Category: Mana Abilities
Crewing Cultivator’s Caravan
Welcome back to the Rules Tip Blog! We sure missed you. Today we’ll be starting on our tips from Kaladesh! To start with, we’ll cover crewing, and crewing a specific card: . Every Vehicle has the Crew ability, which is followed by a number (in this case, Crew 3). That means that anytime you have […]
Corrupted Grafstone: What Can It Do?
is an interesting mana rock. It can make many different colors, but only costs 2 instead of the usual 3! To make up for that, it comes in tapped the turn you play it, and it requires a little work to get going. It has a normal mana ability (because it isn’t a loyalty ability […]
Rattleclaw Mystic and casting spells (it’s not a mana ability)
Rattleclaw Mystic's "turn-face-up" trigger produces mana, but it isn't a mana ability. It uses the stack and can be responded to.
Devotion and Counterspells
By far the biggest chunk of questions I’ve gotten from my players and my threads the past week are all about the last mechanic we’re covering this week (sorry, Scry): Devotion. Devotion is more or less a reworking of Chroma, an ability word from back in Lorwyn block. Put simply, “Devotion to COLOR” is measured […]
Burning Earth only triggers if the land is tapped for mana, not for any other abilities.
An explanation of how Burning Earth works (or really doesn't) when a nonbasic land is tapped for a non-mana ability.
Abilities, Activated Abilities, Continuous Effects, Effects, Mana Abilities, Type & Subtypes, Type Changing
Stony Silence and Artifact Lands
To finish out this week’s Modern flair, let’s talk about a deck called Robots (or back in my crotchety days, “Affinity”). It uses lots of artifacts to make your opponent and his life total very sad. The Legacy version (and the original Standard version) made delightful use of the artifact lands like and pulling double […]
Wall of Roots and +1/+1 Counters
There was a time when counters didn’t cancel each other out on the same permanent; you could have a bunch of +1/+1 counters and a few -1/-1 counters on a creature and they’d just co-exist happily on that creature, in case anything cared. With the Lorwyn block, that got changed up because it was a […]
You can’t tap a Cluestone for mana to activate its own “draw a card” ability.
There’s a small caveat in Magic: you can only pay any given cost for one ability or spell; you can’t use the same cost to pay for two separate abilities. That’s just not how life (or Magic) works. Very simple here with the Cluestones. Since the Cluestone’s abilities require it to tap for both the […]