Rule · 500.8
Vitality costs
An ability paying its own price in Vitality — a Bloodletting cost, an Interest payment, a self-destruct, and the retaliation family in 500.6. A cost is a statement, not a hit, and almost nothing on the defensive side gets to answer it.
This rule is part of the Comprehensive Rules, where every cross-reference resolves in one page.
- 500.8aA Vitality cost skips the whole pipeline in 500.1. Armor, the incoming-damage cap, Insurance, Shield, and damage-ignore charges never see it, and none of them are spent by it. A payer holding a single point of Shield cannot pay a cost for free.
- 500.8bThe payment is clamped to the Vitality the payer actually has. A cost larger than that takes everything and kills the payer; it never carries a debt forward.
- 500.8cBecause it is not a damage instance, a cost starts no damage reactions. It fires no on-damage-taken fanout, no Thorns, no Riposte, and no Shield-damaged or Shield-broken trigger.
- 500.8dIt is still Vitality lost, so anything keyed to losing Vitality does respond. The runes that reset on Vitality damage — Adrenaline, Momentum, and Bolster — lose their accumulated bonus, and Vitality-threshold rune effects re-evaluate.
- 500.8eA cost moves nothing on a unit that discards combat interactions, so a Tool or a Hub pays nothing at all. Dead and Entrapped units are refused as payers outright.
- 500.8fWhether a defy-death rune answers a lethal cost is decided per cost. Retaliation and Bloodletting opt in, and the unit spends its once-per-life charge either way. Interest and self-destruct do not: they pay through.
- 500.8gInterest is the one cost that also debits the payer's maximum Vitality by the amount paid, for the rest of the battle.
- 500.8hA self-destruct spends the unit's entire remaining Vitality as a cost, so nothing talks it out of dying: no damage-ignore charge, no defy-death rune, and no Insurance point burned on the way. Its Shield is scrapped with it rather than damaged, so no Shield trigger fires. Everlasting still revives it on schedule, because that is a revival rather than a prevention.
- 500.8iListeners read the Vitality that actually left the payer, not the price printed on the card. A Bloodletting payment clamped by a low payer pays out its own listeners for that smaller amount.
- 500.8jA death caused by a cost is an ordinary death. Macabre fires, deathrattles resolve, and the activation that charged the cost continues.
See also Bloodletting Interest Shield Insurance Everlasting