4 ms·

The procedure mentions that you need 43 Rotlung Reanimators. A magic deck can only have at most 4 copies of the same card. :-) How are the copies created? Shoul

The procedure mentions that you need 43 Rotlung Reanimators. A magic deck can only have at most 4 copies of the same card. :-) How are the copies created? Shouldn't be too hard to create infinite copies of a card, but I didn't see this mentioned anywhere.

DiabloD3 11y ago
Its funny how the rules were at most 4 copies, yet I had a red/white deck that had different versions of essentially the same spell (1 red + n colorless damage to target player or creature), and used it frequently against people who didn't understand how to properly defend against it. Had something like 12 cards in that deck that just did that.
- 36erhefg 11y ago
  Fun fact. The deck size isn't limited by the rules in tournaments as long as you don't delay the game by shuffling/handling it. A deck with around a thousand cards would be quite a nightmare to deck-check by a judge, and still be fairly quick to shuffle.
  - gambiting 11y ago
    Well. You can have as many cards as you like, but still just 4 copies of any card, apart from basic lands. So there's very little benefit to having 200 cards in your deck.
    - thom 11y ago
      No benefit except that it is awesome. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=battle+of+wits http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=bat...
      - endgame 11y ago
        And anything involving Shadowborn Apostle: 444 Shadowborn Apostle 1 Reaper from the Abyss 1 Sire of Insanity 2 Griselbrand 4 Cavern of Souls 214 Swamp There are probably better lists but I like the simplicity of this one and the 666-card deck. Source: http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/frank-analysis-is-playing-more-than-60-cards-always-a-bad-idea/ http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/frank-analysis-is-pl...
      - joshguthrie 11y ago
        Is this from Unhinged?
        fredoliveira 11y ago
        Unsure if you are serious, but no, it's from an actual core set. Some battle of wits players did "okay" in a couple of tournaments too.
        deathcalibur 11y ago
        There was a modern legal deck which used this card and birthing pod (now banned) and actually won a decent number of mtgo events: http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/deck/1039 http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg...
    - wyldfire 11y ago
      Sometimes it's nice to spare yourself getting milled. :)
    - rol 11y ago
      > but still just 4 copies of any card If you are playing Limited (i.e. Draft or Sealed decks) then you can have as many copies as you have in your card pool. Although you may have some trouble finding 200 cards to use in a Limited event :)
- jpreiland 11y ago
  make sure they don't find out about Kor Firewalker or Leyline of Sanctity
- steveklabnik 11y ago
  Originally, the 4 copy maximum didn't exist. However, there were two early decks that broke the game: 20x Black Lotus 20x Channel 20x Fireball Gatherer links: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=382866 http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver... http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=382882 http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver... http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=393831 http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver... As long as you get 2x Lotus, 1x other two in your opening 7 cards, first turn kill. Play two lotus, sacrifice one for green, one for red. Play channel with green. Give up 19 life. Do 22 damage with Fireball. Black Lotus is worth five figures these days, so building that