Magic: The Gathering/Gameplay Tropes


This page is for tropes that appear in Magic: The Gathering's gameplay (as opposed to tropes that appear in its flavor and storyline).

  • Action Bomb: Blowing oneself up is a favorite tactic of red cards, particularly among goblins. Examples include but are not limited to Mudbutton Torchrunner, Mogg Bombers, War-Torch Goblin, Ib Halfheart's suicide troops, and whichever schmuck ends up carrying the Goblin Grenade.
  • All There in the Manual: The Gatherer Web site includes all rulings on cards. As the game goes on and rules get refined, the company almost constantly changes the way game abilities are printed on cards:
    • This was particularly bad early on when the company was still learning what worked well in the game and there was no set standard on how to phrase anything, but every set introduces new rules terms and longstanding parts of the game may have their names or the related rules changed if necessary. The concept of the "exile" zone, for example, has been in the game since the vAery first set, but did not receive its current name until 2009. (Exiling cards is a way of removing them from play that's more final than most methods. It used to be called "removed from the game" but was renamed, partly because so many design ideas wanted to interact with cards that had been exiled or be used while the card itself was exiled, so "removed from the game" seemed more and more inaccurate.)
    • The general rule is to rely on the most recent printed text of a card to determine what it does, even if someone is playing with an older copy on which its abilities are phrased differently. Without that rule, for example, casting three versions of exactly the same card would mean none of them could actually attack.[1]
    • Subverted by the joke card R&D's Secret Lair, which explicitly bans using later printed text, errata or the rules to 'update' cards. It's, naturally, illegal in all competitive play, and rapidly makes friendly games very unfriendly.
  • An Axe to Grind: As seen here
  • Animated Armor: The effect of March of the Machines.
  • Animate Inanimate Object: March of the Machines as well as the cards here and here
  • Animate Dead: Is a card. And there are many others like it.
  • Anti-Air: A stock green ability is attacking, destroying, or disabling flying creatures Femeref Archers, Deadshot Minotaur, Plummet, and so on.
  • Anti-Magic: Protection, various forms of untargetability, and counterspell and anti-counterspell effects often work this way.
  • Army of the Ages: The basic premise of the game, with you as the summoner.
  • Art Evolution:
    • Due to both a preference for more detailed, elaborate art, and much more meticulous guidance given to the artists. When the company commissioned the art for the card Lord of the Pit, they reportedly gave the artist a one-word instruction: "balrog". (This was years before the Lord of the Rings movies were made.) Under the circumstances, it came out pretty well, but today artists get multi-paragraph descriptions of what the image on the card should look like, generally designed taking into account both exactly what the card itself does and the flavor and description of the world of the current set. Nowadays comprehensive style guides and concept art are made for each set, or consecutive block of set that share the same setting: for example, the goblins of the current Scars of Mirrodin and Mirrodin Besieged block have a large round head with a sharp snout and long pointed ears.
    • In addition, the cards' frames themselves have been updated. All frames have become less blocky and are no longer of an equal width all the way around, and the texturing used in each has been changed.
    • Many cards have related illustrations: basic lands in the same set are usually cut from a wide panorama, and for example the most recent Holy Strength and Unholy Strength face each other vertically.
  • The Artifact:
    • On the back of every Magic card that will ever be printed [2], players will find the word "Deckmaster." The Deckmaster brand ceased to exist in the mid '90s, but because every card has to be indistinguishable from the back, Wizards has to keep printing it.
    • The word Magic itself; on the back of the card, the word 'Magic' is (and always will be) blue, despite the fact that the official logo has been yellow for years.
    • Many card abilities. When the game was new, colors were very ill-defined. Many cards were placed in colors based only on where the creature in question lives or what it does, even if its abilities as a card are completely different from most cards of that color, but cards like that remain in that color now just because of the earlier ones. Look at a list of cards from most sets and compare it to descriptions of the colors and you'll always find a few cards that don't fit the description, but they're there because they are similar or identical to really common or famous or powerful cards that were printed back when the company was still figuring this stuff out.
    • The Gatherer text for Winter Orb returned to it an old, old rule; in old editions of Magic, any Artifact could be tapped to "switch off" its effects, a rule intended to emphasise their status as sorcerous machines.[3]
    • Braid of Fire was introduced when mana burn was a thing, giving it a flavor of an ever expanding fire that you will eventually lose control of and get hurt by. Now that mana burn is gone (as it only mattered in decks that were designed to focus on it), it's just mana acceleration.
