So I recently had a talk about interesting rules situations with some fellow judges and animating abilities (man lands, keyrunes etc.) and ‘global’ effects came up. The main point I'd like your help with today is the difference between Humility and Conspiracy.

So with Humility & Activation abilities the interaction is time stamp based however I was told that Conspiracys' interaction is dependance based (resulting in humility not altering the p/t or abilities gained but conspiracy altering the creature type gained), while I do trust the person who told me this, his explanation of why the two cards effects were different was very sub par, and I was hoping someone on here could talk me through it.

Dependence can only happen inside a layer, i.e. among effects of the same nature. If two effects are of different nature, by virtue of the layers one will always have been applied before the other.

1) With Conspiracy (let's say it names “Goblin”) and Keyrune (let's say Azorius Keyrune) activation, there are two effects trying to affect the Keyrune's types and subtypes:
- Conspiracy tries to change the creature subtype to Goblin
- Keyrune tries to change the type of the Keyrune to Creature and its creature subtype to Bird.

When you determine in which order to apply these (if at all), the Keyrune isn't a creature yet. Conspiracy therefore wouldn't do anything, but applying Keyrune would make it a creature and thus make Conspiracy applicable.

This is exactly what dependency is: two effects of the same type, applying one changes what the other would do.

In this case, Keyrune is applied first, then Conspiracy. You end up with a Goblin.

2) With Humility, we have two competing effects trying to change the Keyrune's power and toughness. By the point you're figuring out which of those to apply if any, the Keyrune is already a creature (changing the type is layer 4, changing power/toughness to a set value is 6b, so always applies after the type changes).

Here, applying one of those doesn't change what the other would do. You don't need to know the current power/toughness to be able to set it to 1/1 or to 2/2. Hence, there is no dependency between those.

The rule in this case is that you apply the oldest first, so effectively the last-created effect wins out.

Daniel Kitachewsky
L3, Paris, France
Rules NetRep