Doubling season... or is it?

This is Doubling Season (click on any card image to see a larger version):

It has the text: "If an effect would put one or more tokens onto the battlefield under your control, it puts twice that many of those tokens onto the battlefield instead. If an effect would place one or more counters on a permanent you control, it places twice that many of those counters on that permanent instead."

Seems simple enough. Here are some statements. Can you figure out for each one if the statement is true or false? All of the statements assume that you control a Doubling Season.

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1) You control a face-down Hooded Hydra, and you turn it face up by paying its morph cost. The hydra will only get five +1/+1 counters.

Hooded Hydra says: "As Hooded Hydra is turned face up, put five +1/+1 counters on it."

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2) You control a face-down Hooded Hydra, and your opponent casts Break Open targeting it. It will get ten +1/+1 counters.

Break Open says: "Turn target face-down creature an opponent controls face up."

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3) You control a Words of Wilding, and you activate its ability during your upkeep, and proceed to the draw step. When you would draw your card, you instead put a 2/2 green Bear creature token onto the battlefield. Only one.

  

Words of Wilding says: "1: The next time you would draw a card this turn, put a 2/2 green Bear creature token onto the battlefield instead."

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4) You control a Words of Wilding and an Alchemist's Apprentice. You activate the ability of the former, and then the ability of the latter. Instead of drawing a card, you instead put two 2/2 green Bear creature tokens onto the battlefield.

 Alchemist's Apprentice says: "Sacrifice Alchemist's Apprentice: Draw a card."

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5) You play a Vivid Grove as your land drop. It will enter the battlefield with just two charge counters.

Vivid Grove says: "Vivid Grove enters the battlefield tapped with two charge counters on it."

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6) You control a Sakura-Tribe Scout, and you use its ability to put a Vivid Grove from your hand onto the battlefield. It will enter the battlefield with four charge counters.

Sakura-Tribe Scout says: "(Tap): You may put a land card from your hand onto the battlefield."

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It may be a surprise to many players, but the answer to each one of the statements above is "true".

Why does Doubling Season sometimes double the number of counters/tokens, and sometimes it doesn't? The reason for this is quite obscure and technical.

The key word here is Doubling Season's wording "if an effect would put..." It's also related to a technical aspect of replacement effects.

The word "effect" in the card's text is not just random or inconsequential. The rules of the game explicitly define "effect" as meaning "spell or ability". In other words, what the text in Doubling Season is really saying is, effectively: "If one or more tokens would be put onto the battlefield under your control as a consequence of a spell or ability..." (and the same for counters).

Turning a face-down permanent face-up by paying the permanent's morph cost is not activating an ability. Instead, it's a special action (this is explicitly specified in the rules), and special actions do not count as activated abilities. Hooded Hydra's "As Hooded Hydra is turned face up..." is a replacement effect (as specified in the rules), and replacement effects do not change the nature or type of the event they are affecting; they simply modify the event in some way. Thus the reason why the hydra is getting counters is a special action, not a spell or ability, and thus Doubling Season has no effect on it.

If the hydra turns face-up due to a spell like Break Open, this changes things. Now it's a spell that's turning it face-up, and thus Doubling Season now has an effect on it.

Drawing a card at the beginning of the draw step is not a spell or an ability either, but a so-called turn-based action. A replacement effect like that of Words of Wilding doesn't make it anything else. Even though the event was modified, it's still a turn-based action, and thus Doubling Season has no effect on it. Thus you get only one bear token.

However, if you are drawing a card with an ability like the one on Alchemist's Apprentice, this once again changes things. Now it's not a turn-based action, but a resolving ability that's making you draw a card. Thus Doubling Season affects it (or rather, the modified version of it by Words of Wilding).

Likewise playing a land is also a special action. It's not casting a spell nor is it an ability. This is why playing a vivid land as your land drop won't double the counters on it. However, putting a land onto the battlefield due to a spell or ability (like the one on Sakura-Tribe Scout) does double the counters.

(Note that this is a consequence of the rules that may change in the future, as the rules coordinators have expressed the sentiment that they may want to change this so that it becomes more intuitive. The rules work like above as of writing this blog post, but may become different in the future.)

One of the reasons why Doubling Season is worded like that (ie. "if an effect would put..."), and why it's so difficult to change so that the abovementioned interactions would become more intuitive, is that they don't want it interacting with things like costs that put counters on permanents (such as activating planeswalker abilities).

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.)

Is pile-shuffling useful?

I posit that it is not, and here's my argument.

"Pile-shuffling" is the method of distributing the cards into a number of piles, and then just collecting the piles together. This is rather different from the traditional "mash shuffling" and "riffle shuffling" methods.