  • Artifact of Death: Jinxed Idol is a good example. There are others.
  • Asteroids Monster: Mitotic Slime
  • Attack Animal:
  • Authority Equals Asskicking: Daimyo Konda, The Emperor of most of Kamigawa, is literally indestructible, and fights as an 8/8. (For comparison, a typical dragon is in the 5/5 range.)
  • Auto Revive:
    • The "Regenerate" mechanic allows you to create a one-time shield that prevents your guy from being destroyed, tapping it instead.
    • Lich's Mirror allows you to start the game over with 20 life if you die with it in play. Of course, you start over with nothing in play, but your opponent gets to keep all the cards they already have out.
    • Shadowmoor block had Persist, and Innistrad has Undying, both of which are abilities that return dying creatures to play with a counter on it (-1/-1 and +1/+1 respectively), if it didn't already have one.
  • Awesome but Impractical: Many cards have spectacular, awe-inspiring effects that will almost certainly win you the game - if you ever get enough mana to actually cast them before your opponent kills you, and your opponent doesn't have a counterspell or some other cheap, efficient answer. For specific examples, see Awesome but Impractical/Tabletop Games/Magic: The Gathering.
  • Awesome Yet Practical: The game designers like powerful, tournament-dominating cards to be exciting and fun to play, so it's common to see exciting and fun cards intentionally pushed up in power level. Planeswalkers are a great example: their characters are designed to be the face of the game, so the developers make sure to give them powerful abilities. Jace, the Mind Sculptor in particular quickly gained a dominating presence in multiple tournament formats.
  • Back Stab: The "Prowl" ability of Rogues in Morningtide functions as one of these.
  • Badass Normal: The card Muraganda Petroglyphs from the "Future Sight" expansion grants a large bonus to creatures without abilities. Also shown by the power creep in cards such as Woolly Thoctar, a 5/4 for a mere 3 mana.
  • Battle Cry: A keyword ability in Mirrodin Besieged. For example: Hero of Bladehold.
  • Big Eater: There's been some debate about which creature in Magic is the hungriest. Some candidates are Doomgape (so hungry it even eats itself!), Worldgorger Dragon (immediately eats all of your permanents), and the more traditional Big Eater, Fat Ass (whose hunger is contagious, compelling any mages who summon him to become Big Eaters themselves).
  • Bigger Is Better:
    • Personified in the Rise of the Eldrazi expansion, where gigantic monsters are the theme of the set.
    • See also Serial Escalation.
  • Blessed with Suck: Many of the extremely mighty creatures (Darksteel Colossus, Serra Avatar, ...) have an ability that puts them back into the deck every time they hit the graveyard. Sounds great, until you realize that this is a deliberate safety measure to prevent players from discarding and reanimating them, thus circumventing paying their steep cost.
  • Blood Knight: Blood Knight. There's also his predecessor, Black Knight.
  • Boogie Knights: Knight of the Hokey Pokey gets a bonus if you do the Hokey Pokey!
  • Boring but Practical: Some of the best cards in the game have very simple effects, but are absurdly cheap. (The latter two are banned in competitive play.)
  • Bribing Your Way to Victory:
    • While generally avoided among friendly games at the kitchen table, Magic is expensive for the serious player or collector. Prices for tournament-winning, in-print single cards have routinely exceeded $20, and sometimes even approached/exceeded $100. On top of that, the most popular and common tournament formats rotate new sets in and old sets out each year, serving the dual function of keeping the game fresh and keeping Wizards in business selling new cards.
    • The trope also applies to Duels of the Planeswalkers and its sequel. While you can unlock any and all of the cards in the game through gameplay, you can also buy DLC that unlocks the thematic decks of the planeswalkers featured in the game. Doing this unlocks all the cards in that deck, meaning you can now use them to customize yours.
  • Card Battle Game: Most video game adaptations, including the Microprose Shandalar game and Duels of the Planeswalkers.
  • Cave Mouth: The card Howling Mine looks like this most of the time, Depending on the Artist.
  • Cast from Hit Points:
    • Aside from the infamous Channel-Fireball combo, planeswalkers fall under this as well: Some of their ability require the removal of loyalty counters. These same counters effectively act as their life totals; once they're out of counters, they're gone. Most also invert this trope by having abilities that give them loyalty counters as well, as well as a few with abilities that do nothing to their counter totals.
    • More recently, there are the cards that use Phyrexian mana symbols from New Phyrexia: For each Phyrexian mana symbol in a cost, you can pay 1 mana of the specified color, or 2 life.
  • CCG Importance Dissonance:
    • Gerrard is the hero of the Weatherlight saga, which spanned across years of the storyline. When he was eventually printed as a card, it was laughably underpowered.
    • Karona, who emerges in Onslaught block as a physical manifestation of Dominaria's mana formed from the fusion of the powerful and iconic legends Phage the Untouchable and Akroma, Angel of Wrath, is far less useful than she has any right to be as well--so much so that head designer Mark Rosewater publicly apologized for how lame she was:

