Unlike an explosive card such as Epic Experiment, which exiles a bunch of cards then lets you cast them right away for free, Nightveil Specter prefers to play a slower, more gradual game. When you exile a card with the Specter, you can play it… but only at a time you could normally play it from your hand. You’re given permission to play the card from an unusual zone, but you must still obey all timing restrictions. If it’s a land, for example, you can’t play it if you’ve already played a land this turn. If it’s a sorcery, you can’t cast it on your opponent’s turn.

You also still have to pay all costs to cast the exiled cards, so if your blue-black deck exiles a Disciple of the Old Ways, you can’t cast it at all (not until you exile a Forest with your Specter, anyway). Fear not if you can’t play it right away; your permission to play the card from exile lasts as long as the Specter sticks around.

What happens when you play the card? Well…nothing special. If it’s a permanent card, it enters the battlefield under your control, just as if you played it from your hand. If it’s countered, or it’s an instant or sorcery, it goes where it would normally go: to its owner’s graveyard. It doesn’t go back to exile (unless it has an effect, like cipher, that specifically says so), which means you can’t simply cast the same exiled card over and over again.

Today’s Rules Tip written by Jen Wong

Editor’s addendum

From reader Keith Hensel:
I’ve grown to love my Nightveil Specter, but I have some rules questions about it. We’ve resolved most of the issues from normal play (still bound by one land per turn, etc.), but have hit a couple snags:

1) When the Specter attacks in a Two-Headed Giant does it affect both opponents? It doesn’t specify target, and it hits the life-point total of both players. Normally, spells specify a “target player” (or “each opponent”) with these sorts of abilities, which makes resolving them easy. But Specter is a bit ambiguous.

In 2HG, while you attack the opponents as a team, damage is only assigned to a single head in the combat damage step. So you choose which player to damage with the Specter (if you don’t specify, the default is the primary head; the player seated on the right from the team’s point of view, which is to your left as you’re viewing the opposing team), and the trigger will exile only a card from that player’s library.

2) Does Specter need to be in play to cast/play the exiled cards? Does the ability to cast them go away when it leaves the battlefield? Why?

Specter has two individual abilities, because they’re in two different paragraphs on the card. The second ability only functions while the Specter is on the battlefield, and only refers to cards exiled by the first ability. If the Specter leaves the battlefield, the link between the abilities breaks. There’s no longer anything that allows you to play the exiled cards, and even if the same Specter returns to the battlefield, it won’t remember that it exiled anything earlier, since it has become a new object with no memory of its previous existence.

As a followup question if you cannot:
3) If a Specter dies, and another Specter gets played, do you have access to the cards exiled by the previous specter? We were unsure because the card specifies Nightveil Specter by name, and not by “this card”.

When a card refers to itself by name (without using the words “card named…”), it really does mean “This thing right here”. So a second Specter can’t access cards exiled by the first.