This is an important fact: Pile-shuffling does not evenly randomize your deck. This might sound like something self-evident and trivial, but nevertheless surprisingly many people have all kinds of misconceptions about it. Some people believe that pile-shuffling two times into a different number of piles is "sufficient randomization". Many even mention prime numbers (even though they have nothing to do with how randomized the deck will become.) Pile-shuffling does not evenly randomize your deck even if you put each card on a random pile.

Assume that at the end of a game you simply collect all your lands and put them on top of your library, and then pile-shuffle for example into seven piles. This means that you know that each 8th card in your deck will be a land. This is obviously not even randomization. Even if you couldn't tell which land will come after the next seven cards, it's still not randomized because you know for certain that it will be a land. This ought to be pretty obvious.

Moreover, if you did this, it would be effectively mana-weaving (ie. deliberately distributing your lands evenly in your deck, with no randomization afterwards), which is illegal.

Most players who pile-shuffle will mash-shuffle or riffle-shuffle extensively afterwards, and they argue that this is sufficient randomization which nullifies the "mana-weaving", and therefore it's not cheating. And that's the crucial point: If they are going to sufficiently randomize it afterwards, undoing any ordering that the pile-shuffling achieved, then the pile-shuffling was a complete waste of time because it did nothing useful.

Pile-shuffling does not increase the randomness of the deck (by its very nature), and the deck is going to be randomized afterwards anyways, so why exactly do it? What's the use?

Some may ask "why not? What's the harm?" There's no other harm except that pile-shuffling takes time, and thus it's a complete waste of it. So why waste time on a procedure that achieves nothing useful?

Some people argue that pile-shuffling is useful to count your cards (in order to verify that no card ended up in the wrong place during a game, and that there aren't any extra cards). Ok, that's fine. However, especially tournament players often pile-shuffle several times. These extra shuffles do not have even this excuse.

The main reason why people pile-shuffle is because they feel that normal mash-shuffling doesn't "separate" cards enough from each other. They feel that pile-shuffling separates the cards from each other in the deck, and thus increases randomness and evens out the deck more (especially in terms of land distribution). But this is once again borderline mana-weaving: If you feel that your mash-shuffling is not randomizing the deck enough, and thus you feel the need to pile-shuffle to compensate, then you are borderline mana-weaving, ie. borderline cheating. If you argue that your mash-shuffling is enough to randomize the deck afterwards (and thus undo any possible mana weaving), then you are arguing that the pile-shuffling was indeed useless and a waste of time.

I find it curious how defensive people get when these things are brought up. Many, if not most, players will vehemently defend pile-shuffling no matter what arguments against its usefulness are presented. I have yet to find a player that simply agrees.

(Often the conversation will quickly start going in circles. When you argue that pile-shuffling effectively amounts to stacking/manaweaving your deck, they will argue that the mash shuffling afterwards will undo any such stacking. When you then point out that they just confirmed that the pile-shuffling achieved nothing useful because of the mash shuffling, they will insist that it was useful because it separates clumps of lands etc. In other words, you can point out, they are indeed stacking/manaweaving with the pile shuffling. And in circles the conversation will go...)

If you don't think pile-shuffling is all that slow, watch this video. (Note that the several pile-shuffles the player does eg. starting at 2:25 in the video have zero benefit in terms of deck randomization because of the rather massive amount of mash shuffling done in addition to them.)

An oddly-worded replacement effect

In Magic, replacement effects are very recognizable because they typically use the word "instead". In fact, the vast majority of them conform to the template:

"If (something) would (do something), (do something else) instead."

For example, Rest in Peace says:

"If a card or token would be put into a graveyard from anywhere, exile it instead."

This form is so ubiquitous that when one gets used to it, a card like Knight of the Holy Nimbus sounds very strange.

It says: "If Knight of the Holy Nimbus would be destroyed, regenerate it."

Note how it almost conforms to the standard template, except that it does not use the word "instead". In fact, it doesn't seem to conform to any standard template for replacement effects. These templates are defined in rule 614.1, and are (paraphrasing):

• Effects that use the word "instead".
• Effects that use the word "skip".
• Effects that read "[This permanent] enters the battlefield with ...", "As [this permanent] enters the battlefield ...", or "[This permanent] enters the battlefield as ..."
• Effects that read "As [this permanent] is turned face up ..."

None of those templates seem to fit Knight of the Holy Nimbus. So what exactly is it?

It turns out that this is a special wording defined in rule 701.12b. Said rule effectively states that

"If [this permanent] would be destroyed, regenerate it."

means

"If [this permanent] would be destroyed, instead remove all damage marked on it and tap it, and if it's an attacking or blocking creature, remove it from combat."

The "instead" is implied in this particular template.

Casting an opponent's commander

Question: In the Commander game format, is it possible to construct a situation where you can cast an opponent's commander from the command zone?

