How exactly does Provoke work?
Asked by lespaul977 3 years ago
I have a couple Deftblade Elite cards and have been a bit confused as to how Provoke works. What I really don't understand is why you'd want to specifically untap a creature just to have it block a card with Provoke. Are you required to have a tapped card be untapped in order to activate Provoke, or can you just have any creature of your choosing block your card with Provoke?
Also, the reason you might want to have an opponent's creature (untap and) block your creature it to remove that opponent's creature either from the battlefield, or just from blocking your main sources of damage.
Deftblade Elite is designed just to busy an opponent's large creature so that it can't block your other sources of damage that might die if blocked by a large creature your opponent controls. It doesn't especially benefit from being able to untap an opponent's creature, unless they control something with 1 toughness like a Birds of Paradise. Feral Throwback is more often large and can provoke creatures specifically to destroy them in combat, even if they were tapped moving into combat.
It's kind of like old, weird fighting (Blood Feud).
Neotrup says... #1
You can target an untapped creature with the provoke trigger to make it block. The reason it untaps the creature is because if it didn't, that creature wouldn't be able to block, so it's added benefit that you can force even a tapped creature to block your provoke creature. You can also choose not to use the provoke ability if you do not want to untap any of their creatures.
November 2, 2021 11:57 p.m.