Pseudo Newb and the Fishy Illusions Rule

Rules questions that came up in casual play on Saturday

If a creature has Islandwalk and an opposing creature has islandwalk can they block each other or is it assumed they are using different paths and they each have substandard intelligence teams while at war?

I have had people count dual producing lands like Seachrome coasts or glacial fortress in X = forests you control. ( or whichever basic land is named) However if you are playing a dual land that is not called or described as a forest or an island and is not triggered by the symbol of the type of mana shouldn’t those producers of mana not count, even though it has a forest symbol on it?

If a card says this.Creature gets flying this turn if you discard a card and there is no manna cost can you discard multiple cards even though the creature already gets powered once? And specifically that would mean that this card has a threshold of 7 cards in a graveyard – if you can you can dump cards from your hand in a single turn on the power of this card to activate it’s own threshold ability?

Thing I learned at Friday Night Magic ( we had to call over a judge).

The trigger to take down an illusion is the act of targeting it – once it becomes a target even manaleaking won’t make it no disappear so if someone doomblades your phantasmal dragon and you hit the doomblade with mana leak in real life it should seem like it resolves on the stack this way

Remembering that the stack resolves top down:

1. Mana leak makes your doomblade cost extra
2. Doomblade doesn’t have enough manna to resolve
3. Doomblade targets illusion
4. Illusion just sits there

What really seems to be happening according to the ruling is this

1. Mana leak targets Doomblade making it cost extra to cast
2. Doomblade doesn’t have enough mana to resolve IF the target is not an illusion do not destroy target
3. Doomblade is cast – mana is tapped and doomblade comes into play targeting illusion ( I don’t understand where the targeting is activating in the stack ) and doesn't resolve
4. Illusion gets sacrficed anyway

From a programming level it looks like even though the spell doesn’t resolve when the spell is cast you have to check on a word search to see if the target has the thext “when (this.card) is targeted then card is sacrificed” and you have to resolve it at the point of being targeted rather than the with the effect being resolved. You additionally have to program a second check because it still isn’t the English version of “targeted” since I asked the judge if this was the stack order and simply targeting a illusion kills it could you use a card that wouldn’t normally affect it but simply by targeting it destroy the illusion – he said no it had to be a legal target so that means the check on the stack looks something like this

1. Illusion is targeted
2. Check if effect/ability can legally target illusion
3. If check = legal then sacrfice illusion
4. Remove from stack
5. Return to stack
6. Effect ability is countered != resolution

There is also no legal target because when it tries to find out whether or not it can resolve the illusion is already sacrificed. So basically it means any legal targeting effect aimed at an illusion = “cannot be countered”.

The only constraint I see is that the mana has to be tapped or the initial ability has to be activated.

Thinking about it, there is still a possible strategic advantage to the mana leak on the doomblade if you want to make sure his mana is tapped out on your turn so you can’t really make the quality “uncounterable” – so I guess it’s going to have to be a subroutine when you mana leak something to keep it from resolving that still lets all the effects of both the original removal and the counter happen.

What this looks like when it isn't an illusion:

For Newbs playing at home when it’s a non illusion creature the stack resolution looks like this:

What it sounds like in real life:

“I’m casting DoomBlade on your Giant Spider for 1 black mana”

“OK, I’m casting Mana Leak on your Doomblade – are you going to pay the extra 3 mana”

“No – I only have two mana left”

“Great”

what it looks like on the stack rememebering that the top of the stack resolves first:

1. Mana leak makes doomblade cost +3 mana ( Doomblade is cast but never resolves anything that damaged the spider is basically “undone” which is the only reason that I can see for the illusion ruling working)
2. Doomblade is cast with 2 mana (theoretically destroying Giant Spider instantly when it resolves so theoretically they Giant Spder is destroyed)
3. Doomblade targets Giant Spider
4. Giant spider just sits there

So the next question I have is if mana leak is predicated on the spell being cast and an additional rule means Doomblade got cast and then mana added for resolution is it the same when a spell is countered like “cancel” or “unsummon”?

Because frankly this is damn close to saying I have a card in my hand and thinking hard about using it makes your illusion go away. It makes me wonder about the mechanic under Cancel – are you really countering the spell or are you erasing the effects of the spell and resetting the board? In a game relying on tempo this is really important.

Or is all of this only important because the word “sacrifice” is on the illusion card so it just forces the player with the illusion to take action regardless of the resolution of the card basically flavor wise “tricking you into suicide”?

I don’t care so much about the illusion being toast but I care a lot about the nature of what’s really happening when you use instants to counter spells – it’s super complicated anyway and the most competitive players can easily bully/intimidate/incorrectly explain newbs like me just by doing the magic equivalent of burying us in paperwork until we agree.

Why this stupid kind of thing might keep women and non- gamers out of Magic, but maybe former jocks and pharmaceutical reps, and mountain climbers should be introduced to the game:

I’m beginning to understand a little bit more of the barriers to entry on magic now.

