I’ve got to say, I’m really liking the new Simic! You’ll be seeing a lot of their little mutations at the prerelease, and just like Batallion, it helps to know how it works before you head into the event so you don’t make a misplay.

Evolve is another triggered ability. If you have a creature with evolve on the battlefield, he’ll get bigger whenever you drop a larger creature. The Simic don’t let their early drops stay weak; even their littlest guys can keep getting bigger to put the hurt on your opponents. Evolve requires that the new creature have a higher power OR toughness, not both. So a 5/2 will make your 4/4 creature bigger just as much as a 6/6 would.

You only compare power to power and toughness to toughness, however. Your 1/2 won’t boost another 1/2, since it doesn’t have higher power OR toughness (having toughness higher than the other power doesn’t matter at all).

Evolve also doesn’t work as well in 2HG as some of the other keywords, since it only triggers off of a creature entering the battlefield under your control. So your buddy windmill slamming big beasties won’t make YOUR Evolve guys any bigger, sadly.

You can’t really cheat the trigger, though. Because of the way Evolve is worded, it won’t trigger at all if the new creature is ‘too small’ at the moment it enters. You can’t drop a 2/2 and hit it with a Giant Growth to make it trigger your 3/3 with Evolve, because your 3/3 never triggered in the first place!  On the flip-side, if your opponent uses something like Downsize on your big new creature and makes it ‘too small’, the Evolve trigger won’t boost up your Experiment One. Be wary of that! But if they try to just straight up kill your big guy in response [like with a Murder or an Ultimate Price], it’ll still get bigger. The trigger will look at how the creature last existed on the field, and Evolve will still make your Experiment One bigger so he can avenge his fallen friend.

Note that a creature that enters the battlefield with counters will have those counters at the time the game checks for Evolve triggers, and they will be counted towards the power and toughness of the creature. It doesn’t enter and then get counters; they’re added as part of the process of entering the battlefield.

Today’s Rules Tip written by Trevor Nuñez