Magic The Gathering / Flavor And Story Tropes A To G

A to G — H to O — P to Z

A

• Abnormal Ammo: Akki Coalflinger, Fodder Launch, Mogg Cannon... the examples are endless (and mostly goblin-based). Deadapult is a zombie-based version that's no less hilarious.
• Aborted Arc: The pre-revision comics were leading up to the Planeswalker War, but the comic line was canceled before it could be published. Some of the characters involved, like Freyalise, Taysir, and Tevesh Szat have turned up later in modern storylines, but details on what actually went down are extraordinarily vague.
• Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Those in the city-world of Ravnica (they're Ravnica's swamps/black mana sources). They're so vast, they're called the "Undercity".
• Actually a Doombot:
  • Volrath's Shapeshifter in Stronghold, as represented on the card Scapegoat.
  • In Test of Metal, after Tezzeret curb-stomps Nicol Bolas, it's revealed that it was just a disposable simulacrum of Bolas the whole time — and that Tezzeret knew that all along. And, possibly, that Bolas knew that Tezzeret knew.
• After the End: Several times. There's the downfall of the Thran, the sylex blast that started the Ice Age, the two giant meteor strikes at Madara, the Apocalypse set, the coming of Karona, and finally, Time Spiral block, which is the closest to the trope. (Of course, it's Time Spiral, so it's before, after, and three seconds to the left of the end.) Dominaria went through so many apocalypses over its history that its thematic focus ended up switching outright from "Standard Fantasy Setting" to "fantasy post-apocalypse".
• A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Memnarch, a golem left behind by the creator of Mirrodin to guard the plane, goes insane and tries to become a planeswalker itself. Though this is at least partly due to external influence.
• Alien Invasion: The subject of several separate sets/blocks.
  • Phyrexia attempted to invade Dominaria in the aptly named Invasion block. Phyrexia is another plane rather than another planet, but Alien Invaders is a spot-on description of its role. They even have giant spaceships with laser beams and everything (seen fighting Urza's Powered Armor on Searing Rays, for example). This attempt would fail, but later sets taking place on Dominaria show that the scars never really healed.
  • The Phyrexians would try again in Scars of Mirrodin, this time striking from the plane's hollow core rather than from another plane. The success of this invasion is best described by the names of the set in the block. In order, they are Scars of Mirrodin, Mirrodin Besieged, New Phyrexia.
  • Nicol Bolas and his army of Eternal zombies from Amonkhet invading Ravnica would be the focus of War of the Spark. It didn't go well for Bolas.
  • In March of the Machine, the Phyrexians work out a way to create inter-planar portals and stage a mass invasion of the multiverse.
• Alien Sky:
  • Mirrodin has four luminous celestial bodies, referred to interchengably as both moons and suns, for four of the five colors of mana — the White Sun, the Blue Sun, the Black Sun and the Red Sun. The third set in the original Mirrodin block, Fifth Dawn, focuses on the birth of the fifth, Green sun, completing Mirrodin's five-orbed sky.
  • Dominaria has two moons, the Mist Moon and the Glimmer or Null Moon. The latter turns out to be an artificial Mana-storing construct and is destroyed during the climax of the Wheatherlight saga.
  • Esper, one of the Shards of Alara and known for being host to a civilization that keeps everything — everything — under minute control, has a star chart for a night sky and clouds sliced into precise segments. Once the four shards rejoin in Alara Reborn, many cards feature skies with visible boundaries from what was once one plane and what was another.
  • The realms of Kaldheim have no sun or moon — they're lit by the light of Arnheim, the World Tree's topmost realm, which is visible as a sundog-like effect in the realms below it — and the twisting branches of the World Tree are always visible beyond the clouds, rising from the horizon and out of sight.
• Alternate Universe: Planar Chaos, which shows a hundred alternate Dominarias, such as one where bad guy Braids, Cabal Minion becomes helpful Braids, Conjurer Adept. Some of these cards were genuine "What If?" questions, others were "This card, Prodigal Pyromancer is functionally identical to this classic of a different color, Prodigal Sorcerer, so serves as a retcon of what the card should have been printed as from the beginning had the design philosophy of the game been consistent from the start." (Eventually some, like the Pyromancer, would be reprinted in the new color. The timeline straightening itself out as it were.)
• All Deserts Have Cacti: Thunder Junction, being a Wild West-inspired plane, naturally. It even goes one step further to have cactusfolk.
• All Trolls Are Different: A historically somewhat varied creature type, but often hexproof — that is, unable to be targeted by opponents' spells — and capable of regenerating health. The hexproof part is an iconic part of trolls (though primarily through the efforts of Troll Ascetic). In terms of flavor, modern trolls have settled fairly consistently into being big, Green, primitive and ogreish humanoids. Notable breaks from this pattern do occur from time to time, however.
  • Ulgrotha is home to sea trolls, amphibious and finned beings who inhabit the oceans and devour anything they can catch.
  • Ravnica's trolls are lanky, horned and often reduced to living on the fringes of society.
  • Mirrodin's trolls are green-skinned, entirely noseless and have sheets of copper growing from their bodies (which is admittedly par for the course for living things on Mirrodin). They're native to the bio-metallic forest of the Tangle, and were already near extinct by the rise of New Phyrexia — one troll was left in the whole plane.
  • The trolls in the dark fairytale plane of Shadowmoor are short, spiny, long-nosed beings and referred to as "trow" — an old folkloric name for trolls.
  • Eldraine, being inspired by the Arthurian mythos and the tales of the Brothers Grimm, features two trolls directly derived from the troll-under-the-bridge archetype.
  • Kaldheim trolls are hunched, green-skinned humanoids with big hooked noses and curving tusks. They live in Gnottvold, a realm of rugged mountains and thick forests, and are divided into two groups. Hagi trolls are shorter (relatively speaking; even hunched over they're taller than a human), have thick manes of shaggy hair, live a primitive tribal existence, and fight constantly with each other and anyone else they meet. Torga trolls are much larger, with craggy features and grey skin, and when sleeping almost perfectly resemble ruins and giant boulders. Torgas can sleep for decades at a time, but if woken up suddenly (say, by adventurers poking around their territory or Hagi making trouble) they fly into murderous rages and rampage across Gnottvold, mauling anything they can catch, until they exhaust themselves and go back to sleep.
• Alternative Calendar: Dominaria has one — denoted as AR, for "Agrivian Reckoning," with year 1 being the birth of Urza and Mishra.
• Always Night: The plane of Shadowmoor is always night, while its foil Lorwyn is always noon. Granted, they're actually the same world, just on different sides of a reeeeeeallllllly long day-night cycle, but the change also warps the inhabitants' personalities and the environment, so they're counted as separate areas.
  • The Alara shard of Grixis, with its lack of white mana, is also like this.
• Ambiguously Gay:
  • Ertai and the Prodigal Sorcerer got a lot of this joke in InQuest Gamer.
  • The way that Chandra Nalaar and Nissa Revane interact give a lot of fans a Korrasami vibe, taken to an even further extreme during War of the Spark.
• American Gothic Couple: Orcish Settlers
• Anachronism Stew: Various minor examples. Any given expansion encompasses some length of time, so sometimes you have cards in the same set representing notably distant points in the timeline.
• Anadiplosis: The Flavor Text of "Squandered Resources", talking about a Chain of Deals, with "for" Mesodiplosis for every link in the chain, and Anadiplosis of every item in it, except at the end:
  He traded sand for skins, skins for gold, gold for life. In the end, he traded life for sand.
• Ancient Grome: Almost averted in Theros, where the set's designers consciously decided to focus on Greek rather than Roman influences. A single Roman influence slipped through, however, i.e. Raised by Wolves.
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: Many sets could be described as this.
  • After Arabian Nights, Antiquities attempted to tell an original story.
  • The "pseudo-block" of Legends, The Dark, and Fallen Empires. Legends was awesome, but neither The Dark nor Fallen Empires continued its mechanics, or its storyline, and were instead sequels to Antiquities.
  • Homelands is between Ice Age and Alliances, both with an Ice Age theme. Homelands, as far as we can tell, is about fairies and paladins vs. vampires. Homelands also didn't have Ice Age's mechanics, and is generally considered the worst set ever.
  • Weatherlight kicked off a five-year story arc.
  • Portal: Three Kingdoms introduced a lot of new mechanics, referred to flying as horsemanship, is incompatible with other Portal sets, and...was actually enjoyable.
