Have you ever had a multiplayer game go on too long? Was there some card that was played that sucked out the fun while pushing the game into extra innings? Were you dealing with a Virtual Shahrazad?

I remember a time when someone at our casual table played Shahrazad. A few people had heard the various myths and rumors that surrounded the card. Two players decided to cast Fork and duplicate it. Let’s play a lot of subgames of Magic!

A few hours later, after the subgames were over, someone promptly cast Flame Rift and killed everyone who had lost a ton of life from the subgame (if you lose, your life is halved, so three subgames means, unless you won all three times, you have a considerably lower life total). It was the suitable anticlimactic end to one of the least exciting games of Magic I’ve ever played.

Shahrazad does a few things. You are forced to play a subgame of Magic layered into the existing game, but any changes to cards and game states there will hurt you on the other side. But the subgame isn’t true Magic. For example, if you play a deck with a lot of fetch lands designed to thin out your deck’s lands, or some ramp like Cultivate, you probably don’t realize just how vulnerable your ability to find and play lands in each of the subgames will be until you shuffle your existing deck and play some Magic with it. Here, let me give you an easy example:

Suppose you have a sixty-card deck normally with twenty-two lands. In the current game, you have eight lands in play, two in your land, and three in your graveyard. Nine lands are left in a thirty-four-card deck, or almost one in four cards left. That’s a pretty low number, and it’ll be hard to figure stuff out. Are people going to allow generous mulligans?

The result is that you invariably have one or two people who have decks that are denuded of their win conditions, or their lands, or what have you. A combo deck is missing its pieces, a control deck its mass-removal options, a ramp deck its mana, and so on. It’s not a great game. You’ll either have one player who steamrolls and gets in an early win against players who never were in it or you all play a massively lengthened subgame that goes on far too long because no one can get half a deck to work.

Neither of those games is good. The subgame is tainted because decks aren’t played in their entirety. It has ceased to be good Magic. And then, when everyone returns, the ones with the weaker decks are losing life to the lucky draw. Now this used to be a legitimate tournament strategy.

You would play a simple G/W/U deck like this:

Shahrazad for the Win! ? Casual | Abe Sargent

• Creatures (14)
• 2 Birds of Paradise
• 4 Flying Men
• 4 Savannah Lions
• 4 Scryb Sprites

• Spells (24)
• 1 Ancestral Recall
• 2 Disenchant
• 4 Swords to Plowshares
• 1 Regrowth
• 1 Time Walk
• 1 Timetwister
• 2 Balance
• 2 Hurricane
• 2 Shahrazad
• 2 Wrath of God
• 2 Unstable Mutation
• 1 Mox Emerald
• 1 Mox Pearl
• 1 Mox Sapphire
• 1 Sol Ring

• Lands (22)
• 3 Island
• 3 Plains
• 4 Forest
• 4 Savannah
• 4 Tropical Island
• 4 Tundra

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And in this case, Shahrazad was played specifically to remove a few creatures from your opponent’s deck to thin it out even more. That’s it. It’s a Spike-driven way to keep the game moving in your general direction. If the extra eighteen-minute subgame resulted in two of your opponents’ creature being gone—as well as their life totals going from 38 to 19—that was worth it for these players.

Hey, look, I’m not criticizing them here; that’s a tournament thing to do. I get it. But that’s not the way I want Magic to play at my own kitchen table. When we have causal Magic night and a few folks come over to hang out and flip some cards, I want things to be better than a subgame that’s weak and a lengthened game.

And unfortunately, there are a few Shahrazads out there in Magic that are played and then do exactly what Shahrazad did. Let’s me give you a banner example: Obliterate.

Let’s drill into this spell a bit more. You can’t counter it, so you can’t stop it from going off. Everything that can be destroyed is, leaving just Planeswalkers, enchantments, and indestructible stuff. (Regenerators need not apply.) That almost always lengthens the game far too much. It’s usually done by a player who’s about to be overrun and the board is strongly against him or her—and then people are essentially trying to top-deck lands or whatnot. Then, you have some people who basically are never really in the game again (just like the subgame of Shahrazad), and they aren’t having a lot of fun.

We had a player at our kitchen table named Don. Don had a deck in which he would play Obliterate and float some mana doing so. Then, he’d drop a Mountain to allow the Anger in his graveyard to give his stuff haste. Then, he’d play Phage the Untouchable and promptly swing at the person he thought would be in the best place to kill Phage with a Plains and Swords to Plowshares or an Island and bounce. A few more Phage swings later, that was game.

I can’t get upset about someone who plays a card that wins the game soon thereafter. It’s a game after all. If I wanted to play a game in which no one was trying to win, I’d grab SimCity or perhaps Dungeons & Dragons (depending on how your playgroup handles it I suppose). But this is Magic, and we have winners and losers. So I don’t mind Don’s Obliterate.

I’d do something similar with Desolation Angel: kill all of those pretty lands and leave a 5/4 flyer behind. I’d win the game relatively soon thereafter. And these strategies had various weaknesses that were very easy to exploit. You could force Don to discard stuff early to keep him from setting up, and perhaps force him to reanimate his own Phage off a Living Death or something and kill him. You could Flicker my Angel back and forth out of play and prevent me from having any lands ever gain.

So yes, there were counters to us easily added. So in addition to winning pretty quickly, we could be metagame’d against if we got out of hand.

But in most decks, and most of the time it’s played, Obliterate is a virtual Shahrazad.

What other virtual Shahrazad’s are out there?

Another important category of Shahrazads out there is the black stuff that has mass discard. Having everyone discarding and forcing people to build their hands one turn at a time or to top-deck is pretty bad. (Or see white’s Balance for a similar effect.)

But when the discard is layered onto a permanent that essentially discards everyone’s stuff and prevents people from building up a deck, thus forcing everyone to top-deck, that is just nasty-slow! A card like Bottomless Pit or Necrogen Mists is a perfect example. See also Gibbering Descent. (Although at least that card does you the favor of hitting someone for life-loss as well.)

So discarding that moves everyone to top-deck city for the rest of the game (or until the permanent is taken down) or mass removal of lands and other stuff via Obliterate are good examples of virtual Shahrazads that delay the game meaninglessly.

What else?

There are a handful of permanents that prevent folks from playing spells. The best example is Iona, Shield of Emeria. If you are playing a mono-colored deck and someone chooses your color when she arrives, that’s it. You can’t cast spells, you can’t race, you can cast’s removal, and you are done playing Magic. That’s not really a good feeling, and Iona can take a few turns to kill you as well.

We also have a number of hate bears that are small creatures that can be dropped early and keep you from doing stuff, like Gaddock Teeg (also long overdue for a reprint). I play him in a Commander deck right now. Sure, these cards can be annoying in the right circumstances, but they are easily slain. Gaddock Teeg, Aven Mindcensor, and others are all handled with aplomb. But I don’t like the artifact and enchantments that shut you down from playing stuff under certain circumstances but that are hard to destroy. I can’t tell you how annoying it can be to be under Arcane Laboratory or Rule of Law. Standstill plays like a virtual slowdown of the game in a multiplayer setting since no one wants to break it and lose the cards, so it’s a similar effect.

Finally, there are a number of very old-school cards that keep you from doing fun things like untap your lands that are also serious game-lengtheners that remove a lot of the fun of playing (like Winter Orb and Stasis).

Stasis. Obliterate. Iona, Shield of Emeria. Bottomless Pit. These are the virtual Shahrazads out there. Do your friends a favor and bench them (unless you are winning shortly thereafter with a careful and fun crafting of your deck!).

What other cards lengthen a game and remove people’s enjoyment of it at the same time? What other Shahrazads are out there?