<\/p>
Today’s Rules Tip written by Jen Wong<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You can only activate abilities when you have priority. If your creature enters the battlefield but dies before you get priority, you’re not going to have a good time!<\/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":[38,5,17],"tags":[],"language":[1196],"class_list":["post-4315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-characteristics","category-state-basedactions","category-staticabilities","language-en"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4315","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=4315"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4315\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4316,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4315\/revisions\/4316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4315"},{"taxonomy":"language","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.magicjudges.org\/rulestips\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/language?post=4315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}<\/p>Although Elesh Norn, Grand Cenobite<\/a> hasn’t been seen in a while, her image has been showing up all over Magic recently, from Conspiracy’s reprint of Rout<\/a> to the head-crest on Soul of New Phyrexia<\/a>. One thing Elesh is excellent at is brutally shutting down small utility creatures. Because the -2\/-2 ability is a static effect, any creature that tries to enter the battlefield on an opponent’s side will immediately have its power and toughness reduced – sometimes going straight to the graveyard before its controller can even do anything with it! For example, Sakura-Tribe Elder<\/a> is a 1\/1 that can sacrifice itself to fetch a basic land from the library. Against Elesh Norn, it’ll enter as a -1\/-1. Because state-based actions (like creature death) are checked before a player would ever receive priority, by the time its controller would be legally allowed to sacrifice the Tribe-Elder, Elesh will have already daintily swept it into the bin. At least triggered abilities will still work, like with Shriekmaw<\/a>!<\/p>\n