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 […]
Category: Static Abilities
How Blood Moon works with Shocklands.
creates a very simple effect: all non-basic lands on the battlefield become mountains. The “Shockland” effect of entering play tapped unless you pay 2 life is not a trigger (you can tell since it doesn’t contain “When ~ enters the battlefield”). Rather, it modifies how the land enters the battlefield in the first place. This […]
Flinthoof Boar and Evolve
is part of a cycle in M13, and it’s a pretty neat cycle! They’re all uncommon mono-colored creatures that have an ability which requires an allied color of mana to activate, and they get +1/+1 if you control a corresponding basic. Flinthoof Boar is a 2/2 for 2 that gets +1/+1 if you control a […]
Miracle doesn’t work when a card is revealed for Duskmantle Seer or Dark Confidant.
Cards, cards, cards, cards, cards, cards, everybody! Everyone loves drawing cards, right? And it’s even better when these cards are miracles! Miracles are a special group of cards from the Avacyn Restored set that you can sometimes cast for a reduced cost. However, Avacyn is very particular about how she hands out her blessings. In […]
Adding a +1/+1 counter to an unleash creature after it blocks won’t remove it from combat.
Unleash is a static ability from Return to Ravnica that has two effects. First, it lets you put an extra +1/+1 counter on a creature as it enters the battlefield — yay, bigger creatures! Second, it says that as long as the creature with unleash has one or more +1/+1 counters on it, it can’t […]
Lifelink can save you from dying in combat.
Ah, lifelink. The boon of white mages, the bane of red mages (the jury is still out on how Boros feels about it). Even though lifelink has only been around for a relatively short period of time (it was introduced in Future Sight), it has caused a lot of confusion, mostly due to how the […]
Corpsejack Menace and Master Biomancer.
From the research notes of Gulistan, Master Biomancer: A strange, filth-covered creature crawled up from the plumbing today. Our laboratory assistants noted a strange aura about it, which responded well to many forms of magic and was especially noted to accelerate the pace of evolution. Naturally, I had to summon one for myself. Imagine my […]
Cipher vs. Thalia (yes, you have to pay 1)
Did you know there’s a proper set of steps for casting a spell? Most people just tap mana, throw the spell on stack and ask for permission to resolve it (darn those blue mages!). Just a very simple breakdown, below are the steps to casting a spell in case you ever wanted to know: Announce […]
Simic Keyrune can cause Abrupt Decay to be countered.
“Can’t be countered…” You get a little tingly feeling inside when you cast a spell with such a phrase. It’s as if you had your old security blanket when you were 3, 6, … or in some cases, 12 years old. But like your security blanket, this phrase doesn’t mean that the spell will always […]