The first time I played MtG, my friend who was teaching me let me go off with the token deck he lent to me. I ended up making so many creature tokens I was just writing them down on a piece of paper. It was in the hundreds. And then when I swung my massive army at him, he Uno-Reverso-d me and basically killed me with my own creatures. I think it’s still the most brutal way I’ve lost a game of Magic and I absolutely loved it XD
IIRC there are infinite token combos and if you are using one, you can just establish the loop and then claim the amount you want, so you don’t have to go through the process a billion times.
You’ve activated my trap card! Also, my unbreakable board full of effect monsters that negate literally everything you could possibly try to do while I pop all of your cards with my spell counters and discard your whole hand.
I had this happen to me a few years ago. My friend was dating this older woman who had a teenage son. We went to her place one night to play games. We all played Yu-Gi-Oh when we were younger and brought our old decks/cards.
Turns out the teenager played also but collected more recent cards, think it was XYZ at the time. We decided to play against him and he destroyed us in two turns, we had no chance. My Mirror Force, Magic Cylinder and Harpies Feather Duster were no use 😭😭
If a deck lets you win on turn 1 6.25% of the time, and completely flop over 50% of the time, you’ll lose often enough that your deck isn’t going to win any tournaments. That’s not an oppressive force in a metagame.
But if even that is too much for certain players, they can just avoid Vintage. There are non-eternal formats with no t1 wins. Pioneer, Standard etc have no such t1 wins.
For the uninitiated, the likelihood of being able to pull off a 4-card combo on turn 1 is very small, even in unrestricted formats. Decks that rely on this interaction either include ways to win on later turns or are unreliable.
Back in the day decks had a 40 card minimum and no max copies of cards. There were decks that were just mountains and lightning bolts. So getting a combo like this out wasn’t completely unheard of.
Nowadays, combos need lots of drawing and fishing to hit in the first couple turns.
Confirm, and I am guilty of having owned, and currently owning, functional decks that basically just boil down to mountains and lightning bolts. The “new” (decades old) rules forced me to diversify a bit, but Fallen Empires brought us the gift of the Goblin Grenade, so it’s all gravy for me. Four goblins and four Goblin Grenades is a win, even if you don’t attack with any of the goblins. You can spice things up in the interim with Lightning Bolts if you like.
The typical variant I’ve seen is using a bunch more Moxes and Lotuses and so forth to play Ancestral Recalls/Timetwisters or Timewalks or similar to either pull the right cards from your deck or skip your opponent’s turn until you draw them naturally. And doing such a thing nowadays is… expensive.
Also, if you shoot your load and your opponent has a way to counter your fireball, now you’re standing there with your pants down around your ankles and 1 health. Ready to be done in by a single goblin, or possibly a stiff breeze.
Even so, in modern formats where Black Lotus, Moxes, and Channel are not outright banned you can only have one of each per deck anyhow. So the notion of having 4 of each to pad your deck out to the minimum 60 cards likewise goes out the window. Still, having this spread available is sort of like having a nuke in your suitcase. You’re never actually going to set it off, but it’s nice sometimes to let everyone around you know that you could if you really felt like it.
I also have an Enduring Renewal based infinite mana deck that is similarly impractical, but no less spectacular when you actually manage to pull off its core combo. Your ability to put your opponent into the negatives – or yourself into an insurmountably gargantuan health pool via Alabaster Potions – is limited only by your opponent’s patience and lack of conceding on the spot in disgust as you shuffle your Ornithopter back and forth and back and forth…
I have a more straighforward lightning bolt/shock/goblin grenade deck that is less exotic, but considerably more reliable. The explosions it makes are smaller, but everyone explodes sooner or later.
I’d disagree. I keep up with both MtG and YGO (MtG as a game I like and YGO as a horrified observer), and the two games are not even close to equivalent here.
In YGO’s one official format, the oft-quoted statistic is that games don’t usually last more than 3 turns - those 3 turns being half the length of how MtG usually measures turns - Starting Player, Non-Starting Player, Starting Player, game. The interaction relies on your opponent having the right disruptive tool to slow down your combo.
For MtG, the only formats that are really like that are Legacy and Vintage, formats that are generally incredibly expensive to play in paper and definitely not where new players are gonna start. Even Modern, the next oldest and thus powerful format, has games that typically last at absolute least 3 turns for each player (twice the YGO standard) and most of the time last much longer. Then Standard, where new players are expected to start, has so much less combo “I win the game now” potential specifically because it’s a bad feeling for new players and the creators don’t want the format to be that fast. I can’t find a great source on it, but winning a Standard game anytime before turn 5 is notable, and usually means your opponent didn’t do anything.
Sure, it’s 3 turns, but each turn lasts 10x as long as in Magic, so it evens out. Also, it’s a pretty big exaggeration - the meme is “turn 3 dead”, but you can usually last a couple more and hope to get some kind of out.
![Yugioh Master Duel [MrLovenstein]](https://startrek.website/pictrs/image/b204ae3d-0d20-44fc-abe0-f16b6d81364a.png){kind=link}
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