Is 4 Horsemen socially acceptable in cEDH?

Kemev
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Post by Kemev » 4 years ago

Ok, this is a bit of a complicated lead-in, and I know it's been discussed on reddit and other venues, but I still feel like it's worth bringing up here to set-up a precedent. So here's the question... how do we feel about 4 Horsemen Gitrog combos for this sub-forum?

Here's a quick rundown if you're not familiar with it... Four Horsemen became popular in EDH after The Gitrog Monster was released. It's not an intuitive combo: you need (in play) The Gitrog Monster + any free discard outlet (Putrid Imp, or your cleanup step if you have 8+ cards in hand), (in hand) Dakmor Salvage, (in library) Kozilek, Butcher of Truth, (anywhere) Dark Ritual, (anywhere) a "payload" card (Geth's Verdict, maybe)

Discard Dakmor Salvage to the discard effect, triggering Gitrog. Replace the draw with Dakmor Salvage's dredge effect, milling two cards. Repeat. As you dredge lands from your library into your graveyard, you accumulate additional Gitrog triggers. You now have an arbitrary number of draw triggers, with Kozilek to reshuffle your deck. At some point, your draw triggers will find you Dark Ritual. Cast it, and your reshuffle + draw triggers will find it again. You now have an arbitrary amount of black mana to go with your arbitrary card draws. Use your black mana to kill the table with your payload.

Here's where the combo runs into tournament rules: "at some point" is not a legal shortcut. Ordinarily, if a player wants to create a loop, they have to say how many times they execute that loop, and how the board will look once it's done. For example, if you have Kiki-Jiki, Mirror Breaker and Zealous Conscripts, you can say, "I will tap and untap Kiki-Jiki a hundred times, so I have a hundred Zealous Conscript tokens." You can't do that with 4 Horseman, since you don't know exactly how many times you want to discard Dakmor Salvage, or what the board state will look like along the way. (As an aside: every once in a while some knucklehead shows up to a Legacy tournament with some 4 Horsemen variant, and a judge gets stuck explaining that they don't have a combo, they have a "slow play" penalty.)

Now admittedly, most cEDH games still happen in casual, unsanctioned settings, and sometimes it's fine to say, "Ok, you got your combo, you win." But the other problem is that sometimes a player has an instant speed answer, and without knowing the board state, there's no way to know when to play it. For example, I was playing Lord Windgrace against my friend's Gitrog deck. When he went to combo, I actually had him cold -- Crop Rotation at the ready, with Bojuka Bog in my library. When do I play it though? The strategically correct play is to wait 'til his graveyard's huge, and he discards Kozilek for the shuffle-in, so I can Rotate for Bog and exile most of his library. But we could sit, draw, and shuffle 'til the suns burns out waiting for that particular board state to happen. We talked it over, and agreed that I'd Crop Rotate after his first draw trigger to save game time.

This situation doesn't come up that often for casual groups... since they often don't have much instant speed GY removal, the combo usually just wins. But in more competitive groups, I feel like it's problematic. I don't think it's reasonable for the Gitrog player to be able to say, "Yeah I know you could exile a chunk of my library, but there's no way for us to know exactly which cards or how many." It feels like an unfair amount of leeway to grant someone who probably knew they were building something to take advantage of an unsanctioned setting.

So here's the question for the group: are we building cEDH decks that people could take to a sanctioned tournament (like a GP side event or something)?

If not, should we still accept potentially problematic combos like this one as legitimate decks to discuss?
Last edited by Kemev 4 years ago, edited 1 time in total.

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Jivanmukta
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Post by Jivanmukta » 4 years ago

By definition if it is legal it is acceptable in cEDH. Note I am biased because I hate the rulings that make 4 horseman unusable in legacy. Slow play is dumb.
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Kemev
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Post by Kemev » 4 years ago

It also occurs to me that I stopped judging about 18 months ago, and I think the rules for which formats count as sanctioned have changed since then. So the rules for sanctioned tournaments might not be relevant at all, even for something like a GP side event.

