What's the most complicated rules interaction between two cards that you can think of? Layers, dependencies, triggers forcing weird SBA checks, whatever you've come across or can think up.

Humility+Opalescence is the old standby. For interactions of exactly two cards it's hard to match. Even when you go past two, adding multiples of opalescence and/or humility causes silly things.

Life and Limb + Conspiracy is a hoot. Technically requires at least one more card to do anything.

Life and Limb and Blood Moon is better, but Hallow plus Hostility in a multiplayer game can be ridiculous depending on the spell.

Overall, most of the true corner-case stuff takes three or more cards to pull off--Clone/Mimic Vat/Doubling Season's been a favorite of mine recently.

My favorite corner cases aren't the ones that make the game difficult to figure out (go go kicked Rite of Replication + Precursor Golem math!) but the ones that create something silly. My favorite is still March of the Machines + Neurok Transmuter + noncreature artifact with CMC greater than 0, resulting in a permanent with no card type.

It's not exactly a rules headache, but I've got a deck whose "magical Christmasland" involves using Bludgeon Brawl and Magnetic Theft to equip an opposing Planeswalker and then bludgeon him/her to death with him/herself.

(Wait, I suppose it needs Liquimetal Coating or Mycosynth Lattice too. You know what I meant.)

All of these are awesome. Rush's is adorable.

My friends and I did the Bludgeon Brawl thing a while back; we had all sorts of fun. Play Bolas and Bolas Walker, equip Walker to dragon so that Nicol Bolas can hit people with Nicol Bolas. Play Mycosynth Lattice, Koth. Animate a mountain and equip all the other mountains to it, attack with a mountain swinging mountains that do no extra damage.

Feel free to go into 3+ cards. I don't remember why I said 2 cards but I probably didn't mean it.

Goblin Gaveleer wielding seven or eight lands as weapons is also fun.

Here's a fun one:

Say you control a Lich's Mirror that your opponent owns, using Memnarch or some other such effect. Suppose whlie controlling Lich's Mirror you also get 10 poison counters. (We'll assume this is a Commander game, because otherwise that's one weird deck.) What happens? The game sees that you're supposed to lose while checking the state-based effects. (Or is it state-based actions? They switched and I forget which way that switch went. Anyway...) The Mirror replaces this losing event by shuffling all the cards you own into your library, drawing 7 cards, then going back to 20 life. But there are two things it doesn't do: shuffle away the Mirror (you don't own it) and reset poison counters. So, SB(E/A)s are checked again, and they see you still have 10 poison counters. This is a different "you lose the game" event than previously, so the Mirror is still allowed to replace the event, and will do so. Thus, the game enters an infinite loop and everything is drawn.

State-based actions. You can remember because the things they do--moving things from zone to zone, removing counters, making players lose the game, and so on--are all actions the rules perform. There's no SBA that applies any kind of continuous effect. (Which is why they changed the name.)

Thanks, zammm. You've been poking around with troublesome rules cards for a long time. Which ones do you feel come up most often when discussing oddities and corner-cases? Besides the obvious blanket answer "anything that alters card characteristics."

Humility and Opalescence. In truth, they're not really all that complicated these days, but they're just complex and off-putting enough that the idea of the pair as being some sort of hideously unfathomable rules nightmare has persisted long past its due date--it's become too ingrained in the player base's consciousness to go away.

Panglacial Wurm is a fun one. If you search your library and see that Wurm is the top card, can you cast it from your library using Millikin? What about with Chromatic Sphere?

"Casting Panglacial Wurm while searching your library follows all the normal rules for casting a creature spell, except for timing (casting the Wurm this way always occurs during the resolution of another spell or ability) and what zone the Wurm is being cast from. The spell goes on the stack. You have to pay the Wurm's mana cost and any applicable additional costs, which means you can activate mana abilities while you're casting the Wurm while you're searching your library."

The answer is yes to both of those, because the first thing you do when casting a spell is to put it on the stack.

What is the interaction between Hostility and Hallow? Isn't only one of them going to end up applying in a given case?

For the clone/vat/season, each token can copy something different, right?

As for the topic: I like the gaps in the rules. I remember there being a way to cast Searing Wind from an Isochron Scepter at one point before linked abilities were defined. And I think there used to be a question of how something like Biomantic Mastery would interact with a Seht's Tiger, but I don't remember how it worked out.

so I could be wrong, but eyeballing it, in a multiplayer game with something like sizzle, I think each player gets to choose individually whether hallow's controller gains life or hostility's controller gets tokens, since each of them is the affected player for the damage dealt to them. maybe there's more to it, I don't know, but that's the first thing that stands out to me.

Nope. Currently, the rules for replacement effects are set up such that they have to be a copy of the same thing. Which everybody gets wrong.

Basically, the Tiger accomplishes absolutely nothing. (Except increasing that player's creature count by 1, for more cards drawn.)

Oh it's even better than that--keep guessing. And throw in Fire Servant and Furnace of Rath to multiply the insanity.

Huh, I wouldn't have expected that, but the relevant rule actually spells it out pretty clearly.



We need more fun rules discussions on this forum. I miss going to the Mothership Rules Q&A section and answering quick questions to get my rules fix.

Agreed. The Rules Q&A was sweet because either I'd get to feel smart by helping someone else with rules, or I'd learn something new myself. And the occasional heated debate was always fun and usually productive.



Well at least I'm not alone then