Combat Celebrant + Aurelia

Asked by Pedrodamus 3 years ago

How would I go about triggering exert on Combat Celebrant with Aurelia, the Warleader in order to achieve three combats? So, the way I think this works (doing it the wrong way) is the following: attack with everything and exert the Celebrant. Aurelia triggers and untaps all attackers and the Celebrant additional combat , along with his untap (that gets wasted because Aurelia already untapped everything) goes on the stack to immediately resolve as the next combat so nothing will untap for the third combat and theoretically only Aurelia will be able to attack barring that I don't have any vigilance creatures or giving my board vigilance somehow.

Am I not able to stack the combat triggers how I want them to resolve? Like, why can't I say I want the Aurelia additional combat to resolve first, and then the Celebrant combat following that so I can untap everything? I guess the smart way to do this would be to exert the Celebrant after the additional Aurelia combat, but I am still unclear as to why I can't stack the combats how I want to stack them. Maybe someone can explain this interaction and additional combats in a way that a simpleton (me) can understand it lol.

Polaris says... Accepted answer #1

Let's take this from the top and answer questions one at a time.

First, as long as you attack with both of them and exert Combat Celebrant during one of your attacks, you'll get three combat phases. Whether or not you can attack during all of them will depend on how you stack things.

You're correct that if you exert Combat Celebrant during your first combat (assuming you're also attacking with Aurelia, the Warleader) one of their untaps will be wasted and you won't be able to attack three times with non-vigilance creatures.

The order doesn't have any bearing on your question, because both Celebrant and Aurelia untap your creatures during the resolution of their triggered abilities, so it doesn't matter whose phase is when. Once created, they're identical. Notably, neither of them create a delayed trigger to untap your creatures at the beginning of the extra combat phase.

You can, however, totally stack the triggers how you like, since they're triggering off the same event (attacking). It just won't change the outcome.

Whenever you create another phase, it gets inserted right then. Both Aurelia and Celebrant create a combat phase "after this phase." Let's say you stacked Celebrant below and Aurelia on top. Aurelia will resolve, untap your creatures, and insert an additional combat phase after this combat phase. Celebrant will then resolve, untap your creatures, and insert an additional combat phase after this phase (before the phase created by Aurelia). These both happen during your initial declare attackers step.

With all that said, the correct answer is, as you said, to swing, get the untap and extra combat from Aurelia, then in the next combat swing and exert Celebrant for a third combat phase, then swing one more time. If you don't think you can keep Celebrant alive, hold it back in the first combat so that you can swing with it in the second to exert for value.

Notably, Combat Celebrant won't untap at the beginning of your next turn, but since Aurelia's attack trigger doesn't specify attacking creatures, you can swing Aurelia on your next turn, untap everything (Celebrant included), and swing and exert Celebrant again during your second combat phase to triple up again. Aurelia pairs very well with exert creatures to let you use their powerful abilities every turn.

August 16, 2021 11:24 p.m.