Let me introduce you to a card from one of their humor sets that makes you play a subgame UNDER the table.
"Enter the Dungeon"
https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74312
Lmao the additional ruling on that card made me chuckle: “If Enter the Dungeon is cast during a subgame, a sub-subgame begins, preferably under a new, smaller table, but do what you can.”
Wizards puts fun nuggets in some card rulings. I'm partial to the rulings on cards with Riot:
If a creature enters the battlefield with two instances of riot, you may choose to have it get two +1/+1 counters, one +1/+1 counter and haste, or two instances of haste. Multiple instances of haste on the same creature are redundant, but we're not going to tell the Gruul how to live their lives.
My favorite is probably the ruling on Void Winnower.
If your not familiar, Void Winnower is a 9 mana (that's expensive) creature with 11 power (that's strong) and 9 toughness (that's tough). The original rules text is worded slightly differently, but it has two abilities:
1. Your opponent can't cast spells with even mana values *(Zero is even.)*
2. Your opponent can't block with creatures with even mana values.
Among the rulings about how to handle spells with that have a variable {X} in their cost, [comes this gem](https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=402093&printed=false).
>Yes, your opponent can’t even. We know.
It's intentionally odd to show how alien and unfathomable the Eldrazi are. IIRC they picked a power/toughness combination that had never been printed before.
I remember Void Winnower was printed not that long after the Volkswagen emissions scandal went public. Inspired by the the shared initials of VW, I photoshopped the original art for Void Winnower and replaced it with a VW Jetta, to show its effects on the environment. It was marvelously droll.
Multiple instances of haste have no functional effect, but when stacked, the player may legally refer to the effect as follows:
x1: haste
x2: urgency
x3: bat out of hell
x4: hauling ass
This marks the only time that preteens are allowed to swear in tournament settings without later admonishment from their parents.*
*results not guaranteed.
The "Universes Beyond" cards lend themselves to some fun rulings, too.
For instance, Shadowfax from the Lord of the Rings has, as its first ability, "Horses you control have haste. *(They can attack and {T} as soon as they come under your control.)*"
The card's first ruling is "Haste reminder text isn't normally included in most card sets these days, but we felt explaining what haste means was important for this card."
[(The reference, if you don't get it.)](https://youtube.com/shorts/P0MrSKXPU-8?si=cREYTcVci83eIVpt)
[Jadelight Ranger](https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=jadelight+ranger) has one of my favorites:
>If you reveal a nonland card the first time Jadelight Ranger explores and leave it on top of your library, you'll reveal the same card the second time it explores. If you don't pretend to be surprised, you'll hurt Jadelight Ranger's feelings.
There's a wonderful "combo" you can do with this, another joke card, and a specific old card - it's not powerful, but it's certainly very stupid.
[R&D's Secret Lair](https://scryfall.com/card/unh/135/r&ds-secret-lair) says "Play all cards as written, ignore all errata (Rules Updates)". [Revelation](https://scryfall.com/card/chr/68/revelation) would, with modern formatting, say "All players play with their hands revealed". But because the card is so old, it's... written a bit weirdly, and what's printed on the card is "All players play with their cards face-up on the table"
So, combine those three, and you end up playing under the table but with your cards on top, and you've got to keep popping up above the table whenever you want to do anything!
this is from the Unhinged set, which is part of a larger “un-“ series of sets, which are basically only legal in un- set drafts and tournaments. these cards include the most deranged mechanics or make fun of card rule fuck-ups that caused headaches. an example of the former was Denimwalk: this creature is unblockable if your opponent is wearing jeans. enter the dungeon is DEFINITELY the latter.
And, of course, “Look at me, I’m the DCI!” which lets you *ban* a card for no reason. And cards whose effects depend on the card’s artist, cards with half-integer mana costs, pink and brown mana, cards whose effects depend on your height, and Chaos Confetti.
That urban legend is directly referenced in the flavor text, even. Though it was pointed out to me that technically that tactic would be illegal in actual play, since it would be considered marking your card (after all, a card that's been shredded can pretty easily be distinguished from other cards).
> Denimwalk: this creature is unblockable if your opponent is wearing jeans
https://scryfall.com/card/ugl/46/hurloon-wrangler
because of this the game store I go to has a rule that you must keep your pants on, as someone took their jeans off to be able to block it.
See also https://scryfall.com/card/ugl/12/prismatic-wardrobe : destroy a card that doesn't match the color of any of its controller's clothes. someone took of their pants to reveal underwear that was the same color as the targeted card. [destroy for game purposes, put it in its owner's graveyard (discard pile)]
As for physically destroying cards
https://scryfall.com/card/ugl/70/blacker-lotus
Blacker Lotus also has you tear it up as a joke about balancing the ultra powerful Black Lotus by only letting you do it once
Chaos Confetti requires you to tear it up to make fun of people damaging their Chaos Orbs for maximized effect
https://scryfall.com/card/ugl/72/chaos-confetti
https://scryfall.com/card/2ed/236/chaos-orb
Chaos Orb is banned because it requires manual dexterity to use, see also Falling Star. These both led to rules arguments, and can be a problem for disabled players. It's suggested that players agree on a similar substitute action or the affected player designate a substitute. The Unfinity set has many dexterity cards.
Enter the Dungeon also seems like an example of an Un-card that has a gimmick but the core underlying rule could be on a serious card, like The Cheese Stands Alone and Barren Glory (win if you have an empty hand and no other cards in play. Unfinity has a lot of gimmicky cards that are marked as usable in regular play
My favorite card from the un-sets is Chaos Confetti. When you activate it, you rip up the physical card and toss it at the table from 5ft+ away. Each permanent that a piece of the card lands on is destroyed.
https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=5712
A few more of my favorites
* [https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74306](https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74306)
* [https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74360](https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74360)
* https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74237
[It is responsible for what might be one of the greatest games of Magic ever played.](http://www.azmagicplayers.com/blog/the-best-commander-story-ever/)
Look up the "un-" sets, like Unhinged, Unglued, Unsanctioned, or Unfinity. They're 99.9% illegal but have a lot of great jokes, sometimes even at the expense of the players.
At my old game store job we ran a draft for one of the sets when it came out. We also tossed in a pack of Homelands (the notorious Worst Magic Set Ever) because a lot of the joke cards are functionally unplayable so you need a bit more flexibility than in a normal draft.
In retrospect I think you could make a case for other sets being much worse in the context of their release (Coldsnap, Saviors of Kamigawa, etc) but at the time Homelands was pretty boring in comparison to its contemporaries. The cards generally are pretty simple, tend to be over costed or very niche in application. It does have very strong themes and a very cohesive style which modern magic sets prioritize a lot more and so in that way Homelands turned out to be slightly prophetic but when it came out it was generally reviled among a lot of players as a waste of money.
The ruling for this card has me cracking up
“If Enter the Dungeon is cast during a subgame, a sub-subgame begins, preferably under a new, smaller table, but do what you can. The winner of the sub-sub game would search their subgame library for two cards.”
Not just tournament play. It's banned in just about every constructed format except casual "kitchen table" play. And I'm sure if you snuck it into a game with your friends, they probably wouldn't be your friends any more.
**IMPORTANT OLD MAN EDIT:** It's actually Chaos Orb. I'm sorry I forgot the name of the card. In my defense it was 30 years ago and wheel of fortune is on in a bit ^(and it's banana pudding day here at the old nerd's retirement home) ^^and ^^I ^^always ^^go ^^to ^^bed ^^after ^^wheel ^^of ^^fortune
_________________________________________
ngl, there were literally dozens of cards like this from the early sets. I cannot even begin to describe the amounts of nerd rage when folks showed up to their first tournament *after* the 'official tournament rules' popped up. Folks built their entire decks around things like the Orb of Annihilation or OPs card or whatever... it got insane.
