Those of you who have been playing Magic for much, much longer than I have may remember a little creature called Morphling. Today we’ll be looking at his latest incarnation, Ætherling. While he has a lot of abilities, the only ones we care about right now are the last two (the only ones that have remained unchanged from the original Morphling): one adds a point of power and subtracts a point of toughness, while the other one does the opposite.

Suppose our Ætherling gets hit with a fused Turn // Burn. The fuse spell follows the instructions in order (left to right), so first Ætherling shrinks down to a 0/1, then it’s dealt 2 points of damage. Before we hold a funeral for our poor little Ætherling, though, let’s check if it’s really dead! While the Turn half shrinks it into a 0/1 and takes away all abilities, it doesn’t remove the lingering effects of any abilities that were activated beforehand; those effects continue to change Ætherling’s power and toughness. So if we used Ætherling’s last ability twice to give it -2/+2, the end result will be a -2/3 creature. While that’s certainly a weird set of numbers (and a red Weird Ætherling), it’s not against the rules to have negative power, so Ætherling will continue to live. On the other hand, if we had activated the ability that gives Ætherling +1/-1 just once, casting Turn (never mind fusing it with Burn) will cause it to become 1/0 and die immediately afterwards; not even making it indestructible can save it from dying for having 0 toughness.

Today’s Rules Tip written by Jen Wong