If a player holds priority and puts 1,000 instances of Frenetic Efreet's activated ability on the stack and then starts flipping. We know a shortcut cannot be taken, so eventually the player will receive warnings for slow play. How do you resolve the ~980 instances of the ability that are still on the stack?
Do you back up the game and remove them?
Just remove them at the current game state?
Let them play out until the player gets enough slow play warnings to warrant a game loss?
The very first resolution of the Efreet's ability will result in it leaving the battlefield one way or the other (either phase-ville or the graveyard), so why would the outcome of the remaining coinflips matter?
If a player holds priority and puts 1,000 instances of Frenetic Efreet's activated ability on the stack and then starts flipping. We know a shortcut cannot be taken, so eventually the player will receive warnings for slow play. How do you resolve the ~980 instances of the ability that are still on the stack?
Do you back up the game and remove them?
Just remove them at the current game state?
Let them play out until the player gets enough slow play warnings to warrant a game loss?
Some other option not listed?
d)
In almost all imaginable cases, this situation is easy to resolve quickly. Just roll a handful of dice, treating odd as "win the flip" and even as "lose the flip", and repeat until you have the necessary number of "win the flip"s. Typically this won't take long, because typically you won't need a very high number of successes, and once that number has been reached the rest of the flips can just be ignored.
For Chance Encounter, for instance, you really only need ten wins, or maybe 20 to protect against some random single-counter removal, so once that number is reached, we can simply pretend that the rest of the flips lose, and skip all ten million of them. And if your opponent can remove 20 counters from Chance Encounter, chances are he can also remove 100 or 1.000.000 counters, so continuing to flip after you have "enough" counters is pointless.
The only situation where the actual number of flips won is relevant is in a contrived setup like in the other thread, where the opponent can remove an arbitrarily large, but finite, amount of counters from Chance Encounter. And I'll worry about that situation when it actually happens in a tournament (i.e. probably never). Outside of a tournament, I'd just say "yeah, Efreet player can almost certainly put more counters on than the opponent can remove, so I'd say that Efreet wins".
In almost all imaginable cases, this situation is easy to resolve quickly. Just roll a handful of dice, treating odd as "win the flip" and even as "lose the flip", and repeat until you have the necessary number of "win the flip"s. Typically this won't take long, because typically you won't need a very high number of successes, and once that number has been reached the rest of the flips can just be ignored.
For Chance Encounter, for instance, you really only need ten wins, or maybe 20 to protect against some random single-counter removal, so once that number is reached, we can simply pretend that the rest of the flips lose, and skip all ten million of them. And if your opponent can remove 20 counters from Chance Encounter, chances are he can also remove 100 or 1.000.000 counters, so continuing to flip after you have "enough" counters is pointless.
The only situation where the actual number of flips won is relevant is in a contrived setup like in the other thread, where the opponent can remove an arbitrarily large, but finite, amount of counters from Chance Encounter. And I'll worry about that situation when it actually happens in a tournament (i.e. probably never). Outside of a tournament, I'd just say "yeah, Efreet player can almost certainly put more counters on than the opponent can remove, so I'd say that Efreet wins".
The Frenetic Efreet example is quite contrived, but this situation has come up in actual tournaments with actual competitive decks. The best example would be Vintage Worldgorger Dragon vs. Vintage Oath of about 5-7 years ago. The Dragon decks generated infinite mana and milled their deck with the combo + Bazaar of Baghdad, moved Animate Dead to Ambassador Laquatus, milled their opponent's library out, then cast Deep Analysis from their graveyard for the kill.
The issue was that the Oath decks played Gaea's Blessing, which would prevent this kill unless the Blessing ended up in the bottom X cards of the deck after an iteration of milling and shuffling, where X would vary based on the number of Deep Analysis the Dragon player was running, how much life they had left, how many they'd flashbacked up to that point, and the amount of cards left in the opponent's deck mod 3. Three left meant generally meant a win if the Blessing got left in the bottom six, two left was bottom four, one left was bottom two. Even those numbers could change if the remaining library was not a multiple of 3, for example with 47 cards remaining the blessing would need to be in the bottom 5 even with 3 Deep Analysis, as Laquatus could only mill 3 at a time.
How unlikely does the outcome have to be until trying to iterate to it constitutes slow play? I don't think anyone's ever answered this.