  • The Urza's Block, while high in power and storyline, was a prequel, leaving you wondering what happened to the crew of the Weatherlight.
  • Nemesis introduced a new ability out of nowhere (Fading) and focused on Rath. Actually, every Masques block set focused on a different plane. Mercadia seemed to come out of nowhere too.
  • Apocalypse is the only set in the Invasion block to focus entirely on enemy colors (white/black, white/red, blue/red, blue/green, black/green).
• Animal Jingoism: The traditional cats-and-dogs rivalry is referenced in a few cards.
  • Feline Sovereign gives other Cat cards you control protection from Dogs.
  • This isn't limited to regular mutts and mogs. Mirri the Cat Warrior shares her four-legged kin's disgust for canids, and "canine" for her is much more broad than just domestic dogs.
    "No matter where we cat warriors go in the world, those stupid slobberers find us." — Mirri, flavor text for Arctic Wolves
• Animating Artifact: Karn is a silver golem who was created by Urza and Barrin as a sentient being capable of feel emotions and decide on his own destiny. He also has the power to animate other artifacts like him (he's considerated a Legendary Artifact Creature in-game), as seen in "Karn, Silver Golem" card, that allows the player to convert its artifacts into artifact creatures until the end of the turn.
• Anthropomorphic Personification: Incarnations are a rare creature type representing the living, physical embodiments of specific concepts and emotions. They are distinct from Elementals, which are living manifestations of natural forces and substances instead of philosophical concepts, and Gods, which are generally much more powerful and hold much broader purviews. They are also all named after the specific thing they embody, such as Purity, Vigor, Anger, Dread, or Subtlety.
• Anti-Hero: Urza dug up more than one Artifact of Doom, fought a war with his own brother that ended in a Fantastic Nuke destroying an entire continent, personally destroyed an entire plane (which, to be fair, was already ruined by a Pyrrhic Victory against Phyrexians), and had about one healthy interpersonal relationship in his entire life. And he is unquestionably the good guy in his conflict against Yawgmoth.
• Anti-Villain: Apparently, the Red Phyrexians of New Phyrexia. They are hardly good or kind people, but the influence of red mana remains strong, rendering them capable of independent thought, creativity, and even mercy and compassion. They even seem opposed to what they see as cruelty, which would include a lot of the actions other New Phyrexian factions have taken.
• Appropriated Appellation: Tezzeret was never given a name by his father. Growing up in the slums, his peers gave him the nickname "Tezzeret", meaning "a concealed, improvised weapon" after he won a fight with a bully by shivving him. The name stuck.
• Apocalypse How:
  • Spirit patrons raging over the kidnapping of one of their own? Kamigawa.
  • A reconverting of five mini-planes into one singular plane? Shards of Alara.
  • An unraveling of the strands of time? Time Spiral.
  • How about the world changing every fifty or so years to a "dark" version? Lorwyn turns into Shadowmoor.
  • Eldritch Abominations emerge from their prisons into a living world that hates their alien magic? Zendikar.
  • A relentless evil that is essentially The Corruption personified and has been growing and festering in the core of the Plane ever since its creation finally amasses enough military power to launch a full-scale invasion headed by the twisted, corrupted husks of the Plane's own legendary heroes from ages past up to and including the Plane's creator himself? Scars of Mirrodin.
  • Humans being exterminated en masse by zombies, werewolves, vampires, demons, possessed trees, and other unspeakable horrors of the night? Innistrad.
  • Ten Guilds being forced to run a a maze in an attempt to either bring peace or destroy them all? Return to Ravnica.
  • An Eldritch Abomination too powerful for even the world's greatest heroes only spares the world because the stars are not yet right? Shadows over Innistrad.
  • An interdimensional invader setting off a plan put into motion decades before, almost completely annihilating a culture and bringing about a zombie apocalypse? Amonkhet.
  • Artificially-created planes are often inherently unstable, usually due to their mana being unbalanced in favor of their planeswalker's creators alignment, and tend to collapse.
• "Arabian Nights" Days: The very first expansion was called "Arabian Nights", and focused on themes and creatures drawn from Middle Eastern history and mythology such as djinn, Ali Baba and Sinbad's travels — and a lot of desert.
• Arc Welding: No matter how isolated a particular storyline may seem... it will be tied into all the rest.
• Arc Words: Each time a Planeswalker joins the Gatewatch, they get a card called "Oath of ..." to commemorate it. The flavor text of each Oath includes the phrase, "I will keep watch." "I will keep watch" is also Gideon Jura's epitaph.
• Arrows on Fire: Occasionally seen in artwork, e.g. Fire at Will and Arrow Storm.
• Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Braids takes up petty extortion as a hobby.
• The Artifact: If you can believe it, the spells in a game called Magic. In the early days of the game, all Enchantments, Sorceries, Instants and Interrupts represented magical spells that the player as a Planeswalker would cast in battle against their opponent, even the more esoteric ones like Wrath of God. However as time went on and in particular as the game became more story-focused (especially around about the time of Weatherlight and the start of the original Rath arc), spells started to include things that were more like story events or personal actions by the characters, such as Debt of Loyalty or Broken Fall. As this became more common, the actual "magical" part of your spells became somewhat of an afterthought.
• Artifact of Doom:
  • The Mirari, an artifact of vast power that warps and mutates reality around itself and drives the wielder to insanity.
  • The Chain Veil, an artifact Liliana Vess picked up on behalf of one of her demon shareholders, elevates her power to incredible levels. Not quite that of an Oldwalker, but certainly enough to mop the floor with her demons. Unfortunately, it takes a large toll on the wielder, and tries to corrupt them.
• Artificial Human:
  • The Metathran. Most were basically emotionless, loyal soldiers, but their commanders, Thaddeus and Agnate, were granted sentience to make them more effective planners and leaders.
  • Phyrexian Newts as spies.
  • The gods of Theros fashioned the artificial human Calix to pursue Elspeth Tirel after she escaped from the underworld. When she attempted to Planeswalk away, Calix followed, even though created beings can't develope a Planeswalker Spark in official canon.
• Artificial Limbs: Commonly seen in both Esper and Phyrexia, both of which view the replacement of fallible flesh with perfected machinery as something like a religious vocation. Notably, the planeswalker Tezzeret's right arm.
• Ascended Fanboy: When we first met Sarkhan, he was a dragon fanboy looking for a dragon who deserved his adorations (and who got a severe case of Be Careful What You Wish For when he met Nicol Bolas). Nowadays he's free from Bolas, mastered draconic magic to the point he can freely shapeshift into one of them, found a new dragon to be loyal to in Ugin, saving Ugin's life from Bolas by altering the past, and doing so he saved the dragons of his own world from extinction and made them its rulers instead.
  Sarkhan Vol: Now I fly with dragons!
• Ascended Meme:
  • The legend of a player who shredded their (now-expensive, but then worth maybe a dollar) Chaos Orb card to win a game (it destroys any card it touches when dropped onto the field) eventually got acknowledged in the Unglued set as Chaos Confetti, which instructs the player to shred the card for the same effect.
  • The art and flavor text on Totally Lost depicts a tiny, frightened homunculus named Fblthp. The community took such a shining to him that he got his own short story and has appeared in the background of a handful of other cards, Statute of Denial, Unquestioned Authority, Captive Audience, and March of the Multitudes being the most prominent (he's still lost). He received his own card in War of the Spark: Fblthp, the Lost.
  • A more storyline related one: In Oath of the Gatewatch's storyline, the finishing blow in the Eldrazi came when Nissa (a Green mage) casts a spell that helps her channel a massive amount of mana from her own lifeforce and from Zendikar itself into Chandra (a Red mage), who then casts a powerful fire spell. Any old-time fan will recognize this as the oldest combo in the history of Magic — Channel + Fireball.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Planeswalkers start off as normal people, and some traumatic or life-changing event causes their Planeswalker spark to ignite and immediately whoosh them away.
• Atlantis: The original Merfolk lord was Lord of Atlantis. Later, "Atlantis" was Retconned to be a human corruption of the proper Merfolk name, "Etlan Shiis".
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Common result of Green pump spells, e.g. Might of Oaks's giant squirrel.

