Panglacial wurm and mana sources interaction
Asked by wasianpower 7 years ago
Let's say that your board state is as follows: 3 forests and a plains, a Corrupted Grafstone, Millikin and Selvala, Explorer Returned. There is an Elvish Mystic in your graveyard. You crack an Evolving Wilds and there is a Panglacial Wurm in your library so you decide to attempt to cast it. The top two cards of your library are both Blightsteel Colossus. What happens? Do you get to cast it? What if the top two cards are Blightsteel Colossus on top and then a land? What if it's a land and then a Blightsteel Colossus? Thanks!
TheRedMage says... Accepted answer #2
@ Epochalyptik: If you activate Millikin while you are trying cast Panglacial Wurm (as opposed to, before you are casting it), the milled card will stay milled. This is because of rule 717, "Handling Illegal Actions".
717.1. If a player takes an illegal action or starts to take an action but cant legally complete it, the entire action is reversed and any payments already made are canceled. No abilities trigger and no effects apply as a result of an undone action. If the action was casting a spell, the spell returns to the zone it came from. The player may also reverse any legal mana abilities activated while making the illegal play, unless mana from them or from any triggered mana abilities they triggered was spent on another mana ability that wasnt reversed. Players may not reverse actions that moved cards to a library, moved cards from a library to any zone other than the stack, caused a library to be shuffled, or caused cards from a library to be revealed.
@wasianpower: That said, in the scenario proposed here - well, in two of the scenarios at least - we know that enough mana to cast Wurm can be made. Let's assume that the opponent has a land on top, so we can be extra thorough.
- Scenario 1: The top cards of our library are Darksteel Colossus and Forest
In this scenario, you crack Evolving Wilds, and decide to cast Panglacial Wurm. At the moment you make that decision, Panglacial Wurm leaves the library and enters the stack on top of the Evolving Wilds ability which we are currently resolving. We go through all the steps of casting a spell until we get to step 5 - Activating mana abilities. We activate our lands to make
, then Corrupted Grafstone to make . We activate Selvala, Explorer Returned, which reveals Darksteel Colossus and Library of Alexandria, thus making and drawing us those cards. Then, we activate Millikin, which flips a Forest into the yard and makes 
, for a total of , or 7 mana. You use that mana to pay for Wurm. At this point we are finally done casting the spell and we can finish resolving the Evolving Wilds ability, finding a land, putting it onto the battlefield tapped and shuffling the library. We then go to resolve the stack as normal, with Panglacial Wurm now being the top object on it. - Scenario 2: The top cards of your library are two copies of Darksteel Colossus.
This is really the same as the previous scenario. The only difference is that when you go to activate Millikin, it flips a Darksteel Colossus, which gets shuffled in the library before we can move forward with the rest of casting our spell. This doesn't affect the casting process since by this point Panglacial Wurm is already on the stack. - Scenario 3: The top cards of our library are Forest and Darksteel Colossus
In this case we have a significant difference with respect to the first scenario: Selvala makes no mana, so we end up with a total maximum of six mana - not enough for Panglacial Wurm. The game then performs a so-called "CR Rewind", according to rule 717, quoted above. Selvala's ability had players draw cards, so it can't be reversed. If we activated Millikin, it flipped a Darksteel Colossus, which caused the library to be shuffled so that can't be reversed either. The rest of the abilities will all be reversed and you'll finish resolving the Evolving Wilds ability. When the dust settles you will control 1 tapped basic land, 4 untapped basics, an untapped Corrupted Grafstone, a tapped Selvala, Explorer Returned and a tapped Millikin. You will have the Forest you drew with Selvala in your hand (your opponent will still have their Library of Alexandria as well) and still in your pool from the Millikin activation.
Epochalyptik says... #1
From Selvala, Explorer Returned's Gatherer rulings:
5/29/2014: If you activate Selvala's ability while casting a spell, and you discover you can't produce enough mana to pay that spell's costs, the spell is reversed. The spell returns to whatever zone you were casting it from. You may reverse other mana abilities you activated while casting the spell, but Selvala's ability can't be reversed. Whatever mana that ability produced will be in your mana pool and each player will have drawn a card.
Your ability to pay Panglacial Wurm's costs may vary depending on whether Selvala, Explorer Returned's ability hits enough nonland cards or not. If it does, you can pay for Panglacial Wurm and finish casting it. If it doesn't, you'll return Panglacial Wurm and the milled card to your library (assuming you activated Millikin's ability first; the smart play would be to activate Selvala, Explorer Returned's ability first to gauge whether you can produce enough mana before you reveal another card from Millikin's ability). You'll have to shuffle to randomize the locations of those cards.
August 10, 2016 3:48 p.m.