The Golgari Swarm are masters of life and death, and view the two of them as a constant cycle. Their mechanic, Scavenge, reflects this pretty well; I’ve heard it described as “Kind of like a Flashback for creatures”, and that’s not entirely wrong. It lets your dead creatures pull some weight and be useful as more than worm food.

Scavenge is an activated ability (which we learned about yesterday with Detain, but Detain doesn’t stop Scavenge at all) that you can only use if the card with Scavenge is in your graveyard. To Scavenge, you pay some cost (which depends on the creature; Slitherhead can be Scavenged for free, but it’ll cost you 4GG to Scavenge a Deadbridge Goliath), exile the card from your graveyard, and voila! The target gets N +1/+1 counters put on it, where N is the Scavenger’s power.

The big drawback to Scavenge is that, unlike most activated abilities, you can only use it at a certain time. While most activated abilities can be activated any time you have priority (i.e., when you could cast an Instant), Scavenge has the rider of “Any time you could cast a Sorcery”, which means you can only Scavenge during your Main Phase while the stack is empty. So you can’t use Scavenge at the end of your opponent’s turn, or as a combat trick, or to dodge a Cremate aimed at your Deadbridge Goliath.

Speaking of Cremate, it’s important to note that exiling the card from the graveyard when you Scavenge is part of the cost to activate the ability. That means nobody will have priority to Cremate the card you’re exiling between the time you announce the ability and the time you’ve paid the cost, and when they do get priority, the card is already exiled.

This weekend, even the dead shall serve you in your conquest!

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