Lethal Vapors weirdness
Asked by chosenone124 6 years ago
I have Lethal Vapors on the field and Teferi's Protection in hand.
I activate Lethal Vapors a googol times then I pass priority. My opponent then activates Lethal Vapors the same number of times then passes priority back to me. Which one of us has to stop activating Lethal Vapors first?
In a tournament setting, suppose I successfully resolve my googol triggers of Lethal Vapors and my opponent doesn't skip any turns. My opponent has an Emrakul, the Aeons Torn in their deck. They would want to draw their deck, discarding to hand size until they hit Emrakul, then discard Emrakul to hand size and repeat the cycle until I've skipped a googol turns. However, since playing a googol turns is impossible, what would happen?
Would my opponent be forced to stop discarding Emrakul, since each Emrakul discard does not advance the boardstate but instead resets it repeatedly in a way similar to Four Horsemen? Would they be forced to just keep on manually doing the iterations until the round goes to time? Would they be allowed to shortcut and say "I do this draw thing until you take a turn again"?
Monomanamaniac says... #2
Technically you could declare the number of turns you skip, because you have to, then they could do the email thing that many times. I bet you could shortcut it but I think you'd have to pay them out. Assuming they didn't repeat the process over and over on the same turn they could keep doing it. It would probably lead to the match being called for time
November 30, 2017 5:42 p.m.
Rhadamanthus says... Accepted answer #3
In the first situation where each player is responding back and forth, the active player is the one who needs to make a different decision to break the loop. So it depends on whose turn it is.
719.3. Sometimes a loop can be fragmented, meaning that each player involved in the loop performs an independent action that results in the same game state being reached multiple times. If that happens, the active player (or, if the active player is not involved in the loop, the first player in turn order who is involved) must then make a different game choice so the loop does not continue.
In the situation with Emrakul, it's possible to describe a sequence of actions that should (call a Judge, as this is one of those "you had to be there" things) qualify as a shortcut and won't cause the opponent to be infracted for Slow Play. By counting out the N cards left in the library and saying that the player will discard Emrakul at the end of every Nth turn, it's possible to shortcut through the first Q * N turns where Q is the integer part of googol / N (i.e. googol = Q * N + R and you skip to only playing out the last R turns of the sequence).
November 30, 2017 5:49 p.m.
chosenone124 says... #4
Rhadamanthus, so if I were to activate Lethal Vapors a googol times on my opponent's upkeep, they activate a googol times in response, then I activate another googol times in response, my opponent would be unable to activate Lethal Vapors anymore because as the active player they must make a different choice?
November 30, 2017 6:02 p.m.
chosenone124 says... #5
Also, is this considered a true loop? Each iteration of the loop technically adds another effect to the stack that actually affects the gamestate when they resolve. That means that the same game state isn't being achieved multiple times.
And finally, if the opponent can't figure out that shortcut, are they forced to either concede or violate slow play?
November 30, 2017 6:06 p.m. Edited.
Monomanamaniac says... #6
Oh and Door to Nothingness could still get around that
November 30, 2017 6:11 p.m.
Tyrant-Thanatos says... #7
Door to Nothingness would be unable to target a player who has resolved Teferi's Protection, as they have Protection from Everything.
November 30, 2017 6:22 p.m.
dragonstryke58 says... #9
...and then the opponent uses his turns to Helix Pinnacle...
November 30, 2017 7:37 p.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #10
To post #4 above: Yes, they can't keep responding by adding another block of activations. They have to stop and do something else.
To post #5 above: Yes, this is a loop around the same game state. The game doesn't have a hard official definition for "game state", because it's not just a matter of objects and events in some particular configuration. It's also about what the objects and events mean in a practical sense for the game. You activating Lethal Vapors 10 times and me responding by activating it 10 times produces a result that's indistinguishable from both of us doing nothing, or from both of us going back and forth with responses of 10 activations for the next 5 minutes. None of what we're doing is actually advancing the game state.
No one is required to help your opponent figure out the best strategy for escaping the situation. If they try to go with a slow-play method then they'll get infractions. The penalty is a warning, but repeated slow play infractions are upgradeable to a game loss.
November 30, 2017 11:58 p.m.
chosenone124 says... #12
One more thing about the loop you mentioned. What is the resultant hand at the final iteration?
You can't just designate 7 cards to hold in hand, because if you draw Emrakul before the Nth turn, the proposed shortcut prevents you from discarding it (since you can only discard it on turn N). That means you can only designate 6 cards that you won't discard.
That means at the end of the last iteration of the shortcut procedure, when you have 8 cards in hand, 7 cards will be determined: the 6 cards you designated as "I will never discard these" and Emrakul. However, the last card will not be. Since the loop's end state isn't defined, then the shortcut you mentioned is illegal right?
December 1, 2017 2:12 a.m.
Rhadamanthus says... #13
Good point. "I will discard what I draw, except for when I draw Emrakul in which case I will discard NN instead" might not actually be okay because it's a conditional step.
Call a Judge. =)
chosenone124 says... #1
Note that in the tournament setting scenario, after successfully resolving a googol turn skips I also successfully resolve Teferi's Protection and my opponent has no way to kill me.
November 30, 2017 2:32 p.m.