Arcbound Ravager has long been a centerpiece of Affinity decks, along with his rightly-banned best buddy Skullclamp. Old Standard, old Extended, and current Modern have all had “Affinity” decks kicking around, and that long tenure comes with a downside: people know how to fight it!

For example, you might see Rest in Peace in lots of sideboards, mostly to deal with graveyard-based strategies. What you might not know is that it helps deal with Affinity fairly well too. One of the things that makes Arcbound Ravager a pain to deal with is Modular. You kill it, and it just shunts all of its counters onto something else for you to deal with. The thing is, Modular requires the creature in question to actually DIE — as in, hit the graveyard. Rest in Peace keeps the Ravager from hitting the graveyard, so Modular won’t trigger. Ditto for any other exile-removal, such as the “exile it instead” burn spells (Anger of the Gods, Pillar of Flame, etc) or just flat out exile spells (Path to Exile, Revoke Existence, etc). Of course, those cards use the stack and can be responded to, so generally the controller of Ravager will just sacrifice it to itself to avoid being exiled, so modular can trigger anyway!

Today’s Rules Tip written by Trevor Nuñez