MTG Salvation

No. Once the Lieutenant enters the battlefield the ability to create two tokens triggers and both players get a chance to respond before it resolves. If they cast down before it resolves there will be no goblins to sacrifice. They can however sacrifice just the lietenant to deal 1 damage and then trigger will resolve leaving them with just two goblin tokens.

Creatures always deal the entirety of their damage so there is no need to try and maximize anything for lifelink. Damage assignment requires you to assign lethal damage to a creature before assigning any to other blockers (or players if you have trample) but because you have death touch any damage is considered lethal so you can assign the damage in any combination you'd like that totals up to 4. You must always deal the full damage.

To start with all the triggers occur at the same time and as a result their controller (you) gets to choose which order they resolve in so you can stack the triggers in any order you want. 2 Yuriko then 2 Ingenious or 1 then 1 then 1 then 1 or whatever.

As for having to look the issue is you must put all the triggers on the stack at one time so you cannot really do what you want. You can activate abilities in between resolutions so if you had Sensei's Divining Top out for example you can actrivate it and reorder as you'd like.

Quote from Pokken »

RIP/Helm exiles, so I doubt this would work there.

Because Rest in Peace and Nexus of Fate have replacement effects the affected objects controller chooses which to apply first and the other won't apply. So if someone were to just mill Nexus of Fate with only rest in peace in place they could just shuffle it back in instead of exiling it. However with the Helm combo they would still continue milling and would eventually be forced to choose to exile it in order to prevent an infinite loop. If they had a way to stop the combo like a enchantment destruction spell they could mill everything but the nexus, destroy the RiP and then have it as their only card left.

Quote from HandsomeP »

Colorless mana is not "many of any color" so if Kozilek, the Great Distortion is your commander, even though it has colorless mana in its color identity, Command Tower would not produce colorless mana since it's restricted to colored mana production, is that correct?

Correct. Colorless mana isn't a color of mana and as a result cannot be created by lands that create mana of any color such as Command Tower or City of Brass.

Lifeline only checks if a card is a creature when that creature dies. So it would return in your scenario, but it would be just an artifact and not a creature.

Yes Lifeline workds the same for commanders as any other creature so long as you don't send it to the command zone.

They aren't super exciting, but they are about as exciting as most of the other land cycles really, Battle lands, Cycling Duals, Depletion lands, manaless filters (Mossfire Valley) Pain lands, Tribal duals, the shadows of innistrad ones (Port Town).

My only real problem is that they haven't finished the cycle yet.

The ability counts all Faeries you control at the time of resolution including Spellstutter Sprite if it is still on the field. If it has been killed or exiled before the ETB ability resolves it will not be counted.

No. Once activated the ability is independent of its source and will resolve even if elder is exiled.

They still draw. The draw ability only checks once if it should trigger (at the beginning of the end step) and after that the player who it triggered under will draw a card no matter who is monarch at the time of resolution.

Quote from genini2 »

If we don't use results from people like Duke or Burkheart where do we draw the line. Do we have a list of players that we don't use results from if they succeed and if they scrub out should we count the result as double or something. The idea that in a tournament filled with the best players in the world we are going to ignore results because the player is good is just bonkers to me.

There are some critics that will never be satisfied with any level of results. Unless the data matches their experience and views, they will find reasons to ignore and undermine it. An excellent example of this was the recent GP. It immediately validated to many Modern critics all the problems they had with the format. Never mind that it was a single event over an otherwise super healthy stretch of the format. That one event was all they needed. But all the other evidence was easy to throw out. MTGO? "Incomplete picture, still linear." SCG? "Glorified FNM, not representative." Smaller regional and local events? "Not competitive enough, not representative." The PT? "Too few rounds, too influenced by draft." We do not see the same criticisms and skepticism for events that support the "Modern too linear/bad/unfun" narrative.

It's the same annoying dissonance we see when players say "I want high-skill decks to win in this format" and then say later "This deck takes too much skill to win with and isn't viable." Again, the issue is not the format. It's a vocal subset of critics who readily discount evidence against their views but eagerly support any cases that validate their views.

