Is This Combo Guaranteed Success With The Right Timing?
Asked by Lord_Olga 4 years ago
So the combo is Near-Death Experience and Wall of Blood . If I were to activated Wall of Blood during my opponents end step to bring myself down to 1 life and had Near-Death Experience out already, how many opportunities does my opponent have to damage me? I’ve always been a little confused by priority and I’m not sure if my opponent would receive it at any point in between this happening and the beginning of my upkeep. I assume they could possibly cast an instant after the activation of my creature if it’s still their end step, but is there anything else? I just want to know how risky this timing would be.
Whenever you activate an ability, you can choose to hold priority, which means you can continue to activate abilities or cast spells as appropriate before opponents get the chance to respond. Ultimately you'll need to pass priority, and the stack won't begin resolving until everybody has passed priority. Basically you need to go around the table with everybody saying "yeah I'm not responding", and then the thing that's on the stack will happen.
Everybody also needs to pass priority before a phase will change. So if you decided that you were okay with the phases changing, and then some abilities or spells happen, you need to decide again if you're okay with the phase changing. You're not locked into your previous choice or anything.
So your opponent can respond to you activating your Wall of Blood's ability, they can respond to the fourth or second-last instance of that ability attempting to resolve, and they can act again after all those abilities have finished resolving.
At the beginning of your upkeep, your Near-Death Experience trigger goes on the stack, and again your opponents can respond before it resolves.
Near-Death Experience has an "intervening if" clause. (It says "When blah happens, if blah is (still) the case, do some blather.") It checks if you have exactly 1 life during its own resolution. So while it mightn't be a very common occurrence, an opponent can respond to the ability by changing your life total to something other than 1 but also not knock you out of the game. If that's the case, the ability won't do anything as it resolves if you don't still have exactly 1 life when the ability checks for that.
Gidgetimer says... #1
They could use an instant or ability to remove Near-Death Experience on their end step.
They could use an instant or ability to kill you on their end step or on your upkeep before the trigger resolves to kill you.
June 21, 2019 8:17 p.m.