For the low, low cost of one green mana and one white mana, you get a 2/2 Elf Cleric with “Whenever Emmara, Soul of the Accord becomes tapped, create a 1/1 white Soldier creature token with lifelink.”. Obviously the easiest way to trigger this is to just start swinging for the fences with her- wreck in for 2 damage, make a friend! But there’s other ways to trigger her- like Convoking. I can already tell some of you are wanting to double dip, too- when casting a March of the Multitudes, you might want to tap Emmara to pay for 1 mana, let her trigger create a soldier, then tap that soldier to pay another 1 mana, right? Unfortunately, that doesn’t work out. Convoke is a part of paying for a spell, which is part of the process of casting a spell. Emmara’s trigger won’t even go onto the stack (let alone resolve!) until well after the March is fully paid for and cast.
It’s not all doom and gloom, though! Because the trigger waits, it goes onto the stack on top of whatever spell you were casting, meaning that the trigger will resolve first- which means that when your spell resolves, Emmara’s soldier friend will already be on the battlefield. For a practical example, that means if you use Emmara to convoke out Overwhelm, then the soldier token will be on the battlefield in time to get +3/+3! (It’ll also have summoning sickness, but hey, they decided that Concordant Crossroads was ‘out of color’ and ‘not thematic’ and other coward talk)
So that’s it for today. See you next time, and until then, may your Worldsoul Collosuses (Colossuses? Colossi?) be huge and your Conclave Tribunals be brutal!
Today’s Rules Tip was written by Alistair Crook