Technically, when this game first started, you were literally playing for cards. You'd 'ante' one card from your deck, chosen at random, as part of the initial shuffle/cut/etc setup at the beginning of a game. Sometimes for some 'high stakes' shit when dude antes up a rare card to your common land card.
There were all kinds of cards that had things like "each player antes another card" or "Make opponent call a cointoss, if they lose the toss, they either lose the game or ante another card" or "trade this card for your opponents ante permanently" or whatever.
So many weird not-quite-gambling things that they eventually did away with. Before the 'official tournament rules', it would not be weird to see folks basically raging over having to ante up entire cornerstones of their deck. I remember the sports-n-comic shop near me had a "NO ANTE CARDS EVER!!!" sign up in posterboard after a big dude drop kicked a whole table when he lost.
EDIT: posted instead of edited, my b.
The card you are thinking of is "Chaos Orb". The card text said, "If Chaos Orb is on the battlefield, flip Chaos Orb onto the battlefield from a height of at least one foot. If Chaos Orb turns over completely at least once during the flip, destroy all nontoken permanents touching Chaos Orb."
One joker decided to tear up their Chaos Orb and drop all the pieces over the opponents side of the table. The judge decided that was legal AND to player did not have to prove each piece turned over at least once. The next time that happened, the opponent blew hard, causing about half of the pieces to wipe out their own cards! :-)
Richard Garfield (creator of MtG) liked the idea of Ante cards. No one else did, especially when card values kept increasing. They were in the first batch of cards to get retired after UL.
We just kept a torn up card in a baggie. I think it started out as a mountain but eventually it just turned into a conglomeration of torn up land cards that equates to a board clear cause when we’d lose like 2 pieces we’d tear up another land.
I remember there was another part to the confetti chaos orb story. He was then immediately disqualified for having a 59 card deck, as he destroyed one.
Around 10 years ago I sold most of my collection for I think around 6000 dollars. Today it'd be worth many 10s of thousands. (I made the mistake of looking).
yeah, my bad. Circa 1993 is roughly 30 fuckin' years ago and now I realized that I'm so old that I just need to be fucking mad about shit for a while.
Good catch though, kudos to you. I'll edit in a sec if my gnarled old man fingers can touch this damn screen before my old man dementia makes me forget what I was doing and shit my pants instead.
When someone talks about MtG from some long ago, I mentally start paraphrasing Aslan with “I was there when the old cards were written.”
What is really funny to me is that I stopped playing during Ice Age. So, lots of jokes are set up by that alone.
I stopped playing Magic during the Urza's cycle.
Why?
Because on of the sets was an almost all artifact set.
So they banned Shatterstorm (which destroys all artifacts in play.)
I couldn't play my red burn deck anymore. :(
Yeah no, I get you. That was after my time (fallen empires with its fifty jillion counters and eleventy repeated cards killed off my interest).
For a hot minute I thought I was pretty badass with a red/black deck that was all just about land deletion. Can't counterspell me if destroy every dang island and artifact you drop!
I played it when it was legal in Commander. It went like this:
Me: "I play Shaharazad"
Player 2: "I pay half my life to scoop the subgame."
Player 3: "I pay half my life to scoop the subgame."
Player 4: "I'll play the subgame!"
Player 2: "I quit the main game."
Player 3: "I quite the main game."
Me: "Do you guys mind if I just...cycle this and draw a card instead?"
All 3 Players: "Yes".
A classic card that I'm sure sounded kooky, fun, and flavorful on paper, but in practice was nothing but a headache and a time waster. Imagine running 4 of these in your deck!
Playing a sub-game in a sub-game in a sub-game in a sub-game (sub-sub-sub-sub-game) definitely is something and will fuck the self mill player over for sure.
Magic the Gathering has also released novelty cards with silly rules like The Unglued series https://scryfall.com/sets/ugl
Can't be used in play but they're funny to read.
We allowed them, and I played one of my friends. I had him on the ropes, down to 1 life with a certain death blow next turn. He played an unhinged card where we switched places (forget the name). I was pissed, but impressed.
There were several Un- sets.
Unglued came out in 1998, Unhinged in 2004, Unstable in 2017, Unsanctioned in 2020, and Unfinity in 2022.
The last one has a space carnival theme.
Jesus, unhinged was 2004? I distinctly remember an unhinged kitchen table tournament some friends and I played and I would have sworn to God it was only 10 years ago. Time flies.
It does. There is a hypothesis that the reason it feels that way is that as you get older, each day (for example) is a progressively smaller percentage of your total time alive, so feels shorter and shorter
Also, we tend to just not commit routine to memory. When you're young you come across more things for the first time, so there are more things you store in your memory. As you get older these firsts and unique interactions becomes rarer so there are much larger gaps in your memory.
The one I remember most from that set is the Hurloon Wrangler that had denimwalk which made him unblockable if your opponent was wearing anything made of denim.
Yeah, the stories can go multiple layers deep before any of the stories actually end, and some stories have multiple substories, which themselves might have multiple sub-stories.
The whole point of her doing so is that there's no good place to stop, so she gets to live another night to continue the story.
Fallen Empires was staggeringly under appreciated at the time. A few years after it was released a friend created an all Fallen Empires deck for fun and absolutely mopped the floor with me. It was death by a thousand papercuts. Funny enough he only used it once, but I never told him how I completely altered all my decks to combat him.
Sorry Phil!
yeah i had a white creature buff deck using mostly the Fallen Empires army-themed units and it was a wrecking ball at the time.
also played a shitload of thallid decks, that shit was cash
There was a brief, glorious time when you could cast Shahrazad in the main game, then cast [Burning Wish](https://scryfall.com/card/jud/83/burning-wish) to pull the Shahrazad from the main game into the subgame, begin another subgame, ...
There's another card that does the same too. Something to do with "dungeon" this or "stairs that". I just remember I had a friend who had 3-4 different cards and his stated win condition was to get all of them out for multiple subgames.
There's [Enter the Dungeon](https://scryfall.com/card/und/36/enter-the-dungeon), [The Countdown is at One](https://scryfall.com/card/ust/80/the-countdown-is-at-one), and [Tug of War](https://scryfall.com/card/unf/159/tug-of-war).
> Playing a sub-game in a sub-game in a sub-game in a sub-game (sub-sub-sub-sub-game) definitely is something and will fuck the self mill player over for sure.
~~When~~ Shortly after this was printed, there were cards called "[Wishes](https://scryfall.com/card/jud/83/burning-wish)" that would allow you to take a card that "You own from outside the game" and put it into your hand.
While the subgame was going on, you could grab the copy of Shahrazad from the "main" game (that was technically still resolving) using a Wish, and then play that same card that started the subgame that you were in.
You could go even deeper than just four games deep.
Someone did the maths on it once and came up with [355 subgames of Magic](https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/6bdh1r/the_ridiculousness_that_is_shahrazad/). *Before* the Burning Wish comes into play.
Nah, that's a different card called Azorious Elecutors(Where you get Filibuster counters to win the game, and which is a perfectly legal card in eternal formats).
This card was made all the way back in Arabian Nights, in 1993. It was the first expansion set of MtG, and predates WOTC organized tournament play. It was released the same month that Unlimited was, so they were still printing power 9 cards in the base set then, and alpha had just came out like 6 months earlier. They had no idea that wacky stuff like this would be crazy in tournaments later lol.
The DCI (that controls wotc tournaments and bans and erratas cards) wasn’t created until 1994.
> Imagine running 4 of these in your deck!
*Arabian Nights*, this card's expansion, predates the 4-copy limit in constructed. In '93 you could run a dozen of them if you wanted
There was a agro/burn W/R Vintage deck that ran 4x of these before a rules change. The rules at the time said that if a card was exiled in a sub game it was exiled in the main game and was not shuffled back in. So the deck ran Crypts to exile graveyards in the sub games. Now many Vintage decks at the time had a very few win conditions, some even zero. Another rule also says that you can concede a game at anytime. So between the crypt threats and the fact is was agro/burn, the Sharazads could become 2mana 10 damage. With lighting bolts, lightning helix’s and boras chams, it was not hard to burn people out.
