MTG Salvation

Nice! I didn't even think of Fate Transfer. I got carried away with the Cloning.

Thanks for your input, everyone! Let the amputating begin!

You have just hit an opponent with Master of Predicaments.

When you choose a card in your hand, does your choice have to be a deliberate decision? Or are you allowed to choose at random (e.g. with your eyes closed) so your opponent can't try to predict what you chose?

A while ago, I saw a hilarious mockup for a Yawgmoth planeswalker:

I was thinking about how you could possibly use it. Since it has no casting cost, you have to cheat it into play - but that's the easy part (you can just use a card with cascade or something). The hard part is how to keep it alive when it has 0 loyalty counters.

I think I came up with a solution, but I'm not 100% sure if it works. Can someone weigh in?

Here's my idea:

Cast Glorious Anthem.
Cast March of the Machines.
Cast Mycosynth Lattice.

Now everything is an artifact creature that gets +1/+1.

Cast Gideon Jura (or any other Planeswalker for that matter) - he'll be a 6/6 artifact creature planeswalker with 6 loyalty counters.
Cast Clone choosing Gideon.

The planeswalker uniqueness rule comes into effect. Sacrifice the original Gideon, leaving the Clone.
The Clone is a 6/6 artifact creature planeswalker with 6 loyalty counters.

Cast Unstable Shapeshifter.

Cast Mirrorweave targeting Unstable Shapeshifter. Now the Clone is a 5/5 (or 1/2, I'm not actually sure but it doesn't matter) Unstable Shapeshifter with 6 loyalty counters.

Cheat in Yawgmoth with cascade or something.

Yawgmoth enters as an artifact creature planeswalker that's 1/1, but it dies immediately due to having 0 loyalty counters

However, the Shapeshifter and the Shapeshifted Clone's ability triggers when Yawgmoth enters, and they both become Yawgmoths. Sacrifice the original Shapeshifter to the planeswalker uniqueness rule, leaving only the Clone (which is temporarily a Shapeshifter, and has now become a Yawgmoth). The Clone-Shape-Moth is a 1/1 Artifact Creature Planeswalker - Yawgmoth with 6 loyalty counters.

Cast another Clone and choose Yawgmoth. Sacrifice the previous one to the uniqueness rule. (This way, it won't revert back to being Gideon when Mirrorweave wears off.)

Then get rid of all the other extraneous permanents (though make sure to get rid of March of the Machines before Glorious Anthem or your Yawgman will die due to being a 0/0 creature). This way, it will no longer have the Shapeshifter's ability.

Does this work? Does anyone have an easier way to achieve the same thing?

OK, that clears up all my questions. Thanks, everyone!

All right, thanks for clearing up the situation in which Player B wants to match the number of Player A's activations.

What about the situation in which BOTH players want to end up with MORE activations? That would be player A activating 500 times, then player B activating 1000 times, then player A desiring to activate 2000 times, etc. What would a judge say there?

I'm still not convinced by any of these answers. However, I'll accept that once the game state reaches a state equivalent to a previous state, either player would be forced to take a new action, as per rule 716.3.

I want to throw another wrench in, though.

For this case, we are considering an "equivalent game state" to be one in which, at any given moment, if all the activated abilities were to resolve with no interruption, the difference between the number of turns each player would skip would be the same as a difference previously reached at some point during the activation war. This interpretation of "same game state" seems to be the most reasonable one given rule 716.3, right?

But here's the wrinkle. Suppose player A continuously adds triggers one at a time while retaining priority, just like the original situation I proposed. Each time, the difference between the number of turns each player will skip increases by 1.

Player A activates the ability for the 499th time. At this moment, Player A would skip 499 more turns than Player B.

Player A then activates the ability for the 500th time. At this moment, Player A would skip 500 more turns than Player B.

Player A then passes priority.

Now, Player B activates the ability once. Player B has activated it once, and Player A has activated it 500 times, so at this moment, if all the abilities were to resolve, Player A would skip 499 more turns than Player B. But this game state has already been reached!

At that point, wouldn't a judge rule that neither player may activate the ability again? If either player activates the ability, the game state will return to a previous one. If Player A activates it, the difference will be 500 (already occurred), and if Player B activates it, the difference will be 498 (already occurred).

This logic actually invalidates what Artscrafter suggested before, which was that each player could activate the ability an equal number of times. If I'm correct in my logic here and my interpretation of rule 716.3, then Player A's scheme would actually work out as planned, because Player B would only be allowed to activate the ability once before both players are required to take a different action.

Thoughts? Did anything I say make the slightest amount of sense?

All right, I'll accept that.

