BLOODRUSH! Similar to Bloodthirst from the original Ravnica block, the barbarians and rubble-slummers of the Gruul Clans have a special love for cracking skulls. Where Bloodthirst would make your creatures bigger as they came down, Bloodrush turns your creatures into pump spells. Like Batallion, Bloodrush isn’t actually a keyword; it is an ability word, and has no rules meaning [it’s in italics, just like reminder text and flavor text]. It only exists to group similar abilities together under one flavorful heading [just like Morbid, Metalcraft, Chroma, Hellbent, Landfall, etc]. The thing that all Bloodrush cards have in common is that you can pay a cost that includes discarding them from your hand in order to give an attacking creature a boost, and sometimes other abilities.

Pretty good for an aggro deck! It’s a body when you need more board presence, and it’s a pump spell when you don’t. Keeps your opponent on their toes. But here are a few things you’ll need to know for the prerelease and for Gatecrash limited in general. For one, Gruul likes to be on the offense. Bloodrush only works on attacking creatures, so you can’t use it as a defensive combat trick, only offensive. You also can’t use it outside of combat. The second thing is that you aren’t casting a spell here; you’re activating an ability, just like Cycling. There are very few ways to counter Bloodrush in the whole of Magic, and most of them don’t exist in Gatecrash [pretty much the only way to stop it in Limited/Standard is to kill the target, or somehow make it an illegal target].

Finally, an important thing for those of you playing 2HG this weekend: Bloodrush says ‘attacking creature’. Not ‘attacking creature you control’. Just like with Boros and their Batallion, your Bloodrush cards play well with friends, so feel free to pump up your buddy’s unblocked creatures!

Today’s Rules Tip written by Trevor Nuñez