Welcome back to the last day of our Battle for Zendikar mechanics week! Today we’ll be going over the OTHER Eldrazi mechanic from this set: Ingest. Many of the Eldrazi creatures in this set have the keyword Ingest, which means that when they deal combat damage to your opponent you exile the top card of their library (face-up, as is the “normal” thing for all exile effects). Now why would you want to do that, you may be wondering? Even with a 1/1 Eldrazi, you’re likely going to do 20 damage to your opponent before you mill 60 cards. The reason is because your Drones feed your Processors! There’s another chunk of Eldrazi that interact with your opponent’s exiled cards, placing them into the graveyard for some kind of effect. Without Drones to feed cards into exile, your Cryptic Cruiser won’t be able to tap your opponent’s creatures, and your Ulamog’s Nullifier won’t be able to counter spells!

A few important points about Processors and Ingest: First, Ingest is only ever gonna hit 1 card per creature. Even if your Benthic Infiltrator is connecting for 3 or 4 damage, he only Ingests 1 card at a time, not 1 card per damage. Second, multiple creatures with Ingest will eat multiple cards! If you attack with 2 Benthic Infiltrators, that’s 2 cards exiled, not just one. Finally, your Processors don’t care HOW the exiled cards got exiled. You could throw an Utter End at something and feed it to a Cryptic Cruiser. You could let your opponent use Jace, Telepath Unbound to pseudo-flashback a spell and eat that. You could even at your opponent’s spells in exile waiting to Rebound off of Narset Transcendant (or if you were to flash in your Ulamog’s Nullifier, try and eat the spell his Abbot of Keral Keep found). You could even use something like Cremate to Ingest a card, Process it, then exile it and Process it again, if you wanted! The processors don’t really care.

Thank you for joining us this week- and for those of you that observe it, may you have a safe and happy Halloween tomorrow night!

Today’s Rules Tip was written by Trevor Nunez