We Have To Go Deeper

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TheRedMage

16 November 2015

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Hello everybody, and welcome to the first ever episode of We Have to Go Deeper, where I talk your ear off about a bunch of narrow corner cases that you probably don’t care about. I will try to have some generic rules discussion for the people that want to learn more about how the game works, and then try to go off the deep end talking about a couple of card interactions that I find weird, interesting, fascinating or all of the above.

Shoutout to VampireArmy for helping me to come up with a name for the series and to all readers for indulging me. Here is how this is going to work: whenever I find a question in the Q&A section that puts me in a writing mood, I will use it as a jumping-off point to discuss the answer. At least for now, there is no schedule, I will just write whenever I find something that tickles my fancy.

And now, without further ado, let’s look at our Jumping-off Point

The Jumping-off Point

^{Jump - art by Eric Deschamps}

This question was asked by TowelGuy on Sunday 10/25. This is the relevant part:

Let's say I have a Cloudfin Raptor on the battlefield, then I cast my Young Wolf, which evolves the raptor making it an 1/2, then I cast my Pongify on the wolf and...What happens? The wolf dies and Undying triggers but does the ape enter the battlefield first, second or at the same time? Do I choose how they enter? Do they enter the battlefield at the same time and I chose how evolve triggers? Do I get a 2/3 raptor or a 3/4??

A number of people, including myself, tried to answer (with various degrees of success). This is the answer I gave the poster (or at least, the relevant part of the answer):

There is a difference between "triggering" and "being put on the stack". Triggered abilities trigger whenever their condition is met; however, they are not actually put on the stack until a player would get priority. If multiple triggers you control would go on the stack at the same time, you get to chose how to stack them.

When Pongify resolves, you do what it tells you to in the order it tells you to do that. So you destroy the Young Wolf, and Undying triggers. Then you put a 3/3 ape token into play, and Evolve triggers, Finally, Pongify finishes resolving and both the Undying and Evolve triggers are trying to go on the stack; as they are trying to go on the stack at the same time and you control both of them, you can stack them however you want.

In this case, the most convenient way is to put the Undying trigger on the stack second, so it will resolve first. In that case, when your 2/2 Young Wolf enters the battlefield, your Cloudfin Raptor is still a 1/2 and evolves into a 2/3. Then, the ape comes in, and evolves it again into a 3/4.

Look at that. Rules counseling AND strategy advice, all in one convenient package! To those of you out there that are looking to become Judges: you are awesome! And also, when people ask you questions at an event, don’t answer them like this! Giving strategic advice to players during a tournament is, as you probably know by now, a bad thing.

But enough about that. We already encounter something that I consider pretty cool, although it is a fairly basic interaction - the Undying ability on Young Wolf quite obviously triggers first. However that doesn’t mean that it goes on the stack first or that it resolves first. Rather you get to pick the order, and pick one of two possible outcomes: you can either do things in the order I suggested in the answer, resolving the undying trigger first; or, you can resolve the evolve trigger first, have the 3/3 Ape token make the Cloudfin Raptor into a 2/3, then resolve the Undying trigger. If you pick the second option, as Evolve is an “intervening If” trigger, the 2/2 Young Wolf won’t cause an Evolve trigger to put on the stack at all, and the Cloudfin Raptor will stay a 2/3.

I don’t know why you would ever choose that option. Maybe your opponent has a Crackdown or something.

A Moment of Inspiration

^{Inspiration - art by Matt Cavotta}

Theros limited was a good environment to teach people about the difference between triggering and going on the stack. The reason for that was all those creatures with Inspired, like Oreskos Sun Guide. Most of the time, those creatures would become untapped and thus trigger during your untap step. However, no players can get priority during the untap step, so the trigger would go on the stack during your upkeep. A whole step goes by before these things can resolve!

