To quickly remind yourself of what protection does, just think of the Orzhov guild’s favorite word: DEBT. D stands for dealing damage; E stands for enchanting/equipping; B stands for blocking; and T stands for targeting. While you might be most familiar with protection from a color, protection can also encompass a wide variety of other […]
Category: Zones
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 […]
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 the ‘Commander tax’ works in EDH/Commander.
Once more, I get the Commander question, and I’m fine with that. Commander is a popular format with Judges, largely because of the fact that it doesn’t rotate, and that the decks can be personalized a good deal. Many judges will haul a deck or five with them to a tournament, knowing that there’s likely […]
When you flicker a double-faced card with Cloudshift, it will always return with the day side up.
When a double-faced card (“DFC”) isn’t on the battlefield, it only has the characteristics of its front (sun) side. This means that barring odd circumstances (i.e., ‘s triggered ability), a DFC always enters the battlefield sunny-side up. This rule creates an interesting interaction when you transform a DFC and then flicker it with something like […]
You can “flicker” a creature to save it from a removal spell.
I’m excited for . Partially because it was a house at the prerelease, and partially because is one of my favorite cards. But why are both of these things true? Among other things, it’s the fact that they can be used to dodge removal very easily. Let’s use for our example. Ronny casts , and […]
A token that is “flickered” with Cloudshift is gone forever.
Yep: New Cards Week. If you haven’t guessed it by now, you don’t visit often enough! My fun card is . You can do a lot of fun things with it. You can chump block with a creature and blink it to keep it from taking or dealing damage; you can blink your attacker out […]
Undying creatures hit the graveyard before they come back.
When a creature with undying dies, the creature goes to the graveyard, and the undying trigger brings them back into play when the ability resolves. This means that because creatures go to the graveyard, both leaves-the-battlefield abilities and enters-the-battlefield abilities will trigger. For example, if you cast on a before it dies, two abilities trigger […]
A creature that changes control is not “entering the battlefield.”
In a game of Magic, there are normally seven zones: library, hand, battlefield, graveyard, stack, exile, and command. Each player has his or her own library, hand and graveyard. The rest of the zones are shared by all players. If you use to steal your opponent’s , you don’t get to remove any other creature […]