With the release of Magic 2010, the rules governing how combat damage is dealt with were changed. Because the assignment of combat damage no longer uses the stack, a few other rules were tweaked to keep some of the same feel and strategic gameplay as before.

One aspect of these rules changes is the creation of the damage assignment order. This assignment order happens immediately after blockers are declared and the controller of an attacking creatures chooses the order that creatures blocking this creature will receive damage. Then the controller of each blocking creatures chooses the order that the creatures that are blocked by it will receive damage. In most cases nothing much happens here as creatures are blocked by or blocking only one creature.

It is important to note that this ordering of blockers only determines the order that creatures will receive damage. Damage is not assigned at this point. After the damage assignment orders are determined both player will receive priority to cast spells and play abilities. And they can obviously use the knowledge of the damage assignment order when casting spells and abilities here.

After both players have passed priority without doing anything, then the game moves on to the combat damage step. It is at this point that players will choose how their creatures in combat will deal damage. When assigning damage, a player must assign damage according to the damage order that was determined before. Creatures earlier in the order must receive lethal damage before creatures later in the order can receive any.

In actual game play these above steps are often glossed over quickly when combat is not that complex. However in instances where creatures are ‘gang blocked,’ a player has a combat trick, or a blocker is capable of blocking more than one creature it is important to know how it all works.