I played two tournaments with back to back complete losses, I am not under any apprehension of being a good enough player but there is this nagging feeling that even when you understand a rule because it looks simple like “you didn’t really cast that spell because you didn’t have enough mana to pay for it” and then you use what you think is a pretty clear method to protect your board state you find out “OH NO my fine friend – even if you are smart enough to know about stack resolution AND you’re trying to do what everyone has been so helpfully coaching you with and play strategically with removal and instants . . . . SURPRISE there is a super secret special version of the application of this rule that is different and not keyworded and I’m going to use it and keep your mana tapped for being FOOLISH enough to think you understood”

So you’re in the process of losing your 8^th game of the night, you try to defend yourself, because you’re applying things you’ve learned by having your own stuff acted upon and it sounds like you’re being hustled – it FEELS like you’re being hustled and then you also kind of feel like the explanation means you can’t trust anything else you thought you understood.

You call over a judge because you really don’t understand why mana leak works differently just because the card is an illusion and then you really feel like perhaps there is no way you’ll ever be able to play in OP because apparently there’s a cabal of supersecret rules on the stack. You only find out about them if you call over a judge they aren’t close to intuitive and they’re not really good programming.

Now you just feel like a clueless idiot and a “problem child” because you called over a judge got a 10 minute lesson in sketchy object oriented design ( which you are painfully aware the 15 year old judge doesn’t know because he’s still too young to take AP Comp Sci) and you still feel scammed but it’s just legally scammed.

Occupy Magic.

I don’t actually know a lot of girls/women that would want to take a chance of feeling this way “for fun”. I don’t know a lot of guys who would participate in these things without a sense of being able to move forward or get something else out of it. The real problem is these things keep coming up towards the end of the tournament nights where the physical toll also kind of means that tournaments are ending for this newb with almost no accomplishments, being overtired, and inevitably feeling like I know less at the end of the night than I did at the beginning.

I personally really enjoy playing the game, I also think that I am not unusually emotional unless overtired, but I do think that the idea of feeling like a bitch because I needed to really understand a ruling or being hyperaware that the only girl actually playing in the tournament is losing 0-2 for three rounds also makes me feel like I’m feeding into the worst stereotypes. There is some pressure for me at least to look like I CAN learn the came and getting tripped up with something like this makes me wonder if it’s even worth it. Maybe by sucking so bad I'm making it harder for women who CAN play really well to be taken seriously. (Somehow this is something I don't think newb boys and men ever consider. )

In casual play the other problem is disagreements over this stuff bleed over for hours. And they cause friction in other areas because at heart my social circle is all rules lawyers but we all like to define the rules ( that’s in real life – forget the game) so if I’m bringing a rule home I want to have the closest thing possible to a definitive ruling.

Then on the other hand, you get the pretty steady abuse of things like counting green mana producers as forests and you sort of feel like “who’s really teaching me this game anyway” if it weren’t for Planeswalker Points being additive instead of the ELo system they were using I think I would be worried that I was being deliberately misinformed. Everyone has still been very nice, but I still feel like an idiot at the end of a tournament.

And we can now add the idea of a spell having an effect even if it doesn’t resolve to the list of things I think are stupid along with Planeswalkers and Infect.

Unlike Planeswalkers and Infect I would say this kind of thing would be the sort of thing that would have stopped me from playing if I hadn’t already played years ago and knew I liked the game. I just would have felt like it was arbitrary and contradictory and I would never be good enough to keep up with it all and I would have just played with my friends and told myself that I wasn’t smart enough to compete with them ( other people who are less inclined to self blame will say magic is stupid and the other people who play it are losers that have no lives and spend time either thinking this stuff up or learning it to screw people over).

I’m writing this here ( although no one will ever see it ) because I think it’s important to understand that treating it like tennis or figure skating or debate means I know that

• a. I’m a beginner ( but not enough of a beginner to write off this level of rules minutia)
• b. I’m going to have bad outcomes while I’m starting and sometimes the “fun” part won’t be enough to counterbalance the “I suck” part and like any competitive sport you work through them
• c. I want to be able to play at a higher level because it is more fun to sling cards with confidence and use them to the full advantage than it is to just enjoy the flavor.
• d. I have to remember that I’m choosing to do this to compete against myself – but frankly I’m not a “sunny attitude” kind of person so I need to feel like I’ve got some chance of being able to at least play without embarrassing myself and if I hadn’t had the experience of playing before I think I might be one more and done because it’s getting embarrassing

And even knowing all of those things it still made me feel like an idiot and a bitch and stupid for either actually being stupid or for being scammed.

If I feel this way when I really do like the game, the chances are it’s a turn off to people who aren’t treating it as anything other than “enjoyable hobby”.


I want it to be an enjoyable hobby too, I also would like to use it to keep my brain active, fight Alzheimer’s and give me something to reach for that isn’t life or death.

Because honestly almost everything else I do is. Magic shouldn’t make you feel bad. Luckily the next day at the store I played for a couple of hours at my local store with a really wonky but fun deck in casual. That’s where the islandwalk question came from. And the discard question I was playing Coulton’s Creepy Dolls against Gravebound.