Preston, the Vanisher Combo

[u/Pro_Gnome_Hunter]

Was checking combos for my preston the vanisher deck and found that the combo involving Fiend Hunter and Charming Prince goes like this:

• Cast Charming Prince by paying.
• 2 When Charming Prince enters the battlefield, it triggers, exiling Fiend Hunter until the next end step.
• 3 When Fiend Hunter leaves the battlefield, its second ability triggers, returning all cards exiled with it to the battlefield under their owner's control.
• 4 At the beginning of your end step, Charming Prince triggers, returning Fiend Hunter from exile to the battlefield.
• 5 When Fiend Hunter enters the battlefield, its first ability and Preston trigger.
• 6 Resolve the Fiend Hunter trigger, exiling Charming Prince.
• 7 Resolve the Preston trigger, creating a copy of Fiend Hunter that is a 0/1 Illusion.
• 8 When the token Fiend Hunter enters the battlefield, its first ability triggers, exiling the nontoken Fiend Hunter until the token Fiend Hunter leaves the battlefield.
• 9 When the nontoken Fiend Hunter leaves the battlefield, its second ability triggers, returning Charming Prince from exile to the battlefield.
• 10 When Charming Prince enters the battlefield, it and Preston trigger, with Charming Prince targeting the Fiend Hunter token.
• 11 Resolve the Preston trigger, creating a token copy of Charming Prince that is a 0/1 Illusion.
• 12 When the token Charming Prince enters the battlefield, it triggers, exiling the Fiend Hunter token.
• 13 When the token Fiend Hunter leaves the battlefield, its second ability triggers, returning the nontoken Fiend Hunter from exile to the battlefield.
• 14 Repeat from step 5.

My question is, cant i use the charming prince trigger from step 10 to simply choose one of the other etb options? It would be nifty to be able to gain infinite life or scry my whole deck, considering that it is the Charming prince copy that targets the Fiend Hunter token to restart the combo. Thanks in advance!

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[u/rzwitserloot]

You:

1. Do the loop by hand.
2. Decree that you are going to perform this loop exactly as you did another 1,000,000,000 times (name whatever number you want, but it has to be a real number, and 'infinity' is not a real number, nor is 'gazillion').
3. Other players at the table are allowed to name any interjection point and interject. For example, they are allowed to say: "Okay, you do that 50,000 times, but then at step 11 I want to cast this instant". Or, they simply say: Okay. All 1,000,000,000 loops happen. You now have 1 billion tokens.
4. You decree that you want to do the loop again, this time picking 'gain life', for another 500,000 times. Again other players are allowed to name a number and a step and take priority at that point, or they decree they will allow the loops to happen. You now have 1.5 million life.
5. You go a third round, going 1 round at a time (but shortcutting the entire round), picking scry. Yet again the other players must be asked if they want to grab priority at whatever step they want.
6. You can't keep this up forever, you have to show forward motion. So eventually you have to end the loop.
7. If you can't, it's still a draw. Fortunately, you can pick other permanents and other modes for all your many triggers to end the loop, so ending the loop is not an issue.
8. You still have to win. You have scried your deck into whatever state you wanted, have a billion tokens, and that's a lot of W1 to exile whatever you want as well, and you have millions of life points, but, that's not quite a win just yet.

In online play none of this works, but physical play - yup. I suggest you call a judge who can monitor the loop, confirm that it is a loop and orchestrate the procedure (where you indicate you intend to repeat the loop a X times, and other players must now indicate if they want to interject that process, and where and how if they choose to).

Yes, in magic, future endless loops always trounce the previous ones (i.e. if you name 15 million billion trillion health, and some other player later on gets an endless loop that deals damage, it's fine to say 'well, uh, .. that.. plus a million').

Loops cannot have a random component. A real interesting case is the old Eldrazi lords: They shuffle your deck when you bin them. Imagine you have infinite ability to mill your deck one card at a time whenever you want with an endlessly loopable action. And you also have the ability to put the top card of your library straight into play.. once, you have no loop for this, you can only do it once. You could claim: I am going to self-mill as long as I have to (mill your deck until you hit the eldrazi, then shuffle your deck, then mill it again).. until by sheer luck I am down to a single card in my library and I haven't hit the lord yet: That means that last card is the lord. This should take, expected value, roughly (size of library + graveyard) 'loops', where one loop is 'self mill one card at a time until the eldrazi is milled'... so can I just ask if anybody wants to interject, and if no, just find the eldrazi, put it as lone card in my library, and dump the rest of my library in the yard?

And that was a tough judge call, but the conclusion was: No. That's not an 'allowed' endless loop operation.

No such shenanigans are involved in this loop though, so you should be fine, this would be, as far as I know, allowed.

[u/Madagan]

Yeah you have it right, once the combo starts you can use 1 [[charming prince]] trigger to continue the combo and the other to scry or gain life, once you are ready to stop you can use both to scry/gain life or you can target other things with your [[Fiend Hunter]]. [[Felidar Guardian]] can also be used as a combo piece which can flicker untapped lands for infinite mana/infinite illusions that don't need to be flickered to keep the chain going

[u/mtgcf → u/Madagan]

All cards
charming prince - (G) (SF) (txt)
Fiend Hunter - (G) (SF) (txt)
Felidar Guardian - (G) (SF) (txt)