After a few quick searches, I couldn't find an answer to this question. I ask because I was brewing some jank and tested volcano hellion with lifelink. The way it should work is I target the hellion for any number I want and that number should be the amount of life I gain. The first time I picked 10,000 and my life became 69. The second time I chose 999 and my life became 126.
Is this a bug with the card itself, or does mtgo have some rule against high life totals?
Since no one has responded for a few days, I'm going to assume it's a bug with the card and not an intended effect of MTGO to keep life totals from getting arbitrarily high.
I don't know if Wizards has ever explicitly said there is a limit, but there most likely is. Seeing some of Saffron Olive's (Seth at MTG Goldfish) videos, that limit appears to be 200 for Volcano Hellion (he did something similar with Hellion, Pariah, and Stuffy Doll). When he chose 10,000 as his number, he only dealt 200 damage to his opponent.
Interestingly, there is also (apparently) a limit on the number of tokens that can be produced. He was running a deck that was meant to create a draw by creating an unending loop of tokens. In paper, it would have been a draw, but on MTGO, the loop automatically stopped at 100 or 200.
Another example is mana in the mana pool. After getting high enough, Doubling Cube stops doubling mana.
This honestly makes sense as Wizards programmers don't want to allow the application to crash due to an infinite loop and I am sure the limit on life totals are due to preventing overflow errors. I do think they set their limits fairly low but having limits makes sense.
Yup, I've brewed that deck though haven't picked it up for a while. iirc if you type in anything higher than 254 it doesn't accept it, but you can type in 254 and then hit the up arrow as many times as you like! I can understand the token limit and how it could make the interface unwieldy, but I wish max life would be like 9999
Is this a bug with the card itself, or does mtgo have some rule against high life totals?
Interestingly, there is also (apparently) a limit on the number of tokens that can be produced. He was running a deck that was meant to create a draw by creating an unending loop of tokens. In paper, it would have been a draw, but on MTGO, the loop automatically stopped at 100 or 200.
Another example is mana in the mana pool. After getting high enough, Doubling Cube stops doubling mana.
This honestly makes sense as Wizards programmers don't want to allow the application to crash due to an infinite loop and I am sure the limit on life totals are due to preventing overflow errors. I do think they set their limits fairly low but having limits makes sense.
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