deck would be very expensive. Replacing them with Mountains and Forests gives you a deck for less than ten dollars that can routinely kill on the fourthish turn every time, though. The second one is even sillier: (see edits and citations below, I slightly mis-remembered this one, but the concept is the same) 60x Shahrazad http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=980 http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver... This was Richard Garfield's favorite card. But due to the way the rules work, a subgame within a subgame within a subgame within.... means that you win, due to the way that rounding works.
  - AlexTFish 11y ago
    The Shahrazad deck also presumably needs either Plains or Black Lotus.
    - steveklabnik 11y ago
      Ahh yes, good call. I will leave my post the way it is to leave your reply coherent, my mental model was "Only Shahrazad", which is true, but you still need to pay for it... EDIT: Looks like Mox Pearl is the right way to go.
  - javajosh 11y ago
    Shahrazad, aka MTG virtualization. Too bad there aren't other ways to encode bits. Also, if you lose half your life and you're at 1, what happens?
AlexTFish 11y ago
On the "Cards" page, http://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/Cards.html http://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/Cards.html: > The first sixteen Reanimators were cast in the normal fashion, four by each of the players, and donated by a Bazaar Trader. The other twenty are Clones and Vesuvan Shapeshifters copying a Rotlung Reanimator. The phasing enchantments can include Teferi's Curse, Cloak of Invisibility, and Copy Enchantment, cast by any player and donated by a Bazaar Trader. These creatures and Auras must not be tokens, because tokens disappear when phased out.
- k__ 11y ago
  So to be Turing complete you have to play with 4 players?
  - AlexTFish 11y ago
    The machine as demonstrated on that page requires 4 players. There are probably ways to do it with fewer, but you might have to accept situations where two abilities trigger and the players need to choose an order to put them on the stack (though it makes no difference either way).
yxhuvud 11y ago
There are cards that allow for copying creatures, so that can be worked around. A more glaring error is the usage of Time and Tide together with comes-into-play effects. At least earlier, comes into play effects did was NOT triggered by phasing. I stopped playing a few years ago, so they might have changed that rule though.
- 36erhefg 11y ago
  Nice catch. They don't trigger according to the latest rules: 702.25d The phasing event doesn’t actually cause a permanent to change zones or control, even though it’s treated as though it’s not on the battlefield and not under its controller’s control while it’s phased out. Zone-change triggers don’t trigger when a permanent phases in or out. Counters remain on a permanent while it’s phased out. Effects that check a phased-in permanent’s history won’t treat the phasing event as having caused the permanent to leave or enter the battlefield or its controller’s control. I don't think this is a problem because they don't use phasing to trigger comes-into-play effects, but only to change the color rules. This is clever because you can keep both parts of the machine, head and color, from interfering with each other.
- AlexTFish 11y ago
  This isn't an error. The machine doesn't use phasing to trigger enter-the-battlefield triggers, merely to switch between the two states (sets of Rotlung Reanimators watching for the current token dying).
bobbyi_settv 11y ago
Maybe this is limited and you happened to draft 43 Reanimators
- jpreiland 11y ago
  ah, I was wondering where I had misplaced my rotlung cube

