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So… Alms Collector is the talk of the town today, at least as far as the questions in my inbox are concerned.

Everyone is wondering how Alms Collector works with various and sundry different cards and effects, and I’m going to do my best to explain, but please remember that my answers are based on the current rules, which may change by the time that Commander 2017 is released. That said, Alms Collector seems to work just fine under the current rules. 

Alms Collector’s second ability is a replacement effect that replaces an opponent drawing multiple cards with that opponent and you each drawing one card instead. The player whose turn it is will always draw their card first. For example, if your opponent casts Divination and you control Alms Collector as Divination resolves, you and your opponent will each draw one card instead of your opponent drawing two cards.

Some of my readers that are more rules-savvy will know that cards are only ever actually drawn one at a time, though, so how can Alms Collector’s ability know multiple cards are being drawn? The answer to this question is that Alms Collector looks at the larger instruction to draw multiple cards and applies its replacement effect to the batch of draws before any individual draws actually happen.

You like chocolate, don’t ya?

As an analogy for this interaction, think of eating a chocolate bar that can be sectioned into squares, e.g. a Hershey bar for my American readers. A spell like Divination is telling you to eat a two-square piece of chocolate, but when you go to eat it, you actually eat the two-square bar one square at a time.

Alms Collector looks at the size of the bar you’re about to eat, not the size of the squares going into your mouth, seeing as you can only ever eat one square at a time. Alms Collector steps in any time you would try to eat a bar of two or more squares and instead gives one square to you and one to your opponent. (It keeps the extras for itself. Greedy cat.)

So what about other replacement effects, then?

So this is where a lot of people’s brains begin to melt. On their own, cards like Thought Reflection or Notion Thief are reasonable enough, but when more than one replacement effect wants to modify the same event, things really start to get complicated.

Normally, when there are multiple replacement effects trying to modify the same event, the affected player or the controller of the affected object gets to choose the order in which to apply replacement effects. There are a few exceptions for things like copy effects or weird cards like Gather Specimens, but these situations are rare and don’t apply to the situation at hand with our friendly Alms Collector. It’s also important to note that each replacement effect only gets to modify the same event once.

For example, if you control Thought Reflection and your opponent controls Notion Thief and you would draw a card from the resolution of a cycling ability then you choose which effect to apply first. If you apply Thought Reflection’s effect first, then you would draw two cards but Notion Thief’s ability is still applicable to each of those draws and so your opponent will draw two cards instead of you. If you apply Notion Thief’s effect first instead, then you’re no longer drawing a card and Thought Reflection’s ability no longer applies and your opponent will draw only one card.

What does apply here is a new rule introduced with the rules changes for Amonkhet which states that replacement effects that modify a larger event have to be applied before any replacement effects that modify smaller parts of that effect. (This change was made mostly so that situations such as embalming Vizier of Many Faces while you controlled Anointed Procession would allow you to copy two different creatures with the tokens.)

With respect to Alms Collector, this rule means that as soon as multiple cards would be drawn by the opponent, Alms Collector’s ability has to applied before any other effect that modifies the individual card draws, such as Notion Thief or Thought Reflection.

For example, you control Thought Reflection and your opponent controls Alms Collector and you cast Divination. When Divination goes to resolve, Alms Collector’s replacement effect has to be applied to the “draw two cards” instruction before Thought Reflection can modify the individual draws. This means that Divination is now causing you to draw one card and your opponent to draw one card. Thought Reflection’s effect still applies to the card you would draw and so you will end up drawing two cards while your opponent draws one card. Alms Collector can’t stop you from drawing two cards at this point since its effect has already applied to this event and can’t be applied again.

Conversely, if you were just drawing a single card, say during your draw step, then only Thought Reflection’s effect would originally apply to that draw. Thought Reflection changes drawing a card into drawing two cards. While Alms Collector’s ability originally didn’t apply to this card draw, it does now since multiple cards are now being drawn. Alms Collector changes your shiny new “draw two cards” into “you draw one and I draw one” instead.

What about multiplayer?

In a multiplayer game with three players, player A casts Vision Skeins on their turn while player C controls an Alms Collector. What happens?

Alms Collector’s ability applies to each of C’s opponents who would draw two cards here. If we break down “each player draws two cards” to “A draws two cards, B draws two cards, C draws two cards, D draws two cards”, it’s easier to see that Alms Collector changes this to “A and C each draw a card, B and C each draw a card, C draws two cards, D and C each draw a card”. All of the draws still need to happen in turn order, starting with the active player, so the next result is that A draws a card, then B draws a card, then C draws five cards, then D draws a card.

Um, yeah…

So that covers the “basic” interactions of Alms Collector. Of course, make sure to double check the Release Notes / FAQ to make sure that I got this all right. (If I got it wrong, or if the rules changed from under me, I’ll be sure to issue a correction.)