Infinite Life?

Asked by Benmtgmage 8 years ago

Say I have Sanguine Bond and Exquisite Blood on the battlefield, and I tap my Soulmender to gain one life. Do I now have infinite life, while the opponent has negative infinite life, or does it have to be a number, say life 100,000,000, or 546,832,239, or 567?

Raging_Squiggle says... Accepted answer #1

Neither. You have exactly as much life as your opponent did upon gaining the 1 life. Your opponent loses because they are at 0 life.

If your opponent has Platinum Angel in play, the game is a draw because it's a mandatory infinite loop.

Also note that "infinite" is not a quantifiable number in Magic and cannot be represented by numbers. Use something like Graham's Number which is the largest quantifiable number out there.

February 7, 2016 4:12 p.m.

Benmtgmage says... #2

 Thanks Raging_Squiggle, that helps me in future duels.
February 7, 2016 7:51 p.m.

Rhadamanthus says... #3

FYI, there's no such thing as a "largest quantifiable number". Also, if you need to choose an incredibly large number it's best to choose one you can explain to your opponent.

February 7, 2016 11:23 p.m.

I enjoy ridiculous facts. Lol. Take for example...

Its the number of grains of sand that could fit in the universe, times 10 billion. So picture the universe jam-packed with small grains of sand for tens of billions of light years above the Earth, below it, in front of it, behind it, just sand. Endless sand. You could fly a plane for trillions of years in any direction at full speed through it, and youd never get to the end of the sand. Lots and lots and lots of sand.

Now imagine that you stop the plane at some point, reach out the window, and grab one grain of sand to look at under a powerful microscope and what you see is that its actually not a single grain, but 10 billion microscopic grains wrapped in a membrane, all of which together is the size of a normal grain of sand. If that were the case for every single grain of sand in this hypothetical, if each were actually a bundle of 10 billion tinier grains, the total number of those microscopic grains would be a googol.

As weve discussed, filling the universe with sand only gets you a ten billionth of the way to a googol, so what wed have to do is fill the universe to the brim with sand, get a very tiny pen, and write 10 billion zeros on each grain of sand. If you did this and then looked at a completed grain under a microscope, youd see it covered with 10 billion microscopic zeros. If you did that on every single grain of sand filling the universe, youd have successfully written down the number googolplex.

And just how long would it take to do that?

Well I just tested how fast a human can reasonably write zeros, and I wrote 36 zeros in 10 seconds. At that rate, if from the age of 5 to the age of 85, all I did for 16 hours a day, every single day, was write zeros at that rate, Id finish one half of a grain of sand in my lifetime. Youd need to dedicate two full human lives to finish one grain of sand. About 107 billion human beings have ever lived in the history of the species. If every single human dedicated every waking moment of their lives to writing zeros on grains of sand, as a species wed have by now filled a cube with a side of 1.7m, about the height of a human, with completed sand grains. Thats it.

February 8, 2016 2:53 a.m.

Edit: It'd be fun to explain these to your opponents and watch their minds explode.

February 8, 2016 2:54 a.m.

This discussion has been closed