Good morning and welcome back! Today we’re covering the Little Draw Engine That Could: Midnight Oil. Midnight Oil gives you access to an extra card every turn, but your industrious card drawing comes at a price: Each time you draw via that trigger, you lose 2 hours! Well, 2 hour counters, anyway. And since your maximum hand size is equal to the number of Hour counters, that means you’ve got to make quick use of those cards every turn (especially since you lose life for discarding while Oil is on board). So what happens when it’s down to 1 counter, and you can’t remove 2? Well, you do all you can; draw your card, and remove the single counter still on the card. Your maximum hand size is now 0! Every turn from then on, you’ll simply draw your extra card (since there’s no counters left), but your hand size will remain at 0.

If you were to play this in another format with older cards (say, Commander), you can do a tricky thing, too; whenever something sets your hand size, it can be “overridden” by another effect setting it to a different number. So if you play Midnight Oil, and then a Reliquary Tower, you can keep drawing to your heart’s content without worrying about your hand size shrinking. You WILL still lose life if you discard though; and that’s for any reason. Discarding a card as a cost, discarding down to your max hand size during your cleanup step, or discarding because an effect forces you to, all of those will trigger Midnight Oil and make you lose life. So use those cards before you lose them!

Today’s Rules Tip was written by Trevor Nunez