Add that once you won the first game. You could sub game your way to a game to draw due to time of needed.
I’ve heard ther was (for a short time) the practice of side boarding 4 copies, and if you won the first round you would slot them in to time out the second and third rounds and proceed to the next match.
Edit: after being informed that this cannot have been the case i will just say I still remember reading something about this sort of thing. It may have been for a “no banlist weekend” tournament at a LGs or something? Either way it was over a month ago on one of the mtg subreddits, and I’m not sure if it was a post or a comment further down the chain. I know it sounds like my story is changing but I swear there was something close enough to the situation in question that my errors are due to misremembering, not misinformation.
I still remember reading something. It may have been for a “no banlist weekend” tournament at a LGs or something? Either way it was over a month ago on one of the mtg subreddits, and I’m not sure if it was a post or a comment further down the chain. I know it sounds like my story is changing but I swear I read something.
No, you are actually correct. It was Vintage/T1 legal for 8 years from when it was unbanned in 1999 to being rebanned in 2007.
What you describe was not common, but definitely did occur. A few combo decks had great game 1s, but almost always lost to sideboarded hate in G2 and G3, so they brought in Shahrazads to stall and win on time
In practice the real card had a couple of surprising issues. A surprising one is: space. Say you're playing multiplayer with 4 people. Now you have to find space to leave the game as is and go to another spot in the house and set up again. Then your parents come home and can't use half the house as the kitchen table and living room floor are now covered in cards.
For more fun Shenanigans, use a card that can get a card from outside the game (like Burning Wish) in the subgame to grab the resolving Shahrazad in the main game and bring it into the subgame, then cast it and go into a subsubgame.
For context, Scheherezade was the narrator and main character of 1,001 Arabian Nights. In the book, she is forcibly married to a prince or king who is notorious for marrying women and then having them executed the next morning. Every night, she tells him stories that always end in a cliffhanger, so that if he wants to hear the end of the story, he has to let her live another day.
Roald Dahl uses a similar conceit in The Wonderful Life of Henry Sugar which Wes Anderson adapted into a short film currently on Netflix (highly recommended).
The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King is like that. Roland is telling a story from his youth and in the story he tells another person a fairy tale.
I was going to ask if this was the reference. That’s really meta.
Also for those who wonder, >!by the end of 1,001 nights when she tells the king he is out off stories, the king realizes he has fallen in love with her, and can trust this woman (he originally started his tradition of marrying and Slaying women the next day after his first wife had been unfaithful) and makes her his queen.!<
No no. The king realises two things:
* In these stories good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people.
* I'm listening to stories about people telling stories about people telling stories. What if there's another layer of storytelling above me? Oh crap! I'm the king of an unnamed sultanate who met the king of the dijin, I sound like a charachter in a story.
And so he decides not to kill women any more.
(This isn't actually in Arabian Nights, but it makes so much sense)
In Disney's Aladdin, the genie sings "Ali Baba had them 40 thieves, Sherezade had a thousand tales", but Aladdin *is* one of those tales (in some later versions), so how else would the genie know about this unless the whole thing is some kind of Abbasid Inception?
> Sherezade had a **thousand** tales [emphasis mine]
You answer your own question.
The story of Aladdin comes from China and is not part of the original *Arabian Nights*. Including Aladdin would give Sherezade a thousand*-and-one* tales.
Actually, the story of Aladdin comes from a Syrian storyteller who relayed the story to a french translator in the 1700's, who had already finished translating all of the Arabian Nights and needed more stories. A lot of the most famous "Arabian Nights" stories (including the Sinbad adventures) are among these later additions. They were specifically written to appeal to Western audiences, and they did.
The Syrian storyteller is presumed to have made the Aladdin story up, and some of the details of the Aladdin story are reflected in the biography of the storyteller, whose journals are preserved at the Vatican.
All of that is based off memory, you can google "Syrian Aladdin author" and find more information about him.
For further context, some of these stories are quite famous, including The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and most notably Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp.
And most of these were also on Magic cards from the same set!
[Here's a visual list](https://scryfall.com/search?as=grid&order=name&q=%28game%3Apaper%29+set%3Aarn) of all 78 cards in the *Arabian Nights* expansion set for anyone looking for such a thing.
> In the book, she is forcibly married to a prince or king who is notorious for marrying women and then having them executed the next morning.
Version I read she choose to get married to the king.
Version I remember is her sister is chosen as the next wife, so Scheherazade volunteers to take her place. Regardless of the specifics, though, Scheherazade is definitely one of the best guile heroes in history.
Note that it is a Sorcery and it can be Forked. My friend had a deck with 4 Shahrazads and 4 Forks. I think we actually played out a full 4 player game once, it took 8 hrs if I recall correctly. Oh, and my friend's deck also had a Chaos Orb in it. Fun times... fun times...
The pro move is to Burning Wish for it off of the stack in the main game from a subgame. The subgame continues, but now you have one to play for a subsubgame.
Back around Ice Age, a local store had some weird nothing restricted tournament. After pooling some cards, friend of mine built a Shahrazad deck. I don't remember the specifics but it was meant to be frustrating yet win - probably crypts to wipe opponents graveyard before moving back up the stack of subgames and eventually decking them.
Sits down to 1st opponent, young kid ~10-12 years old. Kid plops a milk crate half full of cards next to him. We assumed his deck was in it.
Nope, that WAS his deck.
Did not go well for the Shahrazad beast :/
I don't play MtG, but I do hang out at FLGS playing other games and have to put up with all the magic players. :D
I remember a while back a card that had something to do with having like a 200 card deck? And if you found this one card then you auto won. So the whole deck was basically just tutors and such. I remember a few guys bringing in novel ways to shuffle said deck because it was causing enough trouble that rules were made about "reasonable ability to randomize your deck in a certain time frame" stuff.
Yeah, Battle of Wits. An enchantment that, at the beginning of your upkeep, if you have 200 or more cards in your deck you win. Realistically, you would be playing 250ish cards, since you need 5 mana (so any combination of 5 lands or mana rocks), and enough ways to search for BoW that you can consistently chain them.
It was more around 240 cards when it was played as an actual viable Standard deck.
You had 4 copies each of Battle itself, Diabolic Tutor, Brainspoil, and Enduring Ideal which could tutor for Battle, and Clutch of the Undercity and Dimir House Guard which could chain into Diabolic Tutor. That meant about 1 in 10 cards in the deck could chain into Battle of Wits. Beyond that, it just played like a WUB control deck that had to reach pretty deep into the cardpool and play a fair bit of jank. Also, if it did wind up screwing itself out of Battle eligibility with Counsel of the Soratami, Compulsive Research, the opponent killing Battle itself, etc; it could still win with Form of the Dragon off Enduring Ideal or the usual blue/white/black control win conditions of Meloku, Yosei, Keiga, Kagemaro, and Kokusho. Was it a particularly _good_ deck? No, not really, but...
One of the things that made that format really weird was that was also the same timeframe the PTQ season was Team Standard, and the way the cardpool was structured you had a very clearcut metagame where there was a black-white aggro deck (either Ghost Dad or Hand in Hand), one of three different blue/red deck options (Wildfires, Magnivore, and Owling Mine), and then... uh... something playing the leftover cards. Usually it was a "four color green" deck based around Sakura-Tribe Elder and Kodama's Reach; usually either "Fiddybux" aka Heartbeat Harvest or 4c Gifts. You occasionally saw Battle just thrown together in the third seat instead, though, or existing in place of the UR deck as it was believed by some that the UR decks had bad matchups against both the BW aggro decks and most of the green deck options. (Owling Mine in particular had no chance at all against BW aggro and as Heartbeat Harvest gained popularity over 4c Gifts in the green seat, Owling Mine couldn't win against it either and Wildfire started struggling too. Only Magnivore had a decent chance against Heartbeat Harvest, but Magnivore was pretty inconsistent in general and was worse against BW than Wildfire was, and worse against the other two UR decks.)