I think there are legitimate issues we can talk about with Modern. It's by no means a perfect format. But the way some of the critics talk, we would think it was back in September 2016 again. The lack of measured criticism of the current format shows that some people will just never be happy until they get a very specific wish fulfilled, whether that's a ban, an unban, a deck being viable, a deck no longer being viable, etc. Thankfully, as I am sure we will see next Monday, those highly specific criticisms don't matter because Wizards is clearly not on board with them. That was the case in October 2017 and we'll see if it's the case Monday.

Quote from genini2 »

DRS was absolutely the allstar. BBE on t3 vs BBE on t4 is huge in a t4 format.

And Liliana of the Veil on turn 2
And let's not forget a Grim Lavamancer
Oh and also a Ghost-Lit Redeemer
All the while these abilities are an upgraded Scrabbling Claws

Yeah, Deathrite Shaman is god damn stupid. If people ever wanted to know what a 1 mana planeswalker would look like, well there you go.

Quote from h0lydiva »

A deck wins a PT, 2 GPs and some top8s while being played by 3 guys and a dog worldwide. And providing a completely miserable watching experience in the process. And then people talk about possible bans.

Fixed.

You just described UWx Control.

Quote from void_nothing »

The answer is in the layers system. Ensoul Artifact is a type-changing effect, in layer 4. Overwhelming Splendor is power-and-toughness setting, layer 7b. Since the Splendor effect always applies last, the creature is 1/1 and has no abilities.

That's actualy incorrect. Both Ensoul Artifact's ability and Overwhelming Splendor's ability create several effects, that apply in different layers. EA has type changing and power/toughness setting, while Splendor has ability adding/removing and power/toughness setting. For the parts that apply in the same layer (power/toughness setting), time stamp matters. So the later of the two enchantments's time stamps wins out on power/tougness.

Quote from BadMcFadden »

Also if you think seas claim or spreading seas kill eldrazi, tron, and valakut I have some distressing news for you. They are speed bumps vs tron, worthless vs valakut, and basically worthless vs temple.

Saying "play blood moon" would be like removing cage, surgical, leyline of the void and grafdiggers cage from the format and telling people if they want to beat gy decks "stop *****ing and play white for rip".

Land destruction is mostly hot garbage - which is generally fine, but when top tier strategies exploit that fact maybe wizards could get creative and add some more options that dont suck (and actually work reliably) to allow people to fight those strategies when they choose to

Honestly, I would be 100% on the "print good land hate" circle jerk if we were still in the midst of Eldrazi-Winter. I mean, before Eldrazi Winter the community as a whole had a collective hate-boner for Tron decks. It may not have been on these forums, but I remember plenty of people begging for the Tron lands, or Karn to get banned. And unfortunately, Eldrazi-Winter rolling around just made that hate-boner grow, even after Eye of Ugin got itself banned from the format.

Like I honestly don't understand all the hate these decks get.

Let's take Titanshift. What is the fastest, most amazing draw it can get? Turn 1 suspend Search for Tomorrow, turn 2, suspend 2 SFT, turn 4, Scapeshift for 18 damage? For starters, even if you are on the draw that gives you three turns to interact with your opponent before they go off, and even then unless you have fetched, shocked, or been bolted (which admittedly will have happened in most cases) that isn't enough damage to kill you.

Now what about Eldrazi-Tron? I think everyone agrees that the double Eldrazi Temple into turn 2 TKS opener is mean and unfair. But so is Robots playing out their entire hand turn 1 and then using Cranial Plating to attack you with a 6/1 Vault Skirge on turn 2. I'd argue both of those scenarios happen an equal number of times. You can have games where Affinity kills you on turn 2 or 3 and not even being able to cast both ends of an Ancient Grudge or having a Stony Silence would have saved you. But Eldrazi Tron is the problem because it plays good synergy with midrange cards?

I think people are trying to play fair decks that don't work in the Modern format and getting punished for it. People like to draw some parallels between Modern and Legacy, so why don't we dip our toes in. In Legacy you have some degenerate combos using cards like Reanimate, Show and Tell, the entirety of the Storm mechanic, Dredge, etc. There are a lot of unfair things going on in Legacy. Any deck that wants to play close to fair Magic needs to prepare itself for this unfair Magic. As such basically every fair deck is in some way blue so it can run Force of Will. In Legacy it's basically, "If you want to play fair Magic, you have to play FoW or you are so much more likely to lose to the unfair stuff."

