I have a
Shapesharer and a
Jace, Vryn's Prodigy -neither have summoning sickness. My opponent casts something (killspell/bolt etc) targeting my Shapesharer. In Response I turn Shapesharer into a copy of Jace. SBA checks and I get rid of the original Jace. Then I activate the new tap ability on Shapesharer. GY check passes and Shapesharer exiles itself. Shapesharer tries to come back …“return him to the battlefield transformed”
…since he can't come in transformed, do we:
A) Leave him in exile as per CR101.3 ?
or
B) Bring the Shapesharer back to the battlefield normal and face-up, maybe
with CR609.3 ?
The main concern here being “Transform” is not used as a verb. Were the effect to say “exile ~this~. Transform ~this~, then return it to the battlefield” it would seems to fall squarely under 609.3 and we'd just leave out the impossible action and do the rest. But this is not the case here. Rather than those three actions, the wording represents two actions “exile ~this~, then return it in its transformed state” -which makes a person lean more toward 101.3: The action isn't possible. Not to turn this into a templating question at all, just, “is that the way this is intended to work?”
EDIT:
**The Ruling that follows was REVERSED effective with the SHADOWS OVER INNISTRAD RELEASE NOTES in early April 2016:
“711.7a If a player is instructed to put a non-double-faced card onto the battlefield transformed, that card stays in its current zone. This is a change from previous rules.”
Thanks again for everyone's efforts to clarify how the rules should be interpreted at the given time. A++
Edited Beau Jenkins (April 4, 2016 09:25:21 PM)