MTG Magic The Gathering Ask A Judge - The Work of an Enemy 「 E D I T I O N 」

If my opponent uses Spelljack on Phage, the untouchable then plays it on his turn does he lose the game?

He does, because he cast it from exile, not his hand.

Can you cast Phage with Elvish Piper?

No, because Elvish Piper doesn't cast anything.

You can use Piper to put Phage onto the battlefield from your hand, and you will then die because you didn't cast her.

The only way Phage won't trigger is if you put her onto the stack from your hand and cast her. If you cheat her direct from hand (or any other zone) onto the board, she triggers. If you cast her from another zone (exile or library, for example), she triggers.

>Phage is triggered if you didn't cast her from your hand and she's so upset you lose the game.

fucking sjws...

It's more "they stapled weird shit onto scary creatures because the reanimation effects printed as early as Alpha were fucking dumb". It's why the ____steel Colossi have the shuffle-in replacement, why the Eldrazi Titans have the shuffle-in trigger, etc.

They've moved away from that now, and just decided "Fuck it, Legacy's gonna reanimate whatever, just stop printing cheap reanimation spells in Standard"

I think he was making a joke about the dual definition of "trigger", judgeAnon

Also, a question, how the hell does lion's eye diamond work?

Personal thoughts on Lone Rider/It That Rides Alone?

Like a Black Lotus except it's really hard to use it to cast spells from your hand.

Fucking badass name. Might be okay in Limited, maybe? I dunno. It sucks that it can't be a 4/4 until turn 4 at the earliest as far as attacking goes.

How is it even possible to cast spells from your hand? I know they do it in legacy but it's oftne just "I show you these couple cards and we agree the game's over."

Madness. Activate it, ditch your hand, shunt your Madness spell into exile, use the mana to cast it. Technically not casting FROM your hand, but you can use it to cast a Madness spell IN your hand.

The way it works in Legacy is that they don't need shit in their hand. The usual trick is to use other mana sources to cast an Infernal Tutor, hold priority to crack your LED, and then when Tutor resolves you're Hellbent so you fetch up exactly the card you need and cast it with the mana from your LED you already cracked.

Oh, and that works because mana burn isn't a thing anymore?

Worked before that, too. Mana burn only hit you when your mana pool emptied, and it only empties as you move between steps and phases.

Wait, so it's not illegal to have mana and not instantly use it?

Not even a little. Never has been, as far as I know.

You do need to announce what mana you have floating, though.

wow, we've been playing wrong forever. You had to make sure you knew what you were going to do for turns because if you play all your mana and then don't do anything with them you lose them to mana burn.

If I cast yawgmoth will and I have rooftop storm on the battlefield can I cast zombies from my graveyard and pay 0 for there mana cost?

So if I use Soul Seperator on a flip card and manage to trigger the transform on the token, does the token just exile itself or does nothing happen?

Well even mana burn didn't force you to use the mana immediately, you had until the end of the phase/step to figure out what do with the mana, only difference is now mana doesn't last through steps inside of phase, and it doesn't burn you when it dissipates

that's how high tide works. Also peregrine drake with ghostly flicker in pauper (flicker peregrine drake and mnemonic wall, untapping 5 lands and returning ghostly flicker to your hand with their triggers, tap 5 lands for mana, then spend 3 to cast ghostly flicker again, repeat until you have 8857399303797739374759393 mana floating in your mana pool cast kaervek's torch ftw).

only double faced cards can transform. If you would transform something that doesn't have a second face, nothing happens.

Sure! YawgWin just gives you permission to play cards out of your graveyard. It's not an alternate cost, so you can use the alternate cost of 0 from Storm just fine.

Depends on what the DFC you exiled does. If it's just a "transform me" thing, nothing happens because tokens can't transform. If it's like the Origins walkers where it's "exile me, then bring me back transformed" it'll exile itself, fail to come back, then stop existing.

What happens if I use Soul Seperator on Lord of Extinction?

You get a 1/1 Spirit with flying and a Zombie with P/T equal to the number of cards in all graveyards at the time it was created (not counting Lord, since that already got eaten)

But doesn't the Spirit get the ability "~'s power and toughness are each equal to the number of cards in all graveyards."?

