Blessing question

[Jebus]

Well, I'd force them to play the Angel situation out...until they ran out of cards to draw.

Then there is  no longer a changing variable.

Once all cards in the deck are drawn, then they have a repeatable loop with no changing variable.

Their opponent can't be at infinite life, just an arbitrarily large number.  You could repeat the loop enough times until they died.  You could start the loop and declare how many times you would like to run it.  Eventually, the opponent will lose.

[ProZachar]

If it's a Swiss round, the game will probably end in a draw, provided B's life total is high enough.  Time will expire, player A will get 5 turns, and that'll be the end of it.

If it's an elimination round, then player B will probably win.  Time will expire, player A will get 5 turns, and then lose because he (probably) has a lower life total than B.

There's no way I'd declare A the winner automatically, in the Final Fortune situation or the Dragon situation.  IMO, the only time a judge should declare a winner in a game is when s/he has to slap the player's opponent with a game loss for some rule infraction, a situation we're not covering here.

[Gandalf_The_White_1]

If it's a Swiss round, the game will probably end in a draw, provided B's life total is high enough.  Time will expire, player A will get 5 turns, and that'll be the end of it.

If it's an elimination round, then player B will probably win.  Time will expire, player A will get 5 turns, and then lose because he (probably) has a lower life total than B.

There's no way I'd declare A the winner automatically, in the Final Fortune situation or the Dragon situation.  IMO, the only time a judge should declare a winner in a game is when s/he has to slap the player's opponent with a game loss for some rule infraction, a situation we're not covering here.

Actually, if your opponent cannot or will not do anything about it you are allowed to save time by simply stating that you repeat the loop however many times. The player with the plat and scepter wins (its like with a worldgorger dragon; if you want to float 9 to the exponent 9 to the exponent 9 units of mana(this simpifies to like about 3.6 million DIGITS if I remember correctly), you do not have to keep removing stuff from play and tapping your lands.)

The blessing dragon situation is different because probability is involved.  Theoretically, the blessing could NEVER end up as the bottom card (and the dragon player has a FINITE quantiy of mana, thus theoretically could run out if the game continued long enough without the blessing ending up at the bottom)

[Bram]

Theoretically, even with the shortcut, the game could end up lasting a week

I was going to insert a funnah here, but the matter has been properly addressed.

Theoretically, the blessing could NEVER end up as the bottom card (and the dragon player has a FINITE quantiy of mana, thus theoretically could run out if the game continued long enough without the blessing ending up at the bottom)

Indeed. The only way to be 100% sure it turns up is to do it (exactly :-) an infinite number of times. But you can't float infi mana due to the game rules! In a no-time-limit extra turn situation thing as described before, I take it the judge will eventually rule that a 99.99999999999999999999999999 9...% chance of the dragon guy winning could be be enough to declare victore. The again, he could perfectly legally decide on a draw.

A sidenote: when I asked Jaap about this, it went something like this:

<me> Hey Jaap, mind if I ask you a rules question? It's more of a judgement call than anything else, really.
<him> sure. love rules questions.
<me> it's about dragon.
<him> *sigh*

:-)

[Limbo]

The blessing dragon situation is different because probability is involved.  Theoretically, the blessing could NEVER end up as the bottom card (and the dragon player has a FINITE quantiy of mana, thus theoretically could run out if the game continued long enough without the blessing ending up at the bottom)

And this is where I think the rules are crooked. The platinum angel player is 100% sure to win. the dragon player can choose ANY large amount of mana to produce, and in that way, the win percentage he has. As he had a 99% chance of winning after about 10^2 iterations of the loop, you can only drool al the possibility of winning when running googol or even googolplex (10^googol) iterations. I'd say the chance of the opponent surviving are decreased sufficiently to make him lose.

But then we are back at the start where some people disagree with others on that point, so I think we will never agree on that point untill there is an official ruling about this by wizards. Although the L4 judge (Jaap) answer actually qualifies as a ruling, it just isnt in the book yet.

This is the first time I actually disagree with a ruling, even though I understand the point of view of the judge.

