Greetings, fellow students of Mat’Selesnya. I am pleased you’ve joined me here in Vitu-Ghazi to further your understanding of the ways of our guild. As future summoners and mages, it is crucial that you understand how to best direct our many allies in battle. For example, the is both a potent threat and a useful […]
Category: Abilities
Voice of Resurgence makes tokens that are always changing size.
is a card that doesn’t seem to have immediate appeal in standard, but is already having an effect in formats like Modern and Legacy. It punishes players who wait for your turn to play a spell, and it replaces itself if and when it dies. But how big can those tokens get? Does it just […]
Scavenge can’t target creatures with Protection.
Scavenge is a fairly flavorful ability for green and black, since they love dead creatures. Having the ability to turn your dead creatures into counters for your living creatures seems like a pretty good trade off. However, protection won’t help you with your scavenge creatures very much The scavenge ability targets, and one of the […]
Scavenging Jace’s Phantasm with Varolz only gets you 1 counter (but Boneyard Wurm is different).
As a general rule, abilities of a creature only work when that creature’s on the battlefield, unless the rules text or common sense suggests that it works in another zone. , for example, has an ability that gives all creature cards in your graveyard scavenge. Scavenge wouldn’t make very much sense if it applied while […]
Duskmantle Seer is extra painful when revealing Fuse cards.
Split cards are great; it’s like getting two cards in one! You get two names, two (or three) colors, and two sets of rules text… and when you use the Fuse ability, you can even get both at the same time! Of course, one of the downsides of Fuse is that since your spell has […]
Turn // Burn vs. Aetherling
Those of you who have been playing Magic for much, much longer than I have may remember a little creature called . Today we’ll be looking at his latest incarnation, . While he has a lot of abilities, the only ones we care about right now are the last two (the only ones that have […]
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 […]
Goblin Test Pilot only chooses randomly among legal targets.
Because of this card, I’m going to have to start carrying a random number generator (I also suggest all judges do so as well!). ‘s ability says that it deals damage to “target creature or player chosen at random”. A target creature, while activating this ability, can only be chosen if it can be legally […]
Melek doesn’t let you cast spells for free.
can do many things. One of the things that you might not realize is that it doesn’t let you play the top card of the deck for free. In Magic, we often combine “You may cast this card” with the second sweetest phrase, “without paying its mana cost” (the first sweetest phrase being “Draw a […]