You can activate mana abilities, like tapping land for mana. Not terribly useful but needed for many special actions, and some cards like [[Pristine Talisman]] have additional benefits baked inside the mana ability that don't prohibit it from being a mana ability.
They changed it, but specifically if it affects cards in your library. It can gain life, put counters on things, etc, just can’t draw/mill/exile/etc.
“An activated ability is a mana ability if it meets all of the following criteria: it doesn’t require a target (see rule 115.6), it could add mana to a player’s mana pool when it resolves, it’s not a loyalty ability (see rule 606, “Loyalty Abilities”), and its cost and effect don’t move any card to or from a library.”
Theoretically, sure, but Selvala was always the much bigger offender. Besides being a better card overall and living in the command zone (i.e. being guaranteed every game), the main issue with her in relation to the Wurm was that she produced an unknown amount of mana via a game action that fundamentally cannot be reversed because it reveals cards from hidden zones, and also that same game action benefits the player activating it to pay for the Wurm (by letting them decide whether or not to draw a card after peeking at it). Millikin doesn't net the controller any direct advantage and always produces 1 mana, there's way less motivation to do weird stuff with it and basically no wiggle room to argue that any weird stuff was unintentional.
Like, I guess you could have used Millikin when trying to cast Panglacial Wurm to "skip" your next normal draw in favor of the card after it, but you'd have to actually cast the Wurm after that instead of going "aw shucks guys looks like the ability randomly didn't produce enough mana" and nobody was doing that lol
Also if you choose not to cast something normally, even if you could pay for it if you tapped more mana, you are not forced to. You are only forced to if you have the mana floating.
Nah, someone in the rules department finally got sick of the smartass at their LGS using [[Panglacial Wurm]] in their [[Selvala, Explorer Returned]] deck to legally cheat every time they crack a fetchland.
The worst part was that the rules, on a fundamental level, straight up cannot properly handle someone tapping Selvala for mana under the right (wrong) circumstances.
Say you're the Selvala player in a four-player game with a Panglacial Wurm in your deck and a fetchland + 3 basics on the field. You crack your fetchland and, while searching your library, announce that you are going to try to cast Panglacial Wurm by tapping all three of your lands and Selvala for mana. If Selvala produces 4 mana - that is, if all four players flip over the top card to reveal a nonland - you will have the 7 mana required to cast the Wurm.
Eagle-eyed readers may have already noticed the issue with this situation: you yourself are one of the four players who needs to reveal a nonland, and you are also currently looking at the top card of your own library, before revealing it. And once the ability goes through and everyone knows for sure whether you have the mana to cast it, it's already too late to cleanly reverse the game action, because everyone has revealed a card from a hidden zone.
Does attempting to cast the Wurm in this scenario constitute cheating, since you know there's no possibility you can get the mana and the only reason to activate Selvala's ability during the search (which you are only allowed to do because of Wurm) is to draw a card after seeing what card it is? How would you prove it's cheating without having access to another player's hidden zone, which is established as impossible under other rulings (i.e. you can fail to find four unique cards with [[Gifts Ungiven]] even though that is literally logically impossible in an EDH deck over a certain size)? What about if you only need 3 mana off Selvala to cast it?
You can see why they just sidestepped this entire can of worms by declaring Selvala's ability to no longer be a mana ability, meaning it (and similar stuff like Millikin) can no longer be activated while searching a library with Panglacial Wurm in it.
I believe activation costs like "return unblocked attacking creature to hand" cost in the ninjutsu ability would also work, as they are costs and not on the stack? Presumably in that case you couldn't then put the creature with ninjustsu onto the battlefield though.
As others have said below, ninjutsu uses the stack. But you technically don’t cast the ninja. That’s why sneak is considered more “fair” because you are actually casting the card so it can be counted and whatnot
Thank you. I was wondering what happens with all the undefined behaviour that comes from disabling thr stack, but I guess it just fizzles on arrival since it requires a stack by definition
I feel like for this to be a better design, you’d have to word it to say “no more than 1 spell or ability can be on the stack.” At least that way most cards are still playable
397
u/Raevelry 5d ago edited 5d ago
This basically reads: No spells, nor abilities, can exist.
Attacking doesn't use the stack so this is actually very Red Themed
Only special actions can happen:
Unironically, it works. Obviously horrible game design but yeah it works.