Pack Rats are great friends to each other! Each new Rat makes your entire Rat army bigger! However, the flip side to this is that each Rat that dies makes your entire Rat army smaller…which can result in your Rats dying at rather inconvenient times.

If you control two Pack Rats, for example, it wouldn’t be a very good idea to attack into your opponent’s three Soldier tokens created by Elspeth, Sun’s Champion. What your opponent can do is declare two Soldiers as double-blocking one Rat, then declare a single Soldier to “chump block” the other Rat. After combat damage is dealt and state-based actions are checked, the first Rat will die for being a 2/2 with 2 damage marked on it, and the second will survive as a 2/2 with a single damage marked on it. Or will it? State-based actions check repeatedly until no more actions need to happen, so what will happen after the first Rat dies is that the game will see a now-1/1 Rat with 1 damage marked on it, so the second Rat will scuttle off to the bin as well – all before anyone gets priority again.

Today’s Rules Tip written by Jen Wong