Divine Deflection<\/a> for X=1, targeting your Olivia! What happens now?<\/p>\nFortunately for Olivia, and unfortunately for 1\/1 Human tokens everywhere, your bloodsucker will live in this situation. Even though there’s a brief moment where Olivia has lethal damage marked on her, that moment occurs during the resolution of her own ability. State-based actions, like the one that destroys creatures with lethal damage marked on them, are never performed while a spell or ability is resolving.<\/p>\n
Here’s what happens in more detail: First, Olivia tries to deal one damage to the Human token, which is prevented by Divine Deflection and then dealt to Olivia. This results in her being a 1\/1 creature with 1 damage marked on her — lethal damage! But the game doesn’t check whether creatures should die due to lethal damage while a spell or ability is resolving, so there’s still a chance for Olivia to survive.<\/p>\n
Second, Olivia’s target becomes a Human Vampire. OK, gross, but not very relevant to this question.<\/p>\n
Finally, Olivia gets a +1\/+1 counter. Even though the damage was prevented, Olivia still gets her counter, because nothing in the ability indicates that the counter depends on the damage. As a result, Olivia becomes a 2\/2 with 1 damage marked — decidedly not<\/em> lethal.<\/p>\nNow that the ability is done resolving, the game removes the ability from the stack and performs a check for state-based actions, which shrug their metaphorical shoulders at Olivia, who’s now a relatively healthy 2\/2 with 1 damage marked. Olivia survives to snack on another tasty treat.<\/p>\n
Today’s Rules Tip written by Paul Baranay<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Times are tough for your Olivia Voldaren. She came down right on schedule on Turn 4, but your opponent immediately stabbed her with , reducing her to a mere 1\/1. Fortunately, your opponent has a juicy 1\/1 Human token, ripe for the plucking (and the vamping)! You untap and immediately direct your vampire queen towards […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"categories":[108,15,5],"tags":[691,882],"language":[1196],"class_list":["post-2928","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-activatedabilities","category-resolving-spells-and-abilities","category-state-basedactions","tag-divine-deflection","tag-olivia-voldaren","language-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2928"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4650,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2928\/revisions\/4650"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2928"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=2928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}