Every time this comic gets reposted it gives me an opportunity to, in turn, post this.
Response.
To explain this to the uninitiated: (First follow another explanation of the original combo)
In Magic spells are not in effect immediately, instead they go on the stack, before they are resolved. Spells from a stack are resolved in LiFo order, so last in, first out. Instants, like Gut Shot, can be put on the stack at any time by any player (simplified).
So Enemy gets his 21 mana with channel, you let that resolve, he has 1 life. He pumps it all into the fireball, now you act. While fireball is on the stack you cast Gut Shot, paying with 2 life of your 20. It goes on the stack. Your enemy hopefully has no response, without any mana left in his pool, and he looses his last life and the game.
When a player looses the game all his spells are removed from the stack, so you really win and there is no draw.
You stopped his combo with 4 cards worth unreal amounts of money with a single card worth about 50ct.
?
Yeah, I’d like a breakdown as well. I definitely don’t know enough about MTG.
You start with 20 life.
Each of these spells must be played on your turn.
Mox Ruby is free to play with a 0 casting cost. Tap that (turn it sideways) to add 1 mountain (red mana: 🌄) to your mana pool. You don’t remove it from the board.
You have 1 mana in your mana pool: 🌄
Black Lotus is free to play with a 0 casting cost. You can turn it sideways, remove it from the board into your graveyard pile, and add 3 of any color to your mana pool. Choose green for forests: 🌲🌲🌲
You now have 4 total mana: 🌄 🌲 🌲 🌲
Channel costs 🌲🌲. Cast that, remove 🌲 🌲 from the mana pool, and pay 19 of your 20 starting life, so that you gain 19 colorless mana (can be used for most spells). Place Channel into the graveyard pile.
Your mana pool will now have a total of 21 mana: 🌄 🌲 + 19 colorless
Fireball costs 🌄 + any amount of mana you decide, up to how much you have available. So you then use your remaining 🌲+ 19 to do 20 damage to your opponent.
You win with 1 life remaining.
This was the only comment that actually explained it. Thank you.
It all makes sense when someone explains it but the minute I walk away my general impression of magic can be summed up by ProZD’s cow videos.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlE9kZJTsDtYqR2lEuWZkyKvfbTN3b6OQ
This is the only answer.
With those four cards you can turn 1 kill. Magic typically starts with each player at 20 life. Black lotus adds three green mana. Channel costs two, but lets you pay one life to add one generic mana as many times as you want. Mox ruby pays for the red in fireball. Pay 19 life for 19 mana, with the last green you have 20 extra mana to invest into fireball, dealing 20 damage to your opponent and ending the game.
Great explanation, thanks
This is a first turn win in MTG (with ridiculous old, expensive cards).
The first card on the left lets you get three free green mana (currency used to cast cards). This is used to cast the next card, which requires green.
The next card let’s you sacrifice your own health and turn that into mana. This only gives colorless mana.
The third card is another free mana, this time red. One red is required to cast the 4th card.
The 4th card does enough damage to your opponent to kill them.
If you draw this hand, your opponent has zero ways to respond, and the game is no longer fun.
If you draw this hand, your opponent has zero ways to respond, and the game is no longer fun.
Of course, that’s the joke. The only winning move is not to play.
There is a meta-joke in that there are a few ways to respond to this, but only if you know it’s coming. @[email protected] responded with one. If your opponent also has a way to get fast mana out, a simple Lightning Bolt will also do it if it’s inserted between your Channel and Fireball. Or anything that counters your fireball, which will leave you standing there with your pants down around your ankles, 1 life, and probably an empty hand.
Then the meta-meta-joke is if you are known to be packing this combo, people around you will deliberately structure their decks around countering your stupid 1 turn win (if they will even allow you to employ it at all, given that Black Lotus is very, thoroughly, extremely banned specifically because of this combo), but this requires making sacrifices to their usual strategy and then you can show up unannounced with a different deck instead…
I like how your use of “meta-joke” is in itself a meta joke.
This is a wild turn one combo that will win if both players have the same starting life. Assume 20 life each, you play the first card to give you 3 green mana, you play the second card using 2 green mana. This card let’s you use 19 of your life for mana leaving you at 1 life and 19 manager + 1 from the previous card. You play the third card which gives you one red mana (totals are 20 green, 1 red) and finally now you can use the last card by paying one red and X (X can be any number you choose as long as you can pay it). In this case X is going to be 20, for the 20 green you had dealing a perfect 20 damage to the other player leaving them at 0 life and yourself at 1 life.
This combo works for whatever life total as long as yours is greater than or equal to Theirs
I recall there is a similar thing you can do with haste 1r goblin and +x/+0 spell.
I thought there was a way to get the mana without that green sorcery, though I don’t quite remember how
I don’t know anything about Magic so I only understood half but thank you for the detailed explanation!
Others beat me to the punch, but see my other comment here:
Why wait all the way to Turn 1?
Let the newbie go first, and kill them in their first upkeep with Hulk Flash.
Can you explain this for people who haven’t been 11 in a very long time?
This is a first turn win if you draw all four of these cards in your opening hand.
Black Lotus and Mox Ruby can be put down on your opening turn, and since they are not lands you are not limited to playing just one of them. If you are poor you can substitute the ruby with a regular old mountain. Basically, I only employ the ruby here to firmly illustrate that I am indeed an asshole.
If you are poor, cheeky, and lucky you can replace the Black Lotus with 3 Lotus Petals and still theoretically draw all the cards you need to do this with your opening hand.
- Sacrifice the Black Lotus for 3 green mana.
- Spend 2 green manna on the Channel, pay 19 life, gain 19 colorless mana.
