Just out of curiosity, when you declare that you're repeating an infinite loop some finite amount of times in a tournament setting, can you say that you're running the loop until some random occurrence comes true, rather than specifying the number of times you're running the loop?
The reason this seems like it should be invalid to me is that you're definitely supposed to choose a finite number of loops, but a random occurrence may never actually happen in an arbitrary finite number of attempts.
I'm curious mostly cuz of this. Short version: if you can infinitely self-mill and Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre is in your deck, can you say "I keep milling, and therefore shuffling freely, until I've milled all cards in my deck but one without shuffling, and therefore Ulamog is the last card in my library"?
There is uncertainty involved, so shortcuts can't be made here. You can define a finite amount of iterations, but you cannot say what you want the end result to be.
Its not a shortcut unless you can specificly name exactly what is going to happen in each step.
And as you cannot know your library before milling it, you have to "actually" mill it, and if its not ulamog that is the last card, well, its a new random library again.
If anything isnt glass clear you cannot shortcut, especially if a hidden zone is involved and it goes over multiple turns etc.
A shortcut has to be a sequence of actions that is very clear, and theres a bunch of things that dont qualify for that in magic.
So you could pull that shuffling a bunch of times and "try" , but it will end in a slowplay warning at some point and you will have to stop (and no, you cannot repeat in the next turn and wait till its slowplay). However, you totally can try to win that way each turn if you can repeatable pull it off "somehow" , which is as unpleasent for anyone involved as it can get.
One of the main reasons that indeterminate loops aren't allowed in Magic is because there is no way to resolve two conflicting indeterminate "stops".
Imagine your opponent wants to do X when Ulamog is your fifth card from the bottom. Which of your scenarios happens first? It's true that mathematically you can claim that eventually Ulamog will be the bottom card, and it is also true that eventually it will be 5th from bottom. But there's no way of resolving this loop.
That's the reason you need to be able to describe the game state at the nth iteration of your loop.
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The reason this seems like it should be invalid to me is that you're definitely supposed to choose a finite number of loops, but a random occurrence may never actually happen in an arbitrary finite number of attempts.
I'm curious mostly cuz of this. Short version: if you can infinitely self-mill and Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre is in your deck, can you say "I keep milling, and therefore shuffling freely, until I've milled all cards in my deck but one without shuffling, and therefore Ulamog is the last card in my library"?
And as you cannot know your library before milling it, you have to "actually" mill it, and if its not ulamog that is the last card, well, its a new random library again.
If anything isnt glass clear you cannot shortcut, especially if a hidden zone is involved and it goes over multiple turns etc.
A shortcut has to be a sequence of actions that is very clear, and theres a bunch of things that dont qualify for that in magic.
So you could pull that shuffling a bunch of times and "try" , but it will end in a slowplay warning at some point and you will have to stop (and no, you cannot repeat in the next turn and wait till its slowplay). However, you totally can try to win that way each turn if you can repeatable pull it off "somehow" , which is as unpleasent for anyone involved as it can get.
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Imagine your opponent wants to do X when Ulamog is your fifth card from the bottom. Which of your scenarios happens first? It's true that mathematically you can claim that eventually Ulamog will be the bottom card, and it is also true that eventually it will be 5th from bottom. But there's no way of resolving this loop.
That's the reason you need to be able to describe the game state at the nth iteration of your loop.