That card is an embarrassment to card design. I actually had zero to do with the card and I'm still embarrassed. We took two iconic beloved cool legends and combined them into a pile of, well a word I'm not allowed to use on this site. Of all the balls dropped with the design of legendary characters, this is one near the top of the list. My humblest apologies.

  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • You know those useless snow-covered lands from Ice Age? Not so useless as of Coldsnap -- 11 years later!
    • Poison counters. Nearly pointless at first, given a bit more oomph in Future Sight, then turned into a powerful threat (and plot point!) in Scars of Mirrodin.
  • Collectible Card Game: Trope Maker and Trope Codifier.
  • Contest Winner Cameo: Each winner of the Magic Invitational (the game's most exclusive tournament) got to design a card and appear in its artwork.
  • The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: The boss characters in the Duels of the Planeswalker games often have decks that are considerably stronger than the default characters' decks (most of them can't be unlocked either). Karn in particular uses several cards that are outright banned in nearly every format in the physical card game and is capable of killing you on turn 3 in a game where most games tend to go more than 10 turns. If you manage to win against him, it's likely because you got lucky.
  • Continuity Drift: as Wizards' understanding of the game is refined, some classic spells are retired and replaced by (generally) less-powerful versions. Counterspell has been phased out in favor of Cancel, Lightning Bolt for Shock, and Terror for Doom Blade. (In the case of the final two, it's hard to answer which is strictly worse, because one has versatility and the other permanence.) In some cases this can even result in cards moving color--Disenchant (formerly a signature White spell) to Naturalize, Prodigal Sorcerer for Prodigal Pyromancer.
  • Continuity Nod: Every card from the Time Spiral set has at least one. Some are obvious, like Wheel of Fate revisiting Wheel of Fortune; some are downright oblique, like Plated Pegasus, which combines an obscure card from Mirage with an obscure card from Tempest.
  • Creator Cameo: Richard Garfield himself has a card in Unhinged.
  • Critical Existence Failure: A common adage among players is that the only life point that matters is your last one. It was this revelation that made Necropotence decks powerful.
  • Cursed with Awesome: Skullclamp was originally +1/+2 and "When equipped creature dies, draw two cards." Then it became +1/+1. Then it became +1/-1, meaning you can turn any creature with one toughness into two cards. Players took notice.
  • Cute Is Evil: Played for Laughs with the Unglued card Infernal Spawn of Evil, along with its sequel from Unhinged, Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil. As a bonus, it's also a joke about card artist Ron Spencer only drawing hideous monsters.
  • Damage Over Time: Several cards deal damage during a player's "Upkeep" step, in contrast to most cards which can only deal damage once at a time.
  • Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Applies to a few combo decks, especially combos that are Cast from Hit Points. (Channel-Fireball is a good old-school example: you pay all of your life, but the resulting fireball kills your opponent in one shot.) What makes them so dangerous is the likelihood that if they fail to kill the opponent dead then and there, the Cherriest of Taps will be your doom.
  • Death Is Cheap: Or rather, "being removed from the game is cheap". Most permanents and spells that are destroyed, discarded or otherwise gotten rid of go to the graveyard zone by default, but ever since the game was new a few abilities here and there send their targets or themselves to the "removed from game" zone. But such effects have slowly become more common over the years, and two cards were printed that retrieved any card that had been removed from the game, and variations on the effect like suspend have proved very powerful and popular. So in a 2009 rules change, the description of the "remove from game" effect was changed to "exile", to reflect the fact that there's a good chance it hasn't been "removed from the game" at all.
    • Mocked by the unhinged card "AWOL", which first removes an attacking creature from the game, and then takes that creature from the "removed from the game" zone and puts it in a state called "absolutely-removed-from-the-freaking-game-forever".
  • Depending on the Writer: Or rather, Depending On The Design Team. For entire sets. The company is always struggling to deal with Gameplay and Story Segregation, and exactly how the game is supposed to represent an actual wizards' duel. At the moment they seem to have settled on a balance the company likes, but it still changes a little with every new set, partly as they iron out tiny details and partly as another potential way to add variety to the game. A few examples of the ways this goes back and forth:
    • Early in the game, many big blue creatures (like Sea Serpents) could attack players that didn't control any islands only with difficulty, if at all, to symbolize that they were natural aquatic monsters and therefore couldn't leave the water. That effect still appears occasionally, but is much rarer now, partly because designers have decided it's less fun to have creatures with such severe restrictions on attacking and partly because the idea that lands actually represent physical terrain on which creatures are fighting raises more questions than it answers.
    • Creature types have come and gone and been standardized several times. At the moment, humans are the Jack of All Stats: represented more or less equally in all colors but with no Human-specific racial bonuses. Most colors have one "weenie" race (Elves for green, goblins for red, for example) full of small, cheap, quick and/or utility creatures, one "large flier" race (Dragons for red, demons for black, angels for white), and a few other creature types that are much more common in one or two colors than the rest. The thing is, this leaves many creature types from fantasy stories or previous Magic sets unused just because that design space is already taken. Orcs, for example, appeared in early sets, but they eventually fell into the niche of "like goblins, just a little taller" and stopped being used soon after that. Merfolk didn't appear for a long time for the same reason that sea monsters' inherent weakness was dropped, but as soon as designers figured out that they could be bipedal - sort of like Fish People but not as ugly - they were brought back.
  • Disc One Nuke: The "power nine", not seen since Unlimited Edition. There are others.
  • Discard and Draw: the Trope Namer. Many effects cause you to both draw and discard cards.
  • Ditto Fighter: A standard ability for the Shapeshifter creature type.
  • Early Installment Weirdness: Alpha and the first few expansions contained...
  • Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: The Color Wheel is probably the most well-known non-traditional version in gaming.
  • Equivalent Exchange: A key part of the game, every spell you cast or ability you activate has some sort of exchange going on. Even the most simple of cards require you to generate mana and fill precious deck slots with the given cards to work. Some more elaborate spells ask for more tangible costs such as life payments, discarding cards, or sacrificing permanents. Most of the game's problems have come from cards doing far more in return for what you paid for them...
  • Everything's Better with Chickens: Unglued had a lot of fun with chickens, which would be out of place in any normal expansion.
  • Everything's Better with Penguins: Unhinged brings us the rather unusual Curse of the Fire Penguin, which turns a creature into a penguin. And it's contagious.
  • Everythings Nuttier With Squirrels: According to Mark Rosewater, the game has squirrels because the designers thought they were cool.
  • Everything's Squishier with Cephalopods:
    • When the folks in charge got tired of Merfolk, they decided to try replacing them with the Cephalid squid-folk for a while in the Odyssey block. Squids are cool, right?
    • Mark Rosewater's description of the origin of Lorthos, the Tidemaker (the legendary Octopus from Zendikar) fits the trope quite well.
  • Evil Plan: The casual format "Archenemy" has one player as the, well, Archenemy who sets Schemes in motion, against a coalition of players.
  • Exactly What It Says on the Tin: the enchantment cards Fear, Lifelink and Vigilance give the enchanted creature the abilities Fear, Lifelink, and Vigilance respectively.
  • Expansion Pack: In a sense; each set is an expansion to the ever-widening game, though each block can be played independently as well.
  • Fan Nickname: Lampshaded. Morphling earned the nickname "Superman" for its high power level at the time. So when the designers made an enchantment that could give Morhpling's abilities to any of your creatures, they called it Pemmin's Aura--an anagram for "I am Superman."
  • Fan-Speak: Magic players have created an extensive vocabulary of slang terms and technical jargon. This Useful Notes pages has some examples.
  • Fastball Special: Stone Giant, among others, can be tapped to hurl a creature into the air to attack your opponent directly or block an enemy flyer. This is generally not a survivable experience for the creature.
  • Fate Worse Than Death: Exiling or [locking down a creature against a reanimation deck or (lock down only) commander in EDH.
  • Field Power Effect: Various spells that boost and debuff creatures.
  • Flavor Text: Famous for it.
  • Freaky Friday Flip: Some spells and abilities can inflict this effect, exchanging players' cards-in-hand, permanents-in-play, or even life totals, the last one being a popular trick in combo decks.
  • Full Set Bonus:
    • The Empires artifacts in M12.
    • If you have all three Kaldra equipment in play, you can summon Kaldra to wield them.
    • From the Fifth Dawn set comes the four Stations (Blasting Station, Grinding Station, Salvaging Station, and Welding Station), which can deal infinite damage when you have them all in play. According to Magic's R&D, it was the first "I win" combo they ever made intentionally.
  • Gambit Pileup: Due to the nature of the stack, players can find themselves fighting a mini battle in which they're undoing each other's move, for example:

