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CardName: Relentless Flames Cost: 3RR Type: Sorcery Pow/Tgh: / Rules Text: Relentless Flames's deals lethal damage to each creature. Creatures dealt damage this way can't be regenerated this turn. Flavour Text: A flash, a roar, and then oblivion. Set/Rarity: Infinite Potential Well Rare

Relentless Flames
{3}{r}{r}
 
 R 
Sorcery
Relentless Flames's deals lethal damage to each creature. Creatures dealt damage this way can't be regenerated this turn.
A flash, a roar, and then oblivion.
Created on 31 Mar 2013 by dude1818

History: [-]

2013-03-31 18:31:11: dude1818 created the card Relentless Flames

Red's sweepers are differentiated from white's and black's by being damage based. Even Blasphemous Act, which kills almost everything a Wrath of God does, still technically deals damage.

I'm not sure if this wording is legal, but I love the aesthetics of it. If it dealt "a lethal amount of damage," it would work, but I don't like that.

Probably would need a FAQ for things that care about how much damage they've been dealt - but deathtouch works, so I don't see why this can't.

I suppose Healing Salve still stops this? Hmm... maybe not. It's doing lethal damage... not damage equal to toughness. So if I have a Serra, and cast Healing Salve on it, Relentless Flames will now deal 7 damage to that creature (3 of which will be prevented). Tricky.

No, I think Healing Salve works. This isn't aware of any prevention abilities when it determines what's "lethal damage".

"Lethal damage" is a very imprecise term; it's defined in the rules as "damage greater than or equal to a creature's toughness". So if an effect says it's dealing "lethal damage" to a Trained Armodon, all you can say with certainty is that it's trying to deal an amount of damage in the range [3, inf). Does Healing Salve prevent enough to save it? You don't know! (But with probability 1, the answer is no.)

I know R&D said they want to bring more nondeterminism to the game, but this would be ridiculous.

I think it is defined, isn't it? When working out how much damage you have to use up on the first defending, before you get to hit the next one / trample though.

I think it works like, you can assign any amount of damage to the first creature, but only once it's assigned lethal damage can you assign damage to the second creature. So you normally assign exactly lethal damage to the first creature, but you don't have to.

So the natural meaning of "deal lethal damage" would be "the minimum amount of damage that would be lethal". And the rules could be tweaked to say that, but I'm not sure if that would cause problems or not.

When I first saw it, I thought it might be like deathtouch, defining a smaller amount of damage to count as lethal, even though that doesn't quite make sense.

Alternately, it could say "deal damage to each creature equal to its toughness".

Or you could just say "deathtouch; deal 1 damage to each creature" but that feels more black.

Or it could just be blasphemous act...

I realised Blasphemous Act kills almost everything, but looking at gatherer, the only creatures with a listed toughness of >13 are Autochthon Wurm, Worldspine Wurm (where killing it doesn't help much) and Emrakul, the Aeons Torn (where the amount of damage doesn't matter because it has protection). There will be a few more X/X creatures and boosted creatures, but I hadn't realised how close 13 was to infinity (other than for stuffy doll).

"Lethal damage" is not a value. You can't deal "lethal damage". It's actually a condition that is checked when state-base actions are checked. That's why deathtouch works: it basically just turns on this condition.

Go with Jack V's suggestion: "deal damage to each creature equal to its toughness".

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