Good morning and welcome back to your regularly-scheduled, unthemed Rules Tips Blog! Today we’re going to be looking at Divine Visitation and how it interacts with a couple of specific kinds of tokens. First, our usual surface-level look at the card: For 3WW, you get an Enchantment reading “If one or more creature tokens would be created under your control, that many 4/4 white Angel creature tokens with flying and vigilance are created instead.” Whatever creature tokens you were expecting, come out as Serra Angels in everything but name instead. First, this only applies to creature tokens, so no getting cute with Clues or Treasures- it’s already scary enough to turn Sworn Companions into 8 power for 3 mana, we don’t need to go making Captain Lannery Storm power out 4/4s every combat.

But speaking of pirates, how would this work with Kari Zev, Skyship Raider, or the currently-in-Standard Leonin Warleader? They make tapped-and-attacking creature tokens! Well, first let’s look at the Warleader, since those cards are both in Standard so it’s likely you could actually see a turn 4 Warleader followed by a turn 5 Visitation in Standard. All Visitation does is replace whatever color, abilities, P/T, and type the effect SAID the tokens should have, with “white”, “flying and vigilance”, “4/4”, and “Angel”. So in this case, we change “create two 1/1 white Cat creature tokens with lifelink that are tapped and attacking” to “create two 4/4 white Angel creature tokens with Flying and Vigilance that are tapped and attacking”. The tokens are still tapped despite Vigilance, because THAT part of the effect isn’t mucked with. Same with Kari Zev; we replace all the CHARACTERISTICS of the would-be token with “4/4 white Angel creature token with flying and vigilance”; it isn’t a 2/1, it isn’t red, it isn’t a Monkey, it isn’t Legendary, and it isn’t named Ragavan. And finally, that little bit about “Exile that token at end of combat”? That’s still a thing- Visitation might alter the characteristics of the token, but it’s still created by the same effect (as we saw with the token being created tapped and attacking, since those aren’t characteristics!), so the delayed ‘exile this token’ trigger can and will still find it at the end of combat. Your poor vigilant token won’t ever get a chance to block- but hey, you’re attacking for 5 instead of 3!

Today’s Rules Tip was written by Trevor Nunez