That also means that, if you control any card that triggers at the beginning of your upkeep (I usually use Thassa, God of the Sea as an example, which is fortunate as we don’t even have to move from Theros at all) you get to pick the order those triggers work. For example, if you had Thassa and an active Sphinx's Disciple, you can stack the triggers so that you can scry before you draw and control your draw. You are also probably winning that game unless your opponent finds an answer to your Sphinx's Disciple soon, since you are drawing two cards per turn, and all that card advantage means your Thassa is going to be a nice indestructible unblockable 5/5 in a couple turns.

There is no way to come up with a clever paragraph title including the word APNAP

APNAP means “Active Player, Non-Active Player”. It’s a shorthand to remember what happens if triggers controlled by different players are going on the stack at the same time: first, the active player (usually the player whose turn it is) puts all his triggers on the stack, choosing the order. Then, the opponent does the same. If this is a multiplayer game and multiple opponents control triggers that are trying to go on the stack at the same time, you go in turn order. This is the order triggers are going on the stack. That means the opponent’s triggers will resolve first.

Incidentally that means that if one of your opponents has Varchild's War-Riders and another has Mogis, God of Slaughter the riders might get you some (somewhat ironically named) Survivors in time for you to sacrifice them to Mogis, or they might not, depending where your opponents are sitting relative to you.

This situation is obviously completely hypothetical as nobody has ever played Varchild's War-Riders.

Sadly, in the previous scenario, if you control the token generator, you’ll never get the token in time. Mogis’s trigger will always resolve first, as my Aerie Worshippers discovered in a sad game of limited that I played some time ago. The sad part was, of course, that I was at 2 life, and couldn’t just pay to keep my Aerie Worshippers around for one more turn (hint: I lost that game).

On a completely unrelated matter, the Survivor tokens made by Varchild's War-Riders are the only creatures with the creature type Surivor out there. You’d imagine that, if Moriok Rigger got to retroactively become a Rigger when Steamflogger Boss was printed, Riptide Survivor and his friends (Auriok Survivors, Village Survivors and Survivor of the Unseen) would get to be Survivors. As it turns out, they don’t.

Draw’s Undoing

^{Day's Undoing - art by Jonas de Ro}

Day's Undoing might not be the best card in Origins but, from an interaction standpoint, it’s probably the coolest. The reason is a sequence of three magical words that had only appeared on two other cards before: “end the turn”.

If you read the comprehensive rules, there are a few rules that just start by saying “One Card does such and such”. I always liked those rules - it’s kind of the rules manager’s way of saying “By the way, this card does something so outlandish we had to make a rule just for it”. Nine cards have the dubious honor of being the only card that does what they do (if you are curious: Power Play, Karn Liberated, Drain Power, Volrath's Shapeshifter, City in a Bottle, Golgothian Sylex, Apocalypse Chime, Word of Command and Shaharazade (Chulandfall)).

I would argue that the effects that are done by a handful of cards are more interesting. These are general and reasonable enough that Wizards was willing to print other cards doing something similar, but still outlandish enough that they have only done it a handful of times. There is no rule that starts with “Two Cards…” anymore, but there is still one that goes like this:

713.1. Three cards (Time Stop, Sundial of the Infinite, and Day's Undoing) end the turn

Day's Undoing, however, has the unique distinction of being the only card that doesn’t just end the turn. You do some stuff, and then you end the turn. And, when you do some stuff, chances are something can trigger.

What does “end the turn” mean exactly? Basically

1. you exile the stack (including the spell or ability that is ending the turn)
2. you check state-based actions
3. you go directly to the cleanup step

Now, the cleanup step is kinda weird. It’s there so that the rules can do some garbage collecting at the end of the turn without players interfering, so, players don’t get priority during the cleanup step... Except when they do. Basically the last thing you do in your cleanup step is see if anything triggered since the last time you checked. If something did (cards with Madness are usually pretty good at this) then it goes on the stack, and you resolve the stack normally. Then, if any player had priority during the cleanup step, there is another cleanup step.

