Life link and Killing Blow

OrionKannan

I have noticed that, when one of my creatures with life link deals a killing blow to my opponent, my Hit Points to not go up. Everything else with Life Link works fine, just not the killing blow.

loroku

I assumed this was because the instant the game is over all other effects are ignored, and the damage happens before the effect. Hard to say if this is a bug or intentional but I've also seen this happen.

BlackSheep101

As a strict interpretation of the Magic game rules, that is how it should work. In the card game, there's no point in regaining life after you've won because life totals don't carry over between matches. In this game, you could argue that because the player's life total still exists even though the opponent has been defeated, then lifelink should apply on the last attack of the match. So probably not a bug, but something that would be a player-friendly change.

ChrisTot

BlackSheep101 wrote:

As a strict interpretation of the Magic game rules, that is how it should work. In the card game, there's no point in regaining life after you've won because life totals don't carry over between matches. In this game, you could argue that because the player's life total still exists even though the opponent has been defeated, then lifelink should apply on the last attack of the match. So probably not a bug, but something that would be a player-friendly change.

This also works in our favor though. Orbs of Warding for example, will not gain the life if the initial damage would kill your opponent.

Rootbreaker

The game doesn't use the Magic rules in tons of ways. The magic rules are basically just an inspiration for this game.

A few small things that work differently:

Lifelink in the game works as a trigger.
Hexproof is far more powerful, stopping things that don't specifically say they target.
Triggers seem to look at the game state after the triggering action happens.

Example 1: Casting act of treason on a creature with a spellcast trigger (Jhessian Thief, Ringwarden Owl, Soulblade Djinn, Willbender)

Example 2: Casting act of treason on a creature on Hangarback Walker, then sacrificing it with fiery conclusion gives the owner of the hangarback walker the tokens, not the red spellcaster

Obviously there are some bigger things like damage sticking around and attacking and blocking working automatically with aggressive/defender/reach/vigilance.