Scavenge is a fairly flavorful ability for green and black, since they love dead creatures. Having the ability to turn your dead creatures into counters for your living creatures seems like a pretty good trade off. However, protection won’t help you with your scavenge creatures very much

The scavenge ability targets, and one of the benefits of protection is that it can’t be the target of spells or abilities of that type. So no matter how much you want to, you’re not going to be able to scavenge your Dreg Mangler targeting your Woodland Crawler, because the Crawler has protection from green.

In addition, scavenge doesn’t work with protection from creatures either. The source of the scavenge ability is a creature card, and protection from creatures will protect it from being targeted by abilities from creature sources, even if that creature card is in your graveyard. So if you have a creature with a Holy Mantle attached to it, you won’t be able to target it with the scavenge ability, even if you ask it really nicely.

Today’s Rules Tip written by Nathan Long