Thoughtseize is Modern's Force of Will. Why do you think Grixis Death's Shadow is such a good deck? It takes full advantage of the best tool Modern has to control the unfair garbage your opponent is trying to pull off. It definitely helps that the deck has Serum Visions and Thought Scour to help with drawing more action, but the main crux of it is that the deck runs a lot of ways to interact with their opponent before they can do their unfair crap.

Now I can hear a bunch of you at your keyboards already, "LEGACY HAS WASTELAND!!!" Cool beans. Legacy ALSO has City of Traitors and Eye of Ugin isn't banned. You bet your rear end I'd think Modern needed at least something maybe just a little less powerful than Wasteland if both of those were in Modern. You can't compare Legacy's land-hate to Moderns as a way to justify why we need better ones in Modern especially when the lands that need hating in Legacy are so much more powerful.

I'll leave you with a final thought. Against Dredge, or Affinity, they can still play magic when you throw down a Rest in Peace or Stony Silence. Their decks might have been greatly hampered, but they can still play the game. When you destroy the mana base of a deck focusing on cards that cost 5+ mana, they just can't play the game. They can't play magic. So there is a definite difference between why land hate should exist versus hate for other types of permanents, and how strong it should be.

My thoughts may be all over the place but here is my philosophy on Modern.
1) If you aren't being unfair you should be running Thoughtseize and other ways to disrupt your opponent
2) If you aren't doing #1 you are trying to kill your opponent before they can be unfair
3) If you aren't doing #1 or #2, your deck must be trying to do something inherently unfair
4) If none of the above are true, you are probably just playing a bad deck

Quote from Billiondegree »

Twin would actually be good for the meta.

It would force Eldrazi Tron to play more Dismember or Warping Wail in the mainboard.

It would cause dredge to sacrifice some of its speed in order to interact with the combo.

Even affinity would need to run more removal, even if that means maxing out on Galvanic Blasts.

So basically, every deck would end up playing more interaction which is a great thing IMO

First off cards like Dismember essentially always sucked against Twin which runs peek and MD dispel to combat/play around any removal that isn't Abrupt Decay.

Second I don't think that the race to your death type decks like Affinty or Dredge would be inclined to play anymore interaction, more likely it would favor attempting to run the fastest possible MD configuration and hope to race the combo game one. When Pod was banned and Twin was still legal both Burn and Infect rose to T1 simply because they could easily race the combo and the actual deck that policed them was gone.

Twin wasn't a real police deck it was a instant win button for a deck that otherwise isn't able to actually compete, it was far better against other fair decks and simply provided means for beating non-interactive decks with the possibility of T4 instant win. When you play against decks that are looking to mindlessly race the best plan was to dig for the combo and kill them before they kill you, Remand, Cryptic and crew are just as bad now as they had been then in those types of match ups.

If I play Orbs of Warding in response to a Hedron Crab's landfall would the owner of the Hebron Crab have to mill the top 3 cards instead of me? Sene I cant be the target of spells and obillities my opponents control and it's an automatic "target player" ability when the land enters not a "you may" ability?

Moved to Rulings
-ThatRedwood

The two cards I would want to see (for decks I would like to see if they could be competitive), would be cabal therapy, to help provide dredge decks a sac outlet that is a bit harder to hose than current ones. Secondly, Land Grant which would help low-mana charbelcher decks.

Neither card seems completely bonkers, but provide support to fringe decks (though I imagine cabal therapy would be used in a lot more BX decks.

Quote from blacklotus »

I see the power of this guy in Modern
Good finisher and hard to deal with it ... dies to removal and can tap forever in a tokens deck but the rest its pretty solid guy

In most decks, either Tombstalker, Grave Titan, Batterskull, or Abyssal Persecutor is stronger than it. And even those usually don't make the cut because of the powerful finishers in other splashed colors. In other colors, it is outclassed not just by those cards, but by Baneslayer Angel, Sun Titan, Blood Baron of Vizkopa, Thundermaw Hellkite, Gideon Jura, Stormbreath Dragon, Elspeth Knight-Errant, Restoration Angel, Tarmogoyf, Sigarda Host of Herons, Inferno Titan, and any number of other cards.