- Tap the Mox Ruby for 1 red mana.
- Use that 1 red mana to cast Fireball. Dump all 19 colorless mana from your Channel, plus the one green left over from the Channel into that fireball which adds up to 20.
- Fireball does 20 damage to your opponent. You take 19 damage from Channel. You are left at 1 life, but your opponent is dead.
Normally M:tG games start with both players at 20 life. But it doesn’t matter if you play some weird format where everyone has more; all you do is sacrifice all but 1 of your life and dump it into fireball plus the one left over green mana from the Lotus. As long as both players have the same life count or you don’t have less life then your opponent for any reason, you win.
Realistically, just being able to show people this hand will discourage them from engaging you at all in any type of no-holds-barred play. They’ll hide behind their silly Modern or Commander formats or whatever, where Black Lotus is banned and Channel is either restricted or banned.
Wimps.
This was my experience with MTG. Dude was all excited to “teach” me how to play, made a deck for me and everything, and then whomped me on the second turn.
I never played again and still don’t know how
There are of course also Magic: The Gathering decks that can do that on a lucky first hand.
My favorite is this one, which in the abstract can do literally anything a computer can do. Yes, You can in theory run Crysis on a Magic deck. During your opponent’s turn.
I never really played MtG, but I love reading about degenerate combos. My favourite uses an unglued (or un- something) card that can remove any card with a silver border you can see from your seat from play. Doesn’t have to be a card in the game you’re playing, other people nearby as valid targets.
The silver border part makes sure it can only be played on other silly un- cards, but there’s a combo with a card allowing to change a colour in an effect to something else, meaning with a bit of support from a few other cards you could technically use this to nuke all cards in all unrelated games around you.
I had a buddy with a Belcher deck and I loooooved watching him win on his first turn.
That’s a fun one.
I have an Illusions of Grandeur/Donate deck that can’t do first turn, but can take someone out all at once (if I’m super lucky, like all my decks it very rarely wins)
Hahaha that sounds fun too!
My favorites that I made were an actually good legacy elf deck that could win on turn 2-3 with Staff of Domination or Emrikul (my favorites, some other good wincons too) and my very casual but mean Memory Jar/Megrim deck that I used when I was playing people who didn’t have proper legacy decks. The megrim deck was like 15 years ago, before I got into competitive Magic hahaha
I haven’t played Magic much, but boy let me tell you that this is Yu-Gi-Oh in a nutshell!
FTKs should never have been allowed.
Me, a noob playing MTG with a seasoned player with a red deck.
I don’t understand what happened but at the end of his first turn I had less than 10 points remaining.
Reminds me of
I was hoping to find ProZD in here!
This has been my experience all 6 times I’ve tried to learn euchre.
Oh, come on, euchre isn’t that bad. At the very least, you’re playing with a partner that has a vested interest in helping you. Plus, if you’re playing turn-up, it takes at least three hands to win if you’re playing to 11 (and that’s with the other team going alone and making it all three times).
Unless you’re playing bid euchre, in which case you can score…I don’t know… up to 12 points per hand if you go alone? I’m a bit fuzzy on the scoring for bid euchre as it’s been years since I played and I didn’t grow up with it, but IIRC you usually play to a much higher point value, so it still takes a couple rounds to get to a win. But if you’re just learning, you probably shouldn’t be playing bid euchre, anyway.
Of course, if the other team gets lucky you can wind up with each if those hands bring decided in one trick each, so it can feel like the posted comic, but at least the rules aren’t as complicated as M:tG.
You know, rereading what I just wrote, maybe it is nearly as bad as Magic.
Theres just too many rules that completely blow the game if you break them. People tell me there’s room for strategy but everything feels predetermined by the cards you get and of course there’s that guy over your shoulder telling you “can’t do that” every time you try something and oh great the other team knows my cards now, game over. Like yeah lol fuck this you guys can play without me.
There’s really just one rule in the basic euchre ruleset I know that you can’t break: failing to follow suit. Doing that ends the hand and results in points for your opponent.
You are kinda right about your cards predetermining play though - once you get really good and are playing with other people who are really good, whole rounds can be played in minutes, because everyone just knows what to play.
Agreed. There is still strategy, but it comes in picking the suit and the bidding.
It helped that I learned it with my wife from our two best friends that had no one else to play with in our city, and we mostly just hung out and cooked and drank and played cards our whole way through grad school
I learned it in high school because my girlfriend and a bunch of her friends played it at lunch, but I couldn’t tell you the first thing about playing it now.
I unintentionally did this once. I still feel bad about it 7 years later. But hey, I won.
I’ve been trying this new pokemon tcg pocket. Going second is actually a huge advantage.
I honestly loved playing yugioh back in like 2004 ish. A buddy of mine told me he played online and offered to show me how to do it. It was almost exactly this. It might be fun for someone who’s played the whole time, but I liked the clever decks with card combos that would take time to build up.
This is exactly what happened the day many years ago when my grandparents, who were bridge fanatics, tried to teach the game to my mother and I. The whole thing was like they were speaking another language.
And that’s why I only play Pokemon TCG. That, and the fact it’s far more affordable than other card games.
Me trying to be nice and teaching a newbie how to play chess but cant resist the urge to instictively play the fried liver checkmate. 😈
Went to a software engineering conference years ago in utah. Walked up to a table and was invited to sit down. Never felt so lost in my life. Those Mormon boys know how to table top card play. Wow.
![[MrLovenstein] Yugioh](https://lemmy.world/pictrs/image/20b555a3-8c98-4d39-a0da-ca1a9565eae8.png){kind=link}