Once again, I’m here to discuss the week’s Casual Challenge – and this week's topic is Type 4: Limited Infinity. Limited Infinity is a format in which you have infinite mana, but may only play one spell per turn. Also, you need to draft your deck, whether it is roster draft or Solomon draft. Type Four is a rather fun format, but there are several aspects to look at. One is what you should put in your card pool, another is how you should draft, and the last aspect are the ground rules concerning different things. In general, I will be looking at these issues from a multiplayer view of Type Four.

Card Pool
One of the fun things about Limited Infinity is that you have infinite mana, allowing you to play anything of any color at any mana cost. There are, however some general rules to selecting the cards in your Limited Infinity card pool (or "stack"). A lot of these guidelines are obvious, but some people overlook more important ones. Some things to include are:

Big Creatures
This one's the most obvious. You want to include the biggest badasses you can find. Akroma, Angel of Wrath, the Pit Fighters from Onslaught, Darksteel Colossus, and Spirit of the Night are among the common sights for Limited Infinity — and cards like that should always be welcome in the card pool.

Big Spells
This point is also obvious – it's fun to hard-cast Decree of Pain or Decree of Savagery for a change. Plague Winds, white and red Wrath of God effects, and Upheaval are all good considerations for big spells.

Utility/Counter
This is a very important part of Limited Infinity. Everyone wants ways to deal with other cards their opponents might have. Desert Twister and Vindicate are both good choices due to the range of things they remove, but there are other cards that have flexible uses. The Dragon Charms from Planeshift do a nice job when it comes to solving different things (I tend to like Crosis's Charm and Darigaaz's Charm better than some of the others). Planeshift’s battlemages also work well if your group doesn’t have a large budget.

I grouped Counterspells with utility, as they generally serve the same purpose: deal with your opponents’ threats. However, counters provide instant-speed answers that help you deal with threats before they can even threaten anything. Decree of Silence, Time Stop, and Last Word are some of the better counterspells in Limited Infinity, though the aforementioned Dromar’s Charm and Spite / Malice also serve as utility spells.

Tutors and Drawing
How many times did someone in your group wish they had a card in their deck, but never got it? Tutors and draw cards help everyone get what they want when they want it, which can make the group happier as a whole. The Visions Tutors in general are pretty good in Limited Infinity, as you do not want to spend your turn on getting what you want. Yawgmoth’s Bargain is also a good way to get what you want. Other Tutoring and drawing effects that are also useful, like Ring of Ma’Ruf, Diabolic Tutor, Whispers of the Muse, Tower of Fortunes, and the Judgment Wishes — though I will warn you that you may want to have certain cards banned before your friend plays Burning Wish to retrieve a Fireball.

Recursion
I see this aspect over looked many times. No matter who you are, there are times you wish you could Restock your hand or have an All Suns' Dawn to get back what you need when you need it. They also help you deal with an opponent’s removal, as you can just recover what was once destroyed. Aside from the two previously mentioned cards, Eternal Witness and Elven Cache are excellent choices. Genesis is particularly helpful if you can get him into your graveyard, and Hammer of Bogardan and Eternal Dragon serve as recurring threats.

Cards That Allow You To Play Stuff On Other Players’ Turns
Type four is all about playing spells, but you only get to play one every turn. Notice the phrase “one every turn": you want to have something that can make allow you to play things on other players’ turns. Vedalken Orrery and Quicksilver Amulet are both good picks, and Winding Canyons isn’t bad either. Of course, you should also have instants in your deck, but they're grouped in categories #2, #3, and #4.

With all this said, I'd like to share two of my favorite cards to include in a stack.

Greater Morphling
This thing never dies, provided your opponent doesn’t have a Wrath. Some groups just might want to ban this thing, as it can cause an abruptly large amount of damage and kill someone. This can be accomplished by giving the Morphling Provoke, Trample, and Bushido 1 five million times and then provoking any creature your opponent controls — though give the Morphling Double Strike or First Strike if that creature is a basilisk or Phage the Untouchable.

Riptide Shapeshifter
This is your creature tutor on legs. He can beat if you need him, serve as a blocker and replace himself, or fetch out your bomb (if only Darksteel Colossus was a Colossus!).

Drafting Tips
Drafting in Type Four is not all that difficult. Generally speaking, you want to have a good mix of cards in your deck ranging from utility, big creatures, wraths, counters, tutors, and card drawing along with some recursion. There are other things to take into note as well… like, say, card advantage. To keep card advantage in your favor you want cards that do certain things…

Your Creatures Should Be Hard To Kill
You don’t want to waste your once per turn spell on a creature that is just going to get killed unless that’s what you originally wanted it to do (see Body Snatcher and Riptide Shapeshifter). Sure creatures like Visara the Dreadful and Crimson Hellkite are decent — but if removal continually nails them, then you should want to draft creatures like Plated Slagwurm, Jareth, Leonine Titan, and Greater Morphling (if your group allows it) instead. This will make you happier and give you a better chance a winning the game, as your opponent will have dead removal against these types of creatures.

Your Creatures Should Be Able To Kill
I mentioned that Crimson Hellkite and Visara, the Dreadful are big targets for removal — but they themselves pack a wallop. You want to have strong creatures that can kill other creatures and hit hard. Masticore is a famous example of this, and so are Flowstone Overseer and Vampiric Dragon. These creatures essentially serve as spot removal and wraths, allowing you to gain significant advantage over your opponent.

