Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Shock. Today we get to explore something that didn’t really come up much until we Returned to Ravnica and had the Shocklands back in Standard alongside the M10 and Innistrad ‘taplands’. One of the reasons that the shocklands are so amazing as far as color-fixing […]
Abilities, Activated Abilities, Continuous Effects, Effects, Keywords, Mana Abilities, Triggered Abilities
Elvish Archdruid Won’t Trigger Gyre Sage
If there’s one thing Elves love [beyond having Hobbits do their dirty work, but that’s another plane entirely], it’s mana. Lots and lots of mana. Enormous, obscene piles of green mana, ready to be converted into an astoundingly large spell, or into many little elves, who will make even more mana. Continuing the trend of […]
Flinthoof Boar and Evolve
is part of a cycle in M13, and it’s a pretty neat cycle! They’re all uncommon mono-colored creatures that have an ability which requires an allied color of mana to activate, and they get +1/+1 if you control a corresponding basic. Flinthoof Boar is a 2/2 for 2 that gets +1/+1 if you control a […]
Tournament Tuesday: Head Judges and Proxy Cards
So I’m sure plenty of you are familiar with proxy cards, or just ‘proxies’. For those of you who aren’t, they’re basically a stand-in for a card you might not have; they’re very commonly used in playtesting, where someone will just scribble “THRAGTUSK” in sharpie over a janky draft common, or a spare Plains, and […]
Thalia and Omniscience
is a scary thing to have sitting across the table from you no matter what the format. I cringe when I see it in Commander because it usually means there’s a whole freight train of hurt about to come my way, and precious little I can do to stop it. However, there is a way […]
Miracle doesn’t work when a card is revealed for Duskmantle Seer or Dark Confidant.
Cards, cards, cards, cards, cards, cards, everybody! Everyone loves drawing cards, right? And it’s even better when these cards are miracles! Miracles are a special group of cards from the Avacyn Restored set that you can sometimes cast for a reduced cost. However, Avacyn is very particular about how she hands out her blessings. In […]
Adding a +1/+1 counter to an unleash creature after it blocks won’t remove it from combat.
Unleash is a static ability from Return to Ravnica that has two effects. First, it lets you put an extra +1/+1 counter on a creature as it enters the battlefield — yay, bigger creatures! Second, it says that as long as the creature with unleash has one or more +1/+1 counters on it, it can’t […]
Duskmantle Seer killing both players will result in a draw.
is a throwback to one of the most powerful cards in Magic history: . Like Dark Confidant, the Seer will let you have an extra card on each of your turns, for the low, low cost of your life total. Unlike most vampires, Mr. Duskmantle is actually very generous — he lets your opponent get […]
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). […]