You’re playing your Selesnya token deck, and you have five tokens on the board. Hoping to take advantage, you cast your Wayfaring Temple, hoping to start attacking with a large creature and creating a larger army. However, your opponent doesn’t like that idea very much, and they counter your Temple with Essence Backlash. Surprisingly, your […]
Category: Resolving spells and abilities
If Parasalene destroys Havoc Festival, you will gain life.
Your Rakdos opponent has gotten off to a fairly fast start. You managed to their board away, but then they dropped a , shutting off your life gain and threatening to drop you into burn range. You’re holding a , but you’re not sure if you’ll be able to gain any life off of the […]
Divine Deflection vs. Olivia Voldaren (a study in state-based actions).
Times are tough for your Olivia Voldaren. She came down right on schedule on Turn 4, but your opponent immediately stabbed her with , reducing her to a mere 1/1. Fortunately, your opponent has a juicy 1/1 Human token, ripe for the plucking (and the vamping)! You untap and immediately direct your vampire queen towards […]
Why Tarfire can never kill Tarmogoyf by itself.
For our second tip, we cover everyone’s favorite beater with confusing artwork, . Good old Goofy is a Legacy staple because he’s an astoundingly efficient creature for 2 mana, since this format tends to fill graveyards quickly and with a diverse range of card types. What some of you might not know is that killing […]
You can’t Burning Wish for exiled cards
When you wish upon a star Makes no difference who you are Anything your heart desires Will come to you But what can you Wish for in Magic? A card like Burning Wish tells you to choose a sorcery card from outside the game. So what’s outside of the game then? When the Wishes were […]
Best practices for resolving Show and Tell
Chances are, if you’re reading this, one too many Emrakuls have been beating your face in. (I know mine has been squashed in! Holiday Cube is still fun though!). Most people when playing , put their chosen card face down, and flip them up at the same time. While this is acceptable, today I’m going […]
Triumph of Ferocity’s “if” is not intervening, but it still checks at resolution.
RAWR! Looking at exhibit A, , it has one and only one responsibility: to trigger on your upkeep. Now, this triggered ability will trigger on each of your upkeeps no matter what the situation: if the board’s empty, if your opponent controls a creature bigger than yours, or if your opponent has a billion creatures […]
Sphinx’s Revelation vs. Havoc Festival – You can draw cards even if you won’t gain life.
In Magic, there is a “Golden rule” that you should always remember. Basically, it says that “can’t” overrides “can”. So lets explore what happens when Narcissa controls , and Annabelle casts . Sphinx’s Revelation says to gain X life, while Havoc Festival says players can’t gain life. Can’t > Can. No life will be gained. […]
Detention Sphere can exile your opponent’s hexproof creature if you target your own.
More fun with ! As you may already know, Detention Sphere only has one target. Thanks to that, you can get it to exile things it can’t target, by targeting something it shares a name with. For example, if your opponent has a that has gained hexproof for some reason, and one that does not, […]