Welcome to our lead-up to Modern Masters 2015! Hopefully a great many of you will be enjoying the festivities at the Grands Prix in Las Vegas, Utrecht, and Chiba this weekend (nearly the entire Rules Tips Blog team will be at GP Vegas!), and in honor of the new set and the enormous events taking place this weekend, we’re doing a week of Modern Masters rules tips.

Today we’re going to start with one of the mechanics from the Kamigawa block: Arcane. On its own, Arcane really doesn’t mean much of anything; it’s just a subtype of Instants and Sorceries, much like “Elf” is a subtype of Creature. However, much like Elves, there’s cards that specifically interact with Arcane spells, but not other spells. The primary thing is Splice onto Arcane (which we’ll just touch on, since it isn’t in Modern Masters). Splice onto Arcane allowed you to basically “combine” Arcane spells. You’d begin casting a regular Arcane spell like Kodama’s Reach, and as part of casting it you could reveal a spell such as Glacial Ray and pay the Splice cost to add Glacial Ray’s effects onto Kodama’s Reach. It let you re-use your Arcane spells over and over by splicing them onto OTHER Arcane spells. But, more to the point: there’s a few cards in Modern Masters that care about the subtype Arcane. Long-Forgotten Gohei makes your Arcane spells cheaper, while Waxmane Baku, Thief of Hope, and Hikari, Twilight Guardian all trigger off of Arcane (and Spirit!) spells. So any time you cast an Arcane spell, those guys will trigger. Pretty simple, but it’s something you might not think of during your drafting!

Also, just to make sure you don’t get your hopes up: Devouring Greed and Thief of Hope don’t combo as well as you might like! You can feed the Thief to the Greed for 2 extra life drained, or you can have the Thief stick around to drain them for an additional 1 from his own trigger, but not both. Thief won’t trigger until the spell is fully cast, but sacrificing the Spirit is an additional cost, so you’d have to sac the Thief (if you were going to) prior to the point Thief would trigger. So you either get 2 extra life drained and no Thief, or only 1 extra life drained but keep the Thief. If you DO sac the Thief, you’ll get to Soulshift though… and we’ll talk about that tomorrow!

Today’s Rules Tip was written by Trevor Nunez