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2 months ago ::
Mar 13, 2013 - 12:18PM
#1
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Date Joined:
Aug 19, 2012
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If a creature has lifelink, does the creature have to do damage to the player in order for the player to gain life, or does the creature just have to do damage to a creature the player controls?
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2 months ago ::
Mar 13, 2013 - 12:20PM
#2
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Date Joined:
Oct 29, 2007
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it has to deal damage for its controller to gain life, what it hits is irrelevant (player, creature, planeswalker)
MtG Rules Advisor &
Goth/Industrial/EBM/Indie/Alternative/80's-Wave DJDJ VortexDCI Certified Rules Advisor from July 14, 2009 to July 14, 2012 DCI #5209514320 Wit found in Rules Q&ARPJesus: "Man, screw the rules, I'll play a game of 2HG Archenemy Planechase Emperor EDH draft yet. Once I figure out the rules for it..." Chaikov: "Of course, casual Magic may be played any way your Pokemon group agrees on..." and "It's not logic. It's Magic!" GainsBanding: "I only play online. The Magic Online shuffler is AWESOME!" Ikegami: "one might think [adult cats] would make excellent tokens. The issue, though, is that they are very hard to exile. They return to the battlefield more often than an undying creature." Astarael7: "Does 121.1 imply that players are supposed to wear their poison counters?" Bimmerbot: "If you move the wrong way and [the poison counters] fall, it's a game rule violation" Helluminatus: "Just remember, if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but the oracle text says creature - Bunny , then by god, it's a bunny." MadCow21: "Who are you and what have you done with the real Chaikov?" My Wife's Makeup Artist Page <-- cool stuff - check it out
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2 months ago ::
Mar 13, 2013 - 1:07PM
#3
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Also good to note that any creature deals all of its damage to a creature regardless of that creature's toughness.
If your 4/4 lifelinker is blocked by a 1/1, you will gain 4 life.
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2 months ago ::
Mar 13, 2013 - 1:23PM
#4
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Date Joined:
Aug 19, 2012
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Also good to note that any creature deals all of its damage to a creature regardless of that creature's toughness.
If your 4/4 lifelinker is blocked by a 1/1, you will gain 4 life.
thanks for the replies. I was confused due to the fact that since its called LifeLINK. I couldn't tell if you'd have to do damage to player because of the word "life" being in there, so I figured it turned it into a game of tug of war.
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2 months ago ::
Mar 13, 2013 - 1:29PM
#5
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Date Joined:
Jul 28, 2010
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the link is between you and the creature the best flavor example are Vampires  think of them as draining life when they hit something, and since they are nice little servants they drain the life for their master (you)
proud member of the 2011 community team
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2 months ago ::
Mar 13, 2013 - 1:41PM
#6
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Date Joined:
Sep 16, 2011
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I don't like that metaphor, because it breaches Newton's Second Law of Hemodynamics - that they can actually reimburse you with more life from the creature they drain than the amount of 'life' (for lack of a better word) that creature actually 'contained'. If one unit of power could render it completely lifeless, but you hit it with five times as much force as necessary to kill, how can you draw five units of life from its dessicated corpse? PS the fourth edition printing of El-Hajjaj  really bugs me. I think that's the origin of a great deal of Lifelink misunderstanding. "I saw a card once that specifically said you could not gain more life than the toughness of the creature..."
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2 months ago ::
Mar 13, 2013 - 1:45PM
#7
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Date Joined:
Oct 29, 2007
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"I saw a card once that specifically said you could not gain more life than the toughness of the creature..."
this one? 
btw it still does
MtG Rules Advisor &
Goth/Industrial/EBM/Indie/Alternative/80's-Wave DJDJ VortexDCI Certified Rules Advisor from July 14, 2009 to July 14, 2012 DCI #5209514320 Wit found in Rules Q&ARPJesus: "Man, screw the rules, I'll play a game of 2HG Archenemy Planechase Emperor EDH draft yet. Once I figure out the rules for it..." Chaikov: "Of course, casual Magic may be played any way your Pokemon group agrees on..." and "It's not logic. It's Magic!" GainsBanding: "I only play online. The Magic Online shuffler is AWESOME!" Ikegami: "one might think [adult cats] would make excellent tokens. The issue, though, is that they are very hard to exile. They return to the battlefield more often than an undying creature." Astarael7: "Does 121.1 imply that players are supposed to wear their poison counters?" Bimmerbot: "If you move the wrong way and [the poison counters] fall, it's a game rule violation" Helluminatus: "Just remember, if it looks like a duck, smells like a duck, and quacks like a duck, but the oracle text says creature - Bunny , then by god, it's a bunny." MadCow21: "Who are you and what have you done with the real Chaikov?" My Wife's Makeup Artist Page <-- cool stuff - check it out
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2 months ago ::
Mar 13, 2013 - 1:48PM
#8
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Date Joined:
Sep 16, 2011
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Yeah, but El-Hajjaj was the granddaddy of Lifelink (-like abilties) as a creature ability. And its behaviour now explicitly contradicts the behaviour described in excessive detailed text on the 4e printing of the card.
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2 months ago ::
Mar 13, 2013 - 1:58PM
#9
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Date Joined:
Mar 30, 2011
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But it doesn't contradict the behavior of its other 2 printings... Besides, there are tons of old cards that do things quite different from what was printed on them, because the rules were all kinds of made up and stitched together back then. They often have to make what looks like a functional change to the Oracle text to get a card to function the way it would have under the rules that existed when it was printed. For example, long ago in a distant past, you couldn't respond to triggered abilities, so lands that made you sacrifice another land or itself when it entered (e.g., Lotus Vale) weren't totally broken as printed. Also, it used to be that mana abilties had to be activated before you announced a spell, so Lion's Eye Diamond could work as a normal mana ability without the "only any time you could cast an instant" clause being necessary.
Change is part of the game. And I doubt that many people these days are confused about lifelink because of El-Hajjâj... I mean, how terrible is a 1/1 lifelink for 1BB these days anyway? :P
Level 2 DCI Judge
Orange, CA
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2 months ago ::
Mar 13, 2013 - 2:17PM
#10
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Date Joined:
Sep 16, 2011
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It's the casual old-timey players who have tattered pot-addled memories of how the game worked in 1995 and are resistant to accepting change. They see Lifelink and they think "Oh, it's just like how ol El-Hajjaj works! I remember that card with the bloated textbox telling me in so many words how that ability couldn't cause you to gain more life than the toughness of the creature it damaged, and I assume that's how all lifelink still works."
Of course, these aren't Rules Forum visitor types. They're over-the-kitchen-table-every-couple-months types.
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