Ok, lets suppose I am useing tops and Thrumming Stone to ripple wildly thought my deck. I have a more or less arbitrary ammount of mana... Lets say I have all 4 tops in play and enough mana to eventually ripple my entire deck a bunch of times.
Can I fan my deck onto the play serface, face down, with the cards partially overlapping so there is a clear top, and a clear bottom. Then as a ripple, when I choose to put cards on the bottom of my library, have spesfic cards poked out or face up so i can track thier movement through the deck? I would be doing this so as I start to ripple them back to the top, I can make sure that "marked" card eventually ends up as the top card of my library. So I can eventually draw the card I have "marked" usening a sensei's top.
It is totally possible to use Addition and subtraction to deturmin where a spesific card is in my deck at any given itteration of my rippling. So I wouldn't be gaining any information that is unknown. It is just a short-hand way to track a card without needing a pen and paper to track it's possition in the deck. I almost feel like useing pen and paper would start to infinge on Delay of game, because I would have to run some numbers each time I rippled.
Is this "marking" a card cheating? or a short-cut? would useing pen and paper to calculate a card in my deck delay of game?
Unfortunately, you wouldn't be allowed to mark the card to track it. You'd have to keep track of it mentally, or with pen and paper. If you're using pen and paper, I recommend doing it very quickly, as you can get slow play penalties for it. (You're using time and you're not doing anything to advance the game state.)