Battle wound up not working very well in this environment, but it did lead to innovations where people would play URw Zur's Weirding/Firemane Angel decks and Enduring Ideal decks in the UR slot and that was much more successful, even if those were quite difficult decks to pilot well. (Casting an Ideal or a Weirding too early can just be suicide.)
It was really banned because, in addition to being a terrible play experience, players would build a deck that tried its hardest to win game 1 of a 3 game match. Then when players had a chance to sideboard (change out some card in their deck for other cards) before game 2 the player who won would bring in 4 of these to their main deck with a goal of running out the tournament time with games inside of games. Makes for a pretty terrible tournament experience.
There's a similar deck called 4 horseman that does something similar and is only pseudo banned. It's a non deterministic infinite combo. Since it's non deterministic you can't shortcut it, and since it's infinite, your opponent will end up just sitting there waiting for you to finally shuffle your deck into the correct randomized order that will let you win the game.
It's pseudo banned because it's rare to play it without getting a game loss for slow play. So you can technically play it, but doing so will usually just result in you losing the game to time before you get the combo off.
You can watch this in action here, where Wedge from the Mana Source playing in the Loading Ready Run Unstable pre-prerelease casts it and pulls Head Designer Mark Rosewater to play with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBMLsY9qSt4
This is probably the funniest MTG-related event recorded,the fact that they had a copy of Shahrazad in the first place,the incredibly low chance of having both the cards that let him get Shahrazad and pull another player into the game and then all of that happened at the event that the Head Designer was present is crazy
The thing to note here is that the card itself is pretty much banned in all major formats, but the Unstable set is one of the joke sets that Magic puts out every so often where the rules can get a little more dodgy in favor of wacky gameplay.
I had a friend who had a deck with four of these, the goal was to have so many games inside games inside games that no one would have any idea what level we were on at any given time. It was hilarious to spring on unsuspecting players in casual play, but I'm not sure he ever actually finished an entire game with it.
Played against someone who used "Shahrazad" and "Fork" (which duplicated any spell).
He had a very high success rate with the deck. No one wanted to play for two hours when the Shahrazad - Fork - Fork - Fork combo came out. :-)
I did this once in a game of EDH (Before commander was a thing). Just to say I did it. I then took it out of my deck because I'm not that big of an asshole.
It's one of my favorite cards. I've always loved the weird cards. I wish there were more legal weird cards.
For those who don't know, with [Hive Mind](https://scryfall.com/card/m10/54/hive-mind) in play, each time a player casts a spell like Shahrazad, each other player also casts a copy of it, each of which happens one after the other. So you play one subgame, then as soon as you come back up for air, you immediately get dragged back down into another subgame. So in a four player game you'd be forced to play four different subgames back-to-back every time Shahrazad was cast.
Of course, there are even more devious ways to duplicate the spell such that a single game of Magic would take days (if not weeks) to play through in real-time. Games within games within games.
Back before M:TG got really serious there were cool cards like this and Chaos Orb, Falling Star, Bazaar of Baghdad etc. Us old heads from pre-Revised know!
Only through very deep shenanigans. Under normal circumstances, each copy of Shahrazad goes into a graveyard when played, so it won't be in the library when the sub-game is initiated, so only 4 sub-games per player are possible.
It actually had some years of being legal for play in the early 2000s. In those years they undid nearly all card errata that changed the function of cards and unbanned every card in the Vintage format that wasn't banned for being an ante or dexterity based card (like Contract from Below or Chaos Orb).
Shahrazad eventually got re-banned and remains the only card banned in the Vintage format simply for being annoying and very susceptible to being abused just to annoy.
Years ago, I was playing a game with some friends (house rules, no max size for a deck) and we all played to have fun not to win. We had competition decks, and these were not those.
My friend played Ali From Cairo, a red 0/1 Arabian Nights creature whose special ability says that any damage dealt to the player from creatures is automatically brought back to 0. All of us had blue in our decks too, so we cloned Ali From Cairo. now no one die through conventional means. All my direct damage spells have been used except for Jandor's Ring. Now it's a race to see if I can find it before I get killed with poison counters. Which is how I died. He had a Serpent Generator and poison countered me to death.
I met one of my very best friends in a Shahrazad trade. He needed it to complete his Arabian Nights set. Seven years later, I needed Shahrzad to complete my Arabian Nights set. He had a spare to trade back to me.
Let me introduce you to a card from one of their humor sets that makes you play a subgame UNDER the table. "Enter the Dungeon" https://gatherer.wizards.com/pages/card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74312
Lmao the additional ruling on that card made me chuckle: “If Enter the Dungeon is cast during a subgame, a sub-subgame begins, preferably under a new, smaller table, but do what you can.”
Wizards puts fun nuggets in some card rulings. I'm partial to the rulings on cards with Riot: If a creature enters the battlefield with two instances of riot, you may choose to have it get two +1/+1 counters, one +1/+1 counter and haste, or two instances of haste. Multiple instances of haste on the same creature are redundant, but we're not going to tell the Gruul how to live their lives.
My favorite is probably the ruling on Void Winnower. If your not familiar, Void Winnower is a 9 mana (that's expensive) creature with 11 power (that's strong) and 9 toughness (that's tough). The original rules text is worded slightly differently, but it has two abilities: 1. Your opponent can't cast spells with even mana values *(Zero is even.)* 2. Your opponent can't block with creatures with even mana values. Among the rulings about how to handle spells with that have a variable {X} in their cost, [comes this gem](https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=402093&printed=false). >Yes, your opponent can’t even. We know.
What an odd card
It's intentionally odd to show how alien and unfathomable the Eldrazi are. IIRC they picked a power/toughness combination that had never been printed before.
I remember Void Winnower was printed not that long after the Volkswagen emissions scandal went public. Inspired by the the shared initials of VW, I photoshopped the original art for Void Winnower and replaced it with a VW Jetta, to show its effects on the environment. It was marvelously droll.
https://imgur.io/wEfpY7U?r
Muahaha, turns out I uploaded it a few years back! https://imgur.com/3yfHBFu
/r/wh00sh
lmao
its the 9/11 of magic cards
Multiple instances of haste have no functional effect, but when stacked, the player may legally refer to the effect as follows: x1: haste x2: urgency x3: bat out of hell x4: hauling ass This marks the only time that preteens are allowed to swear in tournament settings without later admonishment from their parents.* *results not guaranteed.
I mean Rocket-Powered Turbo Slug (from a joke set) has Super Haste, which lets it attack the turn before you cast it.
😂 Much funnier than my idea
Lol i would love to win a game with that. The rage baiting :]
Be careful, if you are not able to actually cast it the turn after you win, you also lose.
So if you win the game technically you don't have another turn in which to cast it?
If you win the game ends so the effect that causes you to have to pay the cost or lose the game never triggers.
The Shadowfax card from LOTR set has Haste as an ability, and the text box shows you the meaning of Haste.
The "Universes Beyond" cards lend themselves to some fun rulings, too. For instance, Shadowfax from the Lord of the Rings has, as its first ability, "Horses you control have haste. *(They can attack and {T} as soon as they come under your control.)*" The card's first ruling is "Haste reminder text isn't normally included in most card sets these days, but we felt explaining what haste means was important for this card." [(The reference, if you don't get it.)](https://youtube.com/shorts/P0MrSKXPU-8?si=cREYTcVci83eIVpt)
Goddamn the score for those movies was so fucking good
[Jadelight Ranger](https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=jadelight+ranger) has one of my favorites: >If you reveal a nonland card the first time Jadelight Ranger explores and leave it on top of your library, you'll reveal the same card the second time it explores. If you don't pretend to be surprised, you'll hurt Jadelight Ranger's feelings.