B

• Back from the Brink: Humanity in Innistrad was on the verge of extinction after years of Avacyn's absence, with towns being destroyed by undead, werewolf packs, and worse, with humanity desperately struggling against the dark. Once Avacyn was released from the Helvault, she joins them in a war to take back what was lost. However, with the introduction of Shadows over Innistrad, the humans now have to contend with Avacyn herself.
• Back from the Dead:
  • The Planeswalker Elspeth was betrayed by Theros' sun god, Heliod, and consigned to the plane's underworld. She refused to accept this fate, and fought her way out; the Saga card Elspeth Conquers Death depicts her struggle. Fittingly, her title changes from Elspeth, Sun's Champion, to Elspeth, Sun's Nemesis, as a result of Heliod's betrayal.
  • Elspeth did this a second time during the initial battle with New Phyrexia. She saved countless planes from certain destruction from the makeshift sylex (as a soon-to-be-compleated Jace had decided to activate it early) by shunting the sylex and herself into the Blind Eternities before it blew, which should have consigned her to certain death. Once again, through the help of a mysterious voice she believes is her mother (and who turns out to be Serra), she defies death and returns as the Archangel Elspeth and deals a major blow to the Phyrexian defenses.
• Back-to-Back Badasses:
  • Thistledown Duo and Safehold Duo from Shadowmoor.
  • Palace Guard
  • Tibor and Lumia
  • Brothers Yamazaki (left and right). Also a gameplay example since two copies are allowed on the battlefield simultaneously despite being legendary creatures and each supports the other.
  • One of the main moments of March of the Machine is characters from all across Magic The Gathering history being forced into this in the face of New Phyrexia's invasion
• Badass Crew: The crew of the Skyship Weatherlight.
• Badass Family:
  • Seshiro the Annointed from Kamigawa and his legendary family, among which are the shaman Sachi, Daughter of Seshiro and the warrior Sosuke, Son of Seshiro.
  • Also, the aforementioned Umezawas, Toshiro and his descendant, Tetsuo Umezawa, one of the only, if not the only, person to defeat Magic's resident Big Bad Nicol Bolas one on one. Then again, Bolas only really became a God-Mode Sue after he returned in Time Spiral.
  • Kamahl and his sister Jeska.
  • The Nalaar family isn't too shabby either — Pia and Kiran are good at killing things with exploding robots, and their daughter Chandra is one of Magic's burniest planeswalkers.
• Badass Normal: Yawgmoth started out as one of these.
• Badass Preacher: Most white creatures of the Cleric subtype (black Clerics fall under Sinister Minister). In particular, the priests of Innistrad join the fight against the dark forces.
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • The Phyrexian Guys Win in the Scars of Mirrodin block. Mirrodin is now New Phyrexia.
  • After the Gatewatch cast the spell that imprisoned Emrakul in Innistrad's moon, everyone that was directly involved ends up with the uneasy feeling that Emrakul not only allowed it to happen, but that she gotten exactly what she wanted all along.
  • Baron Sengir was last seen marching through a portal to begin conquest, with no way to defeat him and no end in sight.
• Bad Moon Rising:
  • Bad Moon gives a +1/+1 boost to black creatures.
  • Blood Moon and Chaos Moon screw with everyone's mana.
  • Moonmist and Full Moon's Rise from Innistrad. The former transforms all Werewolves while the latter makes them more powerful.
  • The main plot point with the set titled Eldritch Moon, again based in Innistrad.
• Barbarian Tribe: The Gathans are the result of a super soldier program gone awry upon the Keldon Barbarian tribes, resulting in a group of batshit barely sentient marauding murder machines.
• Barrier Maiden:
  • Ashling in the Lorwyn storyline was supposed to take this role and help the flamekin transition from Lorwyn to Shadowmoor. She didn't go along with it, though.
  • Kyodai, the girl you may know as That Which Was Taken, fused with Michiko Konda, her spirit-sister, to become the new protector and embodiment of the barrier between the mortal world and the spirit world.
• Base on Wheels: The Abzan of Tarkir use wheeled forts dragged around by huge beasts.
• Bash Brothers:
  • The Shadowmoor set had a cycle of five pairs of Bash Brothers. There's also Palace Guard, and the Brothers Yamazaki (who are literal brothers as well).
  • Also these channelers, who like the aforementioned Shadowmoor cycle, have two separate class types listed to reflect both participants.
  • Ajani Goldmane's unique brand of magic is the ability to bring out and manifest the best and strongest aspects of another person in physical form. His preferred brother in arms? His elder brother, Jazal Goldmane. Together they were said to be unstoppable.
  • Marisi's Twinclaws
  • Your choice!
• Batman Gambit: In his mission to destroy Phyrexia, Urza deliberately included Tevesh Szat, a Token Evil Teammate, in his group because he correctly predicted that said teammate would betray them. Urza had invented a way to turn a soul into a Fantastic Nuke, but in order to use it, he would need to destroy the soul of a fellow planeswalker, and Tevesh Szat's inevitable betrayal would give Urza an excuse to kill him and power the bomb.
• Bat Out of Hell: The game has a few bats of the huge and monstrous variety under the domain of Black, such as the Blind Hunter and the predatory Grimclaw Bats.
• Battle Cry: Used by the Mirrans in Mirrodin Besieged. They have a surprisingly deep variety of battle cries —Doug Beyer discusses it in great detail in his weekly column.
• Beam-O-War: Seen in the art of Double Negative and Mages' Contest.
• Beanstalk Parody: Eldraine, a plane based on fairytales, has this as a recurring motif.
  • Throne of Eldraine has the cards "Beanstalk Giant", depicting a giant covered in twining bean vines, and "Tall as a Beanstalk", where a character realizes he was supposed to plant the beans, not eat them, once they begin sprouting out of him.
  • Wilds of Eldraine features this more prominently in its main story, where Kellan and Ruby need to climb up a huge beanstalk during their quest in order to consult a magic mirror belonging to the giant Beluna Grandsquall, who doesn't lightly tolerate "smallfolk" in her home. These sorts of vegetable towers are apparently relatively common in Eldraine, and are home to immense vegetal serpents when they aren't animated things in their own right.
• The Beastmaster: Garruk Wildspeaker is the most prominent example, although there are others, usually one-of green rares like Master of the Wild Hunt, Keeper of the Beasts, or Beastbreaker of Bala Ged.
• Beat Them at Their Own Element: Jaya Ballard, on fighting fire, that is, you should use fire. As quoted on Sizzle:
  Of course you should fight fire with fire. You should fight everything with fire.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Judgment's cycle of Wish cards, the flavor text of each of which is a variant on the following: "He wished for X, but not for the [Required Secondary Power] to [effectively use] it. Future Sight adds one more.
• Bee-Bee Gun: Hornet Cannon, a gun that shoots robotic wasps.
• Bee People:
  • Slivers behave like a hive species, led by the Sliver Queen.
  • The faeries of Lorwyn/Shadowmoor block are all born from Oona, Queen of the Fae.
• Berserker Tears: Tears of Rage. Also, they're on fire.
• BFS:
  • Favored by Kamahl, Akroma◊, and many others.
  • Ogre's Cleaver.
• Big Bad: There are two big contenders and several others:
  • The mechanical demon-god Yawgmoth in pretty much all of the storylines from Antiquities to the end of the Weatherlight saga was arguably the most powerful being in The Multiverse. And even long after his death, his creation, Phyrexia, lives on, and is now infecting Mirrodin.
  • Much later, during the Alara storyline, the elder dragon Nicol Bolas (a character from the game's early days) stepped in as the foremost threat to Dominia's stability.
  • There have been a few other, smaller Big Bads in between, including the vampire overlord Baron Sengir in Homelands, the golem wizard Memnarch in Mirrodin (himself a victim of the Phyrexian taint), and the corrupt human king Daimyo Konda in Kamigawa.
  • It is clear that the Eldritch Abomination gods Eldrazi awakened during the Zendikar are actually a menace threatening the entire multiverse. Gideon, Sorin and others gathered allies to bring the fight to them.
• Big Beautiful Woman: Deathless Angel is noticeably chubby, but, being an angel, is still portrayed as quite lovely.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Giant bugs are a staple creature type, especially in green and black.
  • Crash of Rhino Beetles depicts a stampeding herd of beetles over twice as tall as trees.
