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Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-09-05 22:37:11)
| Conversation: Cardlist | Visual spoiler | Export | Booster | Comments | Search | Recent activity |
| Mechanics |
Recent updates to Conversation: (Generated at 2025-09-05 22:37:11)
If flying became a Supertype I'd have to write them a letter expressing my dissatisfaction!
To be fair, Wotc are deliberately moving away from implicit rules text from the type-line. Wall->Defender being the most obvious one.
But I personally like "Instant Creature" it's clear. "Instant Flying Creature - Just Add Water" is even better :)
I thinking have multiple supertypes is self-defeating. A supertype should be the broadest possible category something [a card] can fall under, so having two supertypes doesn't make any sense to me. I also dislike it aesthetically.
The idea of making instant a subtype seems much more natural to me, and the point of having Flash is that the subtype draws attention to the rules text and the two become linked, generally. This is the design Fantasy Flight Games (FFG) adopts with their Living Card Game (LCG) model. In Android: Netrunner, the subtypes almost always come with particular rules text associated with them. I will link you examples if you are curious.
This idea of making Instant a subtype of Sorcery is something I'd been thinking about for a while, as well as some other subtypes for the Sorcery type:
> Cantrips always have 'draw a card' after all other text.
> Arcane cards could have something unique to them... I'm not quite sure yet.
> Charms could always be on cards that offer two or more modular options;
> Rituals always play with mana, either adding it or filtering it, etc.
> Traps are another example - they always have a specific condition relying on your opponent doing stuff.
WotC does a lot of weird things I don't understand. For example, the only subtypes of Enchantments are Auras and Curses, and as you'll notice Auras always come with specific rules text: "Enchant X". Curses work much the same way, always affecting a specific player. But then there were the 'Quest' Enchantments from 1st Zendikar block which would've been a really cool subtype for Enchantments except they weren't legitimized as a subtype.
Hah! Right, Thromok is very useful for this, I hadn't realised that.
But I'm not sure that works for dealing damage to someone with infinite life. If you define a notion of subtraction like "subtract 1, that many times", then subtracting 1 from ω leaves ω, so however many infinite times you do that, ω, ω+1, ω2, all the way up until 2^ω, it still leaves ω.
Whereas if you define subtraction to consider both ordinals at once, then ω - ω (or ω - ω+1) would get to zero anyway.
Is there a case where ω2 works better?
I've looked for magic rules which would naturally generate an uncountable infinity, but I don't think I found any.
If you assume cardinality applies, you can make infinite tokens somehow, devour them with Thromok, and deal infinity2 damage. That is undeniably larger than infinity
I'm not entirely convinced.
Rosewater says, if you have infinity life and take infinity damage, you're still on infinity. Is negative infinity different? I don't know if the way Rosewater chose right, but that's what he says in the FAQ.
There's not a single way of dealing with infinity which is appropriate in all circumstances. If you treat infinity as a number, and say "inf - inf = 0" then you break equations like "x + 1 - x = 1" when x is infinity. If you say "inf - inf = inf" then you break "x - x = 0". Other compromises break other assumptions.
If you allow infinity at all, you get some weirdness. E.g. floating point arithmetic on computers, you get NaN ("Not a number") when you try to calculate INF - INF, -INF + INF, INF/INF or 0/0. The reason being, those are operations you might sometimes expect to be reversible, and sometimes not.
That doesn't work in magic, because your life might be INF but can't really be NaN. So they picked one. I'd prefer an implementation that allowed you do take infinite life to zero SOMEHOW (I have some in mind but haven't played them) but I understand that wouldn't be a good choice for most players who aren't mathematicians.
So they had to pick some interpretation. I think allowing inf - inf to be 0 might be a more fun choice for playing magic. But I don't think it's more mathematically correct (you can justify inf - inf being any other finite number or inf, equally well).
If you have negative infinity life and get dealt positive infinity damage, the answer is you end up with zero life. Infinity plus its negative is zero. I don't think Magic would ignore such a fundamental rule in mathematics.
You mean, to use that version of arithmetic, or what the particular results are?
It seems to follow "when you gain infinity life, lose infinity life, do anything else infinite, the result is the same as doing it for 1, but repeated an infinite number of times" rules, which is (I think?) unambiguous, but sometimes unsatisfying.
The choice is nothing but arbitrary, it seems to me.
Not specifically, but I can't imagine minus infinity gaining infinity is different to infinity losing infinity, i.e. both stay the same.
No. Too complex, inherently silly, extremely parasitic, requires a lot of support.
So what's the general opinion regarding Contraptions as a mechanic. They need to have an environment built around them, but they don't break the rules on a fundamental level.
Would you use them in a custom set that is not "silver-bordered"?
Did he make a ruling about what happens if you have minus infinity life and then gain infinity life?
Ah! They introduced transcendental numbers (pi damage, although you can round to 2 s.f. if it's easier to count).
