If I crack Wooded Foothills while the opponent has a Grafdiggers Cage in play and I choose Dryad Arbor what happens? I understand it can't enter the battlefield, but is choose it an illegal action that would be a GRV and rewind the game to before the choice was made or does it just not enter the battlefield.
If you actually try to put Dryad Arbor onto the battlefield and finish resolving the ability, then that's a Game Rule Violation.
But before that: Putting Dryad Arbor onto the battlfield is an impossible action, so you simply can't do it. Note that Wooded Foothills just has you search and then put a chosen card onto the field - not, say, search, pick a card, reveal it, and then put it onto the field. The selection of the card and the zone change are essentially the same action in this case, so by extension you can't pick Dryad Arbor from your search. If you're in the middle of resolving the effect when you realize the Cage is out, then your options are to choose a different Forest/Mountain or fail to find.
In the situation given, putting Dryad Arbor onto the battlefield is an impossible action (C.R. 101.2). In sanctioned tournaments in practice, if trying to do so is merely the same as revealing the Dryad Arbor card (which you're allowed to do since you're searching your library at the moment [M.T.R. 3.12]), then you can still choose to put a noncreature Mountain or Forest card onto the battlefield, if possible and desired (C.R. 701.7a-b).
I'm not seeing a rule cited that Dryad Arbor can't be the legal selection. Every search of a zone is for a set of cards with or without qualifications (CR701.17a). The actions performed on those cards are always separate syntactically.
When it comes to searching though, picking a card you can't do anything to and choosing to fail the search are indistinguishable. As peteroupc says, even physically claiming the Arbor could be monkeyed as just a spontaneous reveal of your card.
If you were told to "Put a creature card from your library" onto the battlefield, then you are limited to pick such a card that you can actually put. But 'search' is, as the rules say (CR701.1), a "specialized verb", so is it an action? However, 'action' is not what matters. Artscrafter, you are right but also wrong. CR 608.2d says "If an effect of a spell or ability offers any choices other than...", and then is where we see "The player can’t choose an option that’s illegal or impossible". Choices are grouped up into an effect - that is the aggregate level of our concern; effects are how things are 'cut up' for us. The question here is whether 'search' is an effect on its own.
The answer to that is unfortunately not as simple as CR609.1. A happening is not the only sort of effect, since 614.10 shows that efffects can cause players to skip events. Skipping is no happening at all. Indeed continuous effects are largely not happenings, but instead some kind of condition on what is possible, or an under-the-surface change of "state". A search is considered enough of a thing to be called an 'event', since Aven Mindcensor exists, but that doesn't prove that it's an effect. (Effects bring about events, or substitute one event for another.)
Artscrafter, you imagined a text that said to "search, pick a card, reveal it, and then put it onto the field." This is not a difference from the effect at hand, or is not a possible text at all. As I said, picking is syntactically linked to the search, so texts never look like this. The challenge you raise is only this: Is '[search] and [reveal/move/do]' one effect that involves a choice? Or is '[search] and [do]' one effect followed by another effect?
I would claim that searching is a change in state, because it has its own entry as a keyword action, a "specialized verb". "Choose a card [in zone]" is different and would fold into the following action in the way you say - we can see this as just being a syntactic nicety no different from just using an indefinite article like "Put a creature card [in zone] [somewhere]". A search, I think the rules justify, stands alone.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Epic banner by Erasmus of æтђєг.
Awesome avatar provided by Krashbot @ [Epic Graphics].
The semantics of my hypothetical may have been off, but I think we agree on the basic point I was trying to make, which is that there isn't a state where you're somehow stuck with your selection of Dryad Arbor and can't put it onto the battlefield. The option exists to pick something else.
So I have cage in play and my opponent activates a fetchland and attempts to put arbor into play. I call a judge. Do they get to select a different land or not? It seems that have clearly chosen the arbor as the card to find. If it were containment priest that my opponent forgot about or misunderstood instead of cage would the arbor go to exile?
The Cage example is a little bit subjective from a judging perspective. Actually putting Dryad Arbor onto the battlefield is a Game Rule Violation, subject to a warning and either leaving the game state as is or rewinding, depending on how disruptive a rewind would be. But I wouldn't issue the infraction if it's clear that the Arbor player had just revealed the card and could plausibly still be reviewing the board state.
Fetching a Dryad Arbor into Containment Priest is a much clearer case, because it's a completely legal play (if a bad one.) If neither player noticed the Priest and allowed the Arbor to be on the field for a while then we're still in GRV/FTMGS territory. But the Priest player is free (and in fact obligated, if the Arbor player has clearly finalized their selection) to just declare that the effect applied and Arbor is exiled.
So it seems there is no scenario where the player attempting to fetch for arbor into grafdigger's cage gets nothing. Either the game state is left to stand and they keep arbor or the game is rewound and they can select a different land. Is that correct?
This sits as odd to me that I am not allowed to “try” to put arbor into play and have cage block it from entering. Would this extend to a card like clarion ultimatum? With cage in play am I prevented to “chose” a dryad arbor in play as one of the 5 permanents or is only until the searching and finding in the library that cage’s effect is enforced?
The semantics of my hypothetical may have been off, but I think we agree on the basic point I was trying to make, which is that there isn't a state where you're somehow stuck with your selection of Dryad Arbor and can't put it onto the battlefield. The option exists to pick something else.
That's a point from a judging perspective, as a matter of communication between players. In the rules, it matters whether Arbor is actually a legal choice to fail to do anything with, as Zauzich ponders here:
So it seems there is no scenario where the player attempting to fetch for arbor into grafdigger's cage gets nothing. Either the game state is left to stand and they keep arbor or the game is rewound and they can select a different land. Is that correct?