[brianb]

The angel/final fortune situation is an easy call, provided you get into the infinite combo during the regular time in the round--you should just win.  If you are already in extra turns when you get the combo together, then it's trickier.  I would have to say that you don't win, because you are limited to five turns at that point, and you require more turns than that to win.

With the dragon/blessing situation, it comes down to this: there is no rule explicitly requiring  a player to concede defeat just because his probability of victory can be made arbitrarily small.  Stalling is not an issue here.  So you can't really disagree with the ruling.  The players just have to shuffle, shuffle, shuffle until the dragon player gets lucky, his opponent quits, he chooses to exit the loop, or time runs out.  You might think that it's desirable to have a rule that would prevent such boring occurences.  The trouble is that it takes high school level mathematics (limits, probability theory) to explain to a player that you can make his chances of victory arbitrarily small--that is, for any finite non-zero probability he can name, you can make his probability of victory smaller than that.  Lots of elementary schoolkids play magic (some play in tournaments) and a rule like that just couldn't fly.

The only part of all this that isn't clear from reading the rules is under what circumstances a judge can/should set an absolute time limit on the five extra turns at the end of this round.  Such a rule is necessary, (I've had to impose such limits a few times and actually terminate a match once) but not explicitly called out in the floor rules.

[LotusHead]

I just happen to have a deck "Gay Welders" that happens to have Fastbond, Dark Heart of the Woods (sac Forests for 3 life) and Crucible of Worlds, AND 3 maindeck Gaea's Blessing in them (It's a Mesmeric Orb deck, may post it in casual someday).

What if I am a at 2.95 Billion Life, and the Dragon player, trying to ensure a win, gets 80 billion million mana, Animates Laquatus, Mills me forever, triggering Gaea Blessing over and over, gets frustrated, HardCasts Platinum Angel, Imprints Scepter with Final Fortune and THEN tells me he is definitely going to win.

I, as the Crucible/Fastbond/DarkHeart/Gaea Blessing player have taken every precaution to not losing.

I say, the game is a draw!



p.s. My deck really does that, and no, Dragon Decks don't usually pack Scepter, Angel, Fortune, but I couldn't resist.

Resist harder next time. - Jebus

EDIT: Still, the question of one player inevitatably winning a game with unlimited time avaliable (and real life time constrants in effect) is a question I would very much like to know the answer to.  I DO play Blessing, Crucible/Fastbond/Darkheart/Mesmeric Orb in GayWelders.dec.

The question is, if Player A WILL win given unlimeted time/mana/turns and player B has an arbitrarily large amount of life, but no other options (like Possessed Portal in play with double Welder in in play, etc) and it is a Sanctioned Tournament, will the game be a WIN for Player A despite Player B's defences, or will the game be a draw?

[andrewpate]

The game definitely draws here (with the Angel/Scepter vs billions of life).  The Angel player must go through the motions each time; it is not a self-reciprocating loop like the Dragon combo.  If you are at 2.95 billion life and the Angel player can go through his turn once every second (which would be very, very fast), it would take him more than 23 years (around 23 years and 138 days) of nonstop play (i.e., no eating, sleeping, etc.) in order to kill you by attacking with Angel.  This obviously does not fall into the time restraints of the round, so at extra turns he deals 20 more damage and the game is a draw.

The Dragon scenario is different because it all takes place in one turn and thus does not have to worry about going past extra turns.

[Jebus]

Going over several turns and phases shouldn't keep you from declaring a repeatable loop.

I don't see a good reason why the Angel player cannot declare this as a loop, once they have gone thorugh every card in their deck and their hand no longer changes.

[andrewpate]

Okay, I asked Chris Richter about this and he said:

"If the loop is demonstrable and your opponent can not interrupt it, then there is no real reason to carry out the actual steps.  All you need to do is show the loops a few times to prove that it is repeatable. Once you have done that you can then choose a number and repeat the loop that many times.  In the example given the Angel / Final Fortune player would be the winner as the loop will lead to his victory."

Not that this is the topic of the thread, but I just thought I'd settle it.  You were right, Jebus.