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 […]
Category: Shortcuts
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, […]
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 […]
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, […]
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). […]
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 […]
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 […]
Feeling of Dread can only stop attackers if cast before the declare attackers step.
A question that I’ve been asked a lot is, “When is the last time I can tap a creature to prevent it from attacking?” So today, let’s use as our example card. When is the last time I can cast the Dread to prevent a creature or creatures from attacking? The last chance you’ll get […]
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 . […]