...which is what a "time limit" is, and why the judge's ruling is right.
However, the borrowing of "choose N" in the foundation of Magic prevents anyone, including judges, from being able to talk about things as 0% vs. 100%. By definition it's arbitrary.
This is one scenario where the practical limitations of magic, in this case time limits, contradict what is otherwise a natural conclusion, and that's just part of the game.
So I guess the moral here is that if you have a sorcery speed combo deck (and no way to continue comboing in response to a Blessing trigger like Solidarity), just kill with Tendrils or Grapeshot. I mean really, you're already supportingfor Doomsday, is it that hard to just use Tendrils?
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Originally Posted by Slay
(Warning: the following is both academic and nitpicking)
Time limits and "choose N" are two entirely unrelated rules (to prove this, observe that only the latter applies in the finals of a Pro Tour).
The "choose N" rule was introduced to handle problems such as an infinite damage combo squaring off vs. an infinite pump combo, not to stop games from lasting until the end of the Universe.
YOU'RE GIVING ME A TIME MACHINE IN ORDER TO TREAT MY SLEEP DISORDER.
I know that is why it was chosen, but the rule has many other implications. In this case, it directly prevents the storm player from winning specifically because of time limits.
He can choose any number of loops that he wants to, but he only gets the result out of as many as he gets to execute. Given unlimited time, the chance of him not getting it can be as arbitrarily close to zero as he wants, which academically is the definition of two things being equal.
I agree with Machinus, if there was no time limit it should be allowed, because getting something arbitrarily close to 0 is the same as 0. It basically breaks down to the definition of distinct numbers (being that you need to be able to find a number in between for two numbers to be distinct). Its the same kinda thing that says Point 9 Repeating (PNR) is equal to 1, .00000000 (infinite) 00X equals 0 in the same sense, I think. But since judges dont accept this and there is a time limit, just use Grapeshot I guess.
I just got an e-mail on an associated topic (I am an MtG Rules Advisor, so I get these sometimes):
Here is the question:
Suppose player A has somehow gained a lot of life and is currently at
> 1000000 life. Now player B plays the Reiterate + Seething Song + Cloud
> Key / Locket of Yesterday combo and decides to play Ignite Memories for
> *just* 1000000 copies.
>
> Consider if player A is holding
> 1. 5 spells
> 2. 5 lands
> 3. 5 high cmc spells and 1 land
> 4. something like 2 lands and a spell with cmc 3
>
> I think the answer is quite obvious for 1 and 2, but are there any rules
> for handling such cases?
To which Andy Heckt said:
Probability of a result is not usuable to resolve loops. Either its 100%
certain, or impossible to do using a loop.
In this case it definitely means that you MUST continue until either time runs out or someone wins.
Edit:
There is more:
Player A has won game one of a three game match. Game 2 is currently
in progress with 30 minutes remaining to complete the match. Player
A has 10,000 life. Player B performs the aforementioned Ignite
Memories combo 50,000 times. Player A is holding 3 cards with CMC 4
and one land and thus have a high probability of losing.
Since a loop cannot be used to resolve the stack, if Player A refuses
to concede, is he stalling? Can a judge issue a warning and simply
issue a game loss? What if he's holding five lands and one card with
CMC 4?
The answer:
The most common/infamous is the nearly-infinite milling vs. Gaea's Blessing
debate from the first week of July 2005 (and some number of other reruns
that have occurred since).
"What if he's holding five lands and..." - no change to the answer,
because it doesn't change the certainty. The addition of that "wrinkle"
also doesn't really add much to the things we need to learn from this
scenario, which are:
* Judges can not force players to make a specific sort of play, neither
to break a loop nor to win a game (or lose it). Judges can maintain the
pace of play, and progressing through this loop can go quickly - but
probably not quickly enough to resolve 50,000 copies of Ignite Memories.
* If a series of repeated actions contains only certainties, it can be
handled via the loop rules; if there's any chance of a different
outcome, then the loop rules do not apply.
* Oddball scenarios like this rarely happen in real life; they usually
only exist in the minds of devious judges (like me).
Oh, and: no, this is not a topic for debate; the decision has long since
been stated - and now repeated, above.
The emphasis is mine.
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This scenario is meaningless to Magic and not worth discussing. Time limits will always exist because the players could end up dying before the desired gamestate is reached. Suppose your opponent is a terminally ill cancer patient and the doctors say that he has less than six months to live but could pass away at any time. Are you going to call a judge over and argue that, given an unlimited amount of time (or even just six months), your opponent will be unable to continue the match and thus we should 'jump in time' to that gamestate and declare you the winner? Just because the odds of him being dead increase over time toward 100%, the judge isn't going to rule that your opponent is a corpse until it actually happens. He'll sit and make you play your match out and occasionally check to see if your opponent has kicked the bucket.
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Who started to count every calorie
Said her boss in disgust,
'If you lose half your bust
then you'll only be worth half your salary.'
I already stated that the judges ruling is correct. You would see exactly why that point is important if you read this thread more carefully.
This is flagrantly bullshit. It's not stalling when you're playing as fast as reasonably possible to a clear goal (the right stack that lets you kill your opponent). You might as well say it's stalling to attack an opponent with a hundred+ life. How the Hell do you justify calling the action that lets a person win the game stalling? I'm boggled by this and alarmed that it's coming from a judge.
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
Suffice to say that people much better at math than you had input into the ruling. I've seen more than enough about it over the years, I don't argue about it.
You are not advancing the state of the game in any manner - you are likely to be repeating the same things over and over, with little to no difference in the game after 30 seconds. Your goals are irrelevent. Attacking advances the state of the game - a life total is changing, phases are changing, turns are being taken, etc. You will hear this from every informed judge - it's fairly basic application of policy.
