I was playing MTG with a friend last night when we had a slight disagreement about the wording of some cards. Sometimes cards will be marked as having a special ability "for each forest you control" ... and other times cards will be worded as having a special ability "for each forest in play". There is quite the difference in the wording between those.
My belief is that when a card explicitly says "for each forest you control" I thought they are actually talking about individual forest cards, not the mana produced from those forest cards but the actual number of forest cards. So if I had a forest with Wild-Growth enchantment attached to it (which gives an extra forest mana when it is tapped) even though it produces TWO mana when tapped, it is still counted as ONE forest that I control. Is that correct?
If I were to play a card like "Howl of the Nightpack" which lets me place a two/two wolf creature token on the battlefield for "each forest I control" ... if I had a forest with wild-growth on it, would that allow me to put TWO wolf creatures down because it produces two mana, or ONE wolf creature down because it is only a single forest??
I might be completely wrong which is fine but to me it seems like the words "Forests-in-play" means that the spell works with any forest-mana that has been generated by whatever means (un-tapping / re-tapping lands, wild-growth, etc). But that "Forests you control" means the literal number of forest-cards you have no matter what enchantments or untapping/retapping of those lands takes place.
I read "forests-in-play" (or sometimes I read as "X" amount of mana) as allowing any extra special shenanigans the player might invoke to their lands to generate the final total of mana.
This has big implications for spells like Cabal Coffers and others that directly specify "lands you control" and not "lands in play".
Can anyone help point me to the section in the rule-book that addresses this? Thank you