Serra Ascendant says \u201cAs long as you have 30 or more life, Serra Ascendant gets +5\/+5 and has flying.\u201d That’s a static ability that creates a continuous effect when it meets its conditions. A static ability is always checked, doesn’t use the stack and therefore cannot be responded to. Now that you know this, can you guess why Serra is not dead?<\/p>\n
Well, there’s one piece of the puzzle you’re missing: State-Based Actions. It is a “checklist” the game does whenever a player would receive priority. One of them says that if a creature has lethal damage marked on it, it is destroyed.<\/p>\n
There’s just one more piece of the puzzle — how the combat damage step works. After both players successfully pass priority in the blockers step, the game now moves on to the damage step. The players assign their damage: In this case, he’ll assign one damage on your cat and you’ll assign two on his monk. The damage is now dealt: two damage is marked on the Serra Ascendant and one damage is marked on Wild Nacatl.<\/p>\n
But (there\u2019s always a but!), Serra has Lifelink. Its controller gains one life at the exact moment damage is dealt and is now at 30 life. Serra’s static ability is now active, and it creates a continuous effect granting him flying then modifying its P\/T to 6\/6 with two damage marked on it. After all this, priority would be given to your opponent, so State-Based Actions are checked. They see that a Wild Nacatl is 2\/2 with one (non-lethal) damage marked on it, and a 6\/6 Serra Ascendant with two (also non-lethal) damage marked on it. Both creatures survive, and you now understand why he made such a “bad move” by attacking!<\/p>\n
Today\u2019s Rules Tip written by Samuel Tremblay<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Lifelink gains you life before state-based actions are checked in the combat damage step. This means if you’re at 29 life, a 1\/1 Serra Ascendant can take up to 5 damage in combat and still survive!<\/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":[4,17],"tags":[1093],"language":[1196],"class_list":["post-4124","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-combatphase","category-staticabilities","tag-serra-ascendant","language-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4124","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=4124"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4124\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4125,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4124\/revisions\/4125"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4124"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4124"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4124"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=4124"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}