A Ride Through Kaladesh

Hello fellow judges!

With the coming of Kaladesh, a lot of new mechanics as well as a plethora of new cards were introduced. These new mechanics and cards lead to a lot of questions from players during limited events.

Let’s take a ride through these mechanics and through some of the cards that could prove to be problematic.

New mechanics:

Fabricate

Fabricate is a new keyword ability appearing in Kaladesh, a world full of inventions.
Fabricate N means: “When this permanent enters the battlefield, you may put N +1/+1 counters on it. If you don’t, create N 1/1 colorless Servo artifact creature tokens.”
Take in account that the choice of putting counters or creating tokens is made as the ability resolves. If an opponent asks whether the player chooses +1/+1 counters or tokens, then this means they have committed to letting the trigger resolve.
If for any reason the permanent with the fabricate trigger leaves the battlefield before the ability resolves, the player can then not choose to put counters on it, and will have to create Servo’s.
If the trigger is missed and later on one of the player realizes it and calls for your assistance, ask the opponent if they would like to apply the default option (creating a token) or to ignore the trigger. As this is considered to generally be a beneficial trigger, no warnings should be handed out in either case.

Energy

Energy is a new kind of “resource” players can use. Energy is represented by Energy counters on a player.
Players have to keep track of their own Energy counters.
Energy can be used to pay for certain activated abilities or on the resolution of certain triggered abilities.
Effects that interact with counters, such as for example Proliferate, can interact with Energy counters.

Vehicles

A new artifact type appears in Kaladesh; Vehicles. Vehicles are non-creature artifacts that can become a creature through a new activated ability; Crew.
Crew X means: “Tap any number of untapped creatures you control with total power X or greater: This permanent becomes an artifact creature until end of turn.”
You can’t tap creatures with a total power less than X in order to try to get them tapped.
Vehicles have a printed power and toughness, but these characteristics are only valid while the vehicle is also a creature. If a vehicle becomes a creature, it immediately has its printed power and toughness apply.
Remember that any statement like “Combat” or “Declare attackers” is handled as a tournament shortcut that passes priority to your opponent until they have priority in the Beginning of Combat Step. If the stack is empty and your opponent also passes priority, you’re immediately moving to the Declare Attackers Step, and it will be too late to then crew a vehicle to attack with. (You can read more about this interaction in a wonderful blog post by Toby Elliott, which you can find right here).

Strange interactions of cards:

Captured by the Consulate

On the Oracle of the card you can read: “If a spell has multiple targets, it doesn’t have a single target even if the same object is chosen for each of those targets.”

What does this mean? Some spells have multiple occurrences of the word “target”. Even if you legally target the same creature for each instance of the word target, the spell is not considered to have a single target.

As an example is better than a thousand words take a look at the following situation: An opponent’s creature is enchanted by Captured by the Consulate. Your opponent casts Common Bond targeting the same creature twice. Captured by the Consulate will not trigger.

Cataclysmic Gearhulk

The players will choose which permanents they choose to keep in turn order. The active player will start choosing. Each player will know what the players before them in turn order chose to keep before making their own choice.

Fairgrounds Warden

The triggered ability of Fairgrounds Warden generates a one shot effect that exiles the targeted creature until Fairgrounds Warden leaves the battlefield. At that time a second one shot effect is created which returns the creature card to the battlefield. Sometimes Fairgrounds Warden will leave the battlefield before its trigger resolves. In that case the creature will never be exiled at all.

Fumigate

Fumigate doesn’t care of where the destroyed creatures go in order to make you gain life.
Even if a creature never touches the graveyard, for example if one of the players controls a Kalitas, the controller of Fumigate will gain life when the creature is destroyed.

Indestructible creatures are not destroyed by Fumigate and won’t let the controller gain life.

Toolcraft Exemplar

Remember the reminder we made earlier in this article about the ‘Combat’ shortcut? Toolcraft Exemplar is one of the cases where that shortcut will move to Beginning of Combat Step with an ability on the stack, if the player also controls an Artifact.

The player is then allowed to crew a vehicle after this trigger resolves.

Gonti, Lord of Luxury

When the triggered ability of Gonti resolves, a continuous effect is generated that allows the controller of Gonti to cast the facedown exiled card for as long as it remains exiled.
That effect is completely independant of Gonti. Even if Gonti leaves the battlefield, the player will still be allowed to cast the card.

Chandra, Torch of Defiance

Even though the second loyalty ability of Chandra will add mana to the mana pool, it is not considered to be a Mana Ability and thus will use the stack.

Combustible Gearhulk

If the targeted opponent chooses to have the controller of the Gearhulk put the top 3 cards of their library into the graveyard and they are enchanted by Wheel of Sun and Moon, the Gearhulk will still deal damage equal to the total converted mana cost of these cards, even though the cards never reached the graveyard. This is because they’re part of the set of cards the Gearhulk asked to perform the action on, and therefore they are still part of the set of “those cards”.

Cultivator of Blades

Cultivator of Blades has a trigger that looks a lot like a Prowess or Exalted trigger but is treated differently.

The keyword that makes it different is the ‘may’ which is included in its text .
The controller of the trigger has to make the choice if they want to give +X/+X to their other attacking creatures when the trigger resolves.
Just attacking with the Cultivator and some other creatures and saying “my creatures deal more damage” in the Combat Damage Step is not correct, and should be handled as a missed trigger.

Verdurous Gearhulk

The player who controls the Gearhulk has to choose the target(s) and how the counters will be distributed as the ability is put on the stack. Each targeted creature must be assigned at least one counter.
If one of the targets is no longer legal as the ability resolves, the counters assigned to that target will be lost.

Aetherflux Reservoir

The total life the player will gain is calculated as the ability resolves. That means that, if a player casts the first spell of the turn, and then, in response, casts a second spell, when both triggers from Aetherflux Reservoir resolve, that player gains 2 life for each trigger. Making a total of 4 life gained.

The game keeps track of how many spells players cast, even when Aetherflux Reservoir is not on the battlefield. This means that if a player has cast two spells before casting Aetherflux Reservoir, and then casts another spell after Aetherflux Reservoir has resolved, the triggered ability from the Reservoir will count a total of 4 spells having been cast this turn and will make the player gain 4 life.