Goblin Test Pilot shenanigans

There's a handy combo that can be used to get an unlimited amount of copies of almost any creature, which consists of enchanting said creature with Splinter Twin and having an Intruder Alarm on the battlefield. (This way each time you create a copy of the creature, Intruder Alarm will untap the creature, which means you can create another copy, and so on.)

It's fun to think what happens with certain creatures when they are copied without limit. One such case is Goblin Test Pilot. This can create some very interesting rules nightmares.

Goblin Test Pilot has power 0, so it can't be used to win the game by attacking (unless something boosts all your creatures). However, it has an ability that deals 2 damage to a target creature or player. (Because the copy will have haste, you can use it right away.) The thing is, the target is chosen at random. This creates interesting situations.

The game supports the notion of "shortcuts". In other words, if you wanted to create a thousand copies of the goblin, you don't have to go through the motions one at a time, but you can propose a shortcut. You can simply demonstrate how the combo works and say "I create a thousand copies of the goblin; they'll all end up untapped at the end." If your opponent has nothing to interrupt the combo, then they can agree with the shortcut.

However, suppose that now you would want to activate the ability of each copy. Can you shortcut this? Normally you could, but in this case you can't because the target is chosen at random. You pretty obviously just can't propose a shortcut for a repeated random effect. You would need to choose the random target individually for each activated ability. So what exactly are you supposed to do in this case? You can't take forever to activate them.

This isn't just a "troll" combo, however. There's a way to arguably use this combo to win, by following this procedure:

1. If there are no untapped goblin copies, create a copy and let Intruder Alarm untap all creatures.
2. Activate the ability of an untapped goblin copy.
3. If it targets your opponent, one of his or her creatures, or one of your goblin copies, let it resolve and then jump to step 1.
4. Else (in other words, if it targets you or your original goblin) do not let it resolve and instead jump to step 1 in response.

While this is not a formal proof, this informal argument can be used to show that you will eventually deal enough damage to your opponent to win the game, no matter how many iterations it takes. It doesn't really matter if this takes ten iterations or ten million iterations, eventually you will have dealt enough damage to your opponent to win.

Can you propose this kind of shortcut? The official answer is no: You can't. The reason is that the number of iterations is not fixed, but random, and that just can't be shortcut. The rules of the game don't support this.

This creates a curious situation where, at least in a tournament, you would probably be disallowed from running this loop, or even imposed a game loss for stalling, even though there's nothing illegitimate about the combo and you are not really stalling. You are just doing what the cards say, without any kind of stalling. However, if the loop is taking hours, you won't be able to just continue it in an actual tournament. You can't shortcut this either (at least if the judges are strict with the rules of the game.)