DiabloD3 11y ago

Its funny how the rules were at most 4 copies, yet I had a red/white deck that had different versions of essentially the same spell (1 red + n colorless damage to target player or creature), and used it frequently against people who didn't understand how to properly defend against it. Had something like 12 cards in that deck that just did that.

36erhefg 11y ago
Fun fact. The deck size isn't limited by the rules in tournaments as long as you don't delay the game by shuffling/handling it. A deck with around a thousand cards would be quite a nightmare to deck-check by a judge, and still be fairly quick to shuffle.
- gambiting 11y ago
  Well. You can have as many cards as you like, but still just 4 copies of any card, apart from basic lands. So there's very little benefit to having 200 cards in your deck.
  - thom 11y ago
    No benefit except that it is awesome. http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=battle+of+wits http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=bat...
    - endgame 11y ago
      And anything involving Shadowborn Apostle: 444 Shadowborn Apostle 1 Reaper from the Abyss 1 Sire of Insanity 2 Griselbrand 4 Cavern of Souls 214 Swamp There are probably better lists but I like the simplicity of this one and the 666-card deck. Source: http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/frank-analysis-is-playing-more-than-60-cards-always-a-bad-idea/ http://www.channelfireball.com/articles/frank-analysis-is-pl...
    - joshguthrie 11y ago
      Is this from Unhinged?
      - fredoliveira 11y ago
        Unsure if you are serious, but no, it's from an actual core set. Some battle of wits players did "okay" in a couple of tournaments too.
        deathcalibur 11y ago
        There was a modern legal deck which used this card and birthing pod (now banned) and actually won a decent number of mtgo events: http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/deck/1039 http://archive.wizards.com/Magic/magazine/Article.aspx?x=mtg...
  - wyldfire 11y ago
    Sometimes it's nice to spare yourself getting milled. :)
  - rol 11y ago
    > but still just 4 copies of any card If you are playing Limited (i.e. Draft or Sealed decks) then you can have as many copies as you have in your card pool. Although you may have some trouble finding 200 cards to use in a Limited event :)
jpreiland 11y ago
make sure they don't find out about Kor Firewalker or Leyline of Sanctity
steveklabnik 11y ago
Originally, the 4 copy maximum didn't exist. However, there were two early decks that broke the game: 20x Black Lotus 20x Channel 20x Fireball Gatherer links: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=382866 http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver... http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=382882 http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver... http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=393831 http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver... As long as you get 2x Lotus, 1x other two in your opening 7 cards, first turn kill. Play two lotus, sacrifice one for green, one for red. Play channel with green. Give up 19 life. Do 22 damage with Fireball. Black Lotus is worth five figures these days, so building that deck would be very expensive. Replacing them with Mountains and Forests gives you a deck for less than ten dollars that can routinely kill on the fourthish turn every time, though. The second one is even sillier: (see edits and citations below, I slightly mis-remembered this one, but the concept is the same) 60x Shahrazad http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=980 http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiver... This was Richard Garfield's favorite card. But due to the way the rules work, a subgame within a subgame within a subgame within.... means that you win, due to the way that rounding works.
- AlexTFish 11y ago
  The Shahrazad deck also presumably needs either Plains or Black Lotus.
  - steveklabnik 11y ago
    Ahh yes, good call. I will leave my post the way it is to leave your reply coherent, my mental model was "Only Shahrazad", which is true, but you still need to pay for it... EDIT: Looks like Mox Pearl is the right way to go.
- javajosh 11y ago
  Shahrazad, aka MTG virtualization. Too bad there aren't other ways to encode bits. Also, if you lose half your life and you're at 1, what happens?

AlexTFish 11y ago

On the "Cards" page, http://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/Cards.html http://www.toothycat.net/~hologram/Turing/Cards.html: > The first sixteen Reanimators were cast in the normal fashion, four by each of the players, and donated by a Bazaar Trader. The other twenty are Clones and Vesuvan Shapeshifters copying a Rotlung Reanimator. The phasing enchantments can include Teferi's Curse, Cloak of Invisibility, and Copy Enchantment, cast by any player and donated by a Bazaar Trader. These creatures and Auras must not be tokens, because tokens disappear when phased out.

k__ 11y ago
So to be Turing complete you have to play with 4 players?
- AlexTFish 11y ago
  The machine as demonstrated on that page requires 4 players. There are probably ways to do it with fewer, but you might have to accept situations where two abilities trigger and the players need to choose an order to put them on the stack (though it makes no difference either way).

yxhuvud 11y ago

There are cards that allow for copying creatures, so that can be worked around. A more glaring error is the usage of Time and Tide together with comes-into-play effects. At least earlier, comes into play effects did was NOT triggered by phasing. I stopped playing a few years ago, so they might have changed that rule though.

36erhefg 11y ago
Nice catch. They don't trigger according to the latest rules: 702.25d The phasing event doesn’t actually cause a permanent to change zones or control, even though it’s treated as though it’s not on the battlefield and not under its controller’s control while it’s phased out. Zone-change triggers don’t trigger when a permanent phases in or out. Counters remain on a permanent while it’s phased out. Effects that check a phased-in permanent’s history won’t treat the phasing event as having caused the permanent to leave or enter the battlefield or its controller’s control. I don't think this is a problem because they don't use phasing to trigger comes-into-play effects, but only to change the color rules. This is clever because you can keep both parts of the machine, head and color, from interfering with each other.
AlexTFish 11y ago
This isn't an error. The machine doesn't use phasing to trigger enter-the-battlefield triggers, merely to switch between the two states (sets of Rotlung Reanimators watching for the current token dying).

bobbyi_settv 11y ago

Maybe this is limited and you happened to draft 43 Reanimators

jpreiland 11y ago
ah, I was wondering where I had misplaced my rotlung cube