Does Chains of Mephistopheles' effect cause a loop?
Asked by Phaetion 9 years ago
For reference: Chains of Mephistopheles
Suppose an opponent draws outside his or her draw step, and they have at least one other card in their hand. They would have to discard a card, then draw a card. At that point, wouldn't Chains trigger again until they are forced to mill a card due to the card's effect?
It took me a bit to fully digest your post with Chains in mind, but I found the answer I was looking for. Thank you for answering. :)
June 5, 2015 1:33 p.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #3
Sorry, I just re-read my response and I can see it's way more compact than it should have been. For the benefit of anyone else who's having trouble picking it apart:
Chains of Mephistopheles generates a replacement effect (replacement effects always have "as", "with", "instead", "prevent" or a couple other odd constructions somewhere in the text). When a replacement effect is applied to an event it can only modify that event once. It won't be applied again if the modified event is still something it could normally apply to.
In this example Chains modifies a card draw event and the modified event can also include a card draw (instead of drawing a card, you discard a card and then draw a card). Chains won't try to replace that card draw in the modified event, because it's already been applied.
Consider Doubling Season. If you cast Raise the Alarm you know that Season would make it create 4 tokens instead of 2. It doesn't start going "4, no wait 8, no wait 16, no wait..." and on forever.
Rhadamanthus says... Accepted answer #1
A replacement effect (has "as", "with", "instead", etc. in the description) can only be applied to an event once. This is why a card like Doubling Season doesn't immediately hang the game in an infinite stream of tokens once one gets made. Chains won't apply its effect again to an event after it's already modified it.
June 5, 2015 1:01 p.m. Edited.