However, there are ways to make things more confusing

What if the players don't stick to simply equalizing the amounts? Suppose the Glacial Chasm player (the active player, player A) has no other win conditions aside from his opponent decking himself, and player B knows this. In this case, player B would also benefit from skipping all of HIS turns, since then player A would be the one to deck out or die to the Chasm. In this case, player B doesn't need to simply equalize the number of skipped turns; he wants to skip MORE turns than his opponent. Each player wants to be the one to resolve the ability more times.

Thus, suppose player A puts 500 instances on the stack, then player B puts 600, then player A puts 713, then player B puts 2523, etc. The game state is changing each time. The game states are functionally SIMILAR - one player skipping a large number of turns - but not the same, since the number of turns being skipped is varying with each passing of priority.

Can you still make the argument that the game state is functionally equivalent? I feel like it would depend on the exact number of turns being skipped. Skipping 500 turns is rarely going to be functionally different from skipping 501 turns, but skipping 1 turn can have a much different outcome from skipping 2 turns.

Thanks! However, the game state created in my case is not a loop. It's repeatable, but the second player's actions are not truly canceling out the first player's actions or reaching a game state that's identical to an earlier game state; both players are adding more and more triggers to the stack. It just happens that in this case, the abilities would functionally cancel each other out if they eventually resolve. Does rule 716.3 still apply here if it's not truly a loop?

6+: Yes.
5 with P: Yes, because he was a creature when he went to the graveyard. Mimic Vat will check whether he was a creature when he was last on the battlefield.
Less than 5: No.

I'm only 99% sure of my answer though so a second opinion would be nice

Suppose I am playing a game in which I reach a board state where I am unkillable, but cannot win through damage. For instance, I have Glacial Chasm out and my opponent's only win condition is attacking with creatures (and he has no land destruction, etc.). My opponent can't harm me, but eventually the Chasm would kill me.

Since I want to win the game, I come up with a devilish scheme. I cast Lethal Vapors. Once it resolves, I activate the ability, retain priority, active it again and again, until I have skipped an arbitrarily large number of turns (say, 500). Then all the triggers resolve at once and I skip the next 500 turns. My opponent will be forced to just sit there drawing cards each turn and he will eventually deck himself, causing me to win the game.

However, suppose my opponent realizes that he can cancel out my turn-skipping by activating Lethal Vapors himself. After I announce that I am skipping 500 turns, I then must pass priority to him, and he activates the Vapors himself 500 times.

Not to be outdone, once he passes priority back I activate the Vapors 500 MORE times. He of course follows suit.

My question is: what happens? This is a potentially infinite loop, but it's a voluntary one and it's not automatic. We just both have incentive to keep adding to the stack. There's no reason for either of us to want to stop doing it.

Would the game end in a draw immediately because we both refuse to give in? Would it turn into a game of chicken, and whoever gets sick of it first will give up? Would we just keep adding trigger after trigger until time is called in the round? Is there a tournament or game rule that would force us to stop for some reason?

Why do so many people seem to like having their lands all the same? I like playing with lands that all have different art (though I still prefer not to use white-bordered or pre-8th edition lands). Having a variety seems more pleasing to me, especially in limited where you rarely have more than 1 or 2 copies of a single card in your deck anyway.

Well, assuming the designer was planning to have a lot of cards that interact with 1/1 creatures, it might have other applications.

But no, it probably isn't

I was thinking of "snow." There are cards that say "such and such becomes snow."

http://magiccards.info/query?q=o%3A%22becomes+snow%22&v=card&s=cname

But yeah, you would have to add the supertype in the rules, but that's much less problematic than altering how static effects work. It would just be snow 2.0.

The reason I didn't say "activate this ability only once each turn" is so that it WOULD work with new 1/1s entering. Since it's "become 4/4" instead of "get +3/+3," it's ok to activate it multiple times, since it won't stack. It basically lets you re-activate the ability any time a new 1/1 comes into play.

Actually, we would have to change it slightly to have that functionality, it occurs to me now, because currently, you'd have to wait until THREE new 1/1s came into play. I could make the second sentence "Activate this ability only if you control three or more 1/1 creatures, or if you have already activated this ability this turn."

There's still the problem that if some of your dudes die, leaving fewer than 3 guys, they don't shrink back down, as the original design would intend. I'm not sure how to get around that. There's also the problem of someone playing something like Lignify on one of your dudes, which in the original design ought to make the rest shrink back down (assuming there were exactly 3 before).

It's probably best to just redesign the card to have a related but not functionally equivalent effect

EDIT:

I thought of another thing that might work. You could create a new supertype or subtype or something. For example:

NAME
Blah blah blah
When ~ enters the battlefield, each 1/1 creature you control becomes Supertype.
Whenever a creature enters the battlefield under your control, if that creature is 1/1, it becomes Supertype.
Creatures you control get +3/+3 as long as you control three or more Supertype creatures.

This would still be slightly different from the original intended design, since it involves triggered abilities and other possibilities (such as pumping one of your guys and having NAME still work), but it's closer and cleaner than the previous iterations.