  • The Drudge Beetle is an insect large enough to be used as a beast of burden.
  • The Giant Adephage is a monstrously large beetle shown crawling over the ruins of a city.
    —"To a creature like that, we must seem like, well, bugs." — Dars Gostok, Firefist captain
  • The Hawkeater Moth is not as large as the game's other examples, but still big enough to prey on hunting birds.
  • The krotiqs of Tarkir are centipede-like creatures of absurd size. Beasts such as Ambush Krotiq and Segmented Krotiq dwarfsbeasts that haul full-sized forts around and can prey on dragons.
  • The Lithophage is an insect so huge that it consumes mountains.
  • The Moonwing Moth is so big that the birds flying alongside it look like barely more than bugs themselves.
• Big Damn Heroes: A few examples throughout the series. War of the Spark has a cycle of cards calling back to the Defeat cycle from Amonkhet. The Defeats illustrated Bolas stomping the Gatewatch. War of the Spark's version are Triumphs, showing the same five Planeswalkers rallying against and ultimately defeating Bolas' army of Eternals.
• Big Good: On Innistrad, humans looked to the archangel Avacyn, Angel of Hope for deliverance from the horrors of their plane... but she's not the Big Good. That would be her creator... Sorin Markov?!
• Big Red Devil: Generally Averted, as demons are associated with black mana and have colour schemes to match. Played straight with Rakdos and Tibalt, however, as they are associated with both black and red mana.
• Bio-Augmentation:
  • The primary goal and identity of the Simic guild of Ravnica is artificially engineering superior life-forms. Their guild mechanic is "Graft", which is flavored as attaching cytoplast modifications to creatures.
  • And in the Gatecrash set, Simic's new shtick is the "evolve" mechanic, in which their creatures augment themselves, ostensibly by mimicking the favorable traits of other creatures they spend enough time around.
  • In an odd example, Phyrexia biologically augments non-biological creatures.
  • The schtick of the Kaiju plane of Ikoria is that this happens spontaneously to Ikorian wildlife. This results in mishmashes like Wolf Bears, Dinosaur Hippos, and Bird Serpents. The Mutate mechanic (essentially smashing two creatures into one) is meant to depict this in process.
• Bittersweet Ending: The ending to the Godsend novel is a pretty cruel one. Xenagos is slain and order returned to Theros, but Elspeth is killed and winds up in the Underworld, Heliod gets away with everything, and Elspeth's sacrifice turns out to be senseless as it condemns a Returned Daxos to a shadow of life searching endlessly for her.
  • Likewise the Shadows Over Innistrad block. Sure, the Gatewatch managed to seal away Emrakul, but at the cost of any protection the plane had with the unmaking of Avacyn, 2/3 of the lesser angels destroyed or fallen, leaving Sigarda as the only Angelic defender truly on the side of humanity...or what's left of them, too, after Emrakul's corruption mutated a large portion into nightmarish beasts. And Emrakul's sealing? Aided by Emrakul herself, leading one to wonder whether it was really a win at all...
  • There's also the end of the Amonkhet block. Many people from Naktamun survived Bolas's invasion and have been led to safety by Hazoret and other warriors, but Naktamun is completely destroyed, Bolas got the army of undead warriors he wanted (along with two god-level monsters), Hazoret is crippled, and the survivors have to now survive in an extremely hostile desert environment crawling with undead and other monstrosities.
  • Finally, the end of the War of the Spark. Nicol Bolas is finally defeated, being held in the Meditation Realm for all eternity with Ugin watching over him. But many lives were lost and Gideon ultimately sacrificed his own life to save Liliana's. While Liliana was instrumental in Bolas' defeat, the Gatewatch believe she ultimately pulled a Heel–Face Turn too late and are out to kill her for her culpability in leading the Dreadhorde.
• Bizarro World: Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, to each other.
• Black Cloak: Warlocks and wraiths are no strangers to dramatic cowls, and Magic's specters are literally nothing but black cloaks. And there's lots more.
• The Blank:
  • Changeling magic can accomplish this.
  • Phyresis tends to end in this.
  • If a Zendikar Vampire drains someone completely of blood, they turn into a Null; basically a zombie without eyes or a nose.
  • Any of the brood lineage of Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre will have a pristine white skull-like plate over their faces. This is different from the other two eldrazi lineages because Ulamog's sires tend to have heads (whereas Kozilek's lineage have eyes, just elsewhere on the body, and Emrakul's lineage all resemble sentient mushrooms).
  • Ashiok is missing upper half of their face.
• Blinded by the Light: Blinding Mage, Blinding Angel, etc.
• Blind Bats:
  • Blind Hunter depicts a bat with nothing but smooth unbroken skin over its face.
  • Deep-Cavern Bat shows another bat with tiny, atrophied eyes.
• Blind Obedience: The Orzhov Syndicate expects this of its followers. Exemplified in the card of the same name.
• Blood Lust:
  • The card with the same name.
  • Vampires, naturally. Also, Blood Celebrant.
• Blood Magic:
  • A common theme in black, especially among vampires. Sorin Markov, for example, is a notable user of blood magic.
  • Blood Celebrant uses blood to manipulate mana.
  • Others include Call for Blood, Malakir Bloodwitch, Blood Funnel.
• Bloodsucking Bats: The Bloodhunter Bat hunts and retrieves blood for its undead masters, represented by its ability removing life from your opponent and giving it to you.
  It returns eager to share the feast of blood and gore with its ghoulish master.
• Blow You Away: Wind spells are common in both green and blue.
• Body Horror:
  • What many mage-created Chimeras and Phyrexians endure.
  • Some of the card art features really gruesome stuff, particularly on black cards.
  • The Mirari does this to the peoples of the Otarian continent.
• Bold Explorer / Walkingthe Earth: What essentially describes most planeswalkers out there regardless of personal missions or motives. Its a bit sad depending on how you look at it.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution: A stock white spell. Divine Retribution invokes it by name, but there's lots.
• Book Ends: In the Uncharted Realms stories chronicling Sarkhan's adventure in the Khans of Tarkir block, Sarkhan first meets the original Narset when she alights upon a rock in the desert while he's searching for Ugin. The new Narset then first meets Sarkhan when he lands on a rock in the tundra while she's looking for Ugin.
• Bowdlerise: While of course the Fat Man from Fallout had to be referenced in the Universes Beyond set, the design team opted to name the card to represent it Nuka-Nuke Launcher, after an obscure weapon from the Nuka World DLC of Fallout 4, to remove the connection with the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
• Bread, Eggs, Milk, Squick: Used in several card flavors, such as Markov Patrician.
• Breath Weapon:
  • Comes in standard Firebreathing enchantment as well as Dragon Breath. Naturally many dragons already come stocked with Firebreathing.
  • The five broods of Tarkir's dragons have a different one each: Dromoka's laser breath, Ojutai's ice, Silumgar's poison, Kolaghan's lightning and Atarka's fire.
• Brick Joke: The first story of the Kaladesh block mentions Liliana messing with Jace by putting some of his books in the wrong place. Toward the end of the story, the Gatewatch's vedalken guest mentions seventeen books being on the wrong shelves in the library.
• Broken Angel:
  • Black-aligned angels, frequently — see Fallen Angel.
  • With the coming of White Phyrexia, there's more: Chancellor of the Annex and Shattered Angel that are quite literally broken.
  • The introduction of the Shadows Over Innistrad block leaves us with Avacyn and most of her army of angels becoming corrupted and launching an inquisition to "purify" the world through wreaking havoc and burning and killing the humans they were supposed to protect and serve. It only gets worse in Eldritch Moon.
• Brutish Bulls: Many ox creatures are printed with the ability "haste", which causes them to attack the moment they're put into play rather than waiting a turn like most creatures do. Even those that don't tend to have references to fictional bulls' typical bad tempers in their flavor text:
  The good news is it's vegetarian. The bad news is it just doesn't like you. — flavor text for " Ironhoof Ox"
• Brutish Character, Brutish Weapon: Creatures with the Barbarian creature type, such as Balduvian Warlord, Barbarian Outcast, Plundering Barbarian and Tiger-Tribe Hunter, are usually depicted wielding large, broad-headed battleaxes.