How unlikely does the outcome have to be until trying to iterate to it constitutes slow play? I don't think anyone's ever answered this.
Well you can at least try for like 1-2 minutes (at least thats how it was managed in tournaments i attended).
However, you cant shortcut any of these problematic combos, so at some point you simply had to stop, if you wanted or not.
Next turn you would give it another shot if you could, but again, stay in time ; its not a good solution, but to some degree persons were fine with that as it was still reasonable fast (like a storm deck trying to go off every turn, also takes crap ton of time).
If the outcome after a given iterations is not certain, then you run into slow play territory. And even more so if your loop contains a "reset", like the Four Horsemen deck did. In your example under current tournament rules, the Worldgorger deck could essentially try one round of milling the Oath deck, hoping they are lucky and hit the perfect alignment of Blessings; as soon as they mill a Blessing and the Oath library resets, the Worldgorger player cannot restart his mill loop.
In a very strict sense, in the Frenetic Efreet plus Chance Encounter example, you also cannot predict the exact details of the game state after a given number of resolutions, but for all practical purposes it makes no difference whether there are 15 or 15 million counters on Chance Encounter, so for all practical purposes those two states are identical. And since it's easy and quick to roll 30 or 40 dice in batches of five or six, I see no problem there.
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d)
In almost all imaginable cases, this situation is easy to resolve quickly. Just roll a handful of dice, treating odd as "win the flip" and even as "lose the flip", and repeat until you have the necessary number of "win the flip"s. Typically this won't take long, because typically you won't need a very high number of successes, and once that number has been reached the rest of the flips can just be ignored.
For Chance Encounter, for instance, you really only need ten wins, or maybe 20 to protect against some random single-counter removal, so once that number is reached, we can simply pretend that the rest of the flips lose, and skip all ten million of them. And if your opponent can remove 20 counters from Chance Encounter, chances are he can also remove 100 or 1.000.000 counters, so continuing to flip after you have "enough" counters is pointless.
The only situation where the actual number of flips won is relevant is in a contrived setup like in the other thread, where the opponent can remove an arbitrarily large, but finite, amount of counters from Chance Encounter. And I'll worry about that situation when it actually happens in a tournament (i.e. probably never). Outside of a tournament, I'd just say "yeah, Efreet player can almost certainly put more counters on than the opponent can remove, so I'd say that Efreet wins".
The Frenetic Efreet example is quite contrived, but this situation has come up in actual tournaments with actual competitive decks. The best example would be Vintage Worldgorger Dragon vs. Vintage Oath of about 5-7 years ago. The Dragon decks generated infinite mana and milled their deck with the combo + Bazaar of Baghdad, moved Animate Dead to Ambassador Laquatus, milled their opponent's library out, then cast Deep Analysis from their graveyard for the kill.
The issue was that the Oath decks played Gaea's Blessing, which would prevent this kill unless the Blessing ended up in the bottom X cards of the deck after an iteration of milling and shuffling, where X would vary based on the number of Deep Analysis the Dragon player was running, how much life they had left, how many they'd flashbacked up to that point, and the amount of cards left in the opponent's deck mod 3. Three left meant generally meant a win if the Blessing got left in the bottom six, two left was bottom four, one left was bottom two. Even those numbers could change if the remaining library was not a multiple of 3, for example with 47 cards remaining the blessing would need to be in the bottom 5 even with 3 Deep Analysis, as Laquatus could only mill 3 at a time.
How unlikely does the outcome have to be until trying to iterate to it constitutes slow play? I don't think anyone's ever answered this.
Well you can at least try for like 1-2 minutes (at least thats how it was managed in tournaments i attended).
However, you cant shortcut any of these problematic combos, so at some point you simply had to stop, if you wanted or not.
Next turn you would give it another shot if you could, but again, stay in time ; its not a good solution, but to some degree persons were fine with that as it was still reasonable fast (like a storm deck trying to go off every turn, also takes crap ton of time).
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In a very strict sense, in the Frenetic Efreet plus Chance Encounter example, you also cannot predict the exact details of the game state after a given number of resolutions, but for all practical purposes it makes no difference whether there are 15 or 15 million counters on Chance Encounter, so for all practical purposes those two states are identical. And since it's easy and quick to roll 30 or 40 dice in batches of five or six, I see no problem there.