This came up in an EDH game and I was wondering what the official way to go about this would be. Someone has a combo, lets say earthcraft and squirrel nest, and then another person casts tyrant of discord targeting the player with the large amount of tokens. What is the best way of going about picking random permanents in this case?
Use some online random number generator, generate a random number between 1 and X, where X is the stated number of tokens plus all other permanents, then assign the lower values to all the nontokens and let the rest represent tokens? Or you could just say "I have a million tokens, it's mathematically unlikely that I'll have to sacrifice something that isn't a squirrel, can I just sacrifice a squirrel?"
Thank you for the reply, however this does not help. Tyrant of Discord: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Ca...ant+of+DiscordUse some online random number generator, generate a random number between 1 and X, where X is the stated number of tokens plus all other permanents, then assign the lower values to all the nontokens and let the rest represent tokens? Or you could just say "I have a million tokens, it's mathematically unlikely that I'll have to sacrifice something that isn't a squirrel, can I just sacrifice a squirrel?"
will repeat the random sacrifice process if the sacrificed permanent was a nonland one. So using an online random number generator still takes an insanely long amount of time. Just saying "its unlikely I will sacrifice a land" has to stop at a certain point, but who makes that decision? There is always the possibility that a land will get sacrificed while there is a large amount of squirrels, and in fact the more squirrels you have the better the chance of you sacrificing a land while there is still an insanely large amount of squirrels.
You can always put them all face down and let an innocent hand choose at random.
For EDH, write a program.
In competitive REL, if a gamestate occured where an ability could not be resolved in a timely manner, the game would likely be a draw by a judge.
“It's possible. But it involves... {checks archives} Nature's Revolt, Opalescence, two Unstable Shapeshifters (one of which started as a Doppelganger), a Tide, an animated land, a creature with Fading, a Silver Wyvern, some way to get a creature into play in response to stuff, some way to get a land into play in response to stuff (a different land from the animated land), and one heck of a Rube Goldberg timing diagram.”
-David DeLaney
I was curious about this, so I went ahead and wrote a program...Originally Posted by sippingcider
For 1 million squirrels and 7 lands, over 100 trials, on average 874,000 squirrels were left when a land was sacrificed.
For 4 lands, it was 800,800.
For 2 lands, 652,250.
For 1 land, 469,600.
So basically for any large amount of tokens, you will still have "a large amount" of tokens left when you randomly hit a land, no matter how many lands you have.
If you think of it as making a deck out of the permanents, and drawing until you hit a land, it's very easy to see that - on average - 1/(l+1) of the non-land permanents will go away.
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