Staff of Domination & the infinite mana mirror match

Asked by K4nkato 1 year ago

EDH game, here’s the situation.

I have a Staff of Domination, a Priest of Titania, a Lathril, Blade of the Elves and 9 other elves. This is enough to create infinite mana, endless tap & untap my Elves and use Lathril’s activated ability to win the game.

Now here’s the hitch. My friend also has Staff of Domination & Priest of Titania with five elves, meaning they can also make infinite mana. They didn’t know that so I (foolishly) let them do the combo and now we have a problem. Because both of us have an arbitrarily large amount of mana and we can both endless tap & untap Lathril, we have stack that can never resolve. Any time I untap Lathril they can tap her. Anytime I tap their Priest they can untap it. There is no way to force a combo because my opponent can always disrupt it, but I can always undue their disruption. There are effectively infinite actions taken in a loop that will never resolve.

What happens? Is the game a stalemate?

Gidgetimer says... Accepted answer #1

You have to win on their turn. What you are describing is a fragmented loop. When the game enters a fragmented loop the onus is on the active player to make a different choice. So you will be able to untap all of your creatures on their turn (assuming you have the mana to do it on their turn) and activate Lathril and then repeat until they are dead.

728.3. 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.

January 22, 2023 4:01 p.m.