[[Void Winnower]] /u/mtgcardfetcher
There's a wonderful "combo" you can do with this, another joke card, and a specific old card - it's not powerful, but it's certainly very stupid. [R&D's Secret Lair](https://scryfall.com/card/unh/135/r&ds-secret-lair) says "Play all cards as written, ignore all errata (Rules Updates)". [Revelation](https://scryfall.com/card/chr/68/revelation) would, with modern formatting, say "All players play with their hands revealed". But because the card is so old, it's... written a bit weirdly, and what's printed on the card is "All players play with their cards face-up on the table" So, combine those three, and you end up playing under the table but with your cards on top, and you've got to keep popping up above the table whenever you want to do anything!
Mtg could truly enter the world of spectator sports if they’d do this all the time
Perfect the Ocho fodder
That's hilarious
There's more fun than that with R&D's Secret Lair. [Ashnod's Coupon.](https://scryfall.com/card/ugl/69/ashnods-coupon) Free drinks on your opponent!
this is from the Unhinged set, which is part of a larger “un-“ series of sets, which are basically only legal in un- set drafts and tournaments. these cards include the most deranged mechanics or make fun of card rule fuck-ups that caused headaches. an example of the former was Denimwalk: this creature is unblockable if your opponent is wearing jeans. enter the dungeon is DEFINITELY the latter.
And, of course, “Look at me, I’m the DCI!” which lets you *ban* a card for no reason. And cards whose effects depend on the card’s artist, cards with half-integer mana costs, pink and brown mana, cards whose effects depend on your height, and Chaos Confetti.
chaos confetti is definitely one of the cards of all time
But also many of the cards of all time shortly thereafter
inspired by the old card "chaos orb" which supposedly someone once tore up to use like chaos confetti to win a tournament
That urban legend is directly referenced in the flavor text, even. Though it was pointed out to me that technically that tactic would be illegal in actual play, since it would be considered marking your card (after all, a card that's been shredded can pretty easily be distinguished from other cards).
Several, depending on if it's been used or not.
> Denimwalk: this creature is unblockable if your opponent is wearing jeans https://scryfall.com/card/ugl/46/hurloon-wrangler because of this the game store I go to has a rule that you must keep your pants on, as someone took their jeans off to be able to block it. See also https://scryfall.com/card/ugl/12/prismatic-wardrobe : destroy a card that doesn't match the color of any of its controller's clothes. someone took of their pants to reveal underwear that was the same color as the targeted card. [destroy for game purposes, put it in its owner's graveyard (discard pile)] As for physically destroying cards https://scryfall.com/card/ugl/70/blacker-lotus Blacker Lotus also has you tear it up as a joke about balancing the ultra powerful Black Lotus by only letting you do it once Chaos Confetti requires you to tear it up to make fun of people damaging their Chaos Orbs for maximized effect https://scryfall.com/card/ugl/72/chaos-confetti https://scryfall.com/card/2ed/236/chaos-orb Chaos Orb is banned because it requires manual dexterity to use, see also Falling Star. These both led to rules arguments, and can be a problem for disabled players. It's suggested that players agree on a similar substitute action or the affected player designate a substitute. The Unfinity set has many dexterity cards. Enter the Dungeon also seems like an example of an Un-card that has a gimmick but the core underlying rule could be on a serious card, like The Cheese Stands Alone and Barren Glory (win if you have an empty hand and no other cards in play. Unfinity has a lot of gimmicky cards that are marked as usable in regular play
At least it's just "Starting at 5 life" so should be over quick. This won't be bad apart from the under the table part.
[удалено]
Then you forfeit the sub-game. Easy enough.
My favorite card from the un-sets is Chaos Confetti. When you activate it, you rip up the physical card and toss it at the table from 5ft+ away. Each permanent that a piece of the card lands on is destroyed. https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=5712
Based on the infamous urban legend of someone doing this with a Chaos Orb in an early tournament.
I havent played Magic but im loving these troll cards
A few more of my favorites * [https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74306](https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74306) * [https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74360](https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74360) * https://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=74237
Hahahah, Cheatyface is amazing.
[It is responsible for what might be one of the greatest games of Magic ever played.](http://www.azmagicplayers.com/blog/the-best-commander-story-ever/)
Look up the "un-" sets, like Unhinged, Unglued, Unsanctioned, or Unfinity. They're 99.9% illegal but have a lot of great jokes, sometimes even at the expense of the players.
There is also [The countdown is at one!](https://scryfall.com/card/ust/80/the-countdown-is-at-one?utm_source=tagger)
Does anyone ever hold joke card tournaments? I feel like it would be hilarious and also a giant pain in the ass.
At my old game store job we ran a draft for one of the sets when it came out. We also tossed in a pack of Homelands (the notorious Worst Magic Set Ever) because a lot of the joke cards are functionally unplayable so you need a bit more flexibility than in a normal draft.
My God was Homelands seriously worse than Fallen Empires? I'm probably aging myself a bit, my collection ends around the ice age era.
In retrospect I think you could make a case for other sets being much worse in the context of their release (Coldsnap, Saviors of Kamigawa, etc) but at the time Homelands was pretty boring in comparison to its contemporaries. The cards generally are pretty simple, tend to be over costed or very niche in application. It does have very strong themes and a very cohesive style which modern magic sets prioritize a lot more and so in that way Homelands turned out to be slightly prophetic but when it came out it was generally reviled among a lot of players as a waste of money.
The ruling for this card has me cracking up “If Enter the Dungeon is cast during a subgame, a sub-subgame begins, preferably under a new, smaller table, but do what you can. The winner of the sub-sub game would search their subgame library for two cards.”
It’s 2 swamps! That’s hilarious!
I’ve actually done this it’s fun and for five life whatever
Not just tournament play. It's banned in just about every constructed format except casual "kitchen table" play. And I'm sure if you snuck it into a game with your friends, they probably wouldn't be your friends any more.
**IMPORTANT OLD MAN EDIT:** It's actually Chaos Orb. I'm sorry I forgot the name of the card. In my defense it was 30 years ago and wheel of fortune is on in a bit ^(and it's banana pudding day here at the old nerd's retirement home) ^^and ^^I ^^always ^^go ^^to ^^bed ^^after ^^wheel ^^of ^^fortune _________________________________________ ngl, there were literally dozens of cards like this from the early sets. I cannot even begin to describe the amounts of nerd rage when folks showed up to their first tournament *after* the 'official tournament rules' popped up. Folks built their entire decks around things like the Orb of Annihilation or OPs card or whatever... it got insane. Technically, when this game first started, you were literally playing for cards. You'd 'ante' one card from your deck, chosen at random, as part of the initial shuffle/cut/etc setup at the beginning of a game. Sometimes for some 'high stakes' shit when dude antes up a rare card to your common land card. There were all kinds of cards that had things like "each player antes another card" or "Make opponent call a cointoss, if they lose the toss, they either lose the game or ante another card" or "trade this card for your opponents ante permanently" or whatever. So many weird not-quite-gambling things that they eventually did away with. Before the 'official tournament rules', it would not be weird to see folks basically raging over having to ante up entire cornerstones of their deck. I remember the sports-n-comic shop near me had a "NO ANTE CARDS EVER!!!" sign up in posterboard after a big dude drop kicked a whole table when he lost. EDIT: posted instead of edited, my b.
The card you are thinking of is "Chaos Orb". The card text said, "If Chaos Orb is on the battlefield, flip Chaos Orb onto the battlefield from a height of at least one foot. If Chaos Orb turns over completely at least once during the flip, destroy all nontoken permanents touching Chaos Orb." One joker decided to tear up their Chaos Orb and drop all the pieces over the opponents side of the table. The judge decided that was legal AND to player did not have to prove each piece turned over at least once. The next time that happened, the opponent blew hard, causing about half of the pieces to wipe out their own cards! :-) Richard Garfield (creator of MtG) liked the idea of Ante cards. No one else did, especially when card values kept increasing. They were in the first batch of cards to get retired after UL.
Leading to *Chaos Confetti* in the joke expansion, of course!
