Welcome back to Kalitas Week here on the Rules Blog! Today we’re covering another common misconception about the Traitorous Bloodchief: what, exactly, his second ability IS. A lot of people seem to mistakenly think that Kalitas’ ability is a trigger, and subject to the Missed Trigger rules. However, it is not! A trigger will have the words “When”, “Whenever”, or “At” on it, and Kalitas lacks all those words. What Kalitas has is a static ability, which creates a replacement effect: it replaces one event with another event. That’s not a trigger, and more importantly: it’s also not optional. Whether you want to or not, you’re gonna have to exile your ‘dying’ creatures so long as your opponent has a Kalitas on board. If your opponent forgets, you HAVE to remind them- to do otherwise is to knowingly allow a rule to be broken in order to gain advantage, and that’s Cheating! Which is bad.

So, if your opponent doesn’t mention exiling your creature, or forgets to put out a Zombie (which is also part of the replacement effect, and also not optional!), you need to speak up and remind them of their Kalitas.

Today’s Kalitas Rules Tip was written by Trevor Nunez