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Comment by stephengillie | Hacker News Reader

Some time ago, I tried to recreate a few basic Powershell commands as MTG cards.[0] Try/Catch [1] is one of my favorites - it's designed to "pre-counter" counterspells.

[0] https://imgur.com/a/4sa6v

[1] Reveal 2 cards from your hand. Choose 1 and pay its casting cost, then cast it as normal. If it fails to resolve, reset the game state to before the card was cast, then cast the second card as normal. https://i.imgur.com/E2cbdEo.png

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You'd probably want for a try catch: Try catch (0) Instant Split Second

Exile a card from your hand. You may cast a card from your hand with CMC greater than or equal to the exiled card as though it had flash. That spell gains "if this spell is countered, you may play the exiled card without paying it's cost".

... Of course, it's not perfect but it's closer. Doing things like "reset the game state" are not defined in the rules very well, especially since the state wouldn't be the same (there are ways to make it illegal to undo). So that would just be a mess.

>reset the game state to before the card was cast, then cast the second card as normal. https://i.imgur.com/E2cbdEo.png

wouldn't that make the card useless?

play cardA -> get countered ->state reset -> play card B -> B gets countered (because your opponent recovers the counter and untapped cards, due to the reset).

State reset isn't the right term. You want something like "Reveal two cards from your hand. Pay the casting cost for one. If it successfully resolves, exile the second card. If it does not, put the second card into play as if it were cast."

As it turns out, that also doesn't work because you can't just put something into play or it would skip some triggers and activate others it wouldn't normally. So the code is statefully different if it's in the "catch" instead of the "try"

Just add a new ability "uncounterable".

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