Of course the answer is "yes" (and the image below spoils the answer), but the interesting rules question is why it's possible.

One way to achieve that is to make the opponent's commander go to the top of that opponent's library (for example with Excommunicate), and then attack with an unblocked Daxos of Meletis. After that, even if your opponent decides to put the commander in the command zone instead of exiling it, you can nevertheless cast it.

This is a little quirk of the rules of the game (and is in fact something that WotC fully acknowledges as a valid thing to do. In fact, a recent rules change clarifies the situation, making it even clearer.)

The key reason why this is possible is because the effect uses the wording "that card", rather than for example "the exiled card". (For example the same would not work with something like Oblivion Ring, which says "when Oblivion Ring leaves the battlefield, return the exiled card to the battlefield under its owner's control." Because it uses that wording, if the card is not in exile when the ability resolves, it won't do anything. This is delineated in the rules of the game.)

Because Daxos uses the wording "that card", if the exiling is replaced with the card going to another public zone, the effect will keep track of it (until it changes zones to somewhere else, after which it loses track of it because it's now a different object.) Note that it won't be able to track it if the exiling is replaced with going to a hidden zone.

So the next logical question is: What about the commander mana tax? Do you have to pay 2 extra mana for each time it has been cast from the command zone?

You don't pay the owner's mana tax. Instead, you have your own mana tax imposed for that particular commander (and which is independent from the mana tax of your own commander.) In other words, the first time you do this, there is no tax. However, if you manage to repeat the same feat with the same commander during the same game, you'll now have to pay 2 extra mana to cast it (and so on.)

Damage replacement and redirection

Suppose you control a Force Bubble and a planeswalker (it doesn't matter which for the intents of this question; I'm putting Jace in the image just as a random example). Your opponent casts a damage spell, like Lightning Bolt, targeting you. Question: Is it possible for your opponent to redirect that damage to the planeswalker or not?

An intuitive answer would be that "of course not; the Bubble is replacing the damage with something else, so there's nothing to redirect to the planeswalker." However, it's not that simple. This is actually a bit contrived part of the game.

The Bubble's ability is a replacement effect. The redirect-damage-to-planeswalker rule is also a replacement effect (this is defined so in the rules of the game. It doesn't really matter that the replacement effect is optional, it still applies here.) Thus there are two replacement effects trying to modify the same damage. So what happens?

The rules state in this case that the affected player (ie. in this case you) decides the order in which the two replacement effects are applied. Thus you have two options:

If you decide that the Bubble's effect is applied first, then the damage is replaced with putting counters onto the Bubble. After that the planeswalker-redirection effect does nothing because there's nothing to replace anymore.

However, you could also choose to have the redirection effect apply first (in most cases this wouldn't be sensible, but in some cases it could well be.) What happens then?

The effect in question now asks your opponent whether he or she wants to redirect the damage to the planeswalker. If your opponent does, then the damage is redirected, and then Bubble's effect does nothing (because likewise there's nothing to replace anymore).

However, if your opponent does not want to redirect the damage, now the Bubble's replacement effect is applied, and in this case there is something to replace, so the damage is replaced with putting counters on the Bubble.

So this is an interestingly contrived situation. To recapitulate, these are all the options:

1. You decide to apply Bubble's effect first. The damage is replaced with counters on the Bubble, and the other effect then does nothing.
2. You decide to apply the redirection effect first. Now your opponent chooses whether to redirect the damage to the planeswalker or not.
   1. Your opponent decides to redirect, thus the planeswalker gets the damage and nothing else happens.
   2. Your opponent decides not to redirect. Then the Bubble's replacement effect is now applied, and it takes place.

Phasing out Banisher Priest

Suppose you control a Banisher Priest enchanted with a Splinter Twin. You make a token that's a copy of Banisher Priest, and exile some creature with it. Then someone phases the token out using Reality Ripple. Question: Will the exiled creature return to the battlefield?

Banisher Priest has the following ability: "When Banisher Priest enters the battlefield, exile target creature an opponent controls until Banisher Priest leaves the battlefield" (emphasis mine.)

An object that phases out is not considered to change zones nor leave the battlefield.

A token that phases out ceases to exist as a state-based action. As far as I know, it's undefined by the rules whether "ceases to exist" constitutes "leaving the battlefield".

Likewise it's apparently not defined whether Banisher Priest's ability (or any of such new-style temporary exiling abilities) will end when the object they are tracking phases out. (After all, they are looking for the event "leaves the battlefield", and this event never happens.)

It seems to be that (as of writing this post) this is yet another situation where the rules of the game are incomplete, as they do not clearly and unambiguously define what should happen.


Update: It seems that the official interpretation from Wizards is that the creature does not return and will remain exiled indefinitely.