Player 1: Shock on Player 2's Merfolk Looter.
Player 2: Unsummon on Player 2's Merfolk Looter.
Player 1: Counterspell on Player 2's Unsummon.
Player 2: Counterspell on Player 1's Shock.
Player 1: Counterspell on Player 2's Counterspell.

And so on. If they do this by piling the cards onto each other (or playing online), then the trope is being played literally.
  • Game Breaker:
  • Gameplay and Story Segregation:
    • Early sets tried to avert this to a degree with mechanics such as islandhome, which stopped sea-based creatures from attacking opponents who don't control an island, and causing them to cease to exist if their controller controls no islands. This was a rather clumsy and unpopular solution, and R's current policy is to ignore moments of Fridge Logic in favour of gameplay. (After all, you are a wizard!)
    • Another common example are Equipments, a subtype of Artifacts that can be, well, equipped to your creatures. Often it works well, almost as often it results in humongous axes being wielded by a little bird, or magical armor being worn by a tree. Indeed, under certain circumstances you can end up putting cranial plating on a mountain.
  • Glass Cannon:
    • Many combo decks, as well as many linearly-focused decks like the Affinity deck of the Mirrodin era, are incredibly powerful if the opponent has no way to interact with them, but vulnerable to being completely shut down by a single "hoser" card that can disrupt them in the proper way.
    • Lots of creatures have large power, but only one toughness. There's also a literal Glass Golem.
  • Glory Seeker: Is a card.
  • Golden Snitch: Alternate win condition cards can be sprung without warning. Even decking can be considered this, if the winner was at 1 life and the loser was at a whole lot more. Many of these alternate wins are hilariously impractical and for all the time and resources you spend setting one up it's usually just easier to win the old-fashioned way, but Rule of Cool means people love these things anyway and will often bend over backwards to pull one off.
  • Gradual Grinder:
    • Many, many decks use this method to win, much to the dismay of players forced to sit there and slowly get whittled.
    • A less "meta" example is the Orzhov guild from Ravnica block, whose primary strategy is to gradually "bleed" the opponent by combining lifegain effects with repeatable incremental damage.
  • Griefer: The New Phyrexia expansion was intentionally designed with Griefing in mind, and contains many cards that are intended to make your opponent feel bad. For example, Shattered Angel takes something they normally feel happy about (getting more mana) and makes them feel bad about it (by making you gain life every time they play a land); there's a similar dynamic with cards like Consecrated Sphinx, Suture Priest, Invader Parasite, and so on.

    And while most sets have spells that kill or disable your opponent's stuff, in New Phyrexia they have added effects that rub your victory in their face, as with Numbing Dose, Victorious Destruction, Psychic Barrier, Glissa's Scorn, Enslave, Phyrexian Ingester, etc.

    Or, as development team member Tom LaPille puts it:

Our vision of New Phyrexia -- as created by Aaron Forsythe and Ken Nagle, the two players in R&D with the strongest griefing tendencies -- is one of all-upside griefing that leaves your opponent not knowing what they're supposed to do and feeling a little bit violated. Phyrexia doesn't destroy all the creatures on the battlefield; it destroys all the creatures on the battlefield and rips some out of your library to boot. Phyrexia doesn't just exile a permanent. It disallows the opponent from casting every other copy.

