Sid the Chicken wrote:
Sovarius wrote:
Because you cannot say what the game state is at any point for sure. Because while you are explaining that *someday* you will win with Gitrog Horseman, i am not required to tell you i have Faerie Macabre and Extirpate in my hand. I can say "Okay, proceed with your combo".
Yes you can, and you can proceed to screw me over as soon as the intended state is reached... I'm not seeing the issue there.
I don't think this can be true. In the case of Gitrog, the contents of your library and graveyard are constantly being changed and reordered. How do i shortcut to say "I have Ravenous Trap and i exile your whole deck"? You don't necessarily have your whole deck in your graveyard when you go to trigger Kozilek, but you could, if he was in the very bottom of your deck; which we don't know until we get there. And since you have to loop a very large number of times, your graveyard will be different all the time (because the loop is not just 2 actions like
Basalt Monolith +
Rings of Brighthearth), so there will be times you can Trap/Macabre multiple cards in certain loops but not others. (if your win condition is
Rath's Edge, you have to do the loop equal to the life total of opponents for example, and yet again, maybe more since sometimes you will dredge/mill your
Crop Rotation so who knows how many times).
With the Efreet example, nothing of the game state actually physically needs to change. I have no problem shortcutting "Oh you flip one centillion coins for each plank volume in a googolplex worth of multiverses? Yea i assume you scored at least a 20".
If you and i have 40 life and our opponents 25 and i know your win con is
Exsanguinate, i can deterministically say "I
Krosan Grip your Rings of Brighthearth after you generate 25 mana".
It is not possible for me to shortcut your Gitrogian actions to "well i exile all your combo pieces/entire deck/these 3 cards by name", but it is possible in practice to respond at a certain point in a certain loop (since each will be different) to interrupt in whatever way i see most efficient. A competent Gitrog player probably shouldn't say "yea we shortcut and my whole deck is gone" because there ought to be backup pieces and such but for all i know playing against them i have a shot at exiling a whole lotta stuff that could be too effective for them to carry on.
That doesn't mean *in practice* i would never scoop to gitrog, but if i have meaningful interaction the reality is takes too damn long to work through the whole thing.
Sid the Chicken wrote:
spacemonaut wrote:
If they wanted to stack any part of their deck they picked the wrong thing to do infinitely: infinite scry 2+ would do that.
Except it's impossible to know the exact number of scry instances necessary, so by your appeal to strict rules enforcement, that doesn't work either.
You don't need to know the exact number though. You can say 1 billion. There aren't enough cards in an EDH deck to not sort it out in 1 billion scry 2's, no matter the starting order of the cards. Once your deck is in the order you wish it to be, the rest of the scry 2's just go "top, top", "top, top", "top, top". You can even "bottom, bottom" until your deck is in the same order again.
This is just shortcutting physical labor, like Efreet, like Rings of Brighthearth + Basalt Monolith. Scrying my deck isn't affecting the order of the graveyard or any opponent's ability to respond in a particular point. If you can force them to shuffle after their infinite scry2, presumably they can Scry2 again infinitely. Which is not the case when actual cards are exiled from Gitrog's graveyard or another "Horseman" setup on the other hand.