This sits as odd to me that I am not allowed to “try” to put arbor into play and have cage block it from entering. Would this extend to a card like clarion ultimatum? With cage in play am I prevented to “chose” a dryad arbor in play as one of the 5 permanents or is only until the searching and finding in the library that cage’s effect is enforced?
Clarion Ultimatum actually makes a strong case for what I argued. The thing that you -do- with the permanents you choose is you run an instruction "for each of [them]", and that instruction is a search. The search is allowed. If you had to consider whether you could put the card when you searched, then you'd have to consider you could search when you choose the permanent, and then you've got to Nostradamus the possibility of putting a card into play that might not even be in your library, as far as you or maybe your spotty memory for your own decklist goes. You can't be picking up your library to check that legality; that's out of order.
No, there's definitely a spot where the choices for the effect of Ultimatum are stopped, drawn, and called, and that spot is the search. And therefore, when searching up Dryad Arbor, it's legal to find it irrespective of what you're told to do next with it. The matter of -Judging- this situation has its own technicalities which I'm not qualified to pronounce, but the strictest sense of the question, is "Yes you can pick the Arbor if you were or weren't aware of the Cage and then nothing would happen."
I think we're all in agreement about Containment Priest.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Epic banner by Erasmus of æтђєг.
Awesome avatar provided by Krashbot @ [Epic Graphics].
But before that: Putting Dryad Arbor onto the battlfield is an impossible action, so you simply can't do it. Note that Wooded Foothills just has you search and then put a chosen card onto the field - not, say, search, pick a card, reveal it, and then put it onto the field. The selection of the card and the zone change are essentially the same action in this case, so by extension you can't pick Dryad Arbor from your search. If you're in the middle of resolving the effect when you realize the Cage is out, then your options are to choose a different Forest/Mountain or fail to find.
EDIT: Edited after comment 7 was posted.
When it comes to searching though, picking a card you can't do anything to and choosing to fail the search are indistinguishable. As peteroupc says, even physically claiming the Arbor could be monkeyed as just a spontaneous reveal of your card.
If you were told to "Put a creature card from your library" onto the battlefield, then you are limited to pick such a card that you can actually put. But 'search' is, as the rules say (CR701.1), a "specialized verb", so is it an action? However, 'action' is not what matters. Artscrafter, you are right but also wrong. CR 608.2d says "If an effect of a spell or ability offers any choices other than...", and then is where we see "The player can’t choose an option that’s illegal or impossible". Choices are grouped up into an effect - that is the aggregate level of our concern; effects are how things are 'cut up' for us. The question here is whether 'search' is an effect on its own.
The answer to that is unfortunately not as simple as CR609.1. A happening is not the only sort of effect, since 614.10 shows that efffects can cause players to skip events. Skipping is no happening at all. Indeed continuous effects are largely not happenings, but instead some kind of condition on what is possible, or an under-the-surface change of "state". A search is considered enough of a thing to be called an 'event', since Aven Mindcensor exists, but that doesn't prove that it's an effect. (Effects bring about events, or substitute one event for another.)
Artscrafter, you imagined a text that said to "search, pick a card, reveal it, and then put it onto the field." This is not a difference from the effect at hand, or is not a possible text at all. As I said, picking is syntactically linked to the search, so texts never look like this. The challenge you raise is only this: Is '[search] and [reveal/move/do]' one effect that involves a choice? Or is '[search] and [do]' one effect followed by another effect?
I would claim that searching is a change in state, because it has its own entry as a keyword action, a "specialized verb". "Choose a card [in zone]" is different and would fold into the following action in the way you say - we can see this as just being a syntactic nicety no different from just using an indefinite article like "Put a creature card [in zone] [somewhere]". A search, I think the rules justify, stands alone.
Awesome avatar provided by Krashbot @ [Epic Graphics].
Fetching a Dryad Arbor into Containment Priest is a much clearer case, because it's a completely legal play (if a bad one.) If neither player noticed the Priest and allowed the Arbor to be on the field for a while then we're still in GRV/FTMGS territory. But the Priest player is free (and in fact obligated, if the Arbor player has clearly finalized their selection) to just declare that the effect applied and Arbor is exiled.
This sits as odd to me that I am not allowed to “try” to put arbor into play and have cage block it from entering. Would this extend to a card like clarion ultimatum? With cage in play am I prevented to “chose” a dryad arbor in play as one of the 5 permanents or is only until the searching and finding in the library that cage’s effect is enforced?
That's a point from a judging perspective, as a matter of communication between players. In the rules, it matters whether Arbor is actually a legal choice to fail to do anything with, as Zauzich ponders here:
Clarion Ultimatum actually makes a strong case for what I argued. The thing that you -do- with the permanents you choose is you run an instruction "for each of [them]", and that instruction is a search. The search is allowed. If you had to consider whether you could put the card when you searched, then you'd have to consider you could search when you choose the permanent, and then you've got to Nostradamus the possibility of putting a card into play that might not even be in your library, as far as you or maybe your spotty memory for your own decklist goes. You can't be picking up your library to check that legality; that's out of order.
No, there's definitely a spot where the choices for the effect of Ultimatum are stopped, drawn, and called, and that spot is the search. And therefore, when searching up Dryad Arbor, it's legal to find it irrespective of what you're told to do next with it. The matter of -Judging- this situation has its own technicalities which I'm not qualified to pronounce, but the strictest sense of the question, is "Yes you can pick the Arbor if you were or weren't aware of the Cage and then nothing would happen."
I think we're all in agreement about Containment Priest.
Awesome avatar provided by Krashbot @ [Epic Graphics].