How does The Golden Throne work in this situation?
Asked by OdinPlaysGames 11 months ago
So in my last commander game using my Bane, Lord of Darkness suicide deck, I came across a situation where I had The Golden Throne, Wall of Blood, and Soul Conduit all on the battlefield. The objective is to reduce my life total to zero, allow the trigger for the golden throne to go on the stack, then respond by switching life totals with an opponent before The Golden Throne trigger resolves, killing them. We had some lengthy discussion about how it works and came to the conclusion that The Golden Throne's trigger is a state-based effect and cannot be responded to. since it will continuously see that I am losing the game and I cannot take more actions until the trigger resolves. I looked everywhere for a ruling on this and could find none. I think we made the right call, but I'm not sure if it was for the right reasons and I am dying to know a judge's answer. Let me know what you guys think.
OdinPlaysGames says... #2
Delphen7 Thanks! exactly what I needed to hear.
Side note, I lost this game after attempting to switch life anyway since I was up against Teysa life-drain. Not much I could do about it, but still wanted to know how this worked for future reference.
Delphen7 says... Accepted answer #1
You are correct.
Golden Throne is a replacement effect - it replaces a player losing the game with their life total becoming 1. So when you pay 1 life to Wall of Blood, going to 0 life, the game will check state based actions, and see that you have 0 life. The game tries to make you then lose, but the Throne intervenes immediately and sets your life total to 1. No player can respond to state based actions, and so no one can respond to the Golden Throne replacement.
However, 1 is still a very good life total to swap :D
June 19, 2023 2:37 p.m.