Scurry Oak & Heliod, Sun-Crowned Combo Timer
For decks using the Scurry Oak, some life gain creature (typically Prosperous Inn-Keeper, Soul Warden, or Famished Paladin with some kind of enchantment or attached), and Heliod, Sun-Crowned, when they start their combo they are allowed to take as long as they wish to continuously make tokens and gain life. Rarely ever does their timer even start to count down, meaning that, if they wish, they could simply stall the game for as long as they see fit to keep re-activating their combo. Please institute some sort of player overall turn timer, or some timer trigger for how long someone can keep re-activating a combo within the same turn. I don't always mind losing to these crazy infinite token producing combos. It's quite frustrating, however, to always feel that my best bet for not wasting my time once an opponent starts this combo is to simply concede.
tl;dr restrict the ability of infinite token combo decks to stall/waste their opponent's time
baoyouming#57284
shared this idea
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entregadordepizza#60576
commented
I think the topic is valid, however it doesn't seem to explore the main problem, which are interactions and combos that seem to escape fair play. On the other hand, the suggestions don't make any sense either, considering the current rules of the game.
As someone mentioned before on a board discussion, Scurry Oak is already nerfed on MTG Arena, since on tabletop, once any player resolves this combo would just declare "1 billion" tokens being created. If that's the problem, MTG Arena could offer a pop-up counter to stablish the total desired token to generate (within reasonably limits in order to not crash the game), therefore solving the time-wasting problem.
Is not a good idea to limit the time in which a player can interact between cards they own, because that would mean an alteration on the card hability as well. Scurry Oak's squirrel token generation hability isn't limited. In order to give this hability any kind of limit, the card hability should be instead "put up to X +1/+1 squirrel tokens".
The thing is, I think this topic isn't addressing the real issue, which is broken dynamics and fair play - and all of these things are already considered when it comes to ban a specific card.
Also, Scurry Oak belongs to the Historic format, while there are a lot of decks based on infinite combos on Standart and Explorer that are arguably worse than Scurry Oak, since some of them are based on direct damage to creatures and players (usually Rakdos vampire decks sacrificing artifacts or Saheeli planeswalker giving infinite damage to another red creature like Fireweaver). We also have infinite combos involving artifacts in blue decks. Honestly I think all of them are a much bigger rip-off than the Scurry Oak + ETB lifegain combo, given that they're been played on Standart and Explorer.
Apparently this is how MTG has been since its inception, but the only existing resource for this is card banning. Maybe all the examples above should be banned aswell if that's the case.
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Hobbyte#14439
commented
I recorded it when it was happening to me (second time).
Please Wizards give me my 4 wins back (I got two losses instead of two wins)
https://youtu.be/ZNBqpgTwi0A -
thecrimsoncurse#47408
commented
There are plenty of decks that can nullify the wincon of this deck but since the timer doesn't seem to punish them they just keep making tokens. These games can go on for 30+ min or longer just because they are salty and just run their combo and are allowed to. I had a game I had to stick out for because it was in the Decathlon. It doesn't help that this is a very common deck and it really ruins the player experience. Unless they actually win the game, infinite combos are just bad player experience for most players.