Fair point, not illegal but unlikely to go un-penalized.
But the stack being empty has nothing to do with it according to the judges who have spoken on it. It is because you can't tell me what the board state looks like 13 loops in, in case I want to respond then. The board state advances in 4 horsemen, they just cant say how it will look. I don't think you can either.
What I mean when I say does not advance board state is this: The first time through the deck, they get out all of the Narcomoebas because they can mill past the eldrazi. They then shuffle and start the second time. In the second time they could see the three cards they want before the eldrazi. In this case, they cast Dread Return and finish. However, most of the time, they will see the eldrazi before all three cards they want. They then shuffle their deck again. At that point, they have done a bunch of actions without advancing the board state (after shuffling their deck, they milled a bunch of cards then shuffled their deck again). When I said it would be avoided if Dread Return were an instant, I meant they could mill their whole deck and cast Dread Return in response to the shuffle trigger, thereby ensuring that they advance game state. Repeatedly milling and shuffling is not considered an advancement, and it is what usually happens in 4 horsemen.
What you do is you explain the mechanics of how the combo functions, then show your entire deck to them (since the GY is a public zone). From there, you show Kozilek in your deck, thereby proceeding to explain that you intend to do this infinitely until you have enough on-draw triggers on whatever you're trying to draw for, or play infinite Dark Rituals into Exsanguinate, or whatever have you. If they do not then concede, they can be called out for slow play because they are prompting you to do this and refusing to acknowledge the motions of this combo and that it will inevitably get them.
It all boils down to communication. Or is that not how that could work?
~Lil Kalki
I do not know enough about the rules for shortcutting, but would be interested in an answer to this.
Can you shortcut if you do not know the intermediate states? Can you shortcut if your opponent does not understand the loop?
I am suspicious that the shortcut cannot be performed unless the intermediate states are exact. Though determinate, the best we can say about the loop is that it will fall within a range of possibilities. After 20 iterations, I can guarantee to have between X and Y draw triggers, where X and Y depend on the number of lands in your deck. Also, I cannot know if I will ever have exactly 0 cards in my deck, which my opponent may want to respond to. Because of this, I am betting that it cannot be shortcut. Seems like it would not give sufficient opportunity to respond to a particular situation. If the opponent has no responses, they could probably just request to go to the next game to avoid wasting time, but I think it is still up to them to decide.
If people are sick of reading about stuff just stop taking part. You have 100% control over what you read. Simic Ascendancy isn't going to get banned just because you didn't tell someone to shut up on the internet.
Good luck with that. Be prepared for a slow play call to a judge.
Did some reading about definitions for slow play, and you are right that this particular one seems like an edge case.
If you take the rules in the most literal sense, you cannot state the exact number of iterations because it varies slightly based on the order of your deck.
However, it is within the spirit of the rules, since it is always approaching a winning state and never repeating a previous one.
Will have to ask some judges for their opinions.
I dont think you can shortcut this one, mainly because is not a loop, you don't do the same actions time after time a finite number of times.
When you are shortcutting an inf combo normally you say something like "this is the combo ok? now ill do it 1000000 times", here you don't really know the number of times you need to perform the actions to get to the state you need to win the game.
Hello,
I've been playing with Gitrog as my commander for a while now, so naturally I came upon this combo a while back. I added it to my build because it's hecka cool, but also because I want a way to be able to win in one turn when it seems like there's no way I win. Opponents don't love it when I just go straight for this combo (for some of the same reasons that it's not super fun to watch your opponent play magic when they're on storm, along with the simple fact that it's very difficult and not necessarily fun to understand the combo itself and the determinacy in a casual game), and frankly I don't love going straight for it either; I'd rather have an awesome game of EDH than flip through my deck while my opponent watches miserably.
But whether I should include the combo is for another thread.
mazeTemporal, I really appreciate this thread, and that you've taken the time to go through the work of doing the maths. For the past few days this combo has been in the back of my mind, and sometimes I'll think of something that I think proves it non-deterministic, but then I'll realize how to work out the scenario in a way that works.
I'm having some trouble easily reading the flowchart algorithm, I think simply because I haven't examined it closely enough, but my assertion is that I think that it could be displayed in such a way that would be easier to understand. I don't know exactly what this is, so I realize it's sort of lame of me to just say that, but I think that if we can come up with a simpler way to explain all aspects of the combo, then it might help opponents in real-game situations. Maybe that's silly actually, because we have to prove that it works thoroughly....