I guess it just frustrates me from the example above... the "I know you'd lose to this exile effect but we're going to let it slide" kinda grinds my gears.

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benjameenbear
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Post by benjameenbear » 4 years ago

I think so. It's actually been proven to be deterministic once a certain threshold has been met, so you CAN legally shortcut. While I'm no Gitrog master, Leptys has a TappedOut Primer that explains it in detail and the specific steps needed to make it a deterministic combo.

There are two fail points for Gitrog combo, depending on the build that you're facing, and all of them require some sort of instant speed 'yard exiling effect. The first fail point is in response to the Kozi shuffle trigger when it's been flipped over via Dredge. If the player has no options to protect the trigger, their 'yard is exiled along with Kozi and their combo fizzles. Should they play Gaea's Blessing or an Ulamog, then there needs to be a second instant speed exiling effect that will need to be responded to by the Gitrog player. So, when the Gitrog player attempts to execute their combo line, check with them to see if they have responses to an exiling speed effect. If they don't, then you can shortcut the time and explain how they will lose. Otherwise, it is deterministic and they will win.

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pokken
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

I never had any serious trouble explaining the combo to people but it wasn't very fun to do so :) One time someone made me play it out so I emrakul-mindslavered him and killed the table with his combo instead, but most people don't play promised end in competitive hehe.

Personally I think the rules need an update for what constitutes a loop. If we can have an exception for infinite Scry 1 and Scry 2 I think we can get one for Gitrog.

(Infinite scry 1 is commonly used with the Finks combo and Viscera seer, and the shortcut is "cut through your deck to the card you want on top" because you can do it = # of times of cards in your deck to see everything and then know how many resolutions it would take to get the card you want on top -- but in practice no one makes you scry 1 49 times before you can use the cut shortcut).

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Post by Spleenface » 4 years ago

First, let me say that Gitrog combos (with a discard outlet, cleanup is a discussion for another time) are not, in any way, shape or form, equivalent to Four Horsemen

They are completely legal, even in tournament.
The section of the rules that axed 4H says that if you reach an identical game state twice while executing a loop, you must stop. Four Horsemen would repeatedly mill until it hit its cards in the right order, so after every shuffle, would arrive at an identical gamestate.

Gitrog Loops net draw triggers (or cards in hand if you let those triggers resolve), thus changing the game state, and large portions can be shortcut (the sections in bold below).

The typical pattern is as follows:
  1. Draw your deck (this is nondeterministic and cannot be shortcut)
  2. With a Library consisting of Kozilek/Ulamog + A Land, repeatedly discard Dakmor, dredge it to the draw trigger, stack the Shuffle on top of the second draw and resolve the shuffle. This is deterministic, shortcuttable, and every iteration adds a draw trigger to the stack.
  3. Once you have enough draw triggers, draw your deck
  4. Cast Dark Ritual, discard Kozilek, let the shuffle resolve, use 2 draw triggers to draw Kozilek and Dark Ritual
  5. Cast your outlet Spell, discard Kozilek, let the shuffle resolve, use 2 draw triggers to draw Kozilek and your Outlet Spell
As long as you never shuffle your library without having drawn a card or added a draw trigger to the stack, you are safe from any loop rules.

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pokken
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Spleenface wrote:
4 years ago
First, let me say that Gitrog combos (with a discard outlet, cleanup is a discussion for another time) are not, in any way, shape or form, equivalent to Four Horsemen

They are completely legal, even in tournament.
The section of the rules that axed 4H says that if you reach an identical game state twice while executing a loop, you must stop. Four Horsemen would repeatedly mill until it hit its cards in the right order, so after every shuffle, would arrive at an identical gamestate.

Gitrog Loops net draw triggers (or cards in hand if you let those triggers resolve), thus changing the game state, and large portions can be shortcut (the sections in bold below).