"The wild is always changing, but it does have a few constants."
—Garruk Wildspeaker
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia:
    • Jace, the Mind Sculptor's ultimate ability wipes the target's mind clean by deleting their entire library and temporarily blocking access to their hand.
    • Cards like Surgical Extraction and Memoricide. The latter allows you to name a card and exile all of your opponent's copies of that card--out of their hand, graveyard, and library. The former allows you to do the same with a card already in that player's graveyard.
  • Lethal Joke Character: Completely awful cards can turn into Game Breakers with later releases:
    • Lion's Eye Diamond was originally designed to be a Black Lotus tweak so bad that no one would ever play with it. It's now banned or restricted in almost every format.
    • Grindstone started as an oddball Millstone variant that saw little to no serious play. Many years later, Wizards printed Painter's Servant, and a turn-one Vintage or turn-two Legacy combo-kill was born.
    • Dark Depths saw little play when it was originally released. In the Zendikar expansion, Vampire Hexmage was printed and within weeks, Vintage and Legacy players discovered the combo that netted a player an inexpensive, indestructible, flying 20/20 creature that could win the game for them the following turn.
    • Cards from the silly, silver-bordered sets Unglued and Unhinged aren't tournament-legal, but can be surprisingly effective at the kitchen table.
  • Living Weapon:
  • Loads and Loads of Loading:
    • The Magic Online client takes a while to start up if there's an update to download, and still has a substantial loading screen otherwise.
    • If you count shuffling as a loading screen, the paper game has its share as well.
  • Loads and Loads of Races: There are roughly a bajillion different creature types.
  • Loads and Loads of Rules:
    • Some cards really, really stretch the limit of readability with complicated one-off abilities. Like Tempest Efreet and Ice Cauldron.
    • The game rules themselves. The Comprehensive Rulebook is available for download from Wizards of the Coast in PDF form. The document is 185 pages long and grows a little with each new set released.
    • The infamous Mindslaver card created a whole new section of the rulebook dictating how to handle taking control of your opponent's turn. To date only it and Sorin Markov uses said rules (and neither are very expensive cards).
  • Lost in Translation:
    • The Japanese version of Yawgmoth's Agenda was mistakenly translated as Yawgmoth's Day Planner.
    • The Spanish version of M10's Jackal Familiar mistranslated "Jackal Familiar can't attack or block alone" as "Jackal Familiar can't attack or block." That would make the card significantly worse, huh?
    • The Spanish version of the M11 card Disentomb mistranslated "Return target creature card from a graveyard to your hand" as "Return target creature card from your graveyard to play". That would make the card significantly better.
    • The Portuguese version of Stoic Rebuttal does... well, nothing. Stoic Rebuttal a simple counter spell that costs 1 less mana to cast if you have 3 or more Artifacts. Too bad when they translated it, they forgot the whole "counter a spell" part. Ooops.
  • Luckily, My Shield Will Protect Me:
  • Luck Manipulation Mechanic:
    • Krark's Thumb and Goblin Bookie, allow you to re-flip a coin if you lose the flip.
    • Rearranging the top few cards of your library is a staple ability that appears most commonly on blue cards (like Sage Owl). Related abilities include Scry, Fateseal, and Clash.
  • Luke Nounverber: A common naming convention.
  • Playing with Fire: A large portion of Red, described in detail throughout this page. Also, Jaya Ballard and her pupil, the lesser planeswalker Chandra Nalaar.
  • Let's Mock Our Own Monsters every un-set.
  • Loophole Abuse:
    • Some of the more creative strategies border or flat out are this. Most infamously, and maybe apocryphally, the player who multiplied the effect of Chaos Orb by ripping it into pieces and scattering it over his opponents side.
    • Or the player who brought to a tournament a deck based around Wall of Roots, whose ability you can activate only once per turn... and convinced the judges that he could use it infinite times by activating it between turns.
  • Made of Indestructium: Anything made of Darksteel metal is indestructible.
  • Magikarp Power: Flip cards from Kamigawa block and Level Up creatures from Rise of the Eldrazi tend to start out worthless and eventually become very powerful. The double-faced Transform cards from Innistrad block have a similar vein.
  • Mana Burn:
    • It's possible to attack your opponent's lands, denying them their mana.
    • The "Mana burn" mechanic that left the game with the Magic 2010 rules changes is, ironically, not an example.
  • Mana Drain: Mana Drain, Drain Power, and Mana Short, among others.
  • Man-Eating Plant: Carnivorous Plant
  • Mega Manning:
  • Metamorphosis: Delver of Secrets/Insectile Aberration. Starts as a human scientist, morphs into an insectile aberration. According to Word of God, it was inspired by The Fly.
  • Metagame: Probably the best-known instance; decks that dominate one tournament can get curbstomped in the next due to metagame changes.
  • Mook Maker: A staple effect. Examples included but are definitely not limited to: Breeding Pit, Kjeldoran Outpost, Thallid, The Hive, Riptide Replicator, Sarpadian Empires, Vol. VII, Myr Turbine, and many, many more.
  • Multiple Demographic Appeal: The minds behind Magic R&D have actually created three psychographic profiles -- "Johnny", "Timmy", and "Spike" -- representing three different demographics for the game. See Timmy, Johnny and Spike Revisited. Simply put: Timmies love to play cool cards, Johnnies love to design cool decks, and Spikes love to win. Since then, the flavor gurus created two more profiles -- "Vorthos", who likes the flavor aspect of a card, and "Melvin", who likes the mechanical aspect of a card.
  • My Defense Need Not Protect Me Forever: It's common for slower strategies to establish defenses in the early game just to buy time to reach the later stages.
  • No Ontological Inertia: If you are playing in a multiplayer game and you die, all the cards you own disappear from the game. This is primarily so that you don't have to stick around until the end of the game just to get back the enchantment you put on somebody else's creature.
  • Non-Elemental:
    • Artifacts, with a few exceptions, are colorless.