Ok the crossed out section at the bottom of my post is something that just made me think of a scenario that I don't understand.
What do you do when:
T = 0
All cards in deck are X, K, L, L, and L respectively (the 3 lands are on the bottom)
Also lets say that the rest of your cards are exiled from all other zones except for the combo pieces on the battlefield and the Dakmor in hand to simplify.
A scenario that my thought experiments over the last few days have led me to is this:
Odd number of cards in Deck >= 5
T = 0
L in Deck = 3
The bottom five cards are X, K, L, L, and L respectively
In plain english, this is a scenario in which the last card, a land, will have to be drawn with a shuffle trigger on the stack. Once the shuffle is performed, to continue the combo you must discard the land card and draw a card; if you draw into one of the two remaining land cards, then you discard that land as well, and then if you draw the last land you discard that too. [Here's where I realize I'm wrong and start writing the other thing].
The combo is very non-deterministic. We do not know the order of the cards and it will influence how things happen. We do know though that after some number of steps, we get to draw all of our cards though.
The part you were doing wrong in the crossed out part was that you let the draw trigger from your additional land resolve. You should just discard the land and then continue with the draw trigger on stack.
In more details: Just after the reshuffle, you are sitting there with salvage and a random land in hand. You discard the random land, putting a draw a card trigger on stack. You then, in response, repeatedly dredge salvage until you put kozi into the gy. In case there are any draw triggers before dredging Kozi, you put them on stack and then dredge more. After having dredged Kozi, you let his trigger resolve. You are now back to the situration where you had 5 cards in deck (with 3 lands), BUT you also have at least one draw a card trigger on stack. You then just do this repeatedly until you have at least 5 draw triggers on stack and at this point you let them resolve one at a time and discard kozi whenever you would draw from an empty library. Note that in the worst case, you need 2 reshuffles for 1 draw.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
"Hail to the speaker, hail to the knower; joy to he who has understood, delight to they who have listened." - Odin
Oh of course!!
Thank you, that clarifies how to get out of that loop.
I think that the PDF maybe should be updated to include something about when you need to discard a random land and leave the draw trigger on the stack?
Perhaps I'm just reading it wrong.
Contrary to what you said, I believe that the combo is technically deterministic (maybe it's just "determinate"??), in the sense that when you do everything correctly, it is guaranteed to work with a finite number of actions, but it it not short-cuttable because the intermediate steps are unknown.
This is what I learned months ago but last night I confused myself by making the scenario I wrote. Glad I can rest assured that it works as I thought.
Could you walk me through the 2 shuffles for 1 draw case?
Oh of course!!
Thank you, that clarifies how to get out of that loop.
I think that the PDF maybe should be updated to include something about when you need to discard a random land and leave the draw trigger on the stack?
Perhaps I'm just reading it wrong.
Contrary to what you said, I believe that the combo is technically deterministic (maybe it's just "determinate"??), in the sense that when you do everything correctly, it is guaranteed to work with a finite number of actions, but it it not short-cuttable because the intermediate steps are unknown.
This is what I learned months ago but last night I confused myself by making the scenario I wrote. Glad I can rest assured that it works as I thought.
Could you walk me through the 2 shuffles for 1 draw case?
Thanks very much,
CT
Ok, basically, the 2 shuffles for 1 draw happens if it goes XKLLL (using your notation), followed by XKLL. This will, following the prescribed choices, give you 1 draw every second time. (You can replace XK with KX and get the same problem, but besides those in all other cases you draw more than one over 2 shuffles).
I gave a short description of how to do it in my second post in this thread.
I'm hesitant to agree about whether the combo is deterministic. I know that classically non-deterministic loops like the four horsemen and the example used [url=https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-rulings/magic-rulings-archives/647157-stopping-an-infinite-loop-when-certain-conditions]here[/url] aren't ok, and I get that you cannot shortcut this Gitrog loop because you don't know the intermediate steps, but the definition of deterministic says "A deterministic model will thus always produce the same output from a given starting condition or initial state", and this combo will do that if we treat the end goal as the output. That definition says that there can be no randomness in development or future states of the system, but I think that in this context the definition can be modified to only regard a guaranteed end result. Maybe there is a better word to describe the difference between four horsemen style loops and this one, but since this is the word that we've been using on this thread (and also the word they use here=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_249jkteUaQ]here[/url], which is a deck tech with Leptys, who used the combo in the [url=https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveEDH]r/CompetitiveEDH[/url] tournament).
