how does the exile ability work to your advantage?
General forum
Posted on July 17, 2014, 3:14 p.m. by disposingjayce
I'm curious as to why someone would want to exile their own cards?
nobu_the_bard says... #3
Various reasons; it depends on what you mean specifically. In Commander, I played an opponent once using Mindslaver while Selenia, Dark Angel was my commander and I had an even amount of life. This created the strange situation where having my commander in play or being able to play her meant he could kill me; I had to Swords to Plowshares my own commander to keep him from activating her ability until it killed me, which has actually happened before...
There are other situations. Mana Severance can be used in a deck full of lands to cut them out completely; this eliminates the possibility of "dead" draws.
Some exile effects aren't really a disadvantage at all. Exiling your own tokens is not much more troublesome than killing them since they disappear after the zone change anyway; exiling your tokens to City of Shadows incurs less cost. Exiling may even be preferable if you have an opponent that benefits from your creatures dying; someone with The Mimeoplasm ready to cast or avoiding your creature getting stuck onto an opponents' Mimic Vat .
Flicker effects like Cloudshift let your creatures re-enter play. You can abuse comes-into-play effects like Thragtusk - Cloudshift effectively reads "gain 5 life and put a 3/3 beast token onto the battlefield".
That is just some examples.
July 17, 2014 3:32 p.m.
Lacking more information I'm going to take a stab at assuming you mean cards such as Cloudshift which exile and then return cards?
There are many reasons you would want to do something like that. The creature may have a powerful leaves-battlefield or enters-battlefield ability. You can 'blink' something in response to save it from a removal spell, or to save it from dying in combat. Spells and abilities like that which can target things besides creatures can return Planeswalkers with their starting loyalty, can return lands into play untapped and ready to be used.
Really, abilities which remove and return your cards can be very powerful and useful.
July 17, 2014 3:35 p.m.
disposingjayce says... #6
Basically what I was asking is if you were to exile your own card and then you play the scavenge ability on the card that you just exiled. but I kind of figured it out last night while a buddy and I were playing our Thursday night match against each other. he wasn't a happy camper when I started to get the hang of it. sorry the question was a bit vague. this is the deck i was playing scavange minus the m15 cards that are on order. it wasn't making much sense to me until i actually played with the deck.
July 18, 2014 6:55 a.m.
Hallowed_Titan says... #7
Scavenge only works from the grave, not from exile...
July 18, 2014 9:29 a.m.
disposingjayce says... #8
right, you take it from the graveyard, exile it, then put that cards power on a different card correct? or am I missing something?
Sam_I_am says... #2
This is not a rules question
Also, it normally doesn't work to your advantage. What brought this up?
July 17, 2014 3:23 p.m.