    • Eldrazi. Again. Is there any trope they don't fall under?
  • Not the Intended Use: Rampant. Unsummoning your own creatures, countering your own cards to reduce hand size, using a War Barge on your opponents' creatures and then destroying the barge to kill the creatures, ripping up your Chaos Orb before you activate it...
  • Not Using The D Word: References to demons were removed after a few Moral Guardians complained; this carried on for a while with cards being called "horror" or "beast," before demons started appearing again. This is why the Unglued card "Infernal Spawn of Evil" has the text "summon demon beast" and vice versa for the Unhinged card "Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil."
  • Oddly-Named Sequel 2: Electric Boogaloo:
    • The Portal expansion was followed by Portal Second Age and Portal: Three Kingdoms.
    • Head Designer Mark Rosewater has a little fun with it here, with a fake announcement for Homelands 2: Grandmother's Return. He also laments that his suggestion for Portal 2: Electric Boogaloo was rejected.
  • Painting the Fourth Wall: The players are Planeswalkers, immensely powerful wizards who summon monsters and cast spells in battle with other wizards. There are actual planeswalker cards, which are treated like another player, with their own life count and unique "spells".
  • Played for Laughs: Some cards, while still useful, have the ability to cause some much needed hilarity amid all of the chaos and destruction. For example, Turn To Frog
  • Portmanteau: Seen occasionally in card names like "Blightning" and "Deadapult".
  • Power At a Price: A major theme for Black. Phyrexian Negator, Cosmic Horror, Xathrid Demon...one commentator here describes the entire Suicide Black ethos as "tearing off your own arm so you can beat your opponent over the head with it."
  • Power Creep: Of a sort. Creatures started rather poorly and rose in power and usefulness over time (compare Alpha's Force of Nature to Zendikar's Terra Stomper, both 8/8 green creatures), while some early spells were considered too powerful and weaker versions were released to replace them (Counterspell vs. Cancel). Cards that experience either are often considered "strictly better/worse".
  • Powers as Programs: Creature enchantments are this. As are equipment; yes, it's possible for a bird to carry three swords, a shield, and armor clearly designed with humans in mind. Could they be Morph Weapons? It sounds like something a Planeswalker could do, but we might never know.
  • Power Equals Rarity: An interesting case. Although many rares are more powerful than their common or uncommon counterparts, powerful cards are not exclusively rare. Additionally, rarity is used to balance Limited formats (in which players build decks out of a random or semi-random pool of cards). And this is only scratching the surface--whole essays can (and have) been written on the guidelines the designers use to determine rarity.
  • Practical Taunt: Taunting Elf causes all of the defending opponent's creatures to block it when it attacks.
  • Quad Damage:
  • The Power of Friendship: The aptly-named Ally creature mechanic, which benefits from the presence of other Allies.
  • Random Effect Spell:
    • Magic: The Gathering Online's "Vanguard" has several Vanguard avatars which pull random effects like these. Most prominently, Momir Vig allows you to pay X mana to make a copy of a random creature that also costs X mana, spawning an entire alternative format called Momir Basic, where players build a deck using only mana sources and a Momir Vig avatar and battle with randomized creatures from all over Magic. Jhoira of the Ghitu has a similar effect for instants and sorceries; likewise with Stonehewer Giant and equipment.
    • The Cascade ability from the Alara Reborn expansion allows you to cast a random spell from your deck for free. There are a variety of spells with similar randomizing effects.
    • Strategy, Schmategy has you roll a six-sided die to determine which of five totally unrelated abilities you'll get when you cast it. To up the ante, one of the options is "Roll the die two more times."
  • Rated "M" for Manly: They tried to do this by kicking Rebecca Guay, one of the artists who draws the portraits for the cards, because her art was "too girly". After widespread criticism from fans, they reinstated her. This was lampshaded in the Unhinged joke set with the cards "Persecute Artist" and "Little Girl".
  • Recursive Acronym: K.O.T.H. for "Koth of the Hammer."
  • Redshirt Army:
    • Weenie decks can be this sometimes, as your weak creatures take heavy losses but continue trying to swamp the opponent anyway. This is particularly true in the case of tokens; cheap, disposable creatures usually generate en masse from other cards. As an inversion, a particularly successful weenie or token attack with few casualties becomes a Zerg Rush instead.
    • A interesting example is the Eldrazi who use mobs of Eldrazi Spawn Tokens to provide the mana needed for summoning bigger creatures.
  • Retcon: The rules of Magic have undergone many changes, the largest having been the complete overhaul of the game's timing system with the release of Classic Sixth Edition. Cards are frequently given new official wordings ("errata") so that they continue to work properly after each change of rules.
  • Riddling Sphinx: This is a standard mechanic for sphinxes:
    • The original sphinx, Petra Sphinx, had players guess the top card of their libraries. This same guessing game was also used for Conundrum Sphinx.
    • Sphinx of Uthuun gives your opponent choice of which cards to put into your hand.
    • Isperia the Inscrutable rewards you if you can correctly guess a card in your opponent's hand. Of course, since they have to reveal their hand if you guess wrong, the riddle is a lot easier the second time.
    • Sphinx Ambassador secretly chooses one of your opponent's creatures, and if they can't guess which one, you get to steal it.
    • Even sphinxes who don't have riddle-related gameplay will often reference riddles in their Flavor Text, because hey, that's what sphinxes do.
  • Rule of Cool:
    • Both Johnnies and Timmies will play cards just because they do something cool, though for different reasons.
    • Also sometimes used to justify breaking the rules of card design. Form of the Dragon does a lot of things that, in terms of game mechanics, red spells don't normally do. It's okay, though, because the card TURNS YOU INTO A DRAGON!
    • This quote regarding Dragon Roost sums things up:

