So I had a new rules question pop up the other night. Are targets which are already corrupted legal targets for corruption effects?

For instance: My opponent has a corrupted unit in his kingdom zone and I play a festering nurglings into my own kingdom zone. Can I "recorrupt" his unit or am I force to corrupt my nurglings, assuming no other units are in the zone?

This comes into play for Chillwind and several other corruption effects, just needing to understand the exact definition of "corrupt" and if it changes depending on whether it's a cost for playing a card effect.

Thanks!

I believe it is legal to target a corrupted unit for corruption (it just fizzles) unless the action reads "target uncorrupted unit". You cannot use it to pay a cost though, obviously, or cards like Clan Rats or Deathmaster Sniktch would allow you to use their effect as many times as you wanted.

So is that the general consensus here? Your ruling makes a pretty substantial amount of sense, I just wish the act of corruption was a little better defined.

I'll be playing that way for now.

We have always played it exactly as Clamatius described

According to the section on Corruption on p.17, you may only corrupt an uncorrupted card. The wording is, "When [corrruption] occurs, the card's controller turns the card 90 degrees to show that is is corrupt." Also, that "a restored card is no longer corrupt." As this is worded, when a card becomes corrupted, it gains the 'corrupted' game state, and when it is restored, it loses the 'corrupted' game state. Because the rules instruct us to rotate the card when corrupted, and that a restored card is rotated back to its original orientation, and that a restored card is no longer corrupted, we're unable to make an already corrupt card "even more corrupt".

Old-school Magic players will remember the bruhaha over the ruling that you can tap an already tapped creature, which was a reversal of the original rule. Game balance was maintained for two primary reasons that are absent in W:I:

1. You're able to untap all your creatures at the beginning of your turn, and
2. none of the five colors in Magic has creatures being tapped as central to their identity.

In W:I, if you can continue to corrupt the same unit, you are essentially circumventing the rule that allows a player to restore only one unit during your kingdom phase. Why would only one unit being allowed to "come back" per turn matter to me at all if I can corrupt the same unit repeatedly to Warpstone Meteor or any other effect? The corruption of a unit as a side effect or penalty immediately becomes of little consequence AND strategy if I just get my one thrice-corrupted unit back next turn, anyway. Also, cards like Meteor become even more useless than they already are if I can casually point to a corrupted card and say, "I'm corrupting him" to avoid a bad effect.

You're also diluting the effectiveness of both Chaos and Dark Elves, particularly Chaos. I've tried desperately to make a Chaos deck that actually corrupts a sizable number of my opponent's units with very limited success. And that's playing with the legit rule that you can't corrupt a corrupted unit. The only time I can get a decent number of units corrupted at the same time is in multiplayer, which we do play a lot, admittedly. But head up? Not so much.

I'm just giving my philosophies on why I agree with the rule, but they aren't meant to prove the rule, by any means. I'm referring to the rule as written that you can only corrupt an uncorrupted unit, not my personal opinions. See what I'm sayin'?