And Rosewater makes a ruling about infinity life -- it doesn't work like an ordinal, or a cardinal, which I think would be more interesting, it's just infinity life minus infinity damage is still infinity, infinity plus infinity is still infinity
I notice, the cards overall seem a bit less out there than previous un sets. They're still un-rules-y, but there's less art exploding all over the text box, and less disregard for normal templating (like the augment creature which can augment at instant speed, they spell it out in rules text, not just change the reminder text). Even if the rules still need a similar amount of careful FAQ-ing :)
I love "destroy target player", but it feels tacked on on a card that doesn't destroy anything else. I'm not sure if there was a way of doing that better.
Live and learn
I also got a ruling on whether it triggers ETB effects. It does. https://postimg.org/image/7fn7o2rav/
That's incorrect though. It's a new object, so anything targeting the Arcanum Wings fizzles. http://magicjudge.tumblr.com/post/137736392726/i-control-arcanum-wings-enchanting-some-dude-my
I meant that if something is targeting your arcanum wings, and you swap it out, the spell that was targeting arcanum wings will now still be targeting the new aura. Reworded last post to more accurately communicate my intentions. Apologies
@continuumg:
You are misleading either factually or in the choice of words saying "I know that it DOES retain targets like Mary'O'Kill."
The Aura exchanged for Arcanum Wings will retain the permanent the original Aura was enchanting (though that's not a target - anymore; it might have been a targeted during the time Arcanum Wings was a spell if you cast it) and it does not retain target state i. e. you can use Aura Swap to avoid a Naturalize targeting Arcanum Wings and the exchanged in Aura will not be removed.
If you were incorrectly refering to the enchanted permanent as "target" then it's weird you mention this at all since neither the Killbots nor Mary O'Kill even seem capable of enchanting anything.
"Exchange" is an incredibly overloaded action in the rules, but as it applies to swapping objects across zones each object enters its destination zone as a new object and retains only those states explicitly called out in the rules: "If a card in one zone is exchanged with a card in a different zone, and either of them is attached to an object, that card stops being attached to that object and the other card becomes attached to that object."
"Switch" as of its reminder text does not so much move the two objects between zones as much as it swaps out the physical representations of the game objects and applies all the characterstics of the new representation if able.
I.e. if you "exchange" something onto the battlefield it will not retain tapped state since you actually create a new game object which are by default untapped (though card text and abilities may alter this), but if you "switch" the same old game object stays in place with all its relationships to other objects and its personal states and all changes result directly from the new printed characteristics of the card now associated with the game object.
I'm not sure whether it does, but I know that it DOES retain targeted status like Mary'O'Kill.
Just read through all the exchange and aura swap rules. It's not explicitly stated, but I always thought it didn't trigger ETB effects
Pretty sure Arcanum Wings triggers ETB effects though. Exchange is well-defined keyword action already
"switch" was already done in future sight. Arcanum Wings
I had been using a switch mechanic in Archeia, but once Eldritch Moon came out, I realized emerge better suited my needs.
There's a couple duds, but there are a good amount of cards that really push the limits of what Wizards considers okay to experiment on. Stuff like the "switch" effect of Mary O'Kill (where it doesn't trigger ETB effects and just switches states), the Augment mechanic, Do-It-Yourself Seraph, and more seem doable in black border, though maybe with a little tweaking.
I know this is slightly off-topic, but can I just say that I'm loving a lot of cards in this set? It feels like a big portion of them were made specifically for me.
I for my part am happy that something like "block mechanics" will no longer exist. I'm fine with set mechanics that can expand over multiple consecutive sets, but I was moving away from the concept of blocks as a custom card designer and am happy Magic proper does so as well.
And in that context Contraptions are fine: To create a singular set with a unique draft experience. It would be more worrisome if the goal was to make Contraptions evergreen.
The theme is extremely parasitic and I wish assembling Contraptions had an alternate path that would make them self-sufficient - though that would probably make them even more "mandatory" in Constructed.
Not to rain on Contraptions' parade, but I'm liking all of the other new "mechanics" that are coming out of the set more than contraptions. It seems like there are just too many bits and bobs that contraptions add to the game; in a normal draft, you'll need to draft contraptions, draft cards that assemble contraptions, and draft around the contraptions you drafted. In gameplay, not only do you need extra space for your contraptions deck, but you also need space for assembly as well. It seems fine for an unset but it's not something I'd want to see as a block mechanic, even if it was expanded upon and clarified.
I think, I agree that they COULD write all those verbs as done by creature rather than by player. There might be a few cases where it matters a little (e.g. in cases of protection, or if the rules need to be changed so instead of "when you draw a card" they say "when anything draws a card for you" or something).
But the point is, during future sight and since, they are all written with the player doing the verb. The exceptions are times when it specifically matters, such as dealing damage.
That's the sort of thing they might have changed during time spiral, but all the changes in time spiral, they went to some effort to make it clear this was a deliberate difference. It would be weird to choose just one card out of future sight, and write its rules text in a way contrary to the current templating guidelines in just one way that doesn't particularly stand out.
Of course, that only makes sense following the fiction that they designed Steamflogger Boss looking into the future where they could see the contraption rules. Obviously they didn't ACTUALLY do that, and you can easily say, "that was a mistake, they wrote in a way they wouldn't really have done, but it was acceptable enough so no harm done." But I still think it's a mistake, albeit a small one, to write Steamflogger Boss in a way that flouts the templating rules of the time, whether or not you think the templating rules should change in future.