Bleed, undamaged, Hand of Bim-Shalla.

[IndyPendant]

Hi all.

Here's an odd situation that came up in a game I played recently:

My mage gets a Bleed token from moving through a Bloodspine Wall.  Did not have any damage on him (the Wall's attack dealt no damage either).  I went to use Hand of Bim-Shalla to remove the Bleed, and my opponent asked if I could do that, since I had no damage to heal in the first place.

After looking through the FAQ and coming up with nothing, I read through the various RAW sections and finally decided that I couldn't use the Hand.  Now I come to the rules gurus here seeking clarification:

What happens if a creature with a Bleed token on it, but no damage yet, tries to use a healing effect to remove the token?

--IndyPendant.

[ACG]

"You can never remove more damage than the creature currently has. Any excess healing or regeneration is lost."

Bleed: "...Whenever this creature...heals...you may remove 1 Bleed condition for each point of healing you cancel"

I would say that you can use healing to remove bleed, because it says that you cancel the healing (a specifically defined effect), not the damage removal (a more general result of healing).

Cancelling a spell prevents it from resolving. Cancelling a point of healing should prevent it from resolving as well. If it did resolve, it would be lost, but since it was cancelled before resolving, it still counts as being cancelled, and so you can use it to remove bleed. I think the key thing to notice is that nowhere in the heal effect does it state that an uninjured creature may not be healed, only that if it is healed, you cannot remove more damage than it has.

[Wildhorn]

You can.

Having no damage on you doesn't prevent healing. It is just normally useless.

[sIKE]

I agree with both Wildhorn and ACG the removal of a Bleed token costs one point of Healing.

[IndyPendant]

Hmm, okay thanks guys.  Makes sense, and agreed.

I didn't want to rule in my own favour when I wasn't sure, particularly since I was the experienced player in our bout. ; )

[Shad0w]

Removing a bleed replaces 1 point of healing. So even if you have 5 Bleed and less than 5 damage you could remove from 0-5 bleed with a heal of 5+. Lets say you have 2 damage and 5 bleed if you were able get a 7+ heal you could remove all damage and bleeds.