C

• Call-Back:
  • The art of Thespian's Stage depicts a battle between actors portraying Agrus Kos and Szadek—they're performing a play about the plot of the original Ravnica Cycle!
  • The Time Spiral expansion is full of throwbacks to older cards: Ancestral Recall become Ancestral Vision, Blood Moon became Magus of the Moon, Akroma, Angel of Wrath became Akroma's Memorial etc.
  • Starting with Commander 2014, most sets that take place outside the current story arc (typically Core Sets, supplemental sets, and Commander products) typically has at least a nod to some character that was previously referenced but never got their own card. These callbacks can go pretty deep. For example, Rebbec was a minor character in 1994's Antiquities, the third set ever, and got her first Legendary Creature card in 2020's Commander Legends.
  • The original Innistrad set featured a creature named Champion of the Parish, who grows stronger for every Human you put into play. Come Innistrad: Midnight Hunt, it appears he has died in the decade since then, since he comes back as Champion of the Perished, who gets stronger for every Zombie you play instead.
    "I stand for every cobbler, tanner, and fool in this town — and they stand for me."

    — Champion of the Parish
    He rose from the graf for every cobbler, tanner, and fool who’d been slaughtered in the parish — and they rose and shambled after him.

    — Champion of the Perished
• Canis Major: Hollowborn Barghest is a very big dog. That's not dry grass it's standing in — those are trees.
• Canon Immigrant:
  • The Viashino were originally introduced in the Tie-In Novel The Prodigal Sorcerer by Mark Sumner. The designers of the game liked them so much that they worked them into the game.
  • Jodah was created for Jeff Grubb's novelizations of The Dark and Ice Age cycles. He'd eventually return for Time Spiral block and get his own Avenger. Now that the game's returned to Dominaria, he's gotten a proper card.
  • Gideon Jura was created for the story The Purifying Flame, and, like the Viashino, was well-liked by the developers enough to make him into a card.
• The Captain: Gerrard Capashen; although Sisay was the actual skipper of the Weatherlight, Gerrard filled the trope.
• Captain Ersatz:
  • The Serrated Biskelion is a Type I Screamer.
  • Relatively common in newer worlds trying to evoke a certain feel. For example, Throne of Eldraine has a cycle of five Legendary Artifacts meant to reinforce it's Arthurian theme. They correlate to the disparate but decidedly "medieval England" elements of the Round Table, the queen's magic mirror, the Holy Grail, Excalibur, and Stone Henge.
  • The set BattleBond introduces the Azra, who bear more than a little resemblance to the Tieflings.
• Cat Folk: A number of cat races, all typed as regular cats, appear in the game. Most examples, such as the Leonin and Nacatl, are in Green, White or both and tend to be Noble Savages, Proud Warrior Race Guys or some combination of both. The Rakshasa of Tarkir, typed as cat demons, are instead ancient and cunning schemers.
• Catlike Dragons:
  • Nekorus are a species of dragons with catlike features (or cats with draconic features) native to the continent of Jamuraa, in the world of Dominaria. The only nekoru to receive a card, Wasitora, resembles a stout-bodied panther with dragon wings, and is typed as both a Cat and a Dragon. Their name is a portmanteau of the Japanese words for "cat" and "dragon".
  • In its flavor text, the original Shivan Dragon is described as "often tormenting its victims much like a cat plays with a mouse".
  • Even though they don't officially have the Cat creature type, the dragons of the Indian-themed steampunk-inspired plane of Kaladesh, Skyship Stalker and Freejam Regent, have tiger-like facial features, black stripes on orange-red scales and tiger-like claws on the ends of their vaguely feline limbs.
• Cavalry of the Dead: In "Eldritch Moon", the zombie army Liliana raises turns out to be the only effective resistance against the hordes of Eldrazi-twisted horrors; being fundamentally mindless, the zombies No-Sell Emrakul's insanity-inducing influence and successfully go all Zombie Apocalypse on the horrifyingly transformed "living".
• Celestial Body: The Gods of Theros and their servants.
• Cerebro Electro: Keranos is the god of lightning and knowledge in the game's Theros set. He sends lightning storms as tests for explorers, inventors, and mathematicians who seek to understand the mysteries of the world. His symbol, a simple lightning bolt, is both a reminder of his ability to electrocute men in the blink of an eye as well as his ability to provide sudden flashes of inspiration.
• Cerebus Rollercoaster: The tone of each block or even individual expansions in it may vary a lot.
• Chain Lightning: Is a card.
• Chainmail Bikini: Seen in some of the art. Hero of Bladehold is the most recent example.
• Character Alignment:invoked
  • The Color Wheel serves as an alignment system, as it helps indicate what characters value and how they tend to relate to characters of other colors. Though mind you, this system doesn't make any moral judgments; the traits associated with colors can be directed to either good or evil.
  • Crossover sourcebooks for Dungeons & Dragons gave D&D alignments to characters from the planes they feature.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • Ghostfire. Colorless damage basically got the reaction "hmm, interesting..." but it didn't become important until the Zendikar block, where it turned out Ghostfire was part of the key to the lock holding in the Eldrazi.
  • The same block's Steamflogger Boss was openly admitted as created solely as a joke — "assemble" had no in-game meaning and there were no Contraptions. Years later Unstable supplied them. (Possibly subverted, in that Contraptions are all silver-bordered cards and thus not tournament legal anyway.)
  • The Tarkir block is a Time Travel-heavy block in which the first and third sets are Alternate Timelines of each other. Consequently, when Khans of Tarkir gave us a card of a man punching a bear, there was immediate expectation that Dragons of Tarkir would give us the same man punching a dragon, which it did. (Players waiting for the Third Option of a bear punching a dragon had to wait for a silver-bordered Unstable card.)
• The Chessmaster:
  • Urza. The man spent 5,000 years influencing global politics in anticipation of a demonic invasion. In the end, Yawgmoth did him in, but he managed to save the world anyway.
  • Yawgmoth himself was a skillful chessmaster, even managing to Out Gambit Urza's original plan.
  • Nicol Bolas plots to regain the powers he lost in the Mending, causing plane-wide catastrophes in the process.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Starke of Rath.
  • The Dimir of Ravnica.
• Citadel City: The Shadowmoor block has Kithkin settlements built like these.
  • The clan Abzan of Tarkir made endurance and defense their modus operandi.
• City in a Bottle:
  • Is a card.
  • Feroz's Ban is an entire world in a bottle!
• Classical Cyclops: Cyclopes appear somewhat uncommonly in a number of sets. They're strongly tied to Red, the color of chaos, emotion and aggressiveness, and share an in-universe niche with ogres as violent, man-eating and often barely sapient brutes. In appearance, they vary from just big, one-eyed humans to hulking, one-eyed ogres to barely humanoid colossi with faces dominated by grotesquely enlarged orbs and gaping maws bristling with fangs.
  • Dominaria hosts cyclopes in the Ekundu Mountains. They're noted to have a very simple language — their tongue has only fifty words, ten of which mean "kill".
  • Ravnica's cyclopes, also called monoclons, are often employed by Red-aligned guilds. Most live among the Gruul Clans, but they also serve as fortress guards in the Boros Legion and in the Izzet League as heavy lifters. Some, such as the Gruul leader Borborygmos, have horns.
  • In Theros, a plane heavily based off of Classical Mythology, cyclopes are animalistic, aggressive brutes who live in the wilderness and attack anyone they come across. They don't feel pain, and are capable of razing villages on their own. Some even wield lightning.
• Clingy Costume: Some cards, such as Living Armor, feature this.
• Clock Punk: Toss in some magic and this Kaladesh. The block features Pia and Chandra Nalaar, red-aligned rebels, fighting against the blue and white Consulate, a governing body imposing order at the cost of individual freedoms.
• Les Collaborateurs: Nicol Bolas's many minions in the Alara block surreptitiously working to spread paranoia and anarchy throughout their worlds — the xenophobic Knights of the Skyward Eye from Bant, expansionist Seekers of Carmot from Esper, corrupt merchant Gwafa Hazid, and barbarian shaman Rakka Mar. As of Mirrodin Besieged, he's got Tezzeret helping him out in Mirrodin.
