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InMagic: The Gathering, the second main phase is something of a safe zone. You’ve made it through combat unscathed, and are now ready to play some spells and advance your board state.
With Duskmourn: House Of Horror, the second main phase became even better with the introduction of survival. If you may get these survivors into the phase alive, you’ll be drowning in value.
What Is Survival?
Survival is a word used to describetriggered abilitiesthat activate under two conditions:
It’s as simple as that. If a creature with survival is tapped whenyou move into your second main phase, its survival ability will trigger. This could be anything, ranging from putting a +1/+1 counter on a creature, exiling cards off the top of your library, or even playing a permanent for free.
While the implication is that a creature has swung in combat and survived,it doesn’t matter whya creature with survival is tapped. It could be combat, but there are plenty of other ways to tap a creature down that don’t put it at quite as much risk.
It’s important that the creature is tappedat the start of the second main phase. You can’t get to this point in your turn and then tap it to trigger survival, as survival check would have already passed. The latest point for you to tap a creature with survival is theend of the combat phase.
How To Use Survival
As mentioned, how you tap a creature doesn’t matter. Combat is the obvious way, as attacking will tap the creature. But this has the downside ofputting your creature at risk of being blocked and killed.
In Standard, there are currently three reliable ways to tap down a creature outside of specific, individual cards:using it to convoke a spell, crewing a Vehicle, or using the saddle ability on a Mount.These are all free to do, which effectively means survival triggers a free if you have the way to tap them.
you may’t tap a creature just for the sake of it. It has to be either part of the cost of a spell or ability, or as part of its resolution.
Outside of Standard, the ways to tap a creature only increase. Maybeyou turn them into a mana dorkwith something like Battery Bearer, Cryptolith Rite, or Citanul Hierophants, or tap them as part of the cost of an ability likeSpringleaf Drum’s.
One important thing to remember is that this ability specifically triggers on thesecond main phase, rather thanthe older wording ofpostcombat main phase. If you gain extra combat and main phases, such as through an Aggravated Assault, your survival abilitieswill only trigger once, on the second main phase that turn.
The Best Survival Cards
Every card with survival in Duskmourn hasthe Survivor creature type, which could be enough to make Survivor typal decks a viable thing in the future. Until then, though, there are more than a few great survival triggers worth tapping down for.
Theabsolute star of the mechanic isKona, Rescue Beastie. Thanks to the myriad ways of becoming tapped without attacking in combat, Kona can throw out permanents for free with alarming regularity. That permanent could be another creature, or it could be something much scarier, like an Omniscience.
Reluctant Role Model is also worth looking at. Tap it down when it enters with aMountor a Vehicle, and on turn two you could have a2/2 flier. Each turn, it gets better and better as it picks up new abilities, too.
Acrobatic Cheerleader can also get flying just as quickly as Reluctant Role Model, but won’t pick up the extra counters.
Cynical Loner takes a little bit of work andforethought to get you value, but dumping specific cards into your graveyard can pay off big time. In Commander, having a way to easily get cards like Brawn and Anger online shouldn’t be sniffed at.
