Welcome back to the Rules Tips Blog! With the release of Amonkhet, we’ve got a whole slew of new cards and the questions to go with them. Once the set releases on Friday and becomes Standard Legal, we’ll have more tips about interactions with the format as a whole, but for this week we’ll be going over some specific cards. To start with, Decimator Beetle, a big bad beetleborg that shares the love… in the form of -1/-1 counters! Like many of the green cards in the set, the Beetle throws a -1/-1 counter onto one of your creatures when it enters; sometimes that’ll be the Beetle itself, but sometimes you’ll throw it onto a 1/1 you don’t need so your Beetle will be at full strength. It also works well with those types of creatures, because the Beetle can remove -1/-1 counters from your team when it attacks, and slap a counter onto an enemy creature in the process. Grow your team, shrink theirs, great victory! The real fun thing is that placing the -1/-1 counter on your opponent’s creature is not at all dependent on REMOVING one from your own. You just need targets, whether or not they have counters. If you did play your Beetle, and have it feed a counter to a Doomed Dissenter, you now have no creatures with -1/-1 counters. But that’s okay- just target either of them (it doesn’t matter which) with the Beetle’s trigger, and your opponent’s creature with the other half of it. As that trigger resolves, it’ll try and fail to remove a counter from your creature… then shrug and move on to the next instruction! Also, since the trigger has two targets, it only needs one to resolve. Say you play the Beetle onto an empty board, and have to put the counter on the Beetle itself. Then, when it attacks, you target the Beetle and your opponent’s Combat Celebrant, which they bounce to their hand to save. Your trigger will still resolve, removing the counter from your Beetle, because it still has one target. Ditto for the other way around- if they had killed your Beetle rather than bounced their creature, the trigger would still put a counter on their Celebrant!

The only thing that can really muck up the trigger is a lack of YOUR OWN creatures to target. If they all had Shroud, for example, you wouldn’t be able to use the trigger at all. That’s not true of the other way around, though; the trigger hits “up to one target creature defending player controls”, so even if they have nothing you can clean -1/-1 counters off of your own creature. Finally, because this ability targets, the point at which it can be considered ‘missed’ is very early. If you take any actions at all (such as casting a combat trick), your trigger is missed, because you need to pick your targets right away! Remember to pick your targets before you move on.

Tune in tomorrow when we’ll go over some of the changes to the MTR in Tournament Tuesday: Egyptian Edition!
Today’s Rules Tip was written by Trevor Nunez