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 […]
Category: Continuous Effects
In 2HG, if one player can’t lose, the team can’t lose.
Two-Headed Giant is often a bit of a mystery for some people, so we explain how "You can't lose the game" effects work when you have a teammate.
“Damage can’t be prevented” vs. protection
It's important to know that "protection" normally prevents damage. This is no different from any other prevention effect, so it can be overridden by "can't be prevented" abilities.
Havoc Festival and Eternity Vessel
I can tell you from firsthand experience that can be a nasty card (especially in 2HG!), speeding the game up for better or for worse by halving life totals constantly and completely shutting down lifegain. But wait, you may say! What if I can just set my life total to a new number, so my […]
An Enlarge’d creature must be blocked if able, but a single blocker is enough.
Don't confuse "must be blocked if able" on Enlarge with other effects that say "each creature must block this if able"
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 […]
Continuous Effects, Effects, Interaction of Continuous Effects, Type & Subtypes, Type Changing, Uncategorized
Blood Moon and Dryad Arbor
Modern Madness continues, if you hadn’t caught onto this week’s theme. Since the manabases in Modern can get greedy with their shocks and fetches and other color-providing wonder, is a common sideboard hate card to punish those greedy manabases. A whole board of colorfixing goodness, turned into nearly worthless Mountains for the low low price […]
Abilities, Activated Abilities, Characteristics, Continuous Effects, Effects, Interaction of Continuous Effects, Keywords, Static Abilities
Melira and Inkmoth Nexus
Infect! Quite the polarizing mechanic in most areas, it was either considered laughably bad or stupidly broken depending on who you were talking to. It’s gained some traction lately with eggs-in-one-basket rush decks, especially in Modern, and it’s possible you might run into a Pod deck running and you want to know how it interacts […]
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 […]