"Is there a downside?"
"It's pretty expensive."
"Who cares? You're making DRAGONS!"

  • Sadistic Choice:
    • Choice of Damnations
    • Cards like Skullscorch, Dash Hopes, and Lava Blister give your opponents the ability to jump in front of them to stop the spell's effect, taking heavy damage instead.
    • Perplex: if you want to keep your spell, you'll have to discard your hand...
    • Effects that cause your opponents to sacrifice a creature (Or any permanent, really). One of them must die...make your choice.
    • Played with in the card It That Betrays, which possesses an ability that forces your opponent to sacrifice two permanents whenever it attacks. While this is true of all Eldrazi, It That Betrays resurrects said permanents under your control. Now not only do they choose who they have to let go of, but also watch as it's reborn into your service.
    • A number of schemes in Archenemy allow the villain to offer an opponent a choice between "you take a big effect" and "each of your allies takes a smaller effect.
    • There are a few blue cards, such as Fact or Fiction and Gifts Ungiven, that invert this to an extent--instead of forcing your opponent to choose what they want to lose, it forces them to choose which of a selection of cards they want you to gain.
    • Even before New Phyrexia, the Mirrans had Painful Quandary, which, every time an opponent casts a spell, requires he either discard a card or lose five life. Remember, that's a quarter of your starting life.
    • This is the basis of the "Owling Mine" deck type. Howling Mine makes them draw an extra card while Ebony Owl Netsuke damages them for having too many cards in their hand. This forces opponents to either effectively waste cards or take damage. The deck was once popular enough people would actually sideboard One With Nothing, a card which had no purpose but to discard your hand.
  • Samurai: Seen in the Kamigawa block.
  • Scunthorpe Problem: The problem with Assault Strobe and Cumulative upkeep on the Gatherer site. Yes, they're going that far.
  • Serious Business: Tournament Play. This makes sense, because Wizards of the Coast provides some serious prize support. A single tournament can net the winner upwards of $40,000, and they've given away over $25 million in total cash prizes since they started running major tournaments. Several players have lifetime winnings in excess of $100,000, and that doesn't count minor tournaments or free plane trips to exotic foreign locales (though admittedly, you're there to play Magic, so perhaps "dreary foreign convention centre floors" would be more accurate). Of course, this trope often appears in full force even when there isn't a pile of cash at stake.
  • Serial Escalation:
  • Set Bonus: The "Urzatron", the Kaldra equipment cycle, and quite a few others.
  • She Cleans Up Nicely: Chandra manages to be quite lovely when she's not covered in a 3-inch layer of ash.
  • Shout-Out:
  • Spell My Name with a Blank: _____
  • Strategy Guide: Very common online; as the game constantly changes, it's essential for even the most basic Tournament Play.
  • Strategy Schmategy: This card is the Trope Namer.
  • Summoning Artifact:
    • Kaldra's equipment. When his shield, sword, and helm are brought together, they summon an avatar-equivalent of their original owner.
    • The Eye of Ugin acts as this for the Eldrazi.
    • A variety of minor artifacts like Summoner's Egg and Quicksilver Amulet fill this role.
  • Switch-Out Move:
    • The "Ninjutsu" mechanic, which lets you swap one attacker for another, mid-combat.
    • AEtherplasm does this whenever it blocks.
  • Tech Tree: The Level up mechanic from Rise of the Eldrazi functions as a Tech Tree, allowing you to invest additional resources into one of your creatures to upgrade it with new abilities.
  • Teleportation Sickness: Summoning sickness, which prevents creatures from tapping and attacking on the turn they're summoned. The story justifies it as a form of great nausea. Averted by creatures with Haste.
  • That One Rule:
    • "Banding" and "Bands With Other" were so complex that they are among only a stark few keywords that they simply stopped printing entirely.
    • "Phasing" as well, due to the unusual and unintuitive ways that it works (permanents phase in or out on each of their controller's untap steps, and the rules have changed multiple times as to whether this triggers "enters/leaves the battlefield" effects or not. Currently not.)
    • There's also the rules about continuous effects and layers, which are relevant in every format and even more complicated.
  • There Is No Kill Like Overkill: Shivan Meteor is a prime example.
  • Too Awesome to Use: The very first edition included the ante system, which allowed the winner of the match to take some of the loser's cards. This made players very reluctant to add very rare, powerful cards to a deck.
  • Took a Level in Badass: Flip cards, Figure of Destiny, and leveler creatures turn it into a game mechanic.
  • Tournament Play: Sponsored by the game's creators.
  • Transformation Is a Free Action: The Morph capacity. Free in term of timing as it don't use the stack so one can't do anything to respond its use.
  • The Un-Reveal: Mark Rosewater loves to do this. For example, he once replaced most of the words in a spoiler laden paragraph with the word "goblin".

Goblin of the Goblins is going to be a goblin built around the Goblin goblins, all of which have no goblin and are goblin. For example, there are two Goblins at goblin, the goblin of which is 7/7. All of the Goblins have a new goblin called goblin. Goblins with goblin have a goblin; whenever a goblin with goblin goblins, the goblin goblin must goblin that many goblins. The Goblins are very goblin but there are goblins that can create 0/1 goblins called Goblin Goblin that can be goblin to goblin one goblin goblin to your goblin goblin and will help you be able to goblin the Goblins. In addition, the goblin has a new goblin called goblin goblin. You may spend goblin on goblin with goblin goblin to improve their goblins and goblins. This Limited goblin is much goblin than the one in Goblin.

    • This is what it actually says:

Rise of the Eldrazi is going to be a set built around the Eldrazi creatures, all of which have no color and are giant. For example, there are two Eldrazi at common, the smaller of which is 7/7. All of the Eldrazi have a new keyword called annihilator. Creatures with annihilator have a number; whenever a creature with annihilator attacks, the defending player must sacrifice that many permanents. The Eldrazi are very expensive but there are cards that can create 0/1 tokens called Eldrazi Spawn that can be sacrificed to add one colorless mana to your mana pool and will help you be able to cast the Eldrazi. In addition, the set has a new ability called level up. You may spend mana on creatures with level up to improve their stats and abilities. This Limited environment is much slower than the one in Zendikar.