  • Happens again in Guilds of Ravnica and Ravnica Allegiance. Bolas recruited five Planeswalkers (Ravnica natives Ral Zarek, Domri Race, and Vraska, plus outsiders Dovin Baan and Kaya) and manipulated circumstances so that they became the leaders of their Guilds. The idea was that these moles would intentionally destabilize Ravnica in advance of Bolas' Alien Invasion plan, which was the plot of War of the Spark.
• Continuity Snarl: The publication history of Magic’s storyline has been such a jumble of novels, comics, articles and other supplementary material that there are major and minor contradictions all over the place, but a few of the bigger ones are:
  • The state of the island of Lat-Nam. Early sources state the island was rendered poisonous and uninhabitable for thousand of years after the College of Lat-Nam was destroyed during the Brothers’ War. Later sources never mention this, and have the School of the Unseen located there during the centuries that the island was supposedly poisoned. This is covered in greater detail on the Multiverse in Review blog.
  • The Ice Age comics were later replaced with the novel The Eternal Ice. The problem is that while the novel invalidates some aspects of the comics, it does refer the other events from the comics that are not directly shown in the novel, meaning that part of the comic is in continuity and part of the comic is out of continuity.
  • A number of characters from the Legends set show up in both of the Magic Legends cycles, which are set hundreds of years apart, with no explanation. One very problematic example concerns the characters Tor Wauki and Ramirez DePietro. In the first Magic Legends Cycle, Tor Wauki is an archer aboard the ship of pirate Ramirez DePietro. In the second Magic Legends Cycle, set hundreds of years later, Tor Wauki meets the shapeshifter Halfdane in the guise of DePietro and has no idea who the pirate is. Halfdane later reveals he killed DePietro two years ago. The Multiverse in Review Blog has taken a swing at this, but ultimately concludes that there is no other way out than to assume that there are multiple characters with the same name in canon, which was obviously not the original intent.
    • This was finally put to rest in 2020's Commander Legends set. The legend who serves Ramirez DePietro is Tor Wauki The Elder while the later character is Tor Wauki The Younger.
• Cool Shades: Sunglasses of Urza. Style and utility combined.
• Cool Versus Awesome: The conflict of the plane of Ixalan can roughly be summed up as "the Conquistadors, but they're vampires, vs the Aztecs, but they control and worship giant dinosaurs. Oh, and there's also Pirates!"
• Corporate Dragon: The city-plane of Ravnica has this trope in the Mad Scientist dragon Niv-Mizzet, parun and guild-master of the Izzet League. Said guild holds a monopoly on the civic works of the city, including water supply systems, sewers, heating systems, boilers, and roadways.
• Corpse Land: The plane of Grixis is inhabited by dead things, undead things, demons, and the occasional desperate necromancer. Due to a lack of green or white mana, it's incapable of producing new life.
• Corrupt Church:
  • The Orzhov guild.
  • The Church of Avacyn as of Shadows Over Innistrad.
• The Corruption: Phyrexia. This is especially played up in the Scars of Mirrodin storyline.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Shadows Over Innistrad, in contrast to Gothic Horror setting of the first Innistrad. In Shadows, we have cultists summoning Eldritch Abomination, which eventually is sealed because it, Emrakul, chooses to seal itself without being defeated.
• Crack in the Sky:
  • In the Time Spiral cycle, the central conflict revolves around giant time rifts that have appeared all over Dominaria and are sucking the mana out of the land and threatening the total destruction of the space-time continuum.
  • In the Ravnica cycle, a dimensional rift above the Utvara region is a main plot point. (It turns out to be related to Dominaria's time rifts, too.)
  • The trope appears on a variety of individual cards, such as AEther Rift and Wargate.
• Crapsaccharine World: Kaladesh and especially Amonkhet.
  • Kaladesh is a beautiful, colorful world full of creativity and inventions...ruled by a tyrannical Consulate that quashes any ideas it doesn't approve of.
  • Amonkhet is a world where all the necessities of life are handled by an endless number of reanimated mummies, leaving the living populace to focus on the competitive Trials. The Trials, it turns out, are Blood Sport that's often played to the death, pushes combatants to unhealthy limits (one of the block's mechanics, "exert" causes attacking creatures to exhaust themselves so thoroughly that they need an extra turn to recover), and is ultimately done in the service of Big Bad Nicol Bolas.
• Crapsack World:
  • Shadowmoor. It's the Mirror Universe of Lorwyn, and where that world represented a fairytale land, Shadowmoor represents the dark side of those tales. The fiery Flamekin have guttered into Cinders, the helpful Merfolk have become cruel pirates, and the tight-knit families of the Kithkin have become insular and xenophobic.
  • Grixis, one of the Shards of Alara, is a dark world, filled with undead and demons and slowly falling apart. Most of the magic in the plane is dependent on draining the life, blood, and memories from the living, and there isn't quite enough left... Arguably, all the Shards are this, as two of the colors of magic are gone from each, but Grixis is the most dystopian.
  • Rath, a plane created by Phyrexia to eventually be superimposed on Dominaria. The Crapsack World aspect was highlighted in Nemesis.
  • There's also an obscure factoid that one of the 1001 Rabiahs is just as bad as Phyrexia.
• Creative Sterility: Tezzeret, by his own admission, is lousy at coming up with his own plans and inventions. He prefers to adapt and improve on others' designs.
• Creatures by Many Other Names: For multiple card types:
  • "Boggart Sprite-Chaser" are buffed when Faeries are present, so it's implied that "sprite" and "faerie" are synonymous.
  • Geists being all Spirits, implies they're referring to the same thing.
• Creepy Cave:
  • "The Caves of Koilos" is a land showing the view from the mouth of a craggy desert cave. It drains one life from the player each time it is tapped.
  • "Cave of Temptation" shows a cracked, rather yonic rock formation around the entrance to a pitch-black cave.
  • "Bloodfell Caves" shows a jagged, unsettling red- and black-toned cave.
• Creepy Crows: Crow of Dark Tidings, which forces you to discard two of your cards when it enters play and whose art shows it staring balefully at the viewer.
  "Well, this can't be a good sign."
• Creepy Doll: Creepy Doll. It's creepy. And a doll.
• Crossover: Magic has started to really embrace crossovers with other franchises as of the late 2010s:
  • In 2018, Wizards of the Coast published Guildmaster's Guide to Ravnica, a Dungeons & Dragons sourcebook for Ravnica as a D&D setting. This marks the first time the multiverses of D&D and MTG connect. They've since continued with the Mythic Odysseys of Theros and Strixhaven: Curriculum of Chaos sourcebooks, and Magic has returned the favor with the Adventures in the Forgotten Realms card set.
  • Prior to the official sourcebooks, Wizards also put out Plane Shift, a collection of unofficial but free supplements that helped players make character who could fit into the settings of Innistrad, Zendikar, Kaladesh, Amonkhet, Ixalan, and Dominaria.
  • The 2020 Ikoria set, tying into its "monster" theme, included cards of Godzilla and other monsters from that franchise; and 2021's Innistrad: Crimson Vow did the same for Dracula. In game mechanics, these are just "alternate skins" for other cards in the set (for instance, "Godzilla, Primeval Champion" is a Titanoth Rex card).
  • In 2021, Wizards announced Universes Beyond, a subline dedicated to crossover sets. Announced franchises include The Walking Dead^note which debuted in 2020 before Universes Beyond, but is retroactively counted as a UB set through the Grandfather Clause, Stranger Things, Warhammer 40,000, Fortnite, Street Fighter, and The Lord of the Rings.
• Curbstomp Battle:
  • In the trailer for Duels Of The Planeswalkers 2012, Gideon Jura exposits that he picked a fight with Nicol Bolas... the planeswalker Nicol Bolas. He gets summarily crushed.
  • In the story for the Amomkhet block he tried to take Bolas on with a team of other Planeswalkers (the Gatewatch). It went about as well, with a cycle of cards called "x's Defeat" commemorating the event.