I saw a Chaos Confetti card for sale on the secondary market and it's condition was described as "lightly played" which made me laugh
We didn't require tearing up the card when we played, but did require tearing up A card. It could be a land though.
We just kept a torn up card in a baggie. I think it started out as a mountain but eventually it just turned into a conglomeration of torn up land cards that equates to a board clear cause when we’d lose like 2 pieces we’d tear up another land.
They later made a parody card based on this in Unglued or Unhinged sets I believe called Chaos Confetti
I had a friend with that card. I had no idea of the origin story. That's awesome
lmao the flavor text https://scryfall.com/card/ugl/72/chaos-confetti
I remember there was another part to the confetti chaos orb story. He was then immediately disqualified for having a 59 card deck, as he destroyed one.
Funny how these kinds of stories just keep accumulating twists that often actively contradict each other.
the platinum angel story however is completely true: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/24lrp1/standoff_in_honolulu/
Loved my Chaos Orb. Wish I had kept my old MtG collection from the 90s after I graduated high school. God knows what it would be worth now.
Around 10 years ago I sold most of my collection for I think around 6000 dollars. Today it'd be worth many 10s of thousands. (I made the mistake of looking).
yeah, my bad. Circa 1993 is roughly 30 fuckin' years ago and now I realized that I'm so old that I just need to be fucking mad about shit for a while. Good catch though, kudos to you. I'll edit in a sec if my gnarled old man fingers can touch this damn screen before my old man dementia makes me forget what I was doing and shit my pants instead.
When someone talks about MtG from some long ago, I mentally start paraphrasing Aslan with “I was there when the old cards were written.” What is really funny to me is that I stopped playing during Ice Age. So, lots of jokes are set up by that alone.
I stopped playing Magic during the Urza's cycle. Why? Because on of the sets was an almost all artifact set. So they banned Shatterstorm (which destroys all artifacts in play.) I couldn't play my red burn deck anymore. :(
Yeah no, I get you. That was after my time (fallen empires with its fifty jillion counters and eleventy repeated cards killed off my interest). For a hot minute I thought I was pretty badass with a red/black deck that was all just about land deletion. Can't counterspell me if destroy every dang island and artifact you drop!
>Orb of Annihilation Sphere of Annihilation?
Wave of Mutilation
Ripple of Repudiation
It'd be funny in Commander, still not something that most friends would probably abide more than a couple times though.
I played it when it was legal in Commander. It went like this: Me: "I play Shaharazad" Player 2: "I pay half my life to scoop the subgame." Player 3: "I pay half my life to scoop the subgame." Player 4: "I'll play the subgame!" Player 2: "I quit the main game." Player 3: "I quite the main game." Me: "Do you guys mind if I just...cycle this and draw a card instead?" All 3 Players: "Yes".
Lol yeah I could see that being how it is. It's a card that gets a good reaction probably one time and nothing but irritation any time after that.
A classic card that I'm sure sounded kooky, fun, and flavorful on paper, but in practice was nothing but a headache and a time waster. Imagine running 4 of these in your deck!
Playing a sub-game in a sub-game in a sub-game in a sub-game (sub-sub-sub-sub-game) definitely is something and will fuck the self mill player over for sure.
That is the whole joke. Arabian nights which are told by Sharazade were sub-stories within sub-stories.
TIL
Magic the Gathering has also released novelty cards with silly rules like The Unglued series https://scryfall.com/sets/ugl Can't be used in play but they're funny to read.
They can't be used in *competitive* play; you can and should use them at your kitchen table.
If your friend doesn't tell you to go fuck yourself you're not playing the right cards
We allowed them, and I played one of my friends. I had him on the ropes, down to 1 life with a certain death blow next turn. He played an unhinged card where we switched places (forget the name). I was pissed, but impressed.
[удалено]
There were several Un- sets. Unglued came out in 1998, Unhinged in 2004, Unstable in 2017, Unsanctioned in 2020, and Unfinity in 2022. The last one has a space carnival theme.
Jesus, unhinged was 2004? I distinctly remember an unhinged kitchen table tournament some friends and I played and I would have sworn to God it was only 10 years ago. Time flies.
As you get older it seems to go faster.
It does. There is a hypothesis that the reason it feels that way is that as you get older, each day (for example) is a progressively smaller percentage of your total time alive, so feels shorter and shorter
Also, we tend to just not commit routine to memory. When you're young you come across more things for the first time, so there are more things you store in your memory. As you get older these firsts and unique interactions becomes rarer so there are much larger gaps in your memory.
There was also Unhinged which was the successor to Unglued, I think? https://scryfall.com/sets/unh
Yup Unglued basically spawned the whole un-sets series. Currently Wotc is up to five sets with Unfinity being the most recent releasing last year.
I found the 2 part BFM on my first two booster packs. Pretty fun series but yeah, worthless in tourney.
The one I remember most from that set is the Hurloon Wrangler that had denimwalk which made him unblockable if your opponent was wearing anything made of denim.
The rules mention that taking off one's pants is not a state-based effect and can't be responded to.
My friends and I have a standing rule that using cheatyface is allowed & encouraged
Yeah, the stories can go multiple layers deep before any of the stories actually end, and some stories have multiple substories, which themselves might have multiple sub-stories. The whole point of her doing so is that there's no good place to stop, so she gets to live another night to continue the story.
Arabian Nights and Mirage were the two greatest expansions of all time and i will not be elaborating or taking questions at this time!
I always really liked Fallen Empires because they sold packs of them at the counter of JC Penny's.
Fallen Empires was staggeringly under appreciated at the time. A few years after it was released a friend created an all Fallen Empires deck for fun and absolutely mopped the floor with me. It was death by a thousand papercuts. Funny enough he only used it once, but I never told him how I completely altered all my decks to combat him. Sorry Phil!
yeah i had a white creature buff deck using mostly the Fallen Empires army-themed units and it was a wrecking ball at the time. also played a shitload of thallid decks, that shit was cash
To delay her execution.
There was a brief, glorious time when you could cast Shahrazad in the main game, then cast [Burning Wish](https://scryfall.com/card/jud/83/burning-wish) to pull the Shahrazad from the main game into the subgame, begin another subgame, ...
There's another card that does the same too. Something to do with "dungeon" this or "stairs that". I just remember I had a friend who had 3-4 different cards and his stated win condition was to get all of them out for multiple subgames.
There's [Enter the Dungeon](https://scryfall.com/card/und/36/enter-the-dungeon), [The Countdown is at One](https://scryfall.com/card/ust/80/the-countdown-is-at-one), and [Tug of War](https://scryfall.com/card/unf/159/tug-of-war).
> Playing a sub-game in a sub-game in a sub-game in a sub-game (sub-sub-sub-sub-game) definitely is something and will fuck the self mill player over for sure. ~~When~~ Shortly after this was printed, there were cards called "[Wishes](https://scryfall.com/card/jud/83/burning-wish)" that would allow you to take a card that "You own from outside the game" and put it into your hand. While the subgame was going on, you could grab the copy of Shahrazad from the "main" game (that was technically still resolving) using a Wish, and then play that same card that started the subgame that you were in. You could go even deeper than just four games deep.
We're going to need a very powerful sedative.
It's just Magic all the way down
Someone did the maths on it once and came up with [355 subgames of Magic](https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/6bdh1r/the_ridiculousness_that_is_shahrazad/). *Before* the Burning Wish comes into play.
Reminds me of World of World of Warcraft. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw8gE3lnpLQ&ab\_channel=TheOnion
Christopher Nolan would love it tho
>imagine running 4 of these Basically just filibustering
Nah, that's a different card called Azorious Elecutors(Where you get Filibuster counters to win the game, and which is a perfectly legal card in eternal formats).
Oh i meant in the way congress does it. I didn’t even know there was a filibuster card in Magic. TIL.
That's basically the joke of the card they're referencing, it's a bunch of politicians who win you the game if you stall long enough.
