Drawing a Game of Magic: The Gathering
Magic: The Gathering is a famously hard game to draw. The rules of the game only allow draws in vary narrow circumstances; basically, the game state has to break.
In fact I only ever drew a game once. Or, rather, the opponent bumbled into drawing the game. Neither of us realized what had happened at first. I had Enchanted Evening on the battlefield, which makes everything on the battlefield an enchantment. And into that the opponent played Ajani's Chosen, a creature with an ability that says whenever an enchantment enters the battlefield under one's own control, that player must create a 2/2 Cat token.
Since Ajani's Chosen itself entered the battlefield as an enchantment creature due to Enchanted Evening, it automatically triggered itself into making its first 2/2 Cat token...which entered the battlefield as an enchantment creature...triggering the creation of another Cat token...ad infinitum.
The token creation effect on Ajani's Chosen is mandatory—something Magic has moved away from in more recent years, in part to reduce unintended consequences like this one—so there was no way for the opponent to choose not to create a Cat.
In theory, if the opponent had had instant speed enchantment removal, they could have destroyed my Enchanted Evening and broken the loop in response to (any) one of the triggers. But they didn't have instant speed enchantment removal because most decks don't run it.
I did have instant speed enchantment removal in hand, but damned if I was gonna use it! Theoretically, if I had realized what was about to happen (which I didn't) I could've destroyed my enchantment in response to the very first trigger and broken the loop before it ever started. But I was already losing the game at that point due to the opponent's growing menagerie of board threats, and destroying Enchanted Evening would've ruined any chance I had of winning the game. Similarly, once I had allowed a few of these Cat enchantment tokens to resolve onto the board, and realized that the opponent had an infinite combo, there was no way I was going to destroy my enchantment then, because that would've left the opponent with umpteen 2/2 Cat tokens on the board and guaranteed lethal damage on their next turn. So at that point my only out was to draw into a mass enchantment removal card on my next turn. (That was my deck's win condition: Turn everything into an enchantment, make my own things indestructible, and then destroy all enchantments.)
It actually took me a little bit longer to realize that the opponent wasn't in control of their infinite combo, and hadn't done it on purpose. I wasn't sure what would happen next. I figured that whomever's timer ran out first would lose the game, so I had auto-passed all my priorities. In theory, I could still have won the game at this point if the opponent had spent all their remaining clock time resolving new Cat enchantment tokens, but they soon auto-passed priority too, and now the game was playing itself, merrily creating Cat tokens without limit. Mercifully, the game client shortly detected the infinite loop and kindly informed us that an infinite loop had been detected and that the game was a draw.
So by playing Ajani's Chosen into Enchanted Evening, the opponent blundered a game that they had previously been heavily favored to win, and by me not destroying my own enchantment and both of us auto-passing priority, we forced a draw.
I don't know how they felt about it, but I had like eight feathers in my cap afterward.
One of the reasons I like Magic is that, as with chess—in fact even more so than in chess—there are so many permutations and so many possibilities. I wish I could say that you never really play the same game of Magic twice, but that's not true: Magic gameplay is often horribly sameish because most people play the same high-tier netdecks, because they want to win more than they want to have fun (or, more charitably, winning is the part of the game that's fun for them). So most games of Magic follow some very well-worn wagon ruts. But when you do get an opponent with a homebrewed deck, Magic is delightfully varied and diverse in its emergent gameplay, especially when both players' decks are interactive with each other. Games like those become a puzzle to solve, a truly one-of-a-kind puzzle that never came before and will never come again. It's a battle of wits and luck, and the complexity and variety and sheer pleasure of it is truly enthralling.
Anyway, this is apropos of nothing. I am procrastinating from work. Now I guess I should get back to it. :p
