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In Dungeons & Dragons, taking the initiative is what allows you to take your turns before your opponents. ♚Everyone loves to have the initiative, but, at the end of the day, only one player can go first.
While 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Magic: The Gathering’s take on the mechanic doesn’t determine turn orders, it allows one player to stand apart from the rest and be the game's focal point. At least, until someone else decided to try and take it from you. Commander Legends: Battle for Baldur’s Gate is full of cards that helps you take the initiative, so what exactly is it?
What Is The Initiative?
Magic: The Gathering’s initiative combines two previous mechanics: monarch and venturing into the dungeon.
168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Like monarch, initiative is something a player can introduce to the game, but is then stolen by other players each turn. The initiative doesn’t exist at the start of a game; instead, it is added to it by the first player who plays a card that reads “take the initiative”. Fro𝄹m there, it remains in play until the end of the game.
Also like monarch, initiative can be stolen through two ways: playing another card that has “take the initiative”, or dealing combat damage to a player who already has it. As soon as you connect a creature with their face, the initiative passes to you and it triggers immediately. Keep in mind that this is limited only to combat damage, meaning any other kind of damage or life loss won’t cause an opponent ⛎to lose the initiative.
Though creating and taking the initiative is very monarch-esque, the effect itself is a 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:new dungeon, such as those introduced in Adventures in the Forgotten Realms. When you take the initiative, and at the beginning of each of your upkeeps for as long as you have it, you venture into a dungeon known as the Undercity.
Like all dungeons, the Undercity isn’t really a card. It doesn’t sit on the battlefield, in exile, or anywhere else. It’s merely a series of triggers (‘rooms’) laid out in a certain order, and you can choose which trigger happens next. For instance, the first room of the Undercity allows you to tutor for a basic land, reveal it and put it into your hand. Over the next few rooms, you can scry, goad, draw cards, and eventually reveal the top ten cards of your library and put a creature from among them onto the battlefield with thr🍒ee +1/+1 counters on it.
Once you’ve finished the Undercity, if you still have the initiative, the cycle starts again from the first room. If a player takes it from you, they don’t take your progress through the dungeon, they only start their own version from the first room instead. You’ll resume your journey through the Undercity as soon as you reclaim the initiative from an opponent.
Initiative Vs. Venturing
Despite all being dungeons, some incredibly weiℱrd interactions between initiative and the older venturing mechanic can be diffic𝔍ult to understand.
When you take the initiative, the only dungeon you can start is the Undercity. However, if you’ve already started another dungeon, you will instead move to the next room of that dungeon. You have no choice in this; you can’t choose to start an Undercity while also having a Lost Mine of Phandelver, Dungeon of the Mad Ma🌃ge, or Tomb of Annihilation out – you must complete the Lost Mine before you get to go to the Undercity.
If you play an older Adventures in the Forgotten Realm card that reads “Venture into the Dungeon”, you cannot start the Undercity – you can only start one of the other three dungeons. If you’ve already gained the initiative and then venture into the dungeon, you can choose to move into the next room of the Undercity. This works🐲 even if you’ve since lost the initiativ♓e, as you don’t lose the dungeon by losing the initiative, you just lose the trigger on each upkeep to move through it or start a new one.
What Colour Is The Initiative?
The initiative is a good way to unjam games that have reached a stalemate, as it’s available almost equally in every colour and encourages🍌 🎃combat between players.
That being said, 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:blue and black’s draf꧋t archetype in Commander Legends: Battle f൩or Baldur’s Gate is built around the init🐠iative, and therefore it does have slightly more cards that care about it than the other colours.
Counting every card that mentions the initiative (which includes cards like Imoen, Mystic Tricker and Safana, Calimport Cutthroat, who care about it without giving it), 28 cards use the mechanic: five white, four blue, six black, four red, three green, and three colourless. There is also one multicolour card, the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Dimir (blue/black) commander Rilsa Rael, Kingpin.