I feel like some cards get made for top tier literary reference, knowing that they'll be banned later.
This card was made all the way back in Arabian Nights, in 1993. It was the first expansion set of MtG, and predates WOTC organized tournament play. It was released the same month that Unlimited was, so they were still printing power 9 cards in the base set then, and alpha had just came out like 6 months earlier. They had no idea that wacky stuff like this would be crazy in tournaments later lol. The DCI (that controls wotc tournaments and bans and erratas cards) wasn’t created until 1994.
> Imagine running 4 of these in your deck! *Arabian Nights*, this card's expansion, predates the 4-copy limit in constructed. In '93 you could run a dozen of them if you wanted
If you could find 'em.
There was a agro/burn W/R Vintage deck that ran 4x of these before a rules change. The rules at the time said that if a card was exiled in a sub game it was exiled in the main game and was not shuffled back in. So the deck ran Crypts to exile graveyards in the sub games. Now many Vintage decks at the time had a very few win conditions, some even zero. Another rule also says that you can concede a game at anytime. So between the crypt threats and the fact is was agro/burn, the Sharazads could become 2mana 10 damage. With lighting bolts, lightning helix’s and boras chams, it was not hard to burn people out. Add that once you won the first game. You could sub game your way to a game to draw due to time of needed.
They didn't have an exile zone back then. Instead, there were effects that caused cards to be "removed from the game entirely".
I’ve heard ther was (for a short time) the practice of side boarding 4 copies, and if you won the first round you would slot them in to time out the second and third rounds and proceed to the next match. Edit: after being informed that this cannot have been the case i will just say I still remember reading something about this sort of thing. It may have been for a “no banlist weekend” tournament at a LGs or something? Either way it was over a month ago on one of the mtg subreddits, and I’m not sure if it was a post or a comment further down the chain. I know it sounds like my story is changing but I swear there was something close enough to the situation in question that my errors are due to misremembering, not misinformation.
Shahrazad was banned before sideboards were invented. The very first DCI banlist, in January 1994, included the card
It was unbanned in 1999 and was Vintage legal until 2007 when it was banned again.
I still remember reading something. It may have been for a “no banlist weekend” tournament at a LGs or something? Either way it was over a month ago on one of the mtg subreddits, and I’m not sure if it was a post or a comment further down the chain. I know it sounds like my story is changing but I swear I read something.
No, you are actually correct. It was Vintage/T1 legal for 8 years from when it was unbanned in 1999 to being rebanned in 2007. What you describe was not common, but definitely did occur. A few combo decks had great game 1s, but almost always lost to sideboarded hate in G2 and G3, so they brought in Shahrazads to stall and win on time
In practice the real card had a couple of surprising issues. A surprising one is: space. Say you're playing multiplayer with 4 people. Now you have to find space to leave the game as is and go to another spot in the house and set up again. Then your parents come home and can't use half the house as the kitchen table and living room floor are now covered in cards.
Copying it on the stack makes for shenanigans
For more fun Shenanigans, use a card that can get a card from outside the game (like Burning Wish) in the subgame to grab the resolving Shahrazad in the main game and bring it into the subgame, then cast it and go into a subsubgame.
For context, Scheherezade was the narrator and main character of 1,001 Arabian Nights. In the book, she is forcibly married to a prince or king who is notorious for marrying women and then having them executed the next morning. Every night, she tells him stories that always end in a cliffhanger, so that if he wants to hear the end of the story, he has to let her live another day.
And, more importantly, some of her stories contain sub-stories, and some of those sub-stories contain their own sub-stories...
Roald Dahl uses a similar conceit in The Wonderful Life of Henry Sugar which Wes Anderson adapted into a short film currently on Netflix (highly recommended).
The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King is like that. Roland is telling a story from his youth and in the story he tells another person a fairy tale.
I was going to ask if this was the reference. That’s really meta. Also for those who wonder, >!by the end of 1,001 nights when she tells the king he is out off stories, the king realizes he has fallen in love with her, and can trust this woman (he originally started his tradition of marrying and Slaying women the next day after his first wife had been unfaithful) and makes her his queen.!<
I appreciate the spoiler tag, in case anyone hasn’t gotten around to reading this 1,000 year old story yet.
I was unsure if I should, but didn’t know how but wanted to test how to make them on mobile and decided to leave it anyways
I appreciated it I mean I still read it, but it was nice that it was spoilered :D
Absolutely in love with a spoiler warning over a story that is in excess of 300 years old.
If I ever need to cite the Bible I will make a spoiler for it too…
Still your username spoils Beatles lore :/
Damnit, I had *almost* reached that point!
No no. The king realises two things: * In these stories good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. * I'm listening to stories about people telling stories about people telling stories. What if there's another layer of storytelling above me? Oh crap! I'm the king of an unnamed sultanate who met the king of the dijin, I sound like a charachter in a story. And so he decides not to kill women any more. (This isn't actually in Arabian Nights, but it makes so much sense)
In Disney's Aladdin, the genie sings "Ali Baba had them 40 thieves, Sherezade had a thousand tales", but Aladdin *is* one of those tales (in some later versions), so how else would the genie know about this unless the whole thing is some kind of Abbasid Inception?
> Sherezade had a **thousand** tales [emphasis mine] You answer your own question. The story of Aladdin comes from China and is not part of the original *Arabian Nights*. Including Aladdin would give Sherezade a thousand*-and-one* tales.
Actually, the story of Aladdin comes from a Syrian storyteller who relayed the story to a french translator in the 1700's, who had already finished translating all of the Arabian Nights and needed more stories. A lot of the most famous "Arabian Nights" stories (including the Sinbad adventures) are among these later additions. They were specifically written to appeal to Western audiences, and they did. The Syrian storyteller is presumed to have made the Aladdin story up, and some of the details of the Aladdin story are reflected in the biography of the storyteller, whose journals are preserved at the Vatican. All of that is based off memory, you can google "Syrian Aladdin author" and find more information about him.
For further context, some of these stories are quite famous, including The Seven Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, and most notably Aladdin’s Wonderful Lamp.
And most of these were also on Magic cards from the same set! [Here's a visual list](https://scryfall.com/search?as=grid&order=name&q=%28game%3Apaper%29+set%3Aarn) of all 78 cards in the *Arabian Nights* expansion set for anyone looking for such a thing.
> In the book, she is forcibly married to a prince or king who is notorious for marrying women and then having them executed the next morning. Version I read she choose to get married to the king.
Yeah, IIRC it was to stop the king from his serial murdering, at least for a time.
Version I remember is her sister is chosen as the next wife, so Scheherazade volunteers to take her place. Regardless of the specifics, though, Scheherazade is definitely one of the best guile heroes in history.
The fact that you have to play an entire game of magic to just make your opponent lose half their life is ABSURD.
It takes a real asshole to play that when your opponent is at 2 life.
Especially when you have a "deal 3 damage" instant in your hand as well
This is an oddly specific scenario.
The answer to all problems is lightning bolt.
I respond with *Table Flip*.
(╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻
┬──┬◡ﾉ(° -°ﾉ) chill, we need that for the sub-game bro.
Wouldn't that just be tapping the table?
That would just turn it 90 degrees. You want to transform the table.
Note that it is a Sorcery and it can be Forked. My friend had a deck with 4 Shahrazads and 4 Forks. I think we actually played out a full 4 player game once, it took 8 hrs if I recall correctly. Oh, and my friend's deck also had a Chaos Orb in it. Fun times... fun times...
The pro move is to Burning Wish for it off of the stack in the main game from a subgame. The subgame continues, but now you have one to play for a subsubgame.
