Can you assign more damage to a creature than its toughness?
Asked by Samuel_Whitefall 11 years ago
I have been scouring the internet and I think I found my answer but I need to be absolutely sure before I discuss this with a friend of mine.
Can you assign more damage to a creature than its toughness?
Say I am attacking with a 5/5 that is blocked by a Revered Elder . Does it only assign 2 damage or does it assign 5 damage. My friend has said that I can only deal up to the toughness of this creature (and thus he only has to pay 1 mana to keep the Revered Elder alive)
Now, say I am attacking with a 5/5 that is blocked by a Revered Elder and a random 1/4. Can I assign all damage to the Revered Elder ? Or can I only assign 2 damage to the Revered Elder and the other 3 damage has to go to the random 1/4
The reason I am asking this is that it seems like a card that allows to prevent 1 damage seems very hard to kill under these circumstances, which seems a tad off. Plus, everywhere I have looked says that "creatures do not pull punches". I thought this question may allow us to settle this dispute.
I apologize in advance if these questions have been answered elsewhere, I have had trouble finding them.
Schuesseled says... #2
If Revered Elder is the only creature blocking, all 5 points of damage will be dealt to it.
If Revered Elder and another creature is blocking, you choose the order in which damage will be distributed then you choose how much damage to distribute, and you are only able to distribute damage to the second creature in your list if lethal damage is dealt to the first.
Bare in mind, if you wanted to deal all the damage to Revered Elder even though you would have to deal less than all to deal lethal damage, you still can. This can be helpful if say the second creature was Boros Reckoner . You can always choose to do more damage than lethal would require, even if you creature has trample.
July 2, 2013 8:11 a.m.
harrydemon117 says... #3
Let me "hijack" this for another question...say for instance his creature has trample....does he have to assign any "leftover damage" to the defending player or can he still assign all 5 to the blocking creature?
July 2, 2013 8:13 a.m.
He can still assign it to the defending creature. Effectively, trample lets you use any overflow if desired. You have to deal AT LEAST lethal before going to the next creature and/or trampling over.
July 2, 2013 8:32 a.m.
Trample functions as a sort of "extra blocker named 'Their Face' at the end of the blocking assignment" So once you've dealt lethal damage to all blockers, trample allows you to assign the rest to "Their face" where normal damage wouldn't.
July 2, 2013 10:06 a.m.
In addition to what drakanar said you may choose to sign all damage to his blocker and not trample over at all. Which is great in a diplomatic multiplayer game where you all want to tag team on one player and another player attacks you with a primordial hydra and you can block with a stuffy doll and deal all damage to stuffy so you kill the other player and still live.But the majority of the time you will want to trample over (even if you may not in this instance) so remember to specify.
Devonin says... Accepted answer #1
If they block with only one creature, your attacker will deal all of its damage to that creature. The Elder will take 5.
If they block with more than one creature, you assign an order for damage assignment for those blockers (So you could order the Elder first and the random 1/4 second) Then when you assign damage, you can again assign as much to the Elder as you want. The condition for dealing with multiple blockers is that you can't deal damage to the next blocker in the assigned order until you've dealt lethal damage to the previous creature. So with the Elder and a 1/4 your 5/5 could deal 5/0, 4/1, 3/2 or 2/3 damage to the creatures in order, but you couldn't deal only 1 to the Elder than then 4 to the 1/4.
July 2, 2013 7:27 a.m.