Today I learnt: Soul Burn was a common in Invasion. That's old world order for you.

ugh old design makes my head hurt (especially because i traumatized myself by obsessing over a 169 kb document where i wrote down each card in an illiterate language from alpha to ravnica.)

that document single-handedly messed up how i thought design worked for the first few months i was on this site.

you can probably see most my thoughts back then were quite contrary to modern practice. i had only ever had experience with cards from theros (my first intro decks i was gifted) and a headache that i forced on myself :P

tldr im stoopit and i feel with secret

Today I learnt: Wasteland Scorpion has flavor text that ironically foreshadows Hour of Glory.

Today I learnt: MtGSalvation failed to notify me of an owner change and related issues and deleted my account and all the links back to card discussion on that site is now no longer worth anything.

­:(:(

The good news is that magicmultiverse actually encouraged me to make a backup of at least my custom card designs which otherwise would be entirely lost, so that's a special "Thank you" for making this site!

The third round of Ravnica split cards are very competitively costed (as they should be.) My Esper Skies deck will have 4 copies each of these three split cards: Depose // Deploy, Warrant // Warden, Discovery // Dispersal,

Only two cards have the word Human in their names.

woah! do you know which two?

­Human Frailty and whatever the legendary Human was called that was part of the Kamigawa cycle of special members of their tribes that turn into enchantments.

It's very easy to find out: http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?name=+[Human]

­Inhumaniac also shows up in that search. Does that count?

Does the word Elf show up in the name Boreal Shelf?

raises hand

Mrs. Teacherwoman, secretboi420 just gave dudeboi420 3rd degree burns! Requesting medical attention! Thx mum.

Where's that "re-space a cardname" challenge...

^

Today I learnt: Drain Life's Oracle text refers to the card type planeswalker despite dealing damage to "any target". Can you guess why without looking it up?

Thought it may be some weird thing about how damage interacts with Loyalty counters.

I actually read the card wrong, but it's a bit similar in that they couldn't just use one word to refer to 'toughness' 'loyalty' and 'life total' all at once.

If these old cards weren't such as slog to read through, I may have gotten it. Still, neat micro-challenge , though

I mean, when Magic switched so that burn could hit planeswalkers directly, and then combined each [sensible and possible] option into "any target," the natural change would be to update Drain Life to the present, with the caveat of including oracle text that's intuitive based on the similar restrictions presented by the options that existed at the time of the card's creation.

At the time of the card's creation it didn't mention player's life total as a restriction though. The restriction was pretty explicit about it: "If you drain life from a creature, you cannot gain more life than the creature's toughness." Player's life total doesn't get thrown into the mix until Fourth Edition. And to top it all, it seems like a functional change from before; if the change really got introduced with the "any target" ruling, then there was a time in-between when the redirection from player to planeswalker allowed to drain for more life than the planeswalker's loyalty (since "any target" just changes that the planeswalker will be targeted, not whether the spell would be able to damage it). That would be pretty wild considering that the change is reflect it no printed version of the card.

Ah, to avoid looking it up, I looked at the printing Gatherer showed me (Beatdown Box Set) and cross-referenced with the oracle text.
The change on life capping life gained from a player's total seems to me to be significant change. Why Wizards decided to implement that change is I guess the question. Updating the card to treat planeswalker targets the same as creature and (later) player seems just the normalization of making cards work with features that have been added since the card's creation. To me, the wild change was introducing planeswalkers, then, years later, the rule update of targeting them. As for no printed version, the card's last printing was six or seven years prior to planeswalkers being a card type, so of course there would be not printed version of the card to reflect that.

Unfortunately yawgatog.com stopped recording Oracle changes around Ixalan, so now we're left without knowledge other than last printing towards what might have been the wordind before Dominaria.

EDIT: The change has been recorded! It did indeed coincide with the "any target" rules change and required wording change, so there was a time when planeswalkers existed and could be drained for more life than their loyalty, but then they applied functional errata! I'm happy to have found source of Oracle changes.

In other news: Dominaria was released more than three years ago, closer to four. O.O

I have a local copy of rules (not Oracle texts) and may later make them public in order to make diff. However, note that sometimes the character encoding and line break encoding are changed between versions, so I may also make available the versions that have been transformed into one format (e.g. ASCII only, with LF only for line breaks).

https://vensersjournal.com/archives resumes where yawgatag ceased

Thanks!

Today I learnt: While the most often printed (and AFAIK most famous) flavor text of Llanowar Elves is the pretty brutal

> One bone broken for every twig snapped underfoot.
—Llanowar penalty for trespassing

it always seems like such an odd creative treatment of a mana guy. And actually the original flavor text is far less martial and fits the mechanics very well:

> Whenever the Llanowar Elves gather the fruits of their forest, they leave one plant of each type untouched, considering that nature’s portion.

Yeah yeah Elves are natural-loving idealists who live in harmony until you read a speck of Germanic folk lore, and then suddenly 'BAM!' you realize the first text fits a lot better.

These things are descendants of the Fae in most settings, right? That's enough reason to suspicious of them on it's own, right? Everyone saw Lorwyn, yeah? Stop getting tricked by these cunning bastards.

And don't give me "Oh... but that germanic folk lore stuff is soo old, you're totally forgetting about the more recent stuff blah blah blah" dude just quit it. Do you know how old Elves can live until? Not exactly? That's right, most people don't know. Why? BECAUSE THEY ARE HIDING THAT INFORMATION FROM US, MAN!

For that reason, the older stuff is sure to be more accurate in revealing their true nature before the Fair Folk (which yes, is a misleading name) deciding to hide their true selves behind masks of beauty and love... wonder when that started... oh idk, maybe the industrial revolution?

Hm... what else did humanity accomplish during that time... warfare? No way... nuclear weaponry? You're saying the elves might be faking it for such reasons? OBVIOUSLY YES. THEY FEAR US NOW, UNLIKE BEFORE!

Disgusting elves and their wicked lies will deceive you if you give them the slightest opening. Do not give them the upper hand over humanity, or we will return to being mere livestock like we were in the days of fairy tales and lost records.

Elves are demons wearing the masks of angels, do not let them deceive you into believing otherwise. Or else you will regret it.

• Froggy "I Hate Elves" Chum

The original llanowar elves was also designed by the artist to be a vampire elf, since there was basically no oversight in the art direction back then

I just had a wild idea...

How many possible game states are there in magic the gathering?

'infinity' is a boring answer, so what if the repetitions and values were artificially capped at some arbitrary number, like 50?

BTW, a 'game state' would count every card in every zone (including things like stack and mana pool), as well as every resource/effect in every zone, in just one moment.

It would probably be a lot more than the 20K+ cards squared...

For example, starting with 'two players with 1 life each, no cards or effects in any zone except for one card in all player's libraries which is "Ach! Hans, Run!"' as the first game-state, then 'two players with 1 life each, no cards or effects in any zone except for one card in all player's libraries which is "Ach! Hans, Run!" and the card second-from-the-top of player two's library which is _____' and so on so forth

Any math nerds wanna tackle this one? XDDD

A Lot :)

I'm not sure where to start for a full answer. If you had a sixty-card deck of unique cards, it could be in 8320987112741390144276341183223364380754172606361245952449277696409600000000000000 different states, and if you considered all possible decks the number would be much, much, higher.

Other zones have similar calculations. The graveyard would have approximately as many possibilities as the library. Slightly less because cards can usually only be in one or the other. Exile either has a card or not (no order), so for one deck with unique cards that's only 1152921504606846976 possibilities. All these apply to your opponent.

The most complicated would be the battlefield. In the rules it tracks what order permanents entered, but assuming we're ignoring that except when it actually matters for a static effect, you just have some cards. Except that each card can have up to 50 counters on. At the simplest, that would be something like 51⁶⁰ (each can be not there, there with zero counters, there with 1 counter, etc). I couldn't find an exact number, but that's approximately 2800000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000. Obviously it's more complicated than that, e.g. if the cards were all equipment they could all be attached to different things, but also, if every card is a permanent you have less options for the stack.

And then you multiply all those numbers together. And then square them because your opponent's deck can also be in those situations. And then raise them several more powers if you can be in nested subgames with Shahrazad :)

So far, that's something like 100000 0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 (with a LOT of guessing, it will actually be quadrillions of times bigger or smaller several times over). And we haven't yet considered a full deck.

If you made a deck from one each of all 23000 legal cards, it would have a number of possible orders something like "3 followed by 90333 zeroes" which I COULD paste into the comment field but won't. Of course that wouldn't pass the "can shuffle by hand unaided" test

Haha I really didn't expect anyone would want to pick this up lol

Thanks Jack :)

I've gotta say, this really puts into perspective how this game can be mind-bogglingly complex, lmao

It makes me wonder if there has ever been a 'duplicate' game-state in magic... Sort of like how they say a deck of cards is never shuffled the same way twice in human history (because 52! is a huge ass number)...

I was thinking there might have been, since having the same seven cards in your opening hand might be not that unlikely for a popular deck that is played globally by millions of people... but then I remembered that isn't counting for their library, which given that it is 60 cards (maybe with some repeats), is probably close to anywhere from like 30! to 60!, meaning it also never has likely been shuffled identically...

So, I guess the moral of the story is, even if you feel that play patterns are getting stale, just remember that nobody has ever played the exact same game of magic that you are about to play!

> "Exile either has a card or not (no order)"

Some cards can exile cards as ordered pile e. g. Mangara's Tome.

> Haha I really didn't expect anyone would want to pick this up lol

I am an inveterate sucker for nerd bait :)

> It makes me wonder if there has ever been a 'duplicate' game-state in magic...

Your guess sounds about right to me, that if you include the library order, then probably not, but if you only look at cards in hand and in other zones, then probably. There's a lot of possible seven hands out of sixty cards, but there might be precon or degenerate decks that include a fair number of duplicates and get played enough.

There is a way to be interpreted that the order of cards in the library is sometimes not relevant when considering if it is same game state or not; e.g. if the library (or a hidden face-down pile, otherwise) is shuffled, then the order is indeterminite and only collapses when the card is drawn, scried, etc (until it is shuffled again). However, that is only true if you want to count the past and ignore the future. If you want the game state of the future as well as the past, then the order of the library is relevant and maybe also future coin tosses, etc. But, this is not the only way. Counting all cards in a shuffled library even if you cannot see them, but not counting coin tosses, also is a different possible way to do it.

The other thing to be considered is timestamps (although timestamps are not always relevant). Everything inherently has an order. And then, there is history-based effects, effects that take cards from the sideboard, playing the same cards but using a different version of the rules (where some of the differences might or might not be significant), etc.

So, counting game states is really much more complicated. (But, even in chess, there is such thing as a 75 move rule, etc)

(And then, there is conspiracy, vanguard, etc)

There are currently 23,094 unique magic cards. Taking seven cards at random with replacement, there are 6.9e26 possible opening hands. (That assumes no limit to the number of copies in a deck, but applying a 4-of rule wouldn't change it by more than an order of magnitude or so)