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PaperclipPerfector  19hr ago (text post)   805 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026

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In performing some relaxing HTML copyright infringement, I found myself thinking about wording.

Quotes from the official Magic: The Gathering rules:

(107.1) The only numbers the Magic game uses are integers.

(107.1a) You can't choose a fractional number, deal fractional damage, gain fractional life, and so on. If a spell or ability could generate a fractional number, the spell or ability will tell you whether to round up or down.

(119.1) Each player begins the game with a starting life total of 20. Some variant games have different starting life totals.

(111.10b) A Food token is a colorless Food artifact token with "{2}, {T}, Sacrifice this token: You gain 3 life."

Obviously, life is not countable regardless of what these rules say, so when you sacrifice a Food token you actually gain not "3 life" but "3 points of life" or "3 life points". But space on cards is limited, so the authors of Magic have chosen to omit these extra words.

It's somewhat interesting to think about how the particular game with which I am toying (1 2) has a similar problem. Each player, in his capacity as a major country at the Paris Peace Conference, can be considered to start the game with 15 influence points, three military units, and happiness at level 20.

  • Influence point: No problems here. It's just a point of influence. "You may deploy to any two issues any number of available influence points as long as you control both issues after the deployment."

  • Military unit: "Military" is not a quantity. This is a unit that is military (e. g., a corps sent to prevent an issue from becoming unsettled), or maybe a unit of your military, but not a "unit of military". (It could be a unit of military power, but that would be too long-winded.) "You may deploy an available military unit to an empty position 5, 6, 7, or 8 in a region that does not already contain a military unit of yours."

  • Happiness level: Doesn't calling happiness a quantity in this context—where it cannot be spent, but merely rises and falls based on outside factors—sound subtly wrong? It already is somewhat strained to think of diplomatic influence, with its complex one-off favors and threats, as a bucketful of interchangeable liquid that can be doled out and recouped at will by a negotiating government. But treating the happiness of a country's populace in such a manner feels even less appropriate. Rather, happiness is more like a level of temperature than a quantity of liquid. "Your happiness falls by two levels."

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