Draft Repeatable Effects
This is vital in Type Four. It is very useful to have ways of continually doing things over and over again. I myself like Blast from the Past, but Tower of Fortunes, Aladdin’s Ring, and Whispers of the Muse all allow you to slowly work card advantage of the course of several turns by either removing your opponents’ cards from the board or stocking up your hand, or a bit of both.

As a side note, Arcanis the Omnipotent and some other creatures allow you to gain advantage — and they also fit #1! (Though almost all of the creatures in tip #2 are included here as well.)

Use Cards That Ruin Your Opponents’ Tempo or Help Your Own
Tempo is essentially how fast and well a player’s board position develops — and in a format that only allows you to only play only one spell a turn, every spell needs to count. To aid your casting of spells, you will want some of the extra-spell cards I mentioned earlier, like Quicksilver Amulet and Vedalken Orrery. But if you want to be cruel and mess with your opponents' cards, Hoverguard Sweepers, (Blank) Elemental, and Nightscape Battlemage all work wonders. It is best to have a mix of both utility bounce/removal and instant-speed playing. These cards don’t necessarily give you card advantage, but the speed they give you allows you to gain an edge on your opponent.

Get Counters
Counterspells are extremely helpful in type four, but some counters are must-drafts over others. Decree of Silence will help you more than any other counter, as it is nigh counterable (yes, I, like Rosewater and Shakespeare, can make up words) and it can draw you a card. Spelljack will not only deal with a threat that you didn’t want on the board, but it will allow you to use that threat against your opponents (Desertion works too, albeit in a narrower range). Time Stop is one very useful “counter” as it will deal with anything that is uncounterable, but it will prevent further mischief that turn and can ruin the spells all your opponents played on that particular turn. Counters themselves don’t always allow you to get more than one for one, but it is good to have an emergency counter if something very bad is about to happen.

This brings me to my last point….

Alternative Rules
Limited Infinity is filled with a ton of rules issues and certain cards need banned if rules settlements are not worked out beforehand. I just wish to go on about some possible rules; most of them dealing with making certain cards playable in the format but there are a few others.

The Defensive Ability Always Wins
Stephen Median went on about this subject in his article on Limited Infinity. This concept states that if a creature is going to be killed by another creature’s ability, but it has an ability that could save itself, then the defensive ability wins. An example would be if I had a Greater Morphling and my opponent had a Vampiric Dragon. My opponent would try to kill my Greater Morphling, and I would respond to it by making it either targetable, give it protection from red or black, or giving it a super huge behind. More complex answers tend to confuse most people, so the defensive ability always winning isn’t that bad a choice.

One And A Half Drain Life
This is an interesting rule concerning X spells that deal damage. What this rule states is that when a damaging X spell targets a creature, X may be equal to the toughness of the creature, but when it's targeting a player it may do no more than half their life total. (There's also a "quarter" rule.) This rule would allow you to play cards like Drain Life, Soul Burn, Death Grasp, Blaze, Ghitu Fire, and their ilk for a change.

I want everyone to note that the rule is only for X spells that deal damage and do something that could be potentially harmful (like taking a player out in one shot or gaining infinite life with a spell like Swallowing Plague). This rule also helps Rolling Thunder, since you need to select all your targets at once — but Fireball must have modified rules. Since it is divided evenly among the targets, I suggest that you would be allowed to target any number of creatures or players, but only to the point where the damage it deals is equal to/less than half the life of the player.

As for a Fireball that only hits creatures, I would rule that it would be allowed to do damage equal to the toughness of the biggest-butted creature that is targeted. For cards like Earthquake, I would rule that it should only be allowed to do damage equal to half the life total of the player with the lowest life.

Defining X As More Than A Math Book
This is for cards that don’t damage players directly. For creatures with X in their mana cost for the purpose of giving them +1/+1 counters (like, say, Ivy Elemental) I would rule that you can spend X mana, where X is the total number of cards in everyone’s hands in honor of Multani, Maro-Sorceror — though it may be safer to rule these creatures more like Stag Beetle. Also, Rock Hydra should only be allowed to make additional counters based on how big he was to begin with.

(Then again, if you can have creatures with infinite toughness thanks to Greater Morphling, why bother with this rule? – The Ferrett)

The last two options make X spells a little more complicated in your group, but if you want to use them bad enough, you will come up with some rules. (As for Stroke of Genius and Braingeyser, you can have X equal seven — for in Type Four, "draw seven" spells aren’t really that broken.)

Errata
This rule is specifically for cards like Reckless Embermage, Goblin Cannon (and its Legends Cousin Rocket Launcher), Kumano, Master Yamabushi, and other cards that deal infinite damage with infinite mana.

You essentially give these guys errata, removing the phrase “or player” from all of them. This will give you more Masticore-style cards. It also allows you to use them for a change; Kumano’s ability to remove things is quite helpful, while no one minds big old Shivan Hellkite. One thing I will warn, though; you must state that you have errataed these cards well before you start the game.

Fire Drake
This rule is for creatures like Fire Drake, though they don’t have the safety clause. What this rule would state is that Firebreathing or “Shade” creatures would be allowed to be played in Limited Infinity, under the condition they may only be pumped a certain number of times. I suggest that three or four times does not seem unreasonable, though Dragon Tyrant could prove to be a problem; then again, Darksteel Colossus doesn’t exactly pat you gently when it attacks you.

An alternative would be to say that these creatures could pump only on defense or when blocking.

I hope these tips will help you…but don’t get too carried away with making new rules, and make sure you draft carefully.

Take care,
Matthew Lubich