Guidelines Archive

Previously, the rules for casting a spell were complicated.
Previously, the rules for casting a spell were complicated.

On this page, I have links to all version of all rules documents pertaining to the card game Magic: The Gathering that I could locate on the internet. Many of these files were hard to find.

This page has been harvested by the Wayback Machine, so it and the documents it links to should be preserved forever.

This page will not be updated to contain documents after 2015. If you want those, updated and comprehensive archives are at Venser’s Journal.

It was quite easy to find old versions of Comprehensive Rules and some such lists (even though incomplete) could already be found on the internet.

However, finding old versions of the Magic Tournament Rules and Infraction Procedure Guide proved far more difficult. These documents changed name multiple times. For example, the IPG was previously called DCI Penalty Guideliens and the Magic Tournament Rules were created by joining together the DCI Universal Tournament Rules (or DCI Standard Floor Rules) and the DCI Magic Floor Rules. I scraped together most of these documents by googling for PDF files in Wizards archives and by using a crawler bot to try to get documents based on URL’s.

Wizards of the Coast holds copyright to most documents linked to from this page.

I suggest that the reader look at the first edition rulebook and, even better, the first Magic Tournament Rules. I found those very amusing.

Also, for simplicity, I did not distinguish between the various names of the Tournament Rules and Infractinon Procedure Guide. Even documents named DCI Penalty Guidelines are referred to as Infraction Procedure Guide in this list.

Well, here go the documents.

You may also browse the files directly.

Comprehensive Rules & pre-Sixth Edition Rulebooks

Non-Magic Games

Judging at Regular REL

Changelogs

Infraction Procedure Guide

These links don’t show all the IPGs. For a complete list, browse the files directly here and in this subfolder.

Magic Tournament Rules

DCI Universal Tournament Rules

Miscellaneous

Handbooks for Tournament Officials

8 Responses on “Magic: The Gathering Rules, Tournament Rules, Floor Rules and Penalty Guidelines Archive”

    • Petr Hudeček says:

      I don’t plan on updating this but I plan on keeping it online on my website and I’ve also caused the web.archive.org engine to index that page so that, hopefully, these rules will be preserved forever.

      However, no, I’m not planning on adding more recent documents to the list. Yawgatog is doing something similar, and maybe better, for recent Comprehensive rules, though, see here: http://www.yawgatog.com/resources/rules-changes/

  3. Jim Gall says:

    Hi Petr! Thanks so much for your work on this! I tried to access the 1997-03 Fifth Edition rulebook and it links to an HTML document that has an introduction (index.html) and the rest of the sections seem to link to dead wizards pages, are those also saved on your site and if so what would the URL structure be for requesting, say, Section_I.html of the rules?

  4. Timofey Urbanovich says:

    Hi Petr! I thought you’d be glad to know that we had discussion about CR 109.5 and when it came to be, so you page was irreplaceable in figuring it out. Thank you!

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