At this point I was going to write that you can go infinite with Basking Rootwalla + Nettle Sentinel + Retraction Helix if you have enough cards in hand and Impact Tremors or some other way of profiting from a creature entering the battlefield over and over. Then I realized this doesn’t work since the “until end of turn” effect on Retraction Helix will end when you start the second cleanup step. That made me kinda sad.

Wait, I think I cracked it. You can get infinite cleanups with Basking Rootwalla + Basking Rootwalla + Cloudstone Curio or Basking Rootwalla + Intruder Alarm + Tradewind Rider if you control any other creature. Glad we got there, that was going to bug me all week.

Prior to Magic Origins, the rules just said that, when cleanup rolled by, if something had triggered and was waiting to go on the stack, it would just go on the stack during cleanup, no matter when it triggered. But with Day's Undoing, they found that this caused some non-intuitive interaction with some cards (including one from the very same set, Sphinx's Tutelage).

Day's Undoing was single-handedly responsible for a change in how the rules hande ending the turn, which I think is pretty cool. Without further ado, I present you with the “Day's Undoing rule”:

713.1a If there are any triggered abilities that triggered before this process began but haven’t been put onto the stack yet, those abilities cease to exist. They won’t be put onto the stack. This rule does not apply to abilities that trigger during this process (see rule 713.2).

I am going to now attempt a very dangerous maneuver: attempt to explain what a card would have done prior to the rules update that accompanied the set it was in. This is usually a quest of futility, as straightening up those interactions is kind of the point of these updates.

What I am trying to say is, kids, don’t try this at home, but here we go.

Before the Origin

Yawgatog has a pretty awesome collection of resources for judges. Among other things, it has a completely hyperlinked version of the comprehensive rules, and also a rule-by-rule, set-by-set changelog, which is what we are interested in here. According to the pre-origins rules, that didn’t include 713.1a what would have happened is:

1. Player casts Day's Undoing. Assuming no responses, it begins resolving.
2. Hands and graveyards are shuffled in libraries. If Cosi's Trickster is around, he triggers.
3. Players draw seven cards. Cards that trigger on cards being drawn trigger (Nekusar, the Mindrazer, Sphinx's Tutelage, Chasm Skulker, Consecrated Sphinx, you name it).
4. The end of turn procedure begins.
5. Day's Undoing exiles itself.
6. State-based actions are checked.
7. The Cleanup Step begins. Damage marked on creatures is removed and, simultaneously, “Until end of turn” effects end. Players discard to hand size, and all the rest of the fun cleanup stuff happens.
8. The game checks State-based actions again. As state-based actions were just checked and nobody got priority since then, it’s unlikely they do anything, but it still happens, as this is a normal cleanup step.
9. The game checks to see if anything is waiting to be triggered, sees all those sweet Consecrated Sphinx (or whatever) triggers, and puts seven identical instances of the same Consecrated Sphinx trigger on the stack. The stack resolves normally, and players get a chance to respond to the triggers as usual.
10. Since players were given priority during cleanup, a new cleanup step begins. Assuming state-based actions do nothing and no new triggers are waiting to go on the stack, no player gets priority this time.
11. The turn finally ends.

Under the new rules, however, there is a new step between steps (4) and (5) in which all the triggers cease existing. That means that in almost all circumstances, the cleanup step from step (7) will be a normal cleanup step in which no player is given priority, and the turn will end immediately afterwards.

We Have to Go (Deeper)

And that’s it for this first article. I ended up writing a lot more than I thought! I did have a fairly deep topic I guess.

If you liked this article or have comments or feedback, you can write it in the comments below, or tweet @TheR3dMage. I tend to read most of the questions from the Q&A, but if you think I missed an interesting one, you can suggest it in the comments below. If this becomes popular, I might set up an email account for the articles later on.

Next time, we are going even deeper. I’ll see you then!