Face down cards with Ixidron
Asked by mtghypatia 9 years ago
I recently added Ixidron to my commander deck to combat the lack of tuck effects to deal with troublesome commanders.
Imagine I'm playing against a Sliver Overlord deck. I cast Ixidron. He has to turn face down his commander and five other creatures. It is in my best interest that the 2/2 token that is Sliver Overlord doesn't get killed, because he can then re-cast it.
Can I ask him to mark that token? Can he move the tokens around the table to confuse the other players about which token is which creature?
Powerhouse64 says... #2
May I ask the reason why the order in which they entered the battlefield is relevant? I wasn't aware that the order mattered, are there cards which target the most recent cards to enter the battlefield? Epochalyptik
April 22, 2015 7:32 a.m.
Epochalyptik says... #3
No. The reasons are largely strategic and feed into guesswork. For example, if you know the meta-relevant morph cards, you might guess that particular ones would be played in particular stages of the game or with particular contexts (mana available for unmorphing, colors available, etc.).
Additionally, it's relevant for rules-related actions auch as backing up the game state and undoing illegal moves.
April 22, 2015 8:02 a.m.
Also, the commander rules state you need to track where a players commander is on the battlefield at all times, so your opponent will always need to tell you whether a face down card is their commander.
April 22, 2015 8:03 p.m.
Epochalyptik says... #5
@sonnet666: The RC has been wildly inconsistent about that rule in the past, unfortunately. One of their many faults. You can find multiple posts from RC members that present completely different "rulings" on the topic.
Epochalyptik says... Accepted answer #1
First, the face-down cards are not tokens. A card and a token are different things, and an object can never be both, nor can it change from one to the other.
When face-down cards are involved, players are required to be honest about their known characteristics. This includes knowing which face-down cards are which if their faces were at one point public knowledge. It also includes other characteristics such as order in which they entered the battlefield.
April 21, 2015 7:53 p.m.