Yep: New Cards Week. If you haven’t guessed it by now, you don’t visit often enough! My fun card is Cloudshift. You can do a lot of fun things with it. You can chump block with a creature and blink it to keep it from taking or dealing damage; you can blink your attacker out of a sticky situation, or you can reuse enters-the-battlefield abilities.

But if you want to Cloudshift a token, you’re going to have a bad time. Normally, the thing that makes tokens not get along so well with zones other than the battlefield is that there’s a state-based action that says tokens that aren’t on the battlefield cease to exist. But SBAs aren’t checked in the middle of a spell or ability resolving, so theoretically, your token should come back… However, there’s a specific rule that says a token that’s left the battlefield cannot come back… ever. If such a token would try to return to the battlefield, it stays where it is instead, and will cease to exist the next time state-based actions are checked.

Today’s Rules Tip written by
Trevor Nuñez, Level 1 judge from Roswell, NM