The typical pattern is as follows:
  1. Draw your deck (this is nondeterministic and cannot be shortcut)
  2. With a Library consisting of Kozilek/Ulamog + A Land, repeatedly discard Dakmor, dredge it to the draw trigger, stack the Shuffle on top of the second draw and resolve the shuffle. This is deterministic, shortcuttable, and every iteration adds a draw trigger to the stack.
  3. Once you have enough draw triggers, draw your deck
  4. Cast Dark Ritual, discard Kozilek, let the shuffle resolve, use 2 draw triggers to draw Kozilek and Dark Ritual
  5. Cast your outlet Spell, discard Kozilek, let the shuffle resolve, use 2 draw triggers to draw Kozilek and your Outlet Spell
As long as you never shuffle your library without having drawn a card or added a draw trigger to the stack, you are safe from any loop rules.
Even with the shortest route to drawing your deck, isn't that going to take some time to execute perfectly? In a competitive setting you could be forced to do that right? - discard dakmor, place draw trigger on the stack and dredge 2, then see if you either get a card or shuffle, then continue on (even assuming you may find a trick to make sure you draw Kozilek like a volrath's stronghold or something). I imagine it would go much faster once you got your shuffle effects in hand, but man that would be really tedious.

That's always been what kept me from wanting to bother.

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Post by TearsOfTomorrow » 4 years ago

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JOKES ASIDE: why don't you just explain the combo to the folks you're playing with? Talking to the people at your table IS an option, you know.

Kemev
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Post by Kemev » 4 years ago

Pokken's got the right of it. You need to have drawn almost your entire library (which is the tedious, not-technically-short-cuttable part) before the combo becomes deterministic (ie, your library only has a land and a reshuffle effect left).
Spleenface wrote:
4 years ago
The section of the rules that axed 4H says that if you reach an identical game state twice while executing a loop, you must stop. Four Horsemen would repeatedly mill until it hit its cards in the right order, so after every shuffle, would arrive at an identical gamestate.
This is not an accurate description of how shortcutting works (see MTR 4.2).

In any event, it seems like the consensus is that it's fair game, so happy dredging.

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Post by Spleenface » 4 years ago

Kemev wrote:
4 years ago
Pokken's got the right of it. You need to have drawn almost your entire library (which is the tedious, not-technically-short-cuttable part) before the combo becomes deterministic (ie, your library only has a land and a reshuffle effect left).
Spleenface wrote:
4 years ago
The section of the rules that axed 4H says that if you reach an identical game state twice while executing a loop, you must stop. Four Horsemen would repeatedly mill until it hit its cards in the right order, so after every shuffle, would arrive at an identical gamestate.
This is not an accurate description of how shortcutting works (see MTR 4.2).
A) I specifically said that the drawing of the library cannot be shortcut.
B) The Loop Rules explicitly contain language about arriving at an identical gamestate. It has nothing to do with it being shortcuttable

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Post by Spleenface » 4 years ago

pokken wrote:
4 years ago
Even with the shortest route to drawing your deck, isn't that going to take some time to execute perfectly? In a competitive setting you could be forced to do that right? - discard dakmor, place draw trigger on the stack and dredge 2, then see if you either get a card or shuffle, then continue on (even assuming you may find a trick to make sure you draw Kozilek like a volrath's stronghold or something). I imagine it would go much faster once you got your shuffle effects in hand, but man that would be really tedious.

That's always been what kept me from wanting to bother.
It can be done in a couple of minutes with smart play patterns and quick shuffling. It should require fewer than ten iterations, each one becoming faster as the deck shrinks and becomes more saturated with lands.

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pokken
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Post by pokken » 4 years ago

Spleenface wrote:
4 years ago

It can be done in a couple of minutes with smart play patterns and quick shuffling. It should require fewer than ten iterations, each one becoming faster as the deck shrinks and becomes more saturated with lands.
Oh I don't doubt it I just wouldn't want to make a habit out of it. :P

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