What happens when Orpal’s maxband is triggered during the turn of a player who doesn’t control Orpal but does control 2 units with Resist?
The source of the ability is a card controlled by an opponent but it is the active player who chooses and places the runes. This is one of these situations where my common sense and codex intuitions are in conflict.
As an aside, it seems really counter intuitive that this ability targets at all. Initially I had thought it must be to ensure consistent mechanics, but then I noticed that Metamorphosis doesn’t target so it would seem that placing runes doesn’t inherently imply targeting.
That would somewhat depend on who controlled the dying unit that triggered the ability. But, in either case, the active player is the one choosing targets and placing runes, and you don’t have to pay resist costs to target units you control. If the dying unit belonged to Orpal’s controller, then the active player would have to pay resist costs to target units with resist, however… or so I assume, given that no one contested this interpretation when I asked about it previously.
I’m kind of shocked I didn’t find any asks in this thread thus far about how Swift Strike w/ a Tower works… If I attack with something on 4hp against a 3 attack swift striker backed by a tower, do I get to kill it? Does the tower damage happen before or after things dealing damage to each other? Does a tower effectively +1 the damage of a swift strike defender?
The tower deals damage at the same time as the attacker. In this case, the defender swiftly deals three, then the attacker and the tower deal damage, killing both combatants.
Do we play things wrong with Orpal, then? I feel like Orpal + tower has collectively been agreed as adding a -1/1 to something attacking, but is that wrong and it should be 1 damage + -1/1s from Orpal?
It’s the Tower dealing the extra 1 damage, not Orpal, and Orpal’s ability only modifies the attack damage done by Orpal, specifically, so 1 normal damage (from Tower) and X -1/-1 runes (from Orpal) is correct.
What does happen against Orpal is that the tower can let you take less damage: if your attacking unit has 1 health and swift strike, and the defender deals damage in - runes, getting killed by the tower means no rune spread from Orpal’s maxband ability.
Think about it like this: if the tower damage took on properties of the defender, Tiny Basilisk would become much harder to bypass with the likes of Discord.
On the other hand, that would be a very amusing spell possibility for Bigby, possibly a rework of Jurisdiction. Probably a bit too finnicky/specific though.
Hi guys, I’m just playing a game via steam tabletop simulator. If Drakk gives a unit haste which is to be copied by a mirror token. Does the mirror get haste?
For completeness I should note that the same ruling is also on the Sirus Quince page on the Codex Card Database, in case there was any question about whether copying something with Manufactured Truth works differently than Quince copying something (it does not).