D

• Dark Is Not Evil: While Black often tends to produce villains, it has at least a few protagonists under it who don't fit on the worse levels of anti-hero, like Toshiro Umezawa and Xantcha. Some other protagonists are also half Black, half any other colour, like Teysa Karlov (Black/White).
• Dark World:
  • Lorwyn is based on the idyllic fairy tales of the British Isles. Shadowmoor is its dark reflection, based on the darker and more ominous aspects of folklore.
  • Grixis is a world of eternal night full of undead due to its lack of white mana.
• Dating Catwoman: Ashnod and Tawnos are in love, despite being generals on the opposing sides of the Brothers' War.
• Deader than Dead:
  • The exile zone often serves this function. Sometimes this is depicted as a dead creature being vaporized, other times as something alive being utterly obliterated.
  • This trope is invoked by name as a card in Theros Beyond Death, as a card that sends a living creature straight to oblivion.
• Deal with the Devil: Liliana Vess made a pact with four demons that provide her with power and eternal youth. It's represented on the card Demonic Pact.
  • Unfortunately, abuse of this pact forced her to undergo a (temporary) Face–Heel Turn in War of the Spark.
• Death of a Child: During the Shadows over Innistrad/Eldritch Moon storyline. There are references to children dying to werewolf maulings, angel attacks, and being burned alive by the Church of Avacyn in an attempt to purify them, though this is actually the work of the demon-worshiping Skirsdag cult in an attempt to sow disorder and distrust in the church.
• Death of the Old Gods: Amonkhet finds the Gatewatch on a plane reminiscent of Ancient Egypt, watched over by five gods, with everyone mentioning a "God-Pharoah." Hour of Devastation has the God-Pharoah, none other than Big Bad Nicol Bolas, arrive and murder four of the five gods, then abscond with their zombified corpses.
• Death World:
  • Zendikar, even before Eldritch Abominations started coming out of the woodwork.
  • Grixis, quite literally, due to the abundance of black mana (and the absence of green and white) making more life impossible, and death (and undeath) the only option.
• Decadent Court: Appears to be how every organization in the High City of Paliano works. Small wonder that King Brago arranged to continue his reign as a spirit.
• Deliberately Different Description: Unlike modern cards' Flavor Text, several cards from older Core Sets had flavor text from actual, real-life literature, completely free of both the context of the card and the original quote. For example, Dark Banishing (a card about obliterating one's life force) gets flavor text from Romeo and Juliet:
  "Ha, banishment? Be merciful, say 'death,' For exile hath more terror in his look, Much more than death."
• Demonic Possession:
  • Oni Possession is a good straight example.
  • Artifact Possession is a variant where the demon possesses an artifact instead of a person.
• Demonic Vampires:
  • The vampires of Innistrad were created when an alchemist consulted a demon for help with a famine and was given a ritual that involved drinking the blood of an angel.
  • Lord Xander, the founder of New Capenna's Maestros, used to only be a sickly human noble. When his pact with an archdemon let him absorb its power he also became the plane's first vampire.
• Denser and Wackier: Creep and seep related to the game's complexity of both rules and backstory ebb and flow, resulting in a number of sets hitting this trope.
  • Time Spiral block was so dense that it led to a change in philosophy on card design for a decade after.
  • Unglued, Unhinged, Unstable, and Unsanctioned are all joke sets not legal for tournament play. All of them dial up the wacky, but Unstable and Unsanctioned deliberately feature cards too complicated for normal sets as well (for example, Unstable has Rules Lawyer, a card that makes state-based effects stop working. State-based effects cover things as basic as letting lethally damaged creature die).
  • Starting with Commander 2014, most sets that aren't storyline blocks (Core sets, supplemental sets, and preconstructed decks) will feature characters and places from all throughout the Magic canon, even if they were destroyed aeons ago (in-universe or in the real world). For example, 2020's Commander Legends supplemental set contains depictions of characters like Rebbec, a Thran woman last relevant to the plot in Antiquities, printed in 1994 and taking place more than 9000 in-universe years before Zendikar Rising, the most recent regular set at the time of printing.
• Did You Just Scam Cthulhu?: In the Core 2019 storyline, Yasova and her grandchildren, armed with Ugin's memories, are able to not only save Ugin's hedron tomb from Nicol Bolas but also trigger enough fears of his brother's tenacity to scare Bolas away from Tarkir for good.
• Die or Fly: Severe physical or emotional trauma is the catalyst to a Planeswalker igniting their latent spark.
  • Old school, demi-God Planeswalker examples:
    • Nicol Bolas ascended as he fought the other four Elder Dragons, allowing him to win their war and become the last surviving one.
    • Sorin Markov's grandfather Edgar turned him into a vampire (the second one to ever exist in Innistrad with Edgar being the first) with a Blood Magic-fueled demonic pact. The ritual was so traumatizing that it ignited Sorin's spark.
    • Urza Planeswalker, at the climax of the Brothers War, sets off the Golgothian Sylex, which sends all of Dominaria into a centuries-long ice age. His latent spark activated, allowing him to survive the blast.
    • Teferi, Mage of Zhalfir, while studying mind magic at the Tolarian Academy, fell into a bubble of slow time that was filled with fire and got trapped there. The intense damage activated his spark half-way, so that he was able to survive until another student could get him out with water from a different slow-time bubble. She became his favorite companion (in the Doctor Who sense) when they found out that, because of the two different slow-time bubbles, she aged at a dramatically slower rate than a normal human, causing her to fall under the rules of Really 700 Years Old.
  • Post-mending ascensions:
    • Chandra Nalaar: Chandra's family is a smuggler of aether on Kaladesh, and during Chandra's first job as a smuggler, she's caught. Instead of allowing herself be captured, she obliterates a Consul factory, forcing the Nalaars to flee. While Chandra is away from the village they take residence in, Consul forces arrive looking for her. They set fire to the village, killing her father, blaming it on Chandra's pyromancy and taking her into custody. Just as they are about to behead her, her Spark ignites at the last possible second.
    • Sarkhan Vol was born onto a plane that had been a haven for dragons, which had been hunted to extinction by the local warlords, much to the dismay of the local shamans that worshiped them as the ultimate predators. Drifting back and forth between tribes and armies, searching for a purpose, making a name for himself in the process as a powerful warrior, Sarkhan enters into a trance after slaying an opposing commander, where he encounters the spirit of a dragon. So, inspired by the beast's majesty, he ascends killing his and the opposite army in the process.
    • Tezzeret, after being repeatedly denied entry into the Seekers of Carmot, breaks into their vault to prove his worth by crafting his own Etherium. He discovers the vault to be empty and that the Seekers' claims of the ability to craft new Etherium was a lie. Their plane is depleted, and they are merely recycling old Etherium. Caught in the act by the guards, they catch him and beat him half to death. The thought of his entire life's work being for naught was so harrowing that he ascended on the spot.
    • Ajani Goldmane's spark ignited when he discovered his brother Jazal had been murdered.
    • Elspeth Tirel's spark ignited when she was just thirteen under unknown circumstances. In a Phyrexian death camp.
    • Gideon Jura, known as Kytheon Iora on his home plane of Theros, was chosen by the god Heliod to be his champion. His first task was to kill a titan of Erebos, a task which Kytheon and his Irregulars accomplished flawlessly. However, when Erebos himself appeared to witness his titan's destruction, Kytheon attacked Erebos in a fit of arrogance, and had all his Irregulars killed in retaliation. Wracked with guilt and devastation over his hubris, Kytheon's spark ignited.
• Disciplines of Magic: The color pie is built around assigning different effects to its five colors of magic (White, Blue, Black, Red, and Green). There are no explicit restrictions on mixing and matching colors in a deck, but spells of a given color require mana of that color — if a player can't produce the right color of mana for their spells, then they can't cast those spells.
  • White: Civilization, Morality, and Order
  • Blue: Water/Air, Artifice, and Thought
  • Black: Amorality and Death (in the early days it was Evil, but was changed to Amorality later)
  • Red: Fire/Earth, Chaos, Destruction, Rashness
  • Green: Nature and Life
• Don't Think, Feel: A core principle of red and green philosophy, and the main reason why they both hate blue.
• Downer Ending: More than a few of the sets end on a less-than-happy note.
  • The Theros block ends with Elspeth Tirel being killed by the god Heliod after deciding no champion should know more than her god, in front of her friend Ajani Goldmane, and being sent to the underworld.
  • The "Scars of Mirrodin" block ends with Mirrodin conquered by Phyrexia and renamed despite the Mirrodin inhabitants valiantly resisting.
  • The first Zendikar block ends with Zendikar in the middle of being destroyed by the Eldrazi. The subsequent block resolves this, turning it into a Bittersweet Ending as a lot of the damage to Zendikar cannot be undone quickly.
  • The Amonkhet block ends with Nicol Bolas revealing himself as the God-Pharaoh, all the gods of Amonkhet except Hazoret either enslaved or dead, and the Gatewatch defeated.
  • The Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty block ends with Tamiyo getting compleated.
• The Dragon: Gix to Yawgmoth, Greven il-Vec to Volrath and later Crovax, Ertai and Tsabo Tavoc to Crovax, Phage (before Cabal Patriarch died), Malil to Memnarch, Malfegor to Nicol Bolas (literally in the last case).
• Dragon Hoard: A handful of dragons are based on this trope, including Covetous Dragon, Hoarding Dragon, Hellkite Tyrant, and Hoard-Smelter Dragon.
• Dragon Rider: Kargan Dragonlord.
• Dragons Versus Knights: Duel Decks: Knights vs. Dragons, one of several premade decks meant to be played by two players and themed around two opposing factions, pits a deck composed primarily of Knights against on centered around Dragons.
• Dragon Variety Pack: There's a small number of dragon-like creatures in the game, all classified as distinct in-game creature types.
  • True dragons are of the Western kind — four-legged, two-winged and fire-breathing. Some also have additional wings, or feathered ones. When Asian dragons appear, they are part of this type.
  • Drakes are smaller, animalistic and have only two wings and two legs, and are much smaller than dragons. When wyverns appear, they are part of this type.
  • Wurms are immense, bestial creatures that lack limbs of any sort, usually resembling either giant snakes with dragon heads or colossal Sandworms.
• Dream Stealer: Lorwyn's Faeries harvest the dreams of the plane's other residents on behalf of their Queen.
  • Ashiok turns people's dreams and aspirations into their worst nightmares.
  • Dreamstealer depicts a wizard who can steal information from the minds of others, depicted by forcing opposing players to discard cards.
• Dressed to Plunder: Ramirez DePietro has the standard eyepatch and ornate greatcoat.
• Drives Like Crazy: Goblin Test Pilot swerves around so arbitrarily that something is going to get hit, it's just that nobody knows what.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: Poor Ertai. First he was our resident smug snarker, and then the plot for Nemesis turned him into a more heroic character and even put him into a tragic love story... and then immediately turned him into a horrible bad guy and later killed him off in the most embarrassing way possible. Granted, his original personality did lend itself to a Face–Heel Turn, but the way it came about and the extremes it went to were just weird.