  • Urban Legend of Zelda:
    • Throat Wolf, a creature that supposedly had "firstest strike". This was before cardlists were available...
    • The guy who tore up his Chaos Orb, inspiring the Unglued card "Chaos Confetti."
  • Uriah Gambit: Abyssal Persecutor prevents its controller from winning the game as long as it's in play, so you'd better have one of these planned.
  • Video Game Stealing: A decent number of cards let you gain control of an opponent's cards, which includes being able to steal equipment their creatures are using. Bronze Tablet has this effect in the Microprose game (the only place it will see use in due to the legality of ante), allowing you to steal cards from the deck of opposing enemies and keep them after the duel.
  • We Have Reserves: A creature can only block one attacker at a time. If your numbers are overwhelming enough and your opponent weak enough you can win by attacking with all your creatures, even if most of them die in the process. This is especially true in token focused decks which specialize in overwhelming numbers.
  • What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?:
    • Shelkin Brownie's special ability is to remove the "Bands with other" ability from creatures. In the history of Magic, there are two cards with the "Bands from other" ability: the 1/1 tokens created by Master of the Hunt, and the Unhinged card Old Fogey, which is illegal in every format and only has the ability as a joke (the only creatures he can band with, aside from creatures that have the regular Banding ability, are other copies of himself). Oh, plus a cycle of lands that are serious contenders for "Worst card in the game" and probably shouldn't count. Good old Shelkin Brownie, keeping the world safe from four-mana 1/1s and legendary lands that don't produce mana!
    • The infamously bad card Great Wall is an enchantment that stops creatures with the Plainswalk ability. At the time of its printing, this included exactly two cards, both of them craptastic: Righteous Avengers, a 3/1 for 5 mana with no other abilities; and Giant Slug, which could only gain Plainswalk by paying 5 mana a turn. Good thing we built that wall, right?
  • Useless Item: Battle of Wits makes you win the game if you have 200 or more cards in your library. Most formats have no maximum on deck size, so it's difficult to pull off and predictable (since nothing else uses a deck that big) in most formats, but not useless. In formats like Commander, which requires decks have exactly 100 cards, it's useless.
    • Two combos exist that could theoretically allow it to be played. Both amount to summoning nigh-infinite cards from outside the game, shuffling them all into your deck, then playing battle of wits. These have two problems 1: Having a nigh-infinite number of creatures on the battlefield pretty much wins the game anyways, especially as virtually all board wipes are banned in Commander. Shuffling them into your library then playing Battle of Wits is extraneous. 2: Commander's rules state limitations on pulling cards from outside the game have to be agreed upon by all players before the game starts, so you can only pull these off if all opponents let you.
  • When I Was Your Age: The Unhinged Parody set has Old Fogey and its accompanying flavor text.

These kids today with their collector numbers and their newfangled tap symbol. Twenty Black Lotuses and 20 Plague Rats. Now that's real Magic.

  • Wooden Stake: Wooden Stake.
  • Xanatos Gambit:
    • Rhystic Study/Rising Waters: If they pay the mana, they have 1 less. If they don't, well, you get another card.
    • Standstill: They play spells, you draw a whooping three cards. They don't play spells, you get an advantage provided you built your deck around this being beneficious.
    • Choice of Damnations: Your opponent chooses a number, and you then decide whether he loses that many life points or keeps that many permanents, while the rest is sacrificed. (A low number would mean that your opponent loses almost all of his cards, and a high number would mean a large life loss.)
    • Mass creature removal, such as Wrath of God: Control decks use these mostly against aggro, so aggro players will find themselves having to restrain their use of creatures, lest they all be wiped by a single card, but then he may be heading for a late game, in which control decks have advantage over aggro decks.
    • Various creatures have effects if they're blocked, punishing the blocking player. Of note is Slith Strider, which has an ability that triggers when it's blocked, and one that triggers when it deals combat damage to a player.
    • Ichorclaw Myr: Take the attack and gain a poison counter (possibly more if it gets buffed), sacrifice a low-toughness creature to absorb the attack, or have a big beastie suffer a sizable, permanent power/toughness loss.
    • Phyrexian Obliterator cruelly employs this trope. While its earlier counterpart, Phyrexian Negator, actually encouraged the opponent to deal damage to it so that the controller would have to sacrifice something, Obliterator turns that around and makes it so that whoever's responsible for the damage has to sacrifice permanents. It can be a pain for your opponent to get rid of without causing its ability to go off. Oh--it's also an undercosted trampler, so they'll have to block it and/or destroy it, or it'll destroy them in 4 turns flat.
  • Yeah! Shot: Used in a photo from the official coverage of Day 3 of the Pro Tour: Dark Ascension tournament; it's a group shot of the Top 8 all in mid-jump.
  • Your Mind Makes It Real: The entire point of the Illusion tribe of creatures. They can kill other creatures and deal damage to players and planeswalkers just like any other creature, but if they are targeted by anything, they die. [citation needed]
  • Zerg Rush:
    • As mentioned above, aggro decks, especially "weenie" decks. Most (in)famous are Goblins (the Little Red Men), White Weenie (soldiers, knights, and birds of prey), and the Mirrodin block's Ravager Affinity (a rapid-fire Game-Breaker-laden deck which can inflict sudden death very rapidly on a good opening hand).
    • Kuldotha Red. Capable of (potentially) producing as many as seven creatures in turn one.
    • Single-card examples include Swarm of Rats, among others.
    • Saproling decks are based around generating absurd amounts of 1/1 tokens with relative ease; a Doubling Season/Mycoloth combo and a sacrifice of five cratures will generate 40 1/1 tokens per round, each of which the player will gleefully sacrifice for a variety of benefits.
  • Zombie Gait: Evoked with some of the Innistrad zombies. Diregraf Ghoul is a good example--it comes into play tapped to represent its slow gait. M11's Rotting Legion does the same thing.
  1. ↑ This is because the first card prevents every creature type but Evil Eyes attacking. The second is a Horror, not an Evil Eye, so it can't attack. It says only cards called Evil Eye of Orms-By-Gore can attack (though it could potentially be read as saying only it can attack). The first card is called Evil Eye of Orms-By-Gore, so it can still attack. But wait! The third card says only "Eyes" can attack. The first isn't an Eye, it's an Evil Eye, and the third isn't an Evil Eye, it's an Eye. Therefore, none of the three can now attack.
  2. ↑ not counting the double-faced cards which were released starting in 2011
  3. ↑ Or at least it did, until, in true Wizards fashion, the Oracle wording was changed to reflect more recent behavior for artifacts. Now Winter Orb no longer shuts off when tapped.
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