Welcome back to Exploit Week here on the Rules Blog! Today we’ll be covering the OTHER way of messing up Exploit (or trying to, at least): Killing the potential sacrifice. Now, as you learned yesterday, the Exploiting player doesn’t select a creature to sacrifice until the Exploit trigger itself resolves. While many of them will try to save time by simply saying “Cast Sidisi, exploiting this Zombie token”, that’s just a shortcut! Once you interrupt it with removal (or a response of any kind), they aren’t held to it anymore. So let’s say your opponent plans on sacrificing a creature of yours he stole with Ill-Gotten Gains, or that you expect him to do so. You respond by hitting his aura with a Destructive Revelry, or by simply killing your own creature. So long as he has other creatures on board, he can absolutely just choose to sacrifice one of those instead. You’re not gonna be able to stop Exploit by killing his chosen creature, because he can just choose another. What you CAN do, however, is kill his chaff so that his options are to sacrifice his best guy, or just not get the trigger (or, as we discussed yesterday, just kill the Exploiter to deny him his second trigger altogether)

Today’s Rules Tip was written by Trevor Nunez