Even if it is the wrong word, what it comes down to is whether you can be called for slow play. I don't think you should be called for slow play for this, but from what I've read slow play is fairly ambiguous and it ends up being up to the individual judge. So even though we are guaranteed to advance the game state we might still be called? I'm not sure.
What you highlight as the definition is an easy consequence of it. The actual definition was earlier: a deterministic system is a system in which no randomness is involved in the development of future states of the system. You can see that the part you highlighted was not the definition because of the word “thus”. It is clear that this combo contain a lot of randomness and it is thus not deterministic.
It is a bit wierd thing to argue about as you also point out in that the definition of shutcut does not talk about whether it is deterministic.
One of the problems for this combo is rule 702.2a, which says in part: (a shutcut) can’t include conditional actions, where the outcome of a game event determines the next action a player takes. There is no way to avoid using condtional actions for this combo.
What I mean when I say does not advance board state is this: The first time through the deck, they get out all of the Narcomoebas because they can mill past the eldrazi. They then shuffle and start the second time. In the second time they could see the three cards they want before the eldrazi. In this case, they cast Dread Return and finish. However, most of the time, they will see the eldrazi before all three cards they want. They then shuffle their deck again. At that point, they have done a bunch of actions without advancing the board state (after shuffling their deck, they milled a bunch of cards then shuffled their deck again). When I said it would be avoided if Dread Return were an instant, I meant they could mill their whole deck and cast Dread Return in response to the shuffle trigger, thereby ensuring that they advance game state. Repeatedly milling and shuffling is not considered an advancement, and it is what usually happens in 4 horsemen.
I do not know enough about the rules for shortcutting, but would be interested in an answer to this.
Can you shortcut if you do not know the intermediate states? Can you shortcut if your opponent does not understand the loop?
I am suspicious that the shortcut cannot be performed unless the intermediate states are exact. Though determinate, the best we can say about the loop is that it will fall within a range of possibilities. After 20 iterations, I can guarantee to have between X and Y draw triggers, where X and Y depend on the number of lands in your deck. Also, I cannot know if I will ever have exactly 0 cards in my deck, which my opponent may want to respond to. Because of this, I am betting that it cannot be shortcut. Seems like it would not give sufficient opportunity to respond to a particular situation. If the opponent has no responses, they could probably just request to go to the next game to avoid wasting time, but I think it is still up to them to decide.
Did some reading about definitions for slow play, and you are right that this particular one seems like an edge case.
If you take the rules in the most literal sense, you cannot state the exact number of iterations because it varies slightly based on the order of your deck.
However, it is within the spirit of the rules, since it is always approaching a winning state and never repeating a previous one.
Will have to ask some judges for their opinions.
When you are shortcutting an inf combo normally you say something like "this is the combo ok? now ill do it 1000000 times", here you don't really know the number of times you need to perform the actions to get to the state you need to win the game.
I've been playing with Gitrog as my commander for a while now, so naturally I came upon this combo a while back. I added it to my build because it's hecka cool, but also because I want a way to be able to win in one turn when it seems like there's no way I win. Opponents don't love it when I just go straight for this combo (for some of the same reasons that it's not super fun to watch your opponent play magic when they're on storm, along with the simple fact that it's very difficult and not necessarily fun to understand the combo itself and the determinacy in a casual game), and frankly I don't love going straight for it either; I'd rather have an awesome game of EDH than flip through my deck while my opponent watches miserably.
But whether I should include the combo is for another thread.
mazeTemporal, I really appreciate this thread, and that you've taken the time to go through the work of doing the maths. For the past few days this combo has been in the back of my mind, and sometimes I'll think of something that I think proves it non-deterministic, but then I'll realize how to work out the scenario in a way that works.
I'm having some trouble easily reading the flowchart algorithm, I think simply because I haven't examined it closely enough, but my assertion is that I think that it could be displayed in such a way that would be easier to understand. I don't know exactly what this is, so I realize it's sort of lame of me to just say that, but I think that if we can come up with a simpler way to explain all aspects of the combo, then it might help opponents in real-game situations. Maybe that's silly actually, because we have to prove that it works thoroughly....
Ok the crossed out section at the bottom of my post is something that just made me think of a scenario that I don't understand.
What do you do when:
T = 0
All cards in deck are X, K, L, L, and L respectively (the 3 lands are on the bottom)
Also lets say that the rest of your cards are exiled from all other zones except for the combo pieces on the battlefield and the Dakmor in hand to simplify.
