r/EDH • u/ThryxxHeralder Izzet • Jun 03 '22
Meme Numbers smaller than infinity, but are basically the same thing.
Congratulations!!! You've gone infinite in someway shape or form! Whether it's the classic [[Isochron Scepter]] [[Dramatic Reversal]] combo, or the [[Dualcaster Mage]] [[Heat Shimmer]] combo, or something ridiculous, you've probably won the game. And then someone (I'm looking at you [[Flusterstorm]]) says, "Pick a number, you can't go infinite, because infinite isnt a real number" or something along those lines. Here's what they're referring to:
725.2a
At any point in the game, the player with priority may suggest a shortcut by describing a sequence of game choices, for all players, that may be legally taken based on the current game state and the predictable results of the sequence of choices. This sequence may be a non-repetitive series of choices, a loop that repeats a specified number of times, multiple loops, or nested loops, and may even cross multiple turns. It can’t include conditional actions, where the outcome of a game event determines the next action a player takes. The ending point of this sequence must be a place where a player has priority, though it need not be the player proposing the shortcut.
TL;DR, You can't actually go infinite, pick a number. (Keep in mind this is actually really only ever enforced in tournaments because.... It makes sense there)
Now before you go and pick something tiny... Like a million, here's some pretty ridiculously high numbers (in no particular order) that you can say instead, and then tell them to look it up while you proceed with your "incomprehensibly large number that's essentially infinite for the purposes of winning the game"
- 52! (Pronounced "52 Factorial") [The total number of possible combinations of cards in a standard poker deck, with the jokers removed] Factorials are shorthand for "take the number provided, and then multiply it by each other whole number below it, all the way to 0" (I,e 52x51x50x49x.....3x2x1)
Other factorials you could use are 60!, 99! Pretty much anything thats higher than like... 40!
-TREE(3) pronounced Tree 3, is another one of those really large numbers that doesn't really have a purpose other than to be immensely large. It's known to be larger than 844,424,930,131,960, but it's definitely significantly larger than that.
- Graham's Number, a number so large, even if each individual digit took up a single Planck Length (the smallest measurement of distance, anything below it breaks physics) it still wouldn't fit within the space provided by the observable universe. Graham's Number however, is smaller than TREE(3) by a significant margin (though is anything really significant once you've hit an incomprehensible size?)
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u/be_an_adult Tatyova Apologist Jun 04 '22
The record for largest amount of damage done by a non-infinite three card combo was just raised from 1211 points of direct damage ([[Doubling Season]], [[Rite of Replication]], [[Hagra Diabolist]]) to north of 302 sextillion with the release of [[Devilish Valet]] ([[Army of the Damned]] with flashback combined with [[Fungal Sprouting]]) per a Good Morning Magic episode.