“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'd be very surprised if this were true. Regardless, I'm still correct.
I call bullshit yet again. It is not certain that you will be able to kill an opponent with this action, just like it is not certain that attacking will do me any good against an opponent with four hundred life, but it's still part of my plan for winning.
When I let Brain Freeze stack after Brain Freeze stack resolve, I am working towards a clear and definable goal of getting the random shuffle that will cause my opponent to fucking die. And given the nature of the deck, that's pretty much my only way left of winning anyhow. How the Hell can you argue with a straight face that trying to kill the opponent is stalling?
For my confessions, they burned me with fire/
And found I was for endurance made
he is correct, you are basically fighting Xeno's paradox. Given an infinite number of recursive steps, you approach the asymptote of 100% and buy Newton's law, it becomes 100% (thats why we can walk). So therefor there is a 100% chance that is will happen over a infinite storm count.
The problem is that we do NOT have infinite storm. Also each shuffle is an independent action. This means that the previous results play no effect of future effects (in the math world, where you are venturing to try and make your case). This is because each action, does not change the possible outcomes of the future events.
This means that over time, (not infinite time) there is only the given % chance of it happening, which is (deck #)/3^(deck #).
This means you have no way to make sure this event will happen, and thus you must play it out, and there for lose, since the likly hood of it happening in the allotted time are very slim.
and BTW, i play doomsday, and Wasted Life is right...
Grapeshot > Brain Freeze
Quoting myself since the question seems to have been ignored. To Akki and other judges: would you allow this shortcut in your games?
YOU'RE GIVING ME A TIME MACHINE IN ORDER TO TREAT MY SLEEP DISORDER.
No. A) You don't know how many Blessings are in the deck, and your opponent is not obliged (nor should he be) to tell you. B) There are never (or at least, very rarely) 60 cards in a library. C) Brain Freeze does not say "Roll a D60. If the result is 1, 2, or 3, win the game."
With the number of posts made, I think you can forgive one being overlooked.
That would not be acceptable. Rolling dice is done for actual random effects (like choosing a random card in hand), not for situations that might seem effectively random like yours. The other cards in the deck do matter, even if they don't to you. Policy is not to try to "model" any situation like this.
Skipping shuffles on cards like Mind's Desire is completely different and unrelated - if the deck is randomized, you don't need to keep re-shuffling it.
“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
If I chose to make 10,000 copies of Brainfreeze, I have that right as a player. You can't as a judge tell me that the number I chose is too large because it's a judgement call for however much I think I need. Just because it intervenes with the amount of time you have allotted me to take during this round does not mean that I have to let it affect my decisions in game. That is an intelligence check on a player, and thusly, you can't make it. I may not know the number of cards in his library, or that it is in my right to ask. I could possibly not know that there are 60 cards in a library by being a newer player, or what if I actually had dimentia and thought there were 6,000 cards in my opponents library? You could go so far as to say so many things based on a lack of playskill.Personally, I would allow no more than 30 seconds (a quick standard for slow play). The number of Blessings in the deck is irrelevant.
You shouldn't being able to infer to a player what the correct number on a loop may be, so if I actually think that I need 10,000 Brainfreezes, you can't tell me I don't.
Basically, I'm putting 10,000 brainfreezes on the stack. So now, don't I have to play them all out? And being that the result could possibly win or lose me the game if I get lucky (Or unlucky) enough, isn't it my right to continue doing so? Wouldn't you stopping me from resolving the affects on the stack be benefitting my opponent in an unfair way, so unfair in fact that it could be stopping me from winning after only one more shuffle?
You're complicating the situation needlessly. If you mill for 30 secs, even in a deck with Battle of Wits (the largest reasonable deck size in a tournament, which is the only scenario where this matters), you have plenty of time to see if they have Gaea's Blessing or not. If not, they will have milled the library. If so, then the situation becomes more complex, and the "loop" fails in the eyes of the rules. It absolutely is at the judge's discretion as to how long you're allowed to eat clock time with this combo.
so a judge can come over and rule (to the doomsday player)
"those 99999980 (the first 20 or so were used to go through lib once and find a blessing) brainfreezes you have on the stack only give you a very small chance of winning before time runs out, but they will waste a lot of time, so we're just gonna take them off the stack and assume that you never got his library to stack the perfect way"
but a judge can NOT come over and rule (to the opponent)
"those 999999980 brainfreezes give you a very small chance of surviving this game, and it would be a waste of time to try to resolve them one at a time, so lets just take them off the stack and assume that one of them stacked your deck the right way for you to lose."
what's the difference?
in both cases the judge is saying to the players that this small chance of achieving something (win or loss) is not worth the time it will waste to actualy get to it.
as for advancing the game state, ofcourse resolving the stacked brainfreezes is advancing the game state, its taking spells off the stack. there isnt some rule somewhere that sais a player isnt allowed to take more then X minutes for a single phase (cause if there was solidarity as a deck would be banned).
Appealing to math when you say 'in an infinite number of actions' is not a good way to make an argument.
The probability of getting three particular cards at the bottom of an n-card deck in a particular shuffle is:
6/(n*(n-1)*(n-2))
For a 48 card deck, that works out to 1/17,296 chance that it will happen per shuffle, so a few million brainfreezes should be sufficient.
However, it's very unlikely to occur within the amount of time allowed for a game. In addition physical shuffling has issues.
Actually, there are in-game events triggered by shuffles (Psychogenic Probe), or something like Lantern of Insight which reveals the top card of the library could be in play and would force the shuffle.
Of course, the structure of shuffling in the rules does allow both players to just tap the deck, and doing anything else (barring conditions) might qualify as stalling.
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