MTG Keywords: Double Strike
Magic the Gathering is a complex game (and that’s why we love it). These MTG Keywords articles will help you make sense of the 150+ keywords you’ll find on Magic cards. These articles are designed for players just starting out with Magic, and are hopefully useful primers for more experienced players too.
Welcome to our fourth MTG Keywords article — get ready for a breakdown of double strike!
To understand double strike we need to understand one thing (ok two things).
There are two phases to dealing combat damage. First strike damage is dealt first, then regular combat damage.
Aside: We’ll cover first strike in another article, even if that seems unnecessary, because our goal is to write about every single keyword. We’ll also naturally mention keywords in other articles (like we talked about the interaction between deathtouch and first strike previously).
The most important thing to know about the two phases is that creatures can die during the first strike damage phases, before the regular phases happens.
Well look who’s back. Typhoid Rats has deathtouch, but crucially doesn’t have first, or double strike.
We looked previously at how Typhoid Rats could take down an attacking Emrakul, the Aeons Torn in our article about deathtouch, with the help of a spell that gave the rats first strike.
If the Fencing Ace and Typhoid Rats were to face off in combat, then the Fencing Ace would come out on top, being able to deal lethal damage to the rats in the first strike damage phase. When we arrive at the regular damage phase, the rat simply isn’t there! It died, way back in the first strike damage phase.
Double strike doesn’t appear on that many creature cards, all told. There’s around 65 creatures which have or grant double strike — quite few of these don’t actually have double strike, but can grant it to themselves and/or other creatures if certain conditions are met.
Here’s a couple examples of double strike being conditionally granted if certain conditions are met. Veteran Cathar requires you to pay 4{W} to give a target human double strike, whereas Kor Duelist has double strike if you’ve equipped the creature.
Keeping track of which creatures have which keywords at any given point is one of the trickiest parts of playing Magic. Sure there’s more complex interactions out there, but for casual and kitchen table Magic, navigating complex board states is part of the challenge — and fun! — of playing the game. Of course, playing Magic Online is great because the system shows which creatures have temporary abilities, and removes them if the effect would wear off.
For the remainder of the article we’re going to take a look at how double strike interacts with another keyword that we’ll look at later in the series: Trample.
Double Strike and Trample
Dealing double strike damage is, on the face of things, fairly simple. You get two damage phases and usually you can just double up the creature’s power to work out how much damage to assign, right? For the most part, that’s a useful shortcut.
However, what if a creature you control has double strike and trample? What happens when an opponent’s creature blocks your creature? Let’s break it down:
Let’s say you control a creature:
And you declare attackers. Your opponent (skipping a few intricacies here) declares blockers, blocking your double striker with Ankle Shanker (let’s forget that this would be a bad trade for your opponent).
But, aha!
Combat trick! We were prepared for our creature to be blocked in this way, and when we receive priority back from our opponent declaring blockers, we cast Temur Battle Rage on our Avatar of the Resolute. Our Avatar now has reach, trample and double strike!
What happens now?
Lethal damage has to be assigned to all blocking creatures before you can do excess damage to a player (aka trample). So in this case we’d have to assign 2 damage to Ankle Shanker to kill it. Here’s the key thing to remember: our creature has double strike, meaning we kill the blocking creature in the first strike damage phase. We also have an extra 1 damage going over the top of the blocking creature’s toughness, which we can deal to the opponent, because our creature has trample. Moving onto to the regular damage step, there’s no blocking creature, therefore we can assign all damage to our opponent, for a total of 4 damage.
Let’s go over that one more time, in steps:
- First strike damage is assigned. We assign 2 damage to Ankle Shanker, and an excess 1 damage to our opponent.
- Ankle Shanker dies
- Regular damage is assigned. Even though Avatar has been blocked, Ankle Shanker is long dead and we can assign all 3 points of damage to our opponent.
So, we killed our opponent’s creature and dealt 4 damage in total to our opponent. Pretty sweet!
But wait. What about the same exchange, without trample? Because our creature has been blocked, even if we kill the blocking creature during first strike damage, our creature cannot deal any excess damage to the opponent; we’d need to have trample for that, as per the example above.
Step by step:
- First strike damage is assigned. We assign 3 damage to Ankle Shanker
- Ankle Shanker dies
- Regular damage is assigned, but we can’t deal any damage to our opponent because Avatar has already been blocked.
Phew! We really hope that you followed that one. Once you’re comfortable with the idea of these two damage steps it gets easier to work things through step by step.
That’s probably a good place to leave it now for double strike. We could walk through a whole host of examples with other keywords but in interests of keeping things straightforward, we’ll sign off for now.
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