This actually came up in a game: I had a Werebear in play, plus one other 1/1 creature (irrelevant what it was; for the sake of discussion let’s say it was a Scryb Sprites), and six cards in my graveyard. Werebear has an ability “Threshold-- Werebear gets +3/+3”, which means that if I have 7 or more cards in my graveyard, it’s a 4/4 creature instead of 1/1.
My opponent played a Pestilence, and used it to do 1 damage to everything. Now, clearly this killed the Sprites, but would it kill the Werebear? I can see two arguments:
1: As the player whose creatures are dying, I can choose what order my creatures die in. The sprites die first, and upon their death I now have 7 cards in my graveyard, and meet threshold. The werebear also takes 1 damage, but since I now have threshold, he’s now a 4/4 creature, and survives.
2: As the player dealing the damage, my opponent can choose what order my creatures die in. The werebear dies first, and I gain threshold, but it’s too late to help the bear. Then the sprites die as normal.
3: The creatures all die at once, or the order of their death doesn’t matter. This leaves open the question of whether threshold occurs soon enough to save the bear or not.
That would save it. Chronos would play it in response, meaning the instant would resolve first, meaning it would go to the graveyard before the pestilence ability resolved.
Damage prevention / redirection fast effects happen or get used.
Creatures die.
Fast effects triggered by creature deaths happen.
So if I remember correctly, all deaths happen simultaneously. The threshold on the werebear can’t be met, because the graveyard only has 6 cards in it until after the deaths happen.
Yeah, that’s pretty clear: It’d be basically the same effect as using a Giant Growth to save it directly. Of course, I didn’t have any instants I could cast at the time.
I dunno… There’s also some minotaur with First Strike and the text, “Not all minotaurs are tribal. Some are freelance”. Or less punny, the Benevolent Unicorn: “The best use for a unicorn’s horn is to adorn a unicorn”.
I figured as much. Another alternative would be to activate a creature ability that sacrificed a creature, or even have something like a Tim commit suicide?
When the Pestilence activation resolves, it deals 1 damage to all creatures and all players. The game then runs a check for State-Based Actions (these used to be called State-Based effects, but the name changed last month.) Among other things it checks each creature to see if the amount of damage accumulated by the creature over the turn is greater than or equal to its current toughness. All creatures where that is true are simultaneously destroyed (along with other SBAs - there’s a long list, none of which are relevant here.)
So the Werebear and the Sprites are both moved to their owner’s graveyard simultaneously. Afterwards, Chronos has threshold, but the Bear is already destroyed.
If Chronos caused another card to be put into his graveyard before the Pestilence activation resolved, the Bears would immediately become 4/4.
On the other hand, as I understand it, I do still get to choose what order dying creatures end up in the graveyard (as long as they all died at once), which can be relevant for cards that refer to the top card of the graveyard, or cards that trigger if they have cards atop them in the graveyard.
In case anyone’s curious, by the way, the on-the-spot decision was to let the bear live, but my friend ended up winning anyway.
Would you believe, neither? Damage all happens at once. Sure it’s calculated one at a time and mechanically dealt with one at a time, but that’s because of the physical limitations of how many hands we have to pick up cards and move them into the graveyard or how we’re not good at multiple threads of mathematics in our heads at once. The rules don’t concern themselves with those trifles however. An effect is announced, both players pass priority, then it resolves. Since the cards aren’t sentient and autonomous, it’s up to the wetware that runs the game to implement it. IMHO it’s safest to use a two stage process to deal with it. Determine what and how things are affected, and this happens on a card by card basis, and then apply the results of that determination. From the rules PoV this happens all at once. In real life you look at each creature one at a time and decide if it’s going to die, and then, instead of having to remember that it will and dealing with it on a literal second pass, you just go ahead and put it in the graveyard. This jumping back and forth between the two game states, because we’re human and can’t deal with everything simultaneously, causes the confusion. There’s only two game states as far as the rules are concerned. Before the point of Pestilence damage was applied, and after. There’s no middle ground where some have been damaged, and therefore killed and placed in the graveyard, and some have not.
In the rules this is represented by the checking of state based effects. Whenever a game event, like a point of pestilence damage, resolves, these effects are put on hold until after it is completely processed by the wetware. Once the effect has been fully processed, run through the state based effects checklist again. If no further actions need to be taken, then the control of the game returns to the player who would next get priority. The state-based effects section of the comprehensive rulebook is probably one of the few I’d recommend to players who have these kinds of questions.
ETA: Yes, ordering of multiple cards put into the graveyard simultaneously is up to the owner of those cards(and therefore the graveyard they’re going into). This is separate from the resolution of the event which put them there. If you want you can think of the process of ordering the cards as a sort of limbo where cards go after they’ve died but before they go to the graveyard. This keeps them from arriving at different times or allows you to order them for some effect. Currently the rules don’t require maintaining of graveyard order, but some older cards it matters for and should therefore be enforced in games using those cards.
I always liked the one for Reparations, which allows you to draw cards every time you’re damaged: “Sorry we burned down your village. Here’s some gold.”
Yeah, you do get to choose which order the cards wind up in your graveyard, which might mean that if your opponent owned the werebear, it might wind up in the graveyard below the Pestilence. Doesn’t change the fact that it dies in this case.
Then, mana sources permitting, the player could pump BBBB into Pestilence and not worry about when the Threshold is triggered, right? No kill like overkill.
Yes, but few drawbacks to that: First, in the actual situation that came up, he didn’t have enough mana. Second, Pestilence damages everything, including yourself and your creatures, so you might not want to use it to excess. Third, if at any point there are no creatures at all in play, Pestilence is destroyed, too, and he wanted to be sure to keep it around (my deck is largely a weenie deck, so being able to deal one damage to everything is very useful versus it). He had a creature or two with enough toughness to survive a one-point Pestilence, but nothing that could survive four points of it.
