If you control and your opponent enchants one of your other creatures with (obviously they can’t cast Soul Tithe targeting your Sigarda thanks to hexproof), then when Soul Tithe’s ability resolves it will ask, “Wanna pay this thing’s converted mana cost?” At that point, you can pay if you really want to, but when you […]
Category: Resolving spells and abilities
Guttersnipe will deal damage before the spell that triggered it resolves.
Quite a few cards in Return to Ravnica trigger when you cast a spell of some sort, and is one that a lot of people are rather excited to build around. He turns all of your spells into burn, and your burn into better burn. But when does he actually trigger? When does the damage […]
Wild Beastmaster can kill your other creatures if it has negative power when its ability resolves.
This question has come up a few times recently, because the answer doesn’t seem to make sense to everyone. What happens when you attack with a and your opponent responds to the trigger by casting or targeting the Beastmaster? Well the first thing to realize is that the Beastmaster’s power is only checked as its […]
What happens when you attack with two Wild Beastmasters.
is the kind of creature that mono-green decks love. She turns things like , single-target pump spells, into board-pumping game enders. But how do two of them work? The key thing here is when a card refers to itself by name in Magic, it does not mean ‘any object with this name’, it means ‘this […]
You can’t stop Eyes in the Skies by killing the new bird before populate happens.
If your opponent casts , your first instinct might be to kill all his token creatures in response so he can’t populate. However, it’s not quite as easy as that. Once Eyes in the Skies starts to resolve, it continues to resolve until all possible actions written on the card are taken, before being put […]
Abrupt Decay can be countered by game rules.
at first looks a lot like the other cards in its cycle, in that it “can’t be countered.” But look closer and you’ll see a difference… those four little words at the end: “…by spells or abilities.” What does this mean? Well, in most cases, it means nothing. Your opponent still can’t counter your spell […]
You can cast a spell with Populate even if you control no tokens.
The Selesnya guild had their mechanic of Populate stapled onto quite a few of their cards that already did other things. fogs and populates, makes your guys indestructible and populates, is a with Populate thrown on, etc. What I’ve heard happened a fair number of times at a prerelease where a good friend of mine […]
Prevention and Replacement Effects, Resolving spells and abilities, State-Based Actions, Static Abilities, Zones
The different ways Dryad Militant interacts with removal spells.
! This little tree-girl seems like lots of fun in Limited and Constructed both, but the most common question I’ve seen regarding her is how she works with removal. When does the spell go to the graveyard? Does she exile it or not? A spell does not go to the graveyard until it has fully […]
How Nivmagus Elemental’s ability really works.
As many of you know, this weekend marked the pre-release of the new set, Return to Ravnica. Many of us judged such events, and we managed to collect a few common questions that popped up a lot, so we can answer them for you guys here! One I saw happen quite a bit involved . […]