Okay so I was playing a game today and I had an unequipped umezawa's jitte with 9 charge counters on it. My opponent declared an attack against me, to which I replied with my response of removing the counters on my jitte to add the 9 -1/-1 counters on to his creature which would have destroyed it. My opponent then detained using a creatures ability on my jitte and prevented me from removing counters. And the creature stayed alive.
My question here is stack ruling confusion..
Because my ability on the jitte isn't really able to be countered, would the detain have gone off before or after the removal of counters.
I understand how detaining works, but does it act as a direct counter to my counter removal or would it have to work after the jitte's ability?
Though your opponent could activate the ability to detain the Umezawa's Jitte, you could still respond to that ability by activating Umezawa's Jitte's ability and removing the remaining counters before the detaining ability resolved. (This works because Umezawa's Jitte hasn't been detained yet.) Thus the only practical effect of detaining will be to force you to activate Umezawa's Jitte now or to forgo doing so until the opponent's next turn.
But remember, detaining usually applies to creatures. And the activated ability is on Umezawa's Jitte which is an artifact, not a creature. Depending on what creature was used to detain, the detaining might not even work. Currently, the only creature cards that can detain artifacts are Archon of the Triumvirate, Lavinia of the Tenth, Lyev Skyknight, and New Prahv Guildmage.
You could remove the counters either before or after the detaining ability is activated, but before it resolves. The detaining ability, like nearly all activated abilities, does nothing until it resolves. And even if the opponent manages to activate New Prahv Guildmage's ability again to try to detain the artifact after you removed all the counters, that doesn't affect any abilities on the stack that have already been activated; they will still resolve as normal.
After your opponent declares an attack, the opponent has priority, and could activate an ability right away, such as New Prahv Guildmage's detain ability; if the opponent does, we have the exact situation I mentioned above.
But if your opponent passes, you get priority and can use spells and abilities. As you activate the ability of Umezawa's Jitte, you pay the cost of removing one charge counter. You can do this as many times as you can pay that cost before you pass priority to your opponent. Thus, you can remove all the counters from Umezawa's Jitte before your opponent can even use New Prahv Guildmage's detain ability. And even if the opponent does, that won't prevent the Umezawa's Jitte abilities from resolving.
A small detail worth mentioning is, that the Jitte does not add -1/-1 counters to any creatures. It just creates a temporary continuous effect of reducing the power/toughness of the creature by -1/-1. Only effects that use the word "counter" use counters. And with many cards interacting with counters, this difference is important, because those cards cannot interact with the -1/-1 from the Jitte.
My question here is stack ruling confusion..
Because my ability on the jitte isn't really able to be countered, would the detain have gone off before or after the removal of counters.
I understand how detaining works, but does it act as a direct counter to my counter removal or would it have to work after the jitte's ability?
But remember, detaining usually applies to creatures. And the activated ability is on Umezawa's Jitte which is an artifact, not a creature. Depending on what creature was used to detain, the detaining might not even work. Currently, the only creature cards that can detain artifacts are Archon of the Triumvirate, Lavinia of the Tenth, Lyev Skyknight, and New Prahv Guildmage.
So the counters would have been removed either in response to the detainment or before the detainment?
THANK YOU SO MUCH honestly this has been bugging me. I knew I was right and I should have fought it because it cost me the game too
Former Rules Advisor
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