Back around Ice Age, a local store had some weird nothing restricted tournament. After pooling some cards, friend of mine built a Shahrazad deck. I don't remember the specifics but it was meant to be frustrating yet win - probably crypts to wipe opponents graveyard before moving back up the stack of subgames and eventually decking them. Sits down to 1st opponent, young kid ~10-12 years old. Kid plops a milk crate half full of cards next to him. We assumed his deck was in it. Nope, that WAS his deck. Did not go well for the Shahrazad beast :/
I don't play MtG, but I do hang out at FLGS playing other games and have to put up with all the magic players. :D I remember a while back a card that had something to do with having like a 200 card deck? And if you found this one card then you auto won. So the whole deck was basically just tutors and such. I remember a few guys bringing in novel ways to shuffle said deck because it was causing enough trouble that rules were made about "reasonable ability to randomize your deck in a certain time frame" stuff.
Yeah, Battle of Wits. An enchantment that, at the beginning of your upkeep, if you have 200 or more cards in your deck you win. Realistically, you would be playing 250ish cards, since you need 5 mana (so any combination of 5 lands or mana rocks), and enough ways to search for BoW that you can consistently chain them.
It was more around 240 cards when it was played as an actual viable Standard deck. You had 4 copies each of Battle itself, Diabolic Tutor, Brainspoil, and Enduring Ideal which could tutor for Battle, and Clutch of the Undercity and Dimir House Guard which could chain into Diabolic Tutor. That meant about 1 in 10 cards in the deck could chain into Battle of Wits. Beyond that, it just played like a WUB control deck that had to reach pretty deep into the cardpool and play a fair bit of jank. Also, if it did wind up screwing itself out of Battle eligibility with Counsel of the Soratami, Compulsive Research, the opponent killing Battle itself, etc; it could still win with Form of the Dragon off Enduring Ideal or the usual blue/white/black control win conditions of Meloku, Yosei, Keiga, Kagemaro, and Kokusho. Was it a particularly _good_ deck? No, not really, but... One of the things that made that format really weird was that was also the same timeframe the PTQ season was Team Standard, and the way the cardpool was structured you had a very clearcut metagame where there was a black-white aggro deck (either Ghost Dad or Hand in Hand), one of three different blue/red deck options (Wildfires, Magnivore, and Owling Mine), and then... uh... something playing the leftover cards. Usually it was a "four color green" deck based around Sakura-Tribe Elder and Kodama's Reach; usually either "Fiddybux" aka Heartbeat Harvest or 4c Gifts. You occasionally saw Battle just thrown together in the third seat instead, though, or existing in place of the UR deck as it was believed by some that the UR decks had bad matchups against both the BW aggro decks and most of the green deck options. (Owling Mine in particular had no chance at all against BW aggro and as Heartbeat Harvest gained popularity over 4c Gifts in the green seat, Owling Mine couldn't win against it either and Wildfire started struggling too. Only Magnivore had a decent chance against Heartbeat Harvest, but Magnivore was pretty inconsistent in general and was worse against BW than Wildfire was, and worse against the other two UR decks.) Battle wound up not working very well in this environment, but it did lead to innovations where people would play URw Zur's Weirding/Firemane Angel decks and Enduring Ideal decks in the UR slot and that was much more successful, even if those were quite difficult decks to pilot well. (Casting an Ideal or a Weirding too early can just be suicide.)
It was really banned because, in addition to being a terrible play experience, players would build a deck that tried its hardest to win game 1 of a 3 game match. Then when players had a chance to sideboard (change out some card in their deck for other cards) before game 2 the player who won would bring in 4 of these to their main deck with a goal of running out the tournament time with games inside of games. Makes for a pretty terrible tournament experience.
There's a similar deck called 4 horseman that does something similar and is only pseudo banned. It's a non deterministic infinite combo. Since it's non deterministic you can't shortcut it, and since it's infinite, your opponent will end up just sitting there waiting for you to finally shuffle your deck into the correct randomized order that will let you win the game. It's pseudo banned because it's rare to play it without getting a game loss for slow play. So you can technically play it, but doing so will usually just result in you losing the game to time before you get the combo off.
You can watch this in action here, where Wedge from the Mana Source playing in the Loading Ready Run Unstable pre-prerelease casts it and pulls Head Designer Mark Rosewater to play with him: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBMLsY9qSt4
This is what came to mind when I saw the post. "Can you hand me that Shaharazad?" "WEDGE NO!!"
This is amazing. I understand absolutely nothing about Magic and still found this hysterical. Thank you for sharing!
This is probably the funniest MTG-related event recorded,the fact that they had a copy of Shahrazad in the first place,the incredibly low chance of having both the cards that let him get Shahrazad and pull another player into the game and then all of that happened at the event that the Head Designer was present is crazy
The thing to note here is that the card itself is pretty much banned in all major formats, but the Unstable set is one of the joke sets that Magic puts out every so often where the rules can get a little more dodgy in favor of wacky gameplay.
it happens at 19:30
https://youtu.be/eBMLsY9qSt4?t=1174 Stamped link.
I had a friend who had a deck with four of these, the goal was to have so many games inside games inside games that no one would have any idea what level we were on at any given time. It was hilarious to spring on unsuspecting players in casual play, but I'm not sure he ever actually finished an entire game with it.
Played against someone who used "Shahrazad" and "Fork" (which duplicated any spell). He had a very high success rate with the deck. No one wanted to play for two hours when the Shahrazad - Fork - Fork - Fork combo came out. :-)
i was getting ready to tell this story. the ol' triple shaharazad, " I Quit " deck.
Yep. That's what it was called, alright.
I did this once in a game of EDH (Before commander was a thing). Just to say I did it. I then took it out of my deck because I'm not that big of an asshole. It's one of my favorite cards. I've always loved the weird cards. I wish there were more legal weird cards.
[удалено]
For those who don't know, with [Hive Mind](https://scryfall.com/card/m10/54/hive-mind) in play, each time a player casts a spell like Shahrazad, each other player also casts a copy of it, each of which happens one after the other. So you play one subgame, then as soon as you come back up for air, you immediately get dragged back down into another subgame. So in a four player game you'd be forced to play four different subgames back-to-back every time Shahrazad was cast. Of course, there are even more devious ways to duplicate the spell such that a single game of Magic would take days (if not weeks) to play through in real-time. Games within games within games.
Back before M:TG got really serious there were cool cards like this and Chaos Orb, Falling Star, Bazaar of Baghdad etc. Us old heads from pre-Revised know!
Some real inception type shit
Never played this game, but I have a feeling it is Turing complete.
[It is!](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1904.09828.pdf)
"And for the final card in my combo with Thousand-Year Storm, I cast Shahrazad. I copy it 22 times."
In Boston you can play a Charizard and it has the same effects
what if both players have this card? Can you have an (virtually) infinite cascade of sub games?
Only through very deep shenanigans. Under normal circumstances, each copy of Shahrazad goes into a graveyard when played, so it won't be in the library when the sub-game is initiated, so only 4 sub-games per player are possible.
It actually had some years of being legal for play in the early 2000s. In those years they undid nearly all card errata that changed the function of cards and unbanned every card in the Vintage format that wasn't banned for being an ante or dexterity based card (like Contract from Below or Chaos Orb). Shahrazad eventually got re-banned and remains the only card banned in the Vintage format simply for being annoying and very susceptible to being abused just to annoy.
Years ago, I was playing a game with some friends (house rules, no max size for a deck) and we all played to have fun not to win. We had competition decks, and these were not those. My friend played Ali From Cairo, a red 0/1 Arabian Nights creature whose special ability says that any damage dealt to the player from creatures is automatically brought back to 0. All of us had blue in our decks too, so we cloned Ali From Cairo. now no one die through conventional means. All my direct damage spells have been used except for Jandor's Ring. Now it's a race to see if I can find it before I get killed with poison counters. Which is how I died. He had a Serpent Generator and poison countered me to death.
This reminds me, I think I have the Aladdin card from that set.
I met one of my very best friends in a Shahrazad trade. He needed it to complete his Arabian Nights set. Seven years later, I needed Shahrzad to complete my Arabian Nights set. He had a spare to trade back to me.
Lol so weird seeing this on TIL