The most complicated new mechanic of Avacyn Restored is Soulbond. I had dozens of questions regarding Soulbond at my local prerelease, so I will try to explain how it works. Soulbond means this: “When a creature with soulbond enters the battlefield, if you control another unpaired creature, you may pair the creature with soulbond with […]
Desolate Lighthouse can’t work Miracles if you have no cards in your hand.
One of the most-asked questions with Miracle is whether you can cast it in the middle of a resolving spell or ability. You can’t do that because the ability that triggers when you reveal the card can’t go on the stack until a player would receive priority, which doesn’t happen until all parts of the […]
A Miracle card must be cast in the same step you draw the card (even if it’s a sorcery).
When you draw your first card for the turn (usually in your draw step), you can reveal it as you draw it if it has the Miracle ability. When you do that, the ability triggers and goes on the stack as soon as you’re done with the action that let you draw the card. So […]
Divine Deflection prevents and deals a TOTAL of X damage.
With the new card , the wording can be a little misleading. While one might read it to mean that it prevents X damage to you AND X damage for each creature or planeswalker you control, then deals all that combined damage to whatever you targeted, it doesn’t quite work like that. When you cast […]
How the Heartless Summoning + Havengul Lich combo works.
As you might have guessed by now, we’re doing a special Combo Week this week! I got saddled with (in my opinion) the most hilarious combo in Standard right now: Heartless Lich. But how does it work? First, you need to control and a . You also need a (either in the graveyard or in […]
How the Phyrexian Metamorph + Leonin Relic-Warder + Suture Priest combo works.
One of my favorite cards in Standard is , and since this is Combo Week, I decided to talk about a combo that can make you gain an arbitrarily large amount of life using that card. We need 3 cards to accomplish this: , and . First, we must control at least one Suture Priest […]
Why Knowledge Pool + Curse of Exhaustion locks your opponent out of casting spells from the hand.
As part of combo week, I’ve chosen to explain my personal favorite combo in standard: the + lock. First, let’s take a look at what these two cards do before we explain how the combo works. Curse of Exhaustion is pretty simple; it restricts the number of spells your opponent can cast to just one […]
How loop shortcuts work.
So now you’ve assembled your and two s, and are ready to make infinite mana… but you don’t want to sit there tapping and untapping them ad nauseam. Luckily, you don’t have to, thanks to the magic of loop shortcuts. Once you’ve assembled your combo, you can propose a loop shortcut. Demonstrate the combo once, […]
How the Palladium Myr + two Myr Galvanizers combo works to generate unlimited mana.
The / combo of having an unlimited amount of colorless mana in your mana pool can be attained with 1 Palladium Myr and 2 Myr Galvanizers that are untapped and don’t have summoning sickness. You can generate an arbitrarily large amount of colorless mana in your mana pool by taking the following steps, assuming the […]