Welcome back to the Rules Tip Blog! Today we’ll be going over a tricky little delivery-robot, Bomat Courier. On the surface it’s fairly simple; a 1/1 with Haste for 1 mana. Whenever it attacks, you exile the top card of your library face-down. The tricky bit is the third ability: You can pay a red mana, sac the Courier, and ditch your hand to put everything that Courier exiled into their owners’ hands (it doesn’t just say “YOUR” Hand, because your opponent might have Hijacked it, and you don’t get their card!). Basically, you swing with it a few times to build up a ‘backup’ hand, and when you’re running low you can pop your Courier to get a fresh new grip. Even better, you can pay the cost of “discard your hand” even when your hand is empty, so you can go ahead and use everything up before you refresh!

But be warned: when the card refers to itself by name, what it really means is “This exact object”. If you play a Courier and it gets blown up before you can use it, the cards it exiled are just gone. A second Courier can’t get those cards back, because those cards weren’t exiled by THIS Courier! Also, if you have more than one Courier, it’s advisable to make separate ‘piles’ for each of them. Technically all of Exile is one zone, but you want to be able to tell which cards were exiled by which Couriers, so be sure to keep track of that! Finally, as we mentioned earlier in the article, it’s possible for your opponent to have cards exiled from Courier; if they do, they’ll get those cards into their hand when you pop your Courier, without even having to discard their own hand, so be careful!

Today’s Rules Tip was written by Trevor Nunez