If you cast a spell off of , you won’t be able to pay any alternate costs for it [such as Overloading a , or having your opponents gain life to cast ]. The reason for that is because Experiment is having you pay an alternate cost [of not paying at all!] when you cast […]
Author: tnunez
You Can’t Rush Your Opponent Past Steps
Back when my friends and I were first getting into Magic, we didn’t know how priority worked. You’d commonly hear “too late, I already ended my turn” in response to people wanting to cast spells at EOT, or “Too late, it already resolved” in response to an attempted counterspell. But as we know now, you […]
Redirecting a Detention Sphere Does Nothing
Much like the and Emrakul trickiness of Standard long past, this question deals with a common misunderstanding about when Oblivion Ring and actually target. While you can cast on any spell at all, it won’t actually DO anything unless that spell has targets for you to change. And neither Oblivion Ring nor its cousin Detention […]
You don’t have to sacrifice a creature when you copy Fling
Ah, good old . The most common question I hear about Fling is the one I’m answering now, and it always gets worse when Fling is around with good ways to copy stuff. provides a repeatable source of spell-copying, and also a repeatable souce of Fling questions. No, you do not have to sacrifice more […]
How to do things randomly
Every now and then, you’ll need to do something ‘randomly’ in Magic. The most common way this’ll come about is by discarding a card randomly, but there’s a few cases where you’ll have to select something to be affected at random (, , etc). So what’s the best method? Many players tend to do ‘random […]
Overloading in Two Headed Giant
Overload does weird things with 2HG. Some of you at the prerelease may have noticed that. See, all of the Overload spells that you aim at other people’s stuff work on everything of that sort you don’t control, if Overloaded. In a normal 2 man game, or a free-for-all, that means it hits your opponents’ […]
Return to Ravnica Preview Week: Overload and Populate
Double whammy today, since Tuesday got taken up by the new Trigger rules. Today we finish our Return to Ravnica previews with the Izzet League’s Overload mechanic, and the Selesnya Conclave’s Populate mechanic. First, the Izzet: mad scientists that act on equal parts whim, inspiration, and the wishes of their draconic patron Niv-Mizzet, these mages […]
Return to Ravnica Preview Week: Scavenge
The Golgari Swarm are masters of life and death, and view the two of them as a constant cycle. Their mechanic, Scavenge, reflects this pretty well; I’ve heard it described as “Kind of like a Flashback for creatures”, and that’s not entirely wrong. It lets your dead creatures pull some weight and be useful as […]
Return to Ravnica Preview Week: Detain
Azorius! My personal favorite of the guilds, since it focuses on law and rules. This time around, the lawmasters of the Azorius Senate have a fun keyword called ‘Detain’. Put simply, Detain lets you lock something down for a while. Some of the cards detain creatures only, while others can Detain any nonland permanent your […]