Hat Tip to Oktagon Devs: Cast Triggers & Disabled Creatures

jtwood

There is a lot of negativity on these boards, so I thought it might be nice to call out a moment where I was impressed with some great dev work.

Short version: "When you cast" triggers work even if the card is a creature being cast as a reinforcement of a disabled creature

Specific example: My Hypnox was disabled on the board. I cast a 2nd one, and the cast trigger still cleared out Greg's hand.

Why this caught my attention: I think most of us know this... When a creature is disabled, the "Enter the battlefield" trigger won't go off when you cast a reinforcement. As I was casting this 2nd Hypnox, my default expectation was that the disabled creature would suppress the trigger from the new creature. But it didn't, and I am glad Oktagon got this little subtlety right.

Good work!

Tremayne

@jtwood - great to see some praise for the devs. Nicely done.

Something about your description, didn’t ring true. In my experience cards that are disabled do not execute their card text. So I checked the FAQ, which states:

Disable
Creatures on the battlefield which are affected by the Disable effect, cannot attack or block. They have all their abilities prevented from working. ...

I’m pretty sure that cards with the keyword “cast” does not overrule disable (which is definitely not the case with ETB), but it is possible that the keyword have been changed without notification (or can someone direct me to that announcement?).

What you have spotlighted, now leaves the players with an exhaustive testing in order to verify that a number of cards with similar wording also follows this pattern. Sadly it is extremely tiresome to play matches hoping for the opponent to have disable effects and time it correctly in a match to verify correct behaviour.

jtwood

I assume cast should work because it’s in your hand and not disabled there. It’s only disabled in play. 

Another reason to want a real rule book, though 

Asylamb

From my understanding, "cast" means play by paying the mana cost. And since 2nd Hypnox was cast, it should trigger. Basically, casting is what they call "be on stack" in paper, not "on the battlefield" yet. Then the casting part resolves and the creature enters the battlefield/comes into play where it gets disabled.

Asylamb

On the other hand, cards like "Pursued Whale" that read "When this creature enters the battlefield: [enter effect]" would not trigger if disabled upon ETB.