Ambush Permissions and Payment

With Priority, you can use Ambush to play to a battlefield where you control a unit, including during a closed state (while a card is being played or a spell or ability is waiting to resolve). That battlefield need not already be under your control. The presence of your unit provides Ambush’s permission.

At your Base, Ambush supplies no Reaction permission. You may still use your normal play permissions there when they apply. In multiplayer, Ambush does not override the prohibition on entering another two players’ staged or ongoing combat.

Choose the destination and any optional additional costs at their normal step. Ambush itself is permission, not a discount or a readying instruction. Include mandatory additional costs, chosen optional costs, increases and reductions in the total.

Example - Optional ready entry If the unit also has Accelerate and you choose to pay it, that additional cost can make the unit enter ready. Declining Accelerate is allowed; the Ambush unit normally enters exhausted. The presence of Reaction timing alone does not make it ready.

Suppose you have only one unit at the chosen battlefield and the Ambush card requires killing a friendly unit as an additional cost. If you pay by killing that sole unit, the battlefield no longer satisfies Ambush when you finish the choices, costs and legality check that confirm the play.

Without another permission supporting both the destination and timing, the play is illegal. The check-legality step undoes the actions taken to play it and returns the card to its place it came from, such as your hand. You cannot keep the invalid play merely because your supporting unit was present when you first announced it. Nor may you knowingly choose a sequence guaranteed to become illegal when a legal alternative is available.

If you can pay the kill cost with a different friendly unit at your Base, the unit at the battlefield remains and Ambush can still support the play. Check the actual card’s cost: a restriction to units at one location may remove that option.

Other permissions can keep a play legal after Ambush stops applying, but they must cover what is still needed. For example, having control of the destination may support a normal own-turn play; it does not by itself supply Reaction during a closed state. Finalization - the steps that confirm the play - is not an opportunity for an opponent to insert a response between your cost payments. Responses follow the normal priority procedure afterward.

Ambush describes playing the unit. It does not give Reaction to every activated ability printed on that unit. Once on the board, an ordinary activated ability (one you choose to use by paying its cost) still uses its usual timing: on its controller’s turn, with no spell or ability waiting on the chain and outside a Showdown (the response sequence for settling a battlefield’s contest or combat), unless its own text grants Action, Reaction or another permission.

Finish the play first, including legality and entry, then process any abilities triggered by playing it. Keep those later abilities separate from the payment decisions that made the Ambush play possible.