How to sort your library in exactly 51,271 steps
Today's daily ruling on Judging FtW proposed an interesting question that lies at the intersection of mathematics, computer science, and tournament play policy. Take a look at these two cards:
Omniscience allows you to cast Petals of Insight without paying its mana cost, and you can choose to return Petals to your hand after it resolves.
It seems intuitive that by casting and re-casting Petals of Insight, you can put your library in an arbitrary order as long as the number of cards in it is not divisible by three or is equal to three. This claim is true, but actually performing this combo runs into an issue.
In Magic: the Gathering, players can "shortcut" repetitive game actions by demonstrating a loop and then declaring the number of times they'd like to execute that loop. This lets players easily take advantage of infinite combos without also requiring them to mechanically perform the actions of that combo; they just have to pick a number of how many times they'd like to do it. According to IPG 3.3:
IPG 3.3 It is also slow play if a player continues to execute a loop without being able to provide an exact number of iterations and the expected resulting game state.
