Everlasting and Phylactery on the same board

Question

How do the two death keywords differ?

Answer

Everlasting is a timer that always runs. Phylactery is a charge you have to earn, and it lands first.

1. 900.28aBoth are revivals, and both hand off to the same procedure in 500.9. What separates them is the price and the timing.
2. 900.28bEverlasting costs nothing and is never exhausted: 10 seconds after every death, the unit comes back, as long as combat is still running and its board half has a free slot. Ten seconds is a long time in a 120-second round, and the unit does nothing at all while it waits.
3. 900.28cPhylactery is finite. The unit starts holding one Vessel, spends it the instant a death finishes resolving, and is back in its own cell with no gap — but once the Vessels are gone, so is the unit.
4. 900.28dSo on a unit carrying both, the Vessel always resolves first. The Everlasting timer is armed by the death and then cleared by the revival that immediately follows it. Everlasting only ever runs on a death that stays dead — the death after the last Vessel.
5. 900.28eThat makes them complements rather than redundancies. Everlasting is the floor under an Undead board; Vessels are what a Dread-and-Freeze board buys with the statuses it was applying anyway.
6. 900.28fEither revival is a new target incarnation, so Rabid excludes the unit for one activation and new-target rune effects can fire for it again.
7. 900.28gCull destroys either of them like any other unit, and neither prevents the death. A Vessel is spent against a Cull exactly as it is spent against lethal damage, and Everlasting still revives on schedule afterwards.
8. 900.28hOnly a card's own revival line tells the two apart. A self-revive line that names Phylactery hears nothing from an Everlasting revival, even on a unit that has both. A card listening for an ally reviving does not distinguish them and fires on either.

See also Everlasting Phylactery Cull Macabre Rabid

Rules 500.4 Death 500.9 Revival

In 900 Interaction Rulings