Azorius! My personal favorite of the guilds, since it focuses on law and rules. This time around, the lawmasters of the Azorius Senate have a fun keyword called ‘Detain’.

Put simply, Detain lets you lock something down for a while. Some of the cards detain creatures only, while others can Detain any nonland permanent your opponent controls. When a permanent is Detained, it’s pretty much put into lockdown. It can’t attack or block if it’s a creature, and none of its activated abilities can be activated until your next turn. So it’s like putting an Arrest onto their permanent, at least for a bit.

So with Detain, you can throw your opponent’s creatuers into the slammer so your attacks can get through unimpeded, and on top of that, the creature can’t attack back in retaliation, or activate abilities [like the ability on Prodigal Pyromancer, or Deathrite Shaman until your next turn.

It’s easy to tell which abilities Detain will stop; activated abilities are always worded as (COST) : (EFFECT). There will always be a colon separating the cost and the ability. There’s a few abilities that may not have the colon present on the ability, thanks to them being keywords (like Equip), but they have the proper formatting in their rules baggage.

One other thing to note is that for most cards with Detain, it’s part of a triggered ability.  As such, that ability will use the stack, and whatever you targeted to Detain could activate an ability in response, before the Detainment effect actually goes into effect.

Fellow Azorius lawbringers, keep the peace at the prerelease this weekend!

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