E

• Easter Egg: Many, many different cards, but especially in comedy sets like Unglued and nostalgia sets like Time Spiral. See also Alternate Universe, above.
• Eldritch Abomination
  • Yawgmoth is darn close.
  • And of course, there's also a card actually named Cosmic Horror.
  • There's also Dark Depths, which releases Marit Lage when the ice finally melts. The art is reminiscent of Cthulhu lurking underneath the sea.
  • Nemesis of Reason fits perfectly.
  • The Eldrazi, who are so ancient they predate the whole "colored mana" deal, and destroy your opponents just by moving in their general direction. This preview of Kozilek, Butcher of Truth has the unique distinction of destroying the web page it appears on, and the flavor text of Eldrazi Monument reads: "Gods don't die. They merely slumber."
• Elemental Fusion: The Weirds of the Izzet League are created by fusing different elements in often contradictory ways. For instance, Blistercoil weirds are born from fusing molten rock with water, fluxchargers from fusions of lightning and fire, and galvanice weirds have ice elemental bodies with lightning cores.
• Elemental Personalities: Red Mana is associated with both the element of fire and with strong emotions. Regardless of whether the emotion of the moment is anger, hilarity, love or grief, Red characters feel it strongly, vividly and suddenly, but will be quick to shift to another as the situation changes.
  • Chandra Nalaar, a prominent Red planeswalker, is particularly gifted at fire magic, and is a very powerful pyromancer. She's also impulsive and very openly emotive, and has a decidedly short temper.
  • Earth elementals, in a break from how Red creatures normally operate, are beings of immense patience and endurance, who prefer to analyze things from the long view and scorn the haste and impetuousness of mortals.
• Elixir of Life: Elixir of Immortality, described in its flavor text as "bottled life", restores some of your life when used and shuffles your discarded cards (representing your spent magic) back into your deck.
• Empty Piles of Clothing: Seen on Snakeform.
• Enchanted Forest: Usually one fifth of every set, as the basic Green land is forests, which, coupled with Green's love of giant monsters and the untamed wilderness, regularly leads to this trope.
  • Dominaria has had a long list of such forests, most of them ancient, vast, possibly sapient in their own right and home to elves, druids and treefolk. As a rule, their inhabitants are very reclusive and rarely welcoming of outsiders.
    • Argoth was the earliest one to appear in the lore, located on an isolated island and home to treefolk, fairies, an order of druids, and Titania, a demigod who watched over them all. Argoth was ravaged during the Brothers' War when Urza and Mishra clear-cut most of it for resources and then destroyed when Urza detonated a Fantastic Nuke there, destroying the island entirely. The survivors fled to the elf-ruled Fyndhorn on the nearby continent, which remained an important forest haven throughout the Ice Age until it was flooded by the rising waters of the Thaw. The surviving elves and druids then migrated to Yavimaya, another forest that was already home to talking apes, more treefolk, and another forest demigod, but which always remained wild even beyond the humanoids' own comfort.
    • Other major forests include Llanowar, so thick that the elves that live there can spend their whole lives in its canopy without seeing either the sun or the soil, and Krosa, a forest notable for not being home to any elves and instead housing a reclusive order of human druids, centaur tribes, and a lot of wild monsters.
  • Lorwyn and Shadowmoor took place in the same woodsy fairytale land, the first being enchanted and the second being cursed.
  • In Innistrad, there are the forests of the Kessig province, especially the vast and trackless Ulvenwald, home to vast packs of Savage Wolves and werewolves alike and primordial forest spirits. There is also the Somberwald in the mountains of Stensia, home to an enormous variety of wild beasts driven out of Kessig by hunters and werewolves.
• Endless Daytime: There are several places where this is the case.
  • The plane of Mirrodin has five suns. There is night time, but it's brief and exaggerated. Basically the only reason this is worth mentioning is the flavor text on Grasp of Darkness.
  • The plane of Serra is bathed in the light of a perpetual sunrise.
  • In Lorwyn "the sun never quite dips below the horizon".
  • Amonkhet has, in addition to a more normal sun, a second sun that's associated with a prophecy. That sun descends much slower, and in the living memory of the people of the world, it has never set.
• Endless Winter: This is used to enforce the curse on Kaldheim's Kannah clan. When Kannah try to venture past the Adelgard, they are followed by bitter winter conditions and constant snowfall that never abate, which quickly make travel impossible and force them to head back into the woods. The site where they believe the were first cursed, the Cursed Tree at the Aldergard's edge, is covered in snow throughout the year.
• The End of the World as We Know It: A particularly common trope.
  • At one point, after several sets revolving around ever-bigger wars and cataclysms, the designers moved the action to Lorwyn, a new, rural-themed setting that scaled down the conflict: tribes battling neighboring tribes over land and prestige. Months later, yup, the whole world was wrecked. As in, the sun stopped shining (and few remember that it ever did!). So much for that.
  • The Time Spiral block's plot was based around the idea that Dominaria had gone through so many apocalypses that the plane's reality itself was falling apart.
• Enemy to All Living Things:
  • Phage the Untouchable. And we do mean all. Any organic material she touches instantly rots away, save for silk. She wears only silk clothing and sleeps on a bed of stone.
  • The Eldrazi suck the life and mana out of everything they touch, leaving only Wastes behind them.
• Enemy Civil War: There are some major tensions growing between and even within the five Phyrexian factions that conquered Mirrodin, and the liberation of Karn might just be the spark needed to ignite a full-out war among the New Phyrexians. Ultimately took place offscreen. Elesh Norn is now effectively the Mother of Machines.
• Enemy Mine:
  • The Invasion block centered mechanically on multicolored cards. This was illustrated story wise as all the disparate cultures of Dominaria banding together against the common threat of Phyrexia. The third set, Apocalypse, undermines how desperate the situation has gotten by featuring enemy colors working together, a sight previously unseen in the game. This represents forces who find each other anathema working together.
  • The coming of the Eldrazi has all the races and even the land of Zendikar uniting to fight a common threat.
  • Geth joining Glissa against Memnarch in the first Mirrodin cycle. They go back to hating each other in New Phyrexia.
  • War of the Spark showed all ten Guilds of Ravnica working together with both each other and the Guildless in order to repel the invading army.
• Enemy Within:
  • Karn and the Phyrexian corruption in the Scars of Mirrodin block. His inner struggles are depicted on Distant Memories.
  • The Weaver King is an Enemy Within for Venser in Planar Chaos.
• Energy Being: The malevolent Weaver King in Planar Chaos.
• Engagement Challenge: In The Brothers' War, the Warlord of Kroog, searching for a powerful warrior to wed his daughter, decrees that whoever can move a giant jade statue from one end of the palace courtyard to the other will win the hand of Princess Kayla. Urza completes the challenge by building an automaton to lift the statue.
• Eunuchs Are Evil: The expansion Portal: Three Kingdoms has a card called Corrupt Eunuchs.
• Even Evil Has Standards: Or, well, antiheroism. One of Urza's first picks for his strike team of Planeswalkers to go to Phyrexia was a Planeswalker named Parcher. Urza rejected him for being insane.
• Everything Trying to Kill You:
  • Jund (from Shards of Alara).
  • Kamigawa is a battle fought between humans and kami, who, due to the nature of Shinto, live in everything.
  • And taken up to eleven in Zendikar, where the "Roil" dramatically changes the landscape every few months, weird gravity wells cause floating islands of grassy plain that can drop at any moment, and the creatures that are not killed by the landscape are as hard as your average video game mid-boss. Rise of the Eldrazi then kicked that eleven up to twelve, because the usually unpleasant wildlife is being supplanted by Eldritch Abominations.
  • In Scars of Mirrodin, the entire plane is being taken over by the Phyrexian Glistening Oil. Metal becomes flesh, flesh becomes metal, and havoc and chaos ensue.
  • In Innistrad, humanity is the bottom of the food chain. Werewolves and vampires see humans as tasty snacks, ghoulcallers and stichers raise the dead for kicks, geists torment humans out of rage (or because they don't know any better), monsters lurk in the woods to snatch up the unwary, and demons and devils lurk in the shadows, corrupting humanity to gain a foothold into their world.
• Evil Chancellor: In Time Streams, Radiant's war minister turns out to be a Phyrexian spy, secretly working to subvert and corrupt Serra's Realm.
  • The Consulate that rules Kaladesh is pretty much entirely populated by these. Special mention goes to the Planeswalker Dovin Baan, who was willing to work with Big Bad Nicol Bolas to export his personal brand of fascism to Ravnica.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • All over the place; look at White Knight versus Black Knight, for example. The entire Shadowmoor set, as a dark mirror of the earlier Lorwyn set, features many opposite counterparts to specific cards from the Lorwyn block.
  • To go with its theme of Mirrodin vs Phyrexia, Mirrodin Besieged has evil counterparts within the same set (Mirran Crusader and Phyrexian Crusader, Peace Strider and Pierce Strider), and also evil counterparts to cards from the last time we went to Mirrodin (Darksteel Colossus to Blightsteel Colossus).
  • The Northern Paladin and Southern Paladin have the Western Paladin and Eastern Paladin.
  • The Predator can be considered this to the Weatherlight.
  • One of the terminologies of the game is "Mirrored Pair". These tend to be two cards who are polar opposites of each other. Generally they tend to be this trope (although certain examples, like Hero of the Bladehold and Hero of Oxidda Ridge who are both "good", are exceptions).
• Evil-Detecting Dog: Good dog.
• Evil Twin: The card Evil Twin, naturally. With the explicit ability to kill the good twin.
• Evil Sorcerer:
  • Lim-Dul, Heidar of Rimewind, Lord Dralnu, Memnarch, the Cabal Patriarch. Zur the Enchanter was definitely dangerous, but only self-absorbed, not outright evil.
  • Lesser Evil Sorcs include the Disciple of the Vault, one of the clerics who makes the Ravager Affinity deck into a fast-killing machine.
• Exotic Entree: Feast of the Unicorn.
• Expansion Pack World:
  • Since the story details a different plane almost every block, the addition of new planes could be considered this to Dominia. Then again, in a theoretically infinite multiverse, it's justified.
  • Dominaria was also subject to this. While nowadays, the story just focuses on a new plane when a new theme for the setting is needed, as early as Fallen Empires and as recent as Odyssey while new continents would just be added to Dominaria to fit this purpose. This leads to Dominaria being so diverse — while most other planes are only themed around a single culture or gimmick, Dominaria has typical Medieval European Fantasy fare in Terisiare, Aerona, and Corondor; Reniassance-era technology in Caliman; wartorn Vestigial Empires in Sarpadia; Conan-esque Heroic Fantasy in Otaria; a Western Africa analogue in Jamuraa; and a Wutai in Madara, among others. And that isn't taking into consideration the areas from Rath that were fused with Dominaria in the Overlay.
• Explosive Stupidity: As with most other kinds of stupidity, a common goblin strategy. Goblin Kaboomist and Goblin Bangchuckers are among the least moronic goblin ordnance technicians, in that they at least have a 50/50 chance of surviving what they're doing (although with a tribal buff out you can make that 100%).
• Eye Scream: The art on Deathmark shows a person's pupil leaking out of their eye.

F

• Face–Heel Turn:
  • Garruk Wildspeaker is cursed by Liliana Vess during Innistrad, changing him from a nature loving beastmaster into a deranged predatory focused hunting other Planeswalkers.
  • Liliana gets a taste of this trope herself when some Loophole Abuse with her Deal with the Devil led to her working for Big Bad Nicol Bolas during War of the Spark.
• The Fair Folk: Lorwyn's Fae are nasty little trolls who delight in making mischief and playing mean-spirited tricks on the plane's other races and harvest their dreams.
• Fairy Dragons: Ikoria is home to sprite dragons, small creatures with iridescent insect wings that are typed as both Faeries and Dragons. Their flavor text, however, does not imply behavior any more pleasant than their bigger cousins'.
  Size of a pixