Yes it is a big no-no

However it has been established as an area of Silver Borded design space in Unstable. See Five-Finger Discount, Spy Eye, Very Cryptic Command (c) and Sly Spy (e).

Um, this lets you steal opponents cards into your hand. For simple reasons of keeping track of the ownership of things; that's a big no-no.

Maybe rather than giving her the abilities of both Akroma and Phage, adopt something that's more like a symbolic fusion of the two.

Karona, True God

> ~ is all colors and colorless.

> Protection from all colors and colorless

Maybe rather than giving her the abilities of both Akroma and Phage, adopt something that's more like a symbolic fusion of the two.

Karona, True God

> ~ is all colors and colorless.

> Protection from all colors and colorless

Melds from Akroma and Phage

RE: declaring tapping: It's a keyword. It can have more wordy rules included that are not explained in every detail in the reminder text but are generally played correctly with the reminder text - unless you want to search for a loophole in which case you need to refer to the exact rules anyway.

If the FAQ+ already confirmed that just a second prevents tapping, the rule would be in there already (unfortunately as of this writing the ruling exists on blogatog and is missing from the FAQ+, which is surprisingly short-sightened).

Either way for this card the keyword uses the ruling and obviously includes it into the definition of the keyword, so a full write-up of the rules would include a section specifying that tapping is impossible and a "declaring it" loophole would not exist.

RE: gap between casting and resolving: I think you may refer to something else than you say here, because while, yes, there is a "gap between cast and resolve" that "gap" is not overlooked but is actually... the time a spell remains on the stack (unless removed otherwise) - i. e. exactly the time this refers to.

Do you refer to a gap between announcing a spell and it entering the stack? That's a pretty small window since moving the card to the stack is actually part of the first step in casting a spell.

Fortunately the rules for mana abilities actually do not allow you to activate them at "any time" (though it might feel like it) but during a well-defined window which usually (notat all outside of custom cards and maybe silver-bordered cases AFAIK) cannot occur as long as a player maintains priority and uses it to cast a spell.

FUN FACT: Since all players are excluded from tapping lands while (Just a Second Piracy) is on the stack, the player casting it technically might have to float the mana themselves (since they cannot tap lands once they moved the card to the stack and the cost payment is due).

Fortunately some digging in the rules reveals that floating mana does not pass priority (neither for activating nor for resolving the mana ability), so as long as you have the mana available at the time you want to cast this you still do not create a window for your opponent to tap their lands, mana rocks etc.

That would be a problem for Slaying Mantis since floating the mana might tip off your opponent to re-arrange their permanents (and not doing so would enable them to roll back the spell to a time they could do so - thanks to rules lawyering (whether that's in the spirit of having fun is subjective)). It's fine by (Just a Second Piracy) though.

Huh; nice use of new tech to solve old problem. Though technically there's still a gap between cast and resolve which your opponents might be able to exploit? Silver lets you say "That gap is short, real-time matters" but normal magic doesn't.

And I think technically them declaring they are tapping the lands is sufficient. There has to be some way to play without physically moving things, for disabled players.

But in silver-bordered-land the intent is clear and this works fine.

Silver Bordered Piracy + Mana Short. Just a Second works like split second that stops people tapping their lands in response. It can't be split second since that lets players tap their lands in response.