The Dromoka brood might have forbidden the Abzan’s ancestor worship, but they sure kept the love of +1/+1 counters! Not only does Bolster bring your weakest creatures up to snuff with the rest, the Dromoka have a lot of fun with counters in general. A perfect example of this is one of their big baddies, Enduring Scalelord. Whenever another creature of yours gets +1/+1 counters, the Scalelord gets one as well. It’s not a 1-to-1 ratio; if you Bolster 5 onto your 1/1, Scalelord still only gets 1 counter. If you put counters on TWO creatures, Scalelord triggers twice, though. But what happens if you get two Scalelords out? Well, all you need is a Bolster and your opponent’s gonna have a sad time. Every time one of the Scalelords gets a counter, it triggers the OTHER Scalelord, which puts a counter on that one, and triggers the first Scalelord. They’ll go back and forth like that until you say otherwise (since the trigger is optional!). What this means is that you can make your Scalelords arbitrarily large- they can swing for a few thousand damage if you want them to, and that’s gonna hurt. Do note that you don’t need to (and, in fact, shouldn’t!) do this manually; just demonstrate that the abilities “loop”, and say how big you want to make them. Your opponent can interrupt your shortcut if he wants to (for example, he might want to kill one while they’re small and break the chain). Assuming no interruption, the game just jumps ahead to the end of your loop to save time.

Today’s Rules Tip was written by Trevor Nunez