What prevents this loop that would make the combo non-deterministic?
https://mega.nz/#!2SI2XQjD!mKTpM4GhV6wYJCGPbdfyn5N588lFhMa3qTmxu4PHrls
I may have missed something in the "special case" section.
I really really hope I'm wrong and it's deterministic.
Here are some links that I used in my research of this combo and of rules (the judge blog one is quite outdated, but I believe the rules are similar now....):
Deck tech: https://youtu.be/_249jkteUaQ
Slow play rules: https://blogs.magicjudges.org/articles/2012/12/25/slow-play
Thanks very much y'all,
CT
A scenario that my thought experiments over the last few days have led me to is this:
Odd number of cards in Deck >= 5
T = 0
L in Deck = 3
The bottom five cards are X, K, L, L, and L respectively
In plain english, this is a scenario in which the last card, a land, will have to be drawn with a shuffle trigger on the stack. Once the shuffle is performed, to continue the combo you must discard the land card and draw a card; if you draw into one of the two remaining land cards, then you discard that land as well, and then if you draw the last land you discard that too. [Here's where I realize I'm wrong and start writing the other thing].
The part you were doing wrong in the crossed out part was that you let the draw trigger from your additional land resolve. You should just discard the land and then continue with the draw trigger on stack.
In more details: Just after the reshuffle, you are sitting there with salvage and a random land in hand. You discard the random land, putting a draw a card trigger on stack. You then, in response, repeatedly dredge salvage until you put kozi into the gy. In case there are any draw triggers before dredging Kozi, you put them on stack and then dredge more. After having dredged Kozi, you let his trigger resolve. You are now back to the situration where you had 5 cards in deck (with 3 lands), BUT you also have at least one draw a card trigger on stack. You then just do this repeatedly until you have at least 5 draw triggers on stack and at this point you let them resolve one at a time and discard kozi whenever you would draw from an empty library. Note that in the worst case, you need 2 reshuffles for 1 draw.
Thank you, that clarifies how to get out of that loop.
I think that the PDF maybe should be updated to include something about when you need to discard a random land and leave the draw trigger on the stack?
Perhaps I'm just reading it wrong.
Contrary to what you said, I believe that the combo is technically deterministic (maybe it's just "determinate"??), in the sense that when you do everything correctly, it is guaranteed to work with a finite number of actions, but it it not short-cuttable because the intermediate steps are unknown.
This is what I learned months ago but last night I confused myself by making the scenario I wrote. Glad I can rest assured that it works as I thought.
Could you walk me through the 2 shuffles for 1 draw case?
Thanks very much,
CT
Ok, basically, the 2 shuffles for 1 draw happens if it goes XKLLL (using your notation), followed by XKLL. This will, following the prescribed choices, give you 1 draw every second time. (You can replace XK with KX and get the same problem, but besides those in all other cases you draw more than one over 2 shuffles).
I gave a short description of how to do it in my second post in this thread.
The typical definition of determinism in cases such as this is this one:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterministic_system
Which suggests that the combo is not deterministic.
I'm hesitant to agree about whether the combo is deterministic. I know that classically non-deterministic loops like the four horsemen and the example used [url=https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-rulings/magic-rulings-archives/647157-stopping-an-infinite-loop-when-certain-conditions]here[/url] aren't ok, and I get that you cannot shortcut this Gitrog loop because you don't know the intermediate steps, but the definition of deterministic says "A deterministic model will thus always produce the same output from a given starting condition or initial state", and this combo will do that if we treat the end goal as the output. That definition says that there can be no randomness in development or future states of the system, but I think that in this context the definition can be modified to only regard a guaranteed end result. Maybe there is a better word to describe the difference between four horsemen style loops and this one, but since this is the word that we've been using on this thread (and also the word they use here=https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_249jkteUaQ]here[/url], which is a deck tech with Leptys, who used the combo in the [url=https://www.reddit.com/r/CompetitiveEDH]r/CompetitiveEDH[/url] tournament).
Even if it is the wrong word, what it comes down to is whether you can be called for slow play. I don't think you should be called for slow play for this, but from what I've read slow play is fairly ambiguous and it ends up being up to the individual judge. So even though we are guaranteed to advance the game state we might still be called? I'm not sure.
Thanks again,
CT
*EDIT
what is happening with my links lol
It is a bit wierd thing to argue about as you also point out in that the definition of shutcut does not talk about whether it is deterministic.
One of the problems for this combo is rule 702.2a, which says in part: (a shutcut) can’t include conditional actions, where the outcome of a game event determines the next action a player takes. There is no way to avoid using condtional actions for this combo.