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 […]
Category: Static Abilities
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 […]
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 […]
Runner’s Bane will fall off a creature once its power is 4+.
This one came up quite a lot at our prerelease! is a solid common in Limited, locking down your opponent’s little dudes. It can clear a path for you to swing early on, or it can disable his utility guy. But there’s a deceptively easy way to get rid of it, and it involves hulking […]
Blood Scrivener and “Draw two cards” effects.
Card drawing can be a pain. Well, more specifically, black card drawing can be a pain. Black has a long history of letting you draw cards for life. From cards like to to , black can draw cards at the cost of life. And Dragon’s Maze brings us the latest card in that theme, . […]
Prerelease week: How Fuse works.
Split cards have always been a fan favorite. Probably for the same reason people love the Charms so much: they give you options. In the past, we had entwine, to let you cast all of the modes a spell has, and now, with Dragon’s Maze, we have Fuse, which lets us cast both sides of […]
Bioshift onto Corpsejack Menace.
You may remember from a few weeks ago that doubles all +1/+1 counters that would be placed on a creature. Let’s return to the lab where we left off, with a Menace on the battlefield alongside a with four +1/+1 counters on it. What happens if we now cast , moving the counters from the […]
Rest in Peace will exile itself when it gets destroyed.
: Really annoying card against graveyard-based strategies… but it can still be destroyed. You might be interested to know where it ends up, though. At the time the Rest in Peace would be destroyed, its effect is still applying, so it’ll be exiled by its own ability rather than go to the graveyard. Thankfully, this […]
You can’t take 4 for Vexing Devil if there’s a Torpor Orb around.
is a strange and unique card. It makes things that normally happen simply not happen. So abilities that you might really want to trigger from a creature entering the battlefield… won’t. It will shut down your life gain from (but doesn’t stop persist) or your card draw from . But it also works the other […]