Triggered abilities appear in a lot of different forms and on every type of card, yes even sorceries and instants. How triggers work, when they trigger and how they resolve can be confusing to even veteran players. If you look over the right, you’ll see that rules tip blog posts involving triggered abilities one of the largest categories.

Today we are going to start out a bit easy and cover how to identify triggered abilities. Triggered abilities always use one of the following words; ‘at,’ ‘when,’ or ‘whenever.’ They all mean the same thing; ‘this is a triggered ability.’ They are used in different situations for grammatical reasons.

‘At’ triggers at a specific point in time, for example when a step or phase begins (see Mind Unbound). ‘When’ signifies something that can trigger at anytime, and is often seen on abilities that trigger when an permanent enters or leaves the battlefield. ‘Whenever’ is similar to ‘when’ but usually denotes an ability that can trigger multiple times. For example, an ability of a permanent that triggers once when it enters play will use ‘when’ (see Manic Vandal) where an ability of a permanent that triggers for multiple creatures would enter play will use ‘whenever’ (see Blood Seeker).