Replacement Effects Step by Step

Identify the action or state change being replaced. If death becomes healing, exhausting and Recall, the original death did not happen. “As” replacements can instead add an action to the event, such as revealing a card and adding resources together. Always execute the specified alternative, not the original event followed by its replacement.

Distinguish this general system from the capitalized Replace game action. Replace exchanges an object for a token with special inherited identity. A replacement effect is the broader rule system for changing events; a death replacement does not automatically use the token procedure.

When several replacements apply to the same event, the controller of the affected object, the player who controls it, orders them. If the affected subject is a player, that player orders them; for an uncontrolled battlefield, the turn player decides. Apply each only when it qualifies for the event as it is being handled.

A unit has Guardian Angel attached and an active Tactical Retreat protection. Its controller can apply Tactical Retreat to the proposed death first: heal, Exhaust and Recall the unit instead. There is no remaining death for Guardian Angel to replace, so the Equipment is not killed by that replacement. If Guardian Angel applies first, its specified Equipment kill and rescue replace the unit’s death. Tactical Retreat is not an additional rescue after a death that has already been replaced. Ordering matters because both options are competing to change the same event.

One instruction killing two units produces simultaneous death events. Two successive Kill instructions are not simultaneous merely because the same spell contains both. For simultaneous events, assess each event separately, while ordering the replacements with the same controller as that controller chooses. Different controllers’ simultaneous replacement executions follow turn order. Replacement instructions execute before the simultaneous events left unmodified.

If two units die together and one is saved by a death replacement, carry out that replacement’s healing, exhausting and Recall before completing the other unit’s unmodified death. Do not move the second death ahead of the replacement simply to make another card’s replacement ability available in the Trash. Here, a replacement’s source is the card or game object providing it. A source that enters the game area where its replacement is active only through that same simultaneous death was not there early enough to replace the other death.

A source can apply an active replacement to qualifying events simultaneous with its departure from that active zone. That differs from arriving there too late. Each replacement may be applied in only one sequence to a simultaneous set, even when it can cover several qualifying events within that sequence. It cannot start over after another replacement changes its location.

The Core Rules’ Soraka example makes this concrete. Soraka and smaller friendly units at her battlefield and at Base would die together; Guardian Angel is attached to Soraka. Apply Soraka’s protection first and it can save the qualifying units at her current battlefield. Saving and recalling Soraka afterward does not let that same protection start a second sequence for units at Base. Apply Guardian Angel first instead and Soraka’s later protection is assessed from Base. The order changes the qualifying location; it does not give her two uses of one simultaneous-event sequence.

A replacement inherits applicable changes already applied to the event it replaces. If an effect would play a Gold token Exhausted and a replacement adds another copy of that token, the additional copy also enters Exhausted. If the replacement instead draws a card, the Exhausted modification cannot apply to drawing and is ignored. Linked modifications referring to the replaced event can also carry over as the rules specify.

Each replacement can apply only once to an event and to the events or actions replacing it. If one replacement produces a new event that another replacement changes, track which have already applied. Do not repeatedly reuse the same replacement to loop between the alternatives. Limits such as once each turn remain additional restrictions, and declining an optional replacement does not use its allowance.