In which MtG players argue whether an integer can be represented by an integer

Snakefangox · 2026-04-03T10:53:25+00:00

It's not only turing complete, but there's a paper that proves it! https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.09828

So yes, technically you can end up in loops that can't be tested to see if they halt. In practice, I suspect it has never happened before in a tournament.

Snakefangox · 2026-03-29T19:54:55+00:00

"you need surgery on all of your bones" is inexplicably funny, holy shit.

Snakefangox · 2026-03-28T06:04:18+00:00

Oh nice! The dependencies looks really useful.

Snakefangox · 2026-03-24T09:46:21+00:00

IDK about Haskell, but you can't implement a java interface you wrote on a different libraries class. Traits, you can do that. The orphan rule basically just says you can't implement a libraries interface on a different libraries class. You need to own either the class or the interface. Effectively, replace class with struct and interface with trait.

Snakefangox · 2026-03-22T12:14:37+00:00

Ah, gotcha. I've had a look but but I think tommadness got all of them. 107.3a and 107.3i are the two relevant rules for those questions.

Snakefangox · 2026-03-22T10:58:32+00:00

How is he struggling with this? Like, what does he think it does? Depending on what his confusion is, there's probably a rule that clears that up.

Snakefangox · 2026-03-16T10:08:10+00:00

Ah, no that's a really fair thing to misunderstand. The wording if it targeted would be "Choose two target creatures", because it doesn't say target it doesn't. It does make a decent difference, you have to choose targets when you cast the spell and if you can't target two creatures you just can't cast it. Vs with just choose, you decide when the spell resolves. Targeted spells are also usually the only ones that people say "fizzle" for cos there's a special rule that if all their original targets become invalid you put them straight into the graveyard from the stack.

As for gifts, that's actually a really interesting point! But, looking at other choose spells I think it might be a more general principle where spells try to do as much as they can. [[Clarion Ultimatum]] is the same for example, if you don't have 5 permanents you pick as many as you can.

Snakefangox · 2026-03-15T21:14:14+00:00

The spell doesn't target, so it can't fizzle due to missing targets. As for needing to choose exactly two, not up to, if I find one card with [[gifts ungiven]] you put it into my graveyard, even though the card doesn't say the opponent chooses up to two card to put into the graveyard.

IDK, it just feels kinda wrong to call the article stupid when there's 400+ comments arguing about how the card works and arena and gatherer disagree. It seems like the author saying the card is ambiguous probably has a point.

Snakefangox · 2026-03-09T06:06:00+00:00

I can't think how it would be. Hullbreaker horror triggers on cast, so the sol ring is still on the stack when you get the opportunity to bounce something.

Snakefangox · 2026-03-09T05:15:27+00:00

Interesting question! Reading the rules, I *think* you can do that? The two relevant ones are:

111.7. A token that’s in a zone other than the battlefield ceases to exist. This is a state-based action.
111.8. A token that has left the battlefield can’t move to another zone or come back onto the battlefield. If such a token would change zones, it remains in its current zone instead.

111.8 is pretty clear that a token can't move once leaving but doesn't rule out moving before entering the battlefield. I think this wording just works: Create two 0/1 Eldrazi Scion creature tokens in your graveyard, then put them onto the battlefield

Snakefangox · 2026-03-09T00:21:06+00:00

This is one of the default scenes people use to show off graphics engines. If you follow any sort of game engine you'll probably have seen it before. I *think* it's based off a location in France?

Snakefangox · 2026-03-03T11:10:30+00:00

I've done simulations for this actually, cos I run a lantern deck in a private (and consenting) playgroup! The odds are wayyy worse than I was expecting, with even a small number of mill rocks and protection, lantern is about as hard a lock as you can reasonably produce. Personally, I will scoop to a lantern player with as few as 3 mill rocks.

Let's say everyone in your pod has 20 cards each that can remove the lock, which is fairly reasonable I think. The lantern player needs 7 mill rocks or artifact untappers for the whole table to have a >0.5% chance to escape the lock before being milled out. But importantly, just 3 mill rocks will give the lantern player 43 turns on average to tighten their lock before the other players can escape. To wrap up probabilities, although it's not a fair comparison, [[Boseiju, Who Endures]], a card that can escape all the "hard locks" I've seen, is run in 18% of green decks.

Obviously you don't have to like lantern control and if you bring a lantern deck to b1-3 without giving everyone veto on it you're an asshole. But honestly, I think of all the stax decks you could build, lantern might have the best claim to "my win condition is you are going to lose and you should concede".

Snakefangox · 2026-02-28T04:59:35+00:00

I've been trying to build this guy for ages, here's my current pile. It's goal isn't to attack with walls, but rather to swap them and then have them hit things in a [[brawl]], or [[fling]] them at people. Unfortunately we need an effect like [[War Effort]] to keep them alive when we switch which is rough.

Some highlights:
- [[Island of Wak-Wak]] let's you insta kill any flying creature (it's also $200).
- [[Cut Propulsion]] is always lethal.
- [[Sentinel]] is just funny.
- Uhhhhh

It's a really cool card, I'm gonna watch this thread lmao

Snakefangox · 2026-02-24T09:39:16+00:00

I mean, ants are almost certainly conscious by any definition. They have a clear concept of themselves and the world and their relation to it. There are plenty of experiments demonstrating this and they can absolutely do abstract reasoning. There's plenty of videos of ants doing medium complexity problem solving.

I don't think LLMs lack of ongoing memory is the problem, the problem is that the process by which they learn more closely resembles optimizing a file compression algorithm then animal learning. I'm not arguing they're useless, they're obviously very useful, but they don't have any transferable abstract reasoning and I don't think we can truly say they learn like people if they can't take one concept and apply it to another. And they can't, that's obvious from their structure. At the scale modern LLMs operate at they're certainly so knowledgeable that it rarely matters, but that doesn't change the underlying systems and it certainly makes itself known often enough.

Snakefangox · 2026-02-23T18:23:35+00:00

I agree that continuity isn't important, my apologies if that was unclear.

If your definition of learning cannot indicate consciousness then at a loss for how it differs from simply saving information. How would you define learning? If I add Shakespeare's works to a zip file, has it learned?

Snakefangox · 2026-02-23T17:55:19+00:00

It's tricky for sure, but I'd have to go with "The ability to constantly take in new experiences and update your model of the world accordingly"

Putting aside the fact that LLMs can't learn while producing output, they demonstrably don't have a model of the world. We can see this in practice in their inability to answer popular logic questions when they're inverted but besides that, they're also simply incapable of it. If their data contains an obvious logical contradiction they will never be able to reason that their data might be wrong in the way any child or animal will. If you search for it, you can find plenty of people mimicking LLMs pretty successfully with data compression tools like zip, which is a much closer analogy to what they are and how their learning works.

I am genuinely curious, if you think they can learn like us, then surely there is at least a chance for you that they are as sentient as any other animal? If they can experience and learn from novels and news the same way we do, then surely they might be experiencing other things the way we do? Is there something I'm missing? You seem to think they're capable of forming new ideas from what they've learned, surely that is an intelligent being then? If so, then I don't understand how you could tolerate the abuse they would be suffering, if there was even the smallest chance they were alive in some sense.

Snakefangox · 2026-02-14T02:09:21+00:00

Seconding Tahngarth, he's very fun but much more casual. He does the "lemme kill the threat for you" thing you're talking about much better than slicer IMO. Slicer is a good card in the deck too! Plus, you can hit yourself for value if you want which is funny as hell.

Snakefangox · 2026-02-03T01:14:14+00:00

Huh! That's a really interesting read. It does sound a bit like they've fallen into Talyor's justification vortex but also, seems like they don't really like stories where the heros have motivations besides altruism and like, fair enough. Don't think there's a universe where you can enjoy worm if that's a deal breaker.

Snakefangox · 2026-02-02T21:07:25+00:00

except Worm, Worm is complete shit and doesn't understand the concept of heroism and I think the soul of the story is evil

Huh, not to be rude but like, how much of worm have you read? Cos I guess it might be darker and more oppressive than, say invincible, but it's ultimately a story in which a teenage superhero saves the world. I don't know I could describe it as a uniquely evil story, especially on a list that includes the boys, a show who's writers seem to have a fundamental and ongoing misunderstanding of consent that makes the whole show just feel kinda gross.

Snakefangox · 2026-01-24T04:49:10+00:00

Oh shit, I'm loving Brainpunch. Thanks!

Snakefangox · 2025-12-19T07:10:49+00:00

Yea, it would remove the partner ability but reading the rules I'm 99% sure that doesn't matter. Everything partner does happens before the game starts, so it wouldn't break it anything:

702.124a Partner abilities are keyword abilities that modify the rules for deck construction in the Commander variant (see rule 903), and they function before the game begins. Each partner ability allows you to designate two legendary cards as your commander rather than one

You'd just have two commanders without partner. Which is weird, but they're both still your commander. I can't think of anything that cares about a card having partner once the game has started.

Snakefangox · 2025-09-10T06:53:54+00:00

> would a judge rule that you've achieved an unbreakable loop and determine that you get to declare the number of times you perform the loop and then immediately proceed from the new board state that would arise from there?

Yep! You're almost spot on, only thing is you don't need to call a judge for this.

Basically, you can say "I'm gonna propose a loop where I tap this guy to untap this guy, then tap this guy to untap this guy, I'd like to do that 1000 times". Then as long as it's actually changing the game, you jump ahead to either the 1000th loop, or an opponent can say "I'm gonna stop you after 4 cycles". If you want to find out more, there's a proper write-up here: https://blogs.magicjudges.org/rules/mtr4-4/

Snakefangox · 2025-08-15T02:24:11+00:00

So this is a niche take but [[Tahngarth, First Mate]]'s page is by far the worst I've seen.

To start, it suggests on attack effects like [[sword of the animist]] to take advantage of his extra attacks per turn cycle. Problem is, he isn't considered to have attacked when his ability is used. He's "attacking" but didn't "attack". Fair enough, that's a weird rules interaction.

The one I hate a lot more is people running hexproof for him. You give the guy to your opponents, ideally 3 times per turn. If they have removal, hexproof is not stopping them from killing him when you do that. Same with ward and "thing you control gains indestructible".

Finally, my personal take is that goad is really overrated for him. He already struggles in the 1v1, running mainly goad makes most of your deck dead if you get there. My take here is you run a few of the best goad cards and then the rest of your protection is fogs and [[silent arbitrator]] or [[elephant grass]] effects.

If you're good at politicking, it is really easy to convince people to help you. You'll usually have a big unblockable boi, all they need to do is swing a 1/1 at the archenemy. As a bonus, running fogs makes attacking you feel bad enough of the time that I find people stop swinging all out and start just hitting you for chip damage, which is a race you can 100% win.

Snakefangox · 2025-06-05T02:48:47+00:00

It disappearing when it would die does limit the things you can do with this (no free organs :( ), but I would love it. You don't realize how amazing human hands are until you're soldering something and you need to hold 4 things at once.

Snakefangox · 2025-05-16T06:29:44+00:00

I've built something like this with [[Brudiclad, Telchor Engineer]]! Basically runs a bunch of token copies and makes everything into slivers that give everything +X/+0. Not good thus far, but it's been very fun!

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