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My opponent has three face-down morphs on the battlefield.

I play Sever the Bloodline targeting one of them.

Do we exile all three because they all have the "same name"? Or do we exile just one because "no name" indicates a lack of a characteristic altogether?

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Vote to close. A quick glance of the rules could quickly answer this question. We don't want the site flooded with "What happens when a 1/1 blocks a 1/1?", "a 1/1 blocks a 2/2," ad infinium. – user1873 Feb 19 at 18:20
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@user1872 this is a common question for players, and it's not obvious unless you read the comprehensive rules, something that not even the Rules Manager recommed for most players (read the text about "What are the Comprehensive Rules?"). – Pablo Feb 19 at 18:52
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@user1873 False equivalence. Just looking at 707 or 702.35a doesn't actually answer the question unambiguously. Is "no name" a null value or the absence of a characteristic altogether? Before you say "Well, duh, it's the latter," consider how the game treats those same morphs' "no mana cost" as cmc 0 all the time. An unambiguous answer requires some L1-Judge-level reasoning about the comp rules. – Alex P Feb 19 at 20:03
@AlexP, then you are recommending that restating each section of the CR are valid questions? These kind of questions can be answered by just reading the comprehensive rules, and only exist because of a lack of effort by the OP. They should all just be answered "read the rules," or "read the card," or "read the cards offical rulings." If your reasoning is correct, then why did you checkmark the answer as correct (since the answer wasn't sufficient) – user1873 Feb 19 at 21:23
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@user1873 I accepted it because the answer included an official ruling referring to this exact situation, from the Maelstrom Pulse page. (If "Just read the comp rules and then look up all similar cards in Gatherer to see if one of them has any relevant notes about it" is your standard for too little research, then you might as well delete 95% of the content on the site.) – Alex P Feb 19 at 21:33
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up vote 6 down vote accepted

They don't have names:

702.35a Morph is a static ability that functions in any zone from which you could play the card it’s on, and the morph effect works any time the card is face down. “Morph [cost]” means “You may cast this card as a 2/2 face-down creature, with no text, no name, no subtypes, no expansion symbol, and no mana cost by paying {3} rather than paying its mana cost.” (See rule 707, “Face-Down Spells and Permanents.”)

If they don't have names, they can't have the same name, so only the morph targeted by Sever the Bloodline will be exiled.

For an official source, see the fourth ruling in Maelstrom Pulse:

A face-down creature has no name, so it doesn't have the same name as anything else.

Bonus: Why "no mana cost" gives us a converted mana cost of 0 instead of no converted mana cost?: That's because there is a specific rule about this:

202.3a The converted mana cost of an object with no mana cost is 0.

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Accepted: combines both the rules quote and a ruling from Maelstrom Pulse showing that this is the correct interpretation. – Alex P Feb 19 at 20:39
To me, 107.2 doesn't actually imply that everything has to have a mana cost. 202.3a just spells out "no mana cost = converted mana cost 0". – Alex P Feb 19 at 20:43
True, 202.3a is much more clear. I think that 107.2 covers it too, and 202.3a is a redundant rule to make it more clear, but comments in this answer don't seem like a good place to discuss this, so I'll just edit my answer and put rule 202.3a instead – Pablo Feb 19 at 21:31
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