Nope.

706.9d When applying a copy effect that doesn’t copy a certain characteristic, retains an original
value for a certain characteristic, or modifies the final value of a certain characteristic, any
characteristic-defining ability (see rule 604.3) of the object being copied that defines that
characteristic is not copied. If that characteristic is color, any color indicator (see rule 204) of
that object is also not copied.

are shapeshifters all creature types always, or just on battlefield?

Shapeshifters don't have any rules associated with them.

If you mean things with Changeling, that's a Characteristic-Defining Ability. It works in all zones. So a Woodland Changeling is all creature types on the board, in your hand, in your library, in your graveyard, etc.

I know that combat damage assignment with deathtouch creatures have been changed a few times, so i just want to be sure how it works currently.
A 2/4 creature with deathtouch attacks and is blocked by two 2/2s. How many creatures die?

Both, you need to assign lethal damage to the first blocker of your choice before you can assign damage to the second one. Your 2/4 has deathtouch so 1 damage is considered lethal damage

well, all three die

lets see....

IF you enchant a caged sun with song of the dryads, then spreading seas, would the caged sun produce infinite mana? (if the chosen color was blue)

GLHF :D

Ok now i get it, thanks.

oh by the way, you'll have to remove song of the dryads.

All three, if you want. Deathtouch makes it so any nonzero amount of damage from that source is considered lethal, so you can assign just 1 to each blocker and kill them both. Or just kill one, if you want.

Nah. Mostly because it won't have any abilities except tapping for blue because it's just an Island.

Then Spreading Seas falls off because it's not a land anymore.

if you cast song of the dryads on ANY permanent, then play vesuva as a copy of that "land", does it keep its land type?

Nope. Vesuva copies things as they exist in Layer 1, which is three layers before Song of the Dryads fucks with it.

What that means is if you have Song of the Dryads on a permanent, you can play a Vesuva and have your Vesuva come in as a copy of the permanent itself- and not be a land. You could throw Song onto a Planeswalker and then drop your Vesuva as an uncounterable Planeswalker.

same question, but with thespian's stage.

Ditto. Thespian's Stage copies the target as it exists in layer 1, which is before things mess with it. That means that a nonland with Song of the Dryads on it is a legal target for Thespian's Stage's activated ability, but the copiable characteristics it assumes are pre-Song.

It will retain the ability to become a copy of target land though.

Can you explain why it copies things as they exist in layer 1? Do all copy effects do that?

Because layer 1 is the Copy Effects layer. It's where copy effects pull their copiable characteristics FROM. It's why if I Clone a Bear Cub that has 10 +1/+1 counters, a Rancor, two Loxodon Warhammers and a Sword of Fire and Ice on it, I get...

A 2/2 green Bear with no abilities.

How does banding work?

Serious question.

it doesn't

Very TL;DR version: 1) banders can attack as a group the way anyone can defend as a group, 2) the opposite player of normal chooses how to assign combat damage to a banding group.

The short answer is it makes you King Big Dick of All Combat.

So, say you have three things with Banding. You can put those guys (and up to one thing WITHOUT banding) into a "Band". If any creature in the band gets blocked, the whole band gets blocked, so if you attacked with a band of one Flying, one Shadow, one Protection-from-whatever, and one vanilla creature, they could block the whole band by just throwing a body in front of the vanilla guy.

That sounds awful, right? It lets them gang-block even your evasive guys! But here's the fun part: Normally, when I block your creatures, you choose how yours hand out damage, and I choose how mine hand out damage. If I use something like Hundred-Handed One to block three of your 10/1 creatures and your 2/10, I can kill your 10/1s because I choose how to hand out damage. Ditto, if I block your 10/10 with a 0/20 wall and a bunch of 5/1s, you can choose to kill the 5/1s because you choose how your guy does damage. But not with Banding.

With Banding, YOU choose how MY blockers assign damage to your band. Even better, it lets you divvy it up so it doesn't need to be lethal. I could block a band of 2/2s with my 4/4, and you can just have it assign 1 damage to everything and lose nothing. OR assign all damage to one creature, if you want. It makes your little group easier to block for the boon of you fucking up my combat math, hardcore.

It's KINDA similar on defense- you don't actually form a "band", but if you block with at least one Banding creature, you get to decide how the attacking creature's damage is divided out. On defense there's no "up to one not-banding thing" limit; you could gang-block with your whole board, and as long as there's a Benalish Hero among them, you pick how my attacker hands out damage.

3) Banding also works while blocking.

4) Banding lets you assign less-than-lethal to a creature before moving on. That's a big one.

If I attack with a 5/2, a 3/3, and a pair of 2/2s into your 5/5, I can spread the damage such that none of my creatures die (1 damage on each of the 2/2s, 1 damage on the 5/2, 2 damage on the 3/3).

How does Camouflage work?

It's basically "your shit blocks randomly". You form up as many "piles" as there are things attacking you (or one of your Planeswalkers), and then you divide your creatures among piles as you like (and you can have empty ones, so you could just throw all your blockers into one pile, or put 2 blockers each into 2 piles, or 3 and 1, whatever).

Then, we randomly assign your piles to my attacking creatures 1:1. Let's say you have a pair of Runeclaw Bears, a Hill Giant, and a Sun Titan. I'm attacking you with a 5/6, a 2/3, and a pair of Glory Seekers. The smart thing would probably be to just throw your bears at my seekers, your Hill Giant at my 2/3. and your Sun Titan at my 5/6. But ah, I cast Camouflage!

So now, you have four piles. You can put your creatures in however you want- you can have one creature per pile, you could do 2 in one pile, 1 each in two other piles, and one empty. You could do 2 piles of 2, a split of 3/1/0/0, you could do 4/0/0/0, or just not block at all and leave all four piles empty.

Once you've sorted out your piles, we randomly assign one of your piles to one of my attackers, and repeat until all of my attackers have one pile assigned to them. Then, anything in that pile that CAN block the attacker associated with the pile MUST. So if you put your Bears into a pile and it ended up assigned to my 5/6, your bears have to block it.

any interesting interactions with banding?

What are your thoughts of Eldritch Moon so far?

I have Karador, Ghost Chieftain and Gisa and Geralf on the battlefield.
During my turn, I cast a zombie from my graveyard, can I now cast anything else from my graveyard?

Okay, leaving the office! I'll attend to these questions when I get home in a bit.

don't have a question and haven't played magic in years but somehow ended up on Veeky Forums and wanted to thank you gA for doing these for so long, helped me a lot back in the day

cheers man, polite sage

If I have sphinx of the final word is on the board can my opponent cast Invasive surgery on a sorcery I played and have delirium go off?

TL;DR delirium how does it work if the spell is illegal?

Several questions one post

1: Assume I'm casting a spell for free off of windbrisk heights. If that spell has a kicker cost, can I pay it?
What about for like, Buyback? in what case can I pay extra/alternate costs when casting a spell for free?

2: Does delving a treasure cruise allow me to get around Trinisphere, making it so I only have to tap 1 and delve 7? What about other Sphere effects? Can I tap 1 and delve 8 to cast treasure cruise with a Thorn of Amethyst in play?

3: Does Ashnod's altar/phyrexian altar count as a mana ability, and therefore can be activated in response to a split second spell?

4: So after I cast a spell, I maintain priority until I pass it right? Meaning that I cast a spell and before my opponent gets to do anything I can cast another spell immediately in response correct? and THEN my opponent gets his chance before either spell resolves, Correct?

Can't be countered works a lot like indestructible. You can play Doom Blades on an Avacyn all you want, they're legal and will resolve, she just won't care. Same thing goes for counterspells. Invasive Surgery can try to counter and the spell resolves even though the spell isn't actually countered, and your opponent gets to find the rest of that card and exile them because that effect doesn't care if the spell was countered.

1. When you're casting without paying mana cost, you can't pay additional costs or X costs at all.

2. Trinisphere has no effect on Ruse Cruise because its CMC is higher than three, you can pay U and delve 8 cards to cast it with Thorn of Amethyst. Delve pays the generic mana part of costs, it doesn't reduce cost. It and Convoke both used to reduce cost but that was changed in M15.

3. Yep, they're both mana abilities.

4. Correct. State based actions will check after every spell cast, but your opponent has to wait until you pass priority.

for non permanents that say something doesn't untap on the controllers next turn, does it untap the turn after that or stay tapped/

Just their next turn.

thats what I thought but wanted to be sure, thanks.

If I use Dominus of Fealty to gain control of a permanent that also has a trigger at the beginning of upkeep, can I use that too?

No. Beginning of the upkeep happens once, all the triggers that can happen go on the stack at one time, more can't be added even if you add more things that with beginning of upkeep triggers.

If you want, you could use a card like Paradox Haze to have a second upkeep step, then the permanent you took control of has a chance to along with everything else again.

If your Dominus ability has triggered and resolved it's already past the beginning of your upkeep

Angel of Jubilation is out and Living Death is cast, what happens?

how does banding interact with trample? If I block a creature with trample with two creatures of which one has banding, can I decide to apply 1 damage to both, not killing them, and take whatever's left to the face? Can I assign 0 to both blockers and take all damage to the face?

If I block with just one creature and it has banding, does banding still apply?

do attacking creatures that get assigned a camouflage block pile with 0 creatures in it still count as getting blocked?

Angel of Jubilation only stops saccing things for costs, any saccing and life payment in the resolution of the spell is fair game. Living Death'll work as advertised, you'll sac all your creatures and put the ones already in your graveyard on the board.

Living Death resolves and all players exile all creature cards from their graveyard, sacrifice all creatures they control, then return the exiled cards to play

>Players can't pay life or sacrifice creatures to cast spells or activate abilities

I'm gonna leave the banding part to gA or the other user just cause I'm sure I'll second guess myself on it.
After the camouflage clusterfuck is done, if an attacking creature has nothing in its block pile, it's not blocked.

thanks senpaitachi

Not really. It just makes 'blocking' weird.

Honestly, mostly disappointed.

It works like extra land drops used to. Each one is giving you permission to do a thing, so you just say which of them you're using.

Happy to help- thank you for your kind words.

The spell isn't an illegal target. "Can't be countered by spells/abilities" doesn't mean "can't be targeted by counterspells", it's like Indestructible. I can cast a Doom Blade targeting a Darksteel Colossus all day, it just doesn't DO anything. With Invasive Surgery, it's legal to cast it targeting an uncounterable spell, and with Delirium online you'll still get to strip the other zones.

1) You can for additional costs like Kicker and Buyback, and you do have to actually pay. It's ALTERNATE costs that you can't pay, because you can't pay 2 alternate costs, and you're already using one.

2) Hilariously, no. Delve USED to be a cost reduction, so it didn't work as well against 3sphere. It got changed a while back, so now it's another way to pay- and that's AFTER 3sphere locks shit in. You can absolutely Delve a spell down below paying 3 to get around 3sphere.

3) Yes. It's an activated ability that doesn't target, could add mana to a mana pool, and is not a loyalty ability.

4) The default is that you maintain priority, but the actuality is that the MTR establishes a shortcut that you're assumed to pass priority after casting spells unless you explicitly retain it. You can just do that, though- cast a spell, say "Retaining priority, then cast this other spell". Your opponent will still get to respond to those spells, both before and after the 'second' spell resolves.

Just the next turn. If it locked it down forever it'd say so.

Nope.

Nothing much, since saccing the dudes isn't a cost, so Angel won't stop it. Happens normally.

>When you're casting without paying mana cost, you can't pay additional costs or X costs at all.
Pretty sure you can pay additional costs like kicker.
"Because you’re already casting the spell using an alternative cost (by casting it without paying its mana cost), you can’t pay any other alternative costs for the card. You can pay additional costs, such as kicker costs. If the card has any mandatory additional costs, you must pay those."
From the Isochron Scepter gatherer notes.
Also I thought that was the point of exiling an orim's chant onto a scepter.

Sorry, ran out of post.

>Banding and trample
Nope. Trample only lets that creature assign damage to the defender after it's assigned lethal to all blockers. Banding doesn't get around that, it just lets you assign less-than-lethal to one blocker before moving on to the next. You can't elect to skip your blockers, because nothing is letting you do that.

>Camouflage pile
Nope. Nothing was in that pile so nothing's blocking it. It'd be a really bad card if it was something you play just to block all your own creatures.

so i have an experiment one with no counters on it and i cast avatar of the resolute. when the evolve trigger happens, will the avatar come in with a counter?

Nope. The Avatar's ability is a replacement effect that modifies how it enters the battlefield, and at the time it would apply you don't have any +1/+1 counters on your dudes. He comes in without one, triggers Evolve, and then Evolve resolves and ticks a dice up on your Experiment, well after Avatar has entered.

thts what i thought, thanks

What is the cmc of a melded creature? In the case of Bristle is it 0, 4, 7, or 11?

Tabak has confirmed that it's the sum of the CMCs of the base creatures. So for Brisela, it's 11. For Hanweir, it's just 3 since it's comprised of a 3 drop and a Land. For Chittering Host, it's 7.

Bedtime now.

>Honestly, mostly disappointed.
Really? Most people seem to like it so far.

>It works like extra land drops used to. Each one is giving you permission to do a thing, so you just say which of them you're using.
Used to? So extra landdrops work differently now? How?

What if you manifest phage and flip her face up?

it does nothing

MTR:
>Whenever a player adds an object to the stack, he or she is assumed to be passing priority unless he or she explicitly announces that he or she intends to retain it. If he or she adds a group of objects to the stack without explicitly retaining priority and a player wishes to take an action at a point in the middle, the actions should be reversed up to that point.

I never understood this. Why is casting multiple instants not a shortcut for casting them whilenretaining priority? If the game is reversed, can't the casting player just repeat the same action, but say "oh and I'm retaining priority, so you can't cast something in the middle of these"? Why is this shortcut so awkwardly written? What is the main purpose of it?

...

>I think we'd get along
Imagine those two together.

what's that have to do with phage?

judge question

Olivia, Mobilized for War is in play
play a Abbot of Keral Keep
do I get to see which card gets exiled by Abbot before deciding to discard to Olivia? or is it the case that I need to discard a card to make my Human Vampire Monk before being able to act on the knowledge of what the Abbot's exiled card is?

...

Depends on how you stacked the trigger, yes you can.
Olivia's ability will always trigger, and you choose whether to discard or not at the resolution of it.

You can choose whether to exile the top card first (and see what it is), or whether to discard with Olivia. This is because you discard on resolution.

You can make it so that you exile first, and depending on the card you exile, you can decide to discard or not.

I'm frustrated that they played up the big spooky mystery and went to such insane lengths for 'clues' (like the Tamiyo's Journal thing) only for it to be the villain everyone guessed three seconds after they announced the second set's name. It's predictable and lazy and disappointing. I really dislike Meld, too.

Extra land drops used to get 'used up'. I could play a land and say I was using the 'extra' land drop from my Oracle of Mul'Daya, then blink it and it'd "reset" and I could play another land. Or if you killed it after I dropped a land, I could cast another and still have a land drop to use.

Now, it's just a permissions thing. Let's say I play an Oracle, play two lands, then blink it. I don't get to play a third, because when I go to play another land the game goes "Well, you're allowed one, plus an extra from that guy, and you've played two, so you're out of extra."

You're fine. She only triggers when she ETB, and if you Manifest her she had no abilities at that time.

It's because if you add a bunch of objects to the stack at once without explicitly retaining priority, the assumption is that you're doing one, letting it resolve, then doing another. This is for stuff like firebreathing- if I just tap 5 Mountains and say "Pump 5 times", I'm not activating it 5 times in a row all at once. I'm assumed to be activating it once, letting it resolve, and doing it again. If my opponent wants to respond partway through that, they can, and that's what this line is saying- if they 'wish to take an action at a point in the middle', then we back up all the shit after that so they can.

They're both your triggers, so you can put them on the stack such that Abbot exiles a card before you have to decide whether or not to discard for Olivia.

Is emerge related to color identity?