So now you’ve assembled your Palladium Myr and two Myr Galvanizers, and are ready to make infinite mana… but you don’t want to sit there tapping and untapping them ad nauseam. Luckily, you don’t have to, thanks to the magic of loop shortcuts.

Once you’ve assembled your combo, you can propose a loop shortcut. Demonstrate the combo once, and then state the number of iterations you’d like to do and what the game state will be once the loop has finished. If we were to propose a loop shortcut for the Infinite Myr Mana combo, it would look something like this:

“I perform this loop 900 times, ending the loop with 900 colorless mana in my mana pool, a tapped Myr Galvanizer, an untapped Palladium Myr, and an untapped Myr Galvanizer.”

Now, your opponent can either accept your shortcut, or choose a place to interrupt your shortcut and do something, but only if they actually have something to do at that point (e.g., kill your Palladium Myr while all your Myr are tapped with the Galvanizer’s ‘untap’ ability on the stack).

Today’s Tournament Tip written by
Peter Golightly, Level 2 judge from Austin, TX (congrats on making Level 2!)