Upkeep Triggers
Asked by Profet93 8 years ago
If I have The Abyss, Trading Post, and Contamination on the field, during my upkeep, can I use trading post to create a 0/1 goat and then sacrifice for contamination? Or does the abyss destroy the goat first?
Essentially what I'm trying to ask is what order do the cards trigger in?
merrowMania says... #2
According to its Oracle text, The Abyss targets a creature. This means that the creature needs to be on the battlefield before your upkeep begins for it to be a legal target. The Abyss's ability will already be on the stack targeting one of your non-artifact creatures (if you have a legal target) before you receive priority (which is when you would be allowed to activate Trading Post). If you have no legal targets for The Abyss, there will be no trigger from it. The Goat will never be the target of The Abyss. You will then have the opportunity to sac the Goat to your Contamination trigger.
You are allowed to put the triggers from your enchantments on the stack in any order because they are triggered by the same event/phase (the beginning of your upkeep).
January 14, 2016 6:59 p.m. Edited.
Epochalyptik says... #3
Of course, that's assuming you had no creatures at the beginning of your upkeep. If you did control any, you could target one with The Abyss's ability and then sacrifice that creature to Contamination's ability. The Abyss's ability would then be countered on resolution because its targets are all illegal.
January 14, 2016 6:59 p.m.
Thank you merrowMania and Epochalyptik for your well put responses. That's what I thought, I just wanted to be sure. I'm playtesting a deck and want to ensure there are no surprises.
I also wanted to say thank you Epochalyptik for your continued work on Tappedout. I'm relatively new to magic and I see you post/manage a lot of the content on this website and I appreciate it :)
Epochalyptik says... Accepted answer #1
The Abyss's ability targets. This means that if there are no legal targets at the time the ability would be put onto the stack, the ability is put onto the stack and removed immediately.
If the ability didn't target, we'd look at the situation differently. Let's say you have Because you control both triggered abilities, and because both abilities triggered since the last time a player received priority, you choose the order in which you place them onto the stack. If you put Contamination's ability above whatever other ability might remove a creature you control, you can respond to Contamination's ability by producing a token, sacrifice the token to Contamination's ability when it resolves, and then do nothing for the last ability.
January 14, 2016 6:57 p.m.