I agree with you. You're interpretation based on explaining the rules and explaining what is meant by format legality is perfectly acceptable to me. Carthain asked me to challenge his explanation on page one, which is why I'm still responding.


There are no rulings like the relentless rats ruling that I know of, and I'm not going to read through gatherer in the hopes on finding one. The rulings I gave you are all worded differently because each situation and rule being referenced is different, thats the point each one applies explicitly to the situation being responded to.

You asked me to find rulings that have a narrow scope to demonstrate that gatherer rulings typically apply to specific situations and not as broad rule replacements.

At this point both of you are deliberating talking past each other and neither of you are making an effort to approach things from the other's perspective. THERE WILL BE NO END TO THIS. Take it to DM's or stop it. Please.

Do you have something useful to add? Do you have anything to offer that might help align our perspectives? Your contribution so far has been jazzy gifs and a story about spawnsire.

It is a discussion forum, and as much as it might not seem so to some of you I was and am genuinely trying to further my understanding. Arguments get a little heated and I've certainly felt attacked and I probably crossed the line with regards to completely civil discourse, but at no point have I been deliberately trying to avoid understanding.

I am caught between Willbender and Carthain arguing two different lines to the same end, one of which I agree with and one of which I don't and my points for one seem to be being conflated with the arguments from another.

So ultimately no, I won't leave it here, as I'm still interested in the discussion, but you are welcome not to click into the thread if you see no value in it.

You want a serious answer? OK here's your serious answer.

By page 5 of this increasingly useless waste of bandwidth, I am contributing exactly as much as you and Carthain are. Neither of you are listening to the other's points - you are instead taking the smallest minutiae in each post which has the slightest bit of logical fallacy and expanding on that point as if refuting someone's error in the tiniest point of logic invalidates their entire argument.

It doesn't.

It is clear by this stage that you have both dug your metaphorical heads further and further into the metaphorical sand, such that the points that you are arguing now are so far removed from any useful discussion of the original point that it makes reading them - intentionally, I'm sure - confusing and incomprehensible.

While the points you're making are technically correct (which, as we all know, is the best form of correct) they are so goddamn irrelevant to any real world application that I wonder why you're bothering, other than to win Point On The Internet(tm) which are worth exactly as much as the paper they're printed on. And you know it.

Carthain, by the same margin, is intentionally continuing the argument because they too now wish to win the Internet Points. It's irrelevant and, well, Pointless.

You're looking for a written-in-stone confirmation or denial of your position. It doesn't exist, and the very reasonable points made by very reasonable people on this thread have been ignored by you because it's not exactly what you were looking for. You're not "genuinely trying to further my understanding" at all - if you were, you'd be able to see the reasonable arguments, and the reasonable extrapolations of those arguments and see that those are the means by which your understanding could be furthered.

There's my contribution.

You're right I did -- and it highlighted to me how different the one for the rats is, and also how it's worded differently. Which is why in my last one I mentioned and tried to show how the rulings are written differently and the importance of that.

The rulings aren't written in a sloppy manner - the way it's written is important, same as templating of the cards effects is important. You're not going to find things like the misuse of the word 'target' in the rulings, because the people who write those rulings are the same people to understand that kind of thing.

Rats are written as a "it does X", and compare to the last ruling on the Soulblade Corruptor. It says "it will trigger when X" Nothing about that wording excludes other triggers. By contrast if it was written as "the last ability triggers when X" then I'd say that it says that it only triggers when condition X.

You make a good point, the wording will be different for a reason. I think part of my problem has been getting too bogged down in the minutia of the language, English being as strange as it is.

I have been trying to figure out what it is in the card text that focusses the effect on the four of rule. Why people are drawn to that rule and no others. I have read and re-read posts in this thread a number of times, and I think omitting the word "named" has probably caused me problems as well. Throughout the topic I have likely referenced the card text as "any number of relentless rats" but the 'cards named' part helps to refocus on what the rule is saying. The only rule that cares about card names is the four of/singleton rule.

No I didn't. I said that in the event that a legendary Relentless Rats variant was printed, the rules would be ambiguous, but that's not a problem.

The CR only concerns itself with things that can actually happen (with the exception of a couple small guard rules). The rules are ambiguous over how we handle the Floop mechanic, too. But - shock - the rules are likely to get updated should it ever be printed. Similarly, if there was a legendary variant, the rules would be updated to handle that too, and worrying about it before that time is utterly pointless.

Good catch. Can we agree, then, that the ability definitely does not apply to the 100-card limit?