Welcome back to the Kaladesh Prerelease Week! Today we're going over Fabricate, a new mechanic that shows off the inventiveness of a plane full of artificers. Fabricate is a triggered ability that fires upon the permanent entering the battlefield, and will come with a number- for example, has Fabricate 2. What that means is as the Fabricate trigger resolves, you can either place 2 +1/+1 counters on the Augmenter, or create two Servos- adorable little 1/1 colorless artifact creature tokens. So you
Category: Shortcuts
Nahiri: You Choose the Zone on Resolution
I hope everyone has been enjoying all the new Commander cards and the new abilities that have come with them. One of the more exciting of these new cards is - She gets you value through tokens and Equipment and she is really fun to play. But here is a situation: You have a in your hand and a in your graveyard. You activate Nahiri’s second loyalty ability and say you want your Sword back. In response an opponent exiles your graveyard with a . After the graveyard has been removed from the game
Exploit Week: Exploiting Yourself for Fun and Profit
So, we've covered what happens when your opponent kills your Sidisi in response to the trigger (you get no tutor, but can still sac), and what happens if they destroy the creature you were going to sac (You can sac something else, but don't have to). But what happens if you play an Exploit creature into an empty board, or your opponent kills your only other creature in response? Well, it's perfectly possible to sacrifice the Exploit creature to its own ability! Since none of the Exploit creatures
Exploit Week: Trying to Kill the Potential Sacrifice
Welcome back to Exploit Week here on the Rules Blog! Today we'll be covering the OTHER way of messing up Exploit (or trying to, at least): Killing the potential sacrifice. Now, as you learned yesterday, the Exploiting player doesn't select a creature to sacrifice until the Exploit trigger itself resolves. While many of them will try to save time by simply saying "Cast Sidisi, exploiting this Zombie token", that's just a shortcut! Once you interrupt it with removal (or a response of any kind), they
Enduring Scalelord Combo
The Dromoka brood might have forbidden the Abzan's ancestor worship, but they sure kept the love of +1/+1 counters! Not only does Bolster bring your weakest creatures up to snuff with the rest, the Dromoka have a lot of fun with counters in general. A perfect example of this is one of their big baddies, . Whenever another creature of yours gets +1/+1 counters, the Scalelord gets one as well. It's not a 1-to-1 ratio; if you Bolster 5 onto your 1/1, Scalelord still only gets 1 counter. If you put counters
Tournament Tuesday: Goblin Rabblemaster Confusion!
Today's post is going to be about everyone's favorite Goblin buddy-maker (Well, second favorite for Commander players! No hard feelings, Krenko): Goblin Rabblemaster. He slices, he dices, he makes disposable bodies to feed to and he looks great while doing it. But how can you stop your opponent from getting those tasty tasty Rabblemaster tokens when you've got removal in your hand? The answer is to make things clear! In Magic, we play with a lot of shortcuts. Effectively, they let us play the game
Shortcuts: Adding multiple objects to the stack.
Today, we’ll be looking the shortcut policy in the tournament rules, which lets you do things that aren’t technically correct but still understandable by both players. Sit tight, because we’ve got a lot to cover. One of the little-known rules concerning the stack is that when a player casts a spell or activates an ability, that same player gets priority next. Most of the time this isn’t going to actually matter. For example, when I cast my and my hand is all creatures, I have no reason
Understanding Out-of-Order Sequencing
Magic is a complex game. With over 12,000 unique cards and a hefty set of Comprehensive Rules, it’s not reasonable to expect players to have complete mastery over the precise rules behind every action they’re taking in the game. As a result, tournament Magic has codified a policy known as Out-of-Order Sequencing (OoOS for short). In a nutshell, OoOS permits players to perform actions without adhering to the strictest sense of the rules, as long as the sequence is still clear and arrives at
All about Lion’s Eye Diamond (yes, it’s a mana ability, but it has a timing restriction)
So is kind of a weird card. Let's start things off by looking at its current Gatherer text: Sacrifice Lion's Eye Diamond, Discard your hand: Add three mana of any one color to your mana pool. Activate this ability only any time you could cast an instant. So the main difference between the printed version of the Diamond and its current official text is that line at the end that says you can only activate the ability any time you could cast an instant. What does that mean? Normally, if you're
Shortcut directly to X-mas! (about the X-spell shortcut)
If you've ever played Magic Online, sooner or later you’re going to experience the frustration of clicking too rapidly through an X spell, like , and ending up casting it for X=0. Luckily, in the real world we’re a little more forgiving. If you cast an X spell without announcing the value for X, the Magic Tournament Rules prescribe a shortcut that assumes the value of X is whatever amount of mana is remaining floating in your mana pool. Tap a bunch of lands then say “Bonfire”? That counts.