Vs Matriarch in the Time Cataclysm, Surprise Shopping Trip in play, Darken the Sky is drawn. Madness ensues.
I could come up with three ways to play this, two of which triggered some sort of infinite damage loop by applying Shopping Trip to each fowl as I pulled it from the trash. Once I figured that out I focused on the DtS instruction “Put all of the fowl cards from the villain trash into play.” and put them all out at once then dealt 13 x 1 damage.
Thank God the Scholar had Flesh to Iron and Alchemical Redirection in play!! But it wiped out two Carrion Fields, the mask and knocked the Matriarch down a nice peg.
What I’m hoping none of you are going to tell me is that
Sounds like you played it pretty much right; I think you put the fowl into play one at a time, but once they've been knocked back out they don't get a second in.
I disagree, because destroyed cards go to the trash. So if you pulled each fowl out and put it into play individually, it would trigger Shopping, get destroyed, go to the trash and then come back out. That would trigger the infinite loop.
The only way to avoid that is to follow the "put all Fowl cards" into play but doing it all at once. Then that card is done. Then Shopping Trip deals a one damage attack for each Fowl card that came out.
If you look at the wording of Darken the Skies, and then take the rules in the rulebook into consideration, you take them all out of the trash one at a time, then you put them into play one at a time.
This is the same loop as Darken the Skies & Hairtrigger Reflexes, I believe we're still waiting on an official ruling on that too.
The consensus from the players is that Darken the Skies is "Remove all Fowl from the Trash. Put all the removed Fowl into play." as two separate instructions, not as the single one written on the card (purely to stop the loops).
However, as I said, we are still waiting on an official type ruling on this.
I could have sworn that we received official information that it does work like that while also being given a hint along the lines that if something can be interpreted in such a way that an infinite loop is created, then it is likely an incorrect interpretation.
I remember seeing hints around it but nothing from the designers, though I could be mistaken (not being able to search all post by specific people limits the usefulness of the search function here).
As for infinite loops, Oxygen Leak, Relic Spirit and Runes of Maladiction is a potential infinite loop, so they are possible within SotM.