Many Magic players are not very good at actually playing spells. I do not mean that they have bad strategic understanding; I mean that they have a very poor grasp on the actual game mechanics behind playing a spell. This article will walk you step-by-step through the process of playing a spell correctly, and will discuss why not doing it correctly can lead to bad things.
Consider the following card.
Meddling Shrapnel Decree Elemental
1WWUR
Hypothetical Creature – Elemental
1/1
As an additional cost to play Meddling Shrapnel Decree Elemental, sacrifice an artifact.
As Meddling Shrapnel Decree Elemental comes into play, name a card. The named card can’t be played.
When Meddling Shrapnel Decree Elemental comes into play, you may pay X. If you do, put X 1/1 white soldier tokens into play.
When Meddling Shrapnel Decree Elemental comes into play, it deals five damage to target creature or player.
I understand that this card would never be printed as is because it isn’t flavorful and is comically confusing. I made it up because it covers everything tricky that I can think of. I am going to use it to show you the precisely correct order of actions for playing a spell and the immediate aftermath. As we walk through this together I will discuss the potential consequences of not doing it properly. Let’s pretend that our lands can produce 6WWUR altogether, and that our only artifact in play is a Sapphire Medallion.
Step 1: Announce the spell
We place our Meddling Shrapnel Decree Elemental card on the table and say the card’s name.
At this point our opponent can tell us that what we are doing is illegal before we give him any extra information. Perhaps we have attempted to cast a spell during our opponent’s end step while he controls a Teferi, or there is a Meddling Mage in play that named our spell. Either way, we will not have to tell our opponent what lands we wanted to tap or what we intended to target.
Step Two: Declare Targets
Our creature spell doesn’t target, so we don’t do anything.
I include this for completeness. If our spell targeted, we would declare targets before paying costs. Once again, this gives our opponent a chance to tell us that our spell is illegal before we give him more information. If a spell cannot be played legally, it simply returns to your hand, so doing nothing else before this makes it very unlikely for something bad to happen to us. For example, if we announce a Terror when the only creature in play is our opponent’s creature with protection from black but we didn’t tap any mana for it, it will just return to your hand painlessly.
Step Three: Lock in and pay costs
We note that the Sapphire Medallion reduces the total cost of our spell by one since it is blue, and lock in the cost at WWUR. We tap WWUR and then sacrifice the Sapphire Medallion.
The game allows you to play mana abilities like those on Llanowar Elves or Chromatic Sphere during the pay costs step, so we should under no circumstances have mana in our mana pool before we actually announce a spell. Doing this can tip off our opponents to what we have in our hand or lead to unpleasant mistakes. For example, you might tap the mana for two spells, play and resolve one of them, and discover that you have the wrong colors of mana left over for the second spell and be forced to burn.
The locking in of mana costs is another important rules detail. This can allow you to play spells in situations that you might not have thought you could. For example, suppose your only permanents in play are Vault of Whispers, Great Furnace, and Chromatic Sphere. You can announce Thoughtcast, lock in the mana cost of 1U, then use the Chromatic Sphere to make the blue mana.
Now that we have announced the spell, declared no targets, and paid costs, the spell goes on the stack. We pass priority. Note that we have not named a card, declared a target for our five damage, or tapped mana to make soldiers. These things don’t happen until our Meddling Shrapnel Decree Elemental comes into play, which has yet to happen. We want to avoid doing these things early because we don’t want our opponent to know anything about our intentions.
When our opponent passes priority, our creature finally enters play and we have things to do. The first thing we do is name a card, since this happens “as” it enters play. We have been careful not to name a card before now because we didn’t want him to know how to respond. For example, someone who announces “Meddling Shrapnel Decree Elemental on Cancel.” before giving the opponent a chance to respond will probably get his spell Canceled if his opponent has one. However, if he had waited, his opponent would have no window to cast the Cancel until it was too late to stop the naming. Similarly, if we told our opponent before the Elemental came into play that we planned on sending the five damage at a creature that he really cared about, he might Cancel it, but if we wait until the Elemental has entered play, there is nothing he can do to stop the trigger going on the stack targeting that creature.
Now that the Elemental has entered play, we have two triggered effects to place onto the stack. We can do this in either order we choose, since we control both of them. The ability that we place onto the stack first will resolve after the one we put on second, since the second ability will be the top of the stack. We must also choose targets for triggered abilities at the time that they go on the stack. We choose to put the five damage ability on the stack targeting our opponent, and then the token making ability on top of that.
When the token making ability resolves, we tap the 6 mana that we can make with the rest of our lands, and put six soldier tokens into play. Note that we did not tap any mana before the ability resolved. This is really important. Until the ability actually resolves, we don’t know if we’ll get the chance to pay that mana; we might get it Trickbinded or Voidmage Hushered. Multiple times in Onslaught block constructed events, I saw many a poor soul tap huge amounts of mana and then cycle Decree of Justice. Their opponents would happily respond “So you have 16 mana floating, right? Stifle the creature-making trigger, and now you burn for 16.” We don’t want this to happen to us, so we don’t tap the mana before the ability resolves.
Finally, our second triggered ability resolves and our opponent takes five damage.
I bring this topic up because I think it’s very important. I can’t count the amount of times that my opponents have given me pretty big advantages by doing this stuff wrong. For example, in an extended tournament I was playing Psychatog against a Rock deck. I played first, and played Island and Underground River on my first two turns. On my opponent’s second turn, he laid a swamp and said “Cabal Therapy naming Counterspell.” I responded by Brainstorming, to which my opponent responded “God, you people ALWAYS have it!” That told me that I was safe to just put my two Counterspells on top of my deck and then show him my hand, since he didn’t seem to think he could name anything else.
When it comes to arcane rules knowledge, Magic Online is one of the best ways to learn. It doesn’t let you take any shortcuts and graphically shows you what is happening with triggers and timing. In order to learn the rules for playing a spell, I suggest that you turn on the “Allow me to announce spells without the proper mana” checkbox in the game options. Then, everything will happen in the order I laid out above, which is the order you should do things in real life too. Just click on a card when you want to play it, pick a target if you have to, and then tap mana.
Playing spells properly won’t give you an edge per se in tournament Magic, but it will keep you from giving away free advantages. If you don’t do it correctly now, it only takes a small change in habits to keep you safe. It is very awkward when people lose games they should win due to rules mistakes like the Decree of Justice one I mentioned earlier, and you don’t want that to happen to you.
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