This page is current as of Comprehensive Rules April 2011. Please direct your feedback to: The Staff

Not everything that's able to affect a game has a physical representation. Abilities can be as powerful as spells, but they only live on the stack for a brief moment before disappearing; while they share many similarities with spells, they also have peculiarities and a strict (and important) categorization.

However, there's something even more impalpable than abilities. Effects are the ghost of spells and abilities past, lingering results of objects that resolved. We'll learn to differentiate between an ability and its effect, and then explore the different types of effects and the minutiae and pitfalls each one possesses - since everything in the game is or has an effect, except perhaps vanilla creatures, this chapter is bigger than it appears.^[1]

There's a class of effects that has a tendency to throw judges running in panic: continuous effects, the interaction thereof has historically been a focal point of judge testing, but as we'll see it's not a difficult topic if treated systematically and with a bit of - nudge nudge wink wink - humility.

Footnotes

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	Game Structure	Main Page	The Game in Slow Motion

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