I Built a COMPUTER in Magic: The Gathering

Thanks for watching, Super Nerds! I know this one is a bit dense, but being the MTG nerd that I am, I wanted to try an experiment. And below is the full set-up of the deck and a link to the paper if you're interested (it's very complicated!): arxiv.org/abs/1904.09828 and if you like Magic and/or EDH, please subscribe to The Command Zone, the only magic podcast I listen to: www.youtube.com/channel/UCLsiaNUb42gRAP7ewbJ0ecQ -- kH 1) Go infinite. Play Staff of Domination, draw whole deck. 2) Play Fathom Feeder, Reito Lantern, Lotus petal, demonstrate loop where cast—sac—lantern—fathom feeder to exile rest of Josh’s library. 3) Play Karn, exile card from Josh’s hand. Demonstrate loop with Capsize to exile all cards from Josh’s hand and all permanents he controls. 4) Cast Infest, in response Cleansing Beam (fathom feeder), Coalition Victory, Soul Snuffers, Gix 5) Sac Soul Snuffers to Gix 6) Cast Blazing Archon, Vigor, XN, RR, Dread of Night, Shared Triumph (naming Luhrgoyf), Privileged Position, Mesmeric Orb, Fungus Sliver, Wild Evocation, Prismatic Omen, Choke, Memnarch, Olivia Voldaren, Djinn 7) Cast Cloak of Invisibility on one XN. 8) COPY TIME. With Stolen Identity, copy 79 times with Djinn. Vigor, Archon, XN (7), RR (33), Dread of Night, Shared Triumph. Use Memnarch to make Dread of Night, Shared Triumph (naming rat), Cloak of Invisibility artifacts. a. Give cloaks to 36 XN and RR. 9) Using Riptide Replicator and Capsize, create 36 creature tokens of varying power and toughness, using 18 different creature types we are going to use as symbols in our program. 10) Using Prismatic Lace, Glamerdye, Artificial Evolution and the Djinn, change text, creature type, and color of pretty much all my permanents. a. All XN + RR going to be red, black, green, and white, and are going to make different creature tokens of a different color, according to our program. b. All tape tokens to the left of the 2/2 orc are going to be green, all to the left will be white. c. Our Fungus is going to be white and give counter to “incarnations” instead of slivers d. Dread of night is going to look for “black” creatures instead of white. e. Olivia Voldaren to make Assembly Workers instead of Vampires 11) Cast Donate 41 times. Give Josh all the hacked RR and XN, the Wild Evocation, a copy of the Vigor and the Archon. 12) Cast Illusory Gains on your White 3/3 Faerie. 13) Hacked Olivia Voldaren to hack all creatures in play as type Assembly Worker 14) Cast Recycle 15) Reito Lantern all graveyard specific order, Staff of Domination draw Donate, Donate + Djinn to Recycle and Privileged Position, draw 2 a.ON THE STACK, cast Reality Ripple on 18 of the XN and RR according to our program, gives the computer 2 different phases as your turn comes around 16) Reito Infest, Cleansing Beam, Coalition Victory, Soul Snuffers to library, draw rest of library + Infest 17) Karn / Capsize exile my hand plus all set-up permanents 18) Cast Karn, exile card from my hand, in response, Capsize Karn 19) Cast Wheel of Sun and Moon, cast Steely Resolve (naming Assembly Worker) 20) PASS

Incidentally this deck is also more expensive than most modern computers.

One day you bring a deck to FNM. "How does your deck win?" "Oh, it doesn't. It just mines Bitcoin."

Opponent in a tournament: What kind of a deck do you have? Kyle: It's a Turing machine deck. It calculates 2+2 and then wins.

I love how 5 cards in he's already ignoring the option to literally deal infinite unblockable damage to his opponents lol

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from Magic the Gathering" -Arthur C. Clark

When a blue player forgets to put a win condition in their deck.

Josh: "I play a forest" Kyle's Turing computer deck: "Hold my beer"

I like the flavor text on Coalition Victory literally saying "You can build a perfect machine out of imperfect parts". I wonder if Urza meant Turing machine at that moment ...

I love how having infinite mana and drawing your entire deck on turn one is the easy part 🤣

"I play a forest." "Coo, I play my deck."

I like how answering Josh's question of "do you win" is actually impossible to answer without just going through the game until you do win (or someone gives up and concedes/"interrupts" the game), because of the halting problem.

Just noticed the majority of the card that Kyle used were blue. Blue is so strong it can literally make a computer.

"But we need someone to play with" -1st move makes them unable to do anything.

After gaining infinite mana, drawing his entire deck, and exiling everything his opponent owns all on turn 1, Kyle proceeded to assemble a Turing Machine.

Playing solitaire with himself for 2 hours while preventing you to do anything and concede in the end - sounds like a classic UW-control experience :)

Months from now: "Todd Howard to develop Skyrim for MtG Turing deck"

Next Episode: Running Doom in a Magic: the Gathering Turing Machine.

> "I made a Computer in MTG!" "Is it bl-" > "..it's blue."

The most amazing part about this in my opinion is that the program runs by itself once it is assembled, i.e. every action is forced. You could probably build a way simpler computer by using charge counters etc on lands and artifacts and tap / untap effects, but then the player would have to execute the algorithm by actively choosing the correct actions, which is then not sufficient for saying "mtg is turing complete". Also, using token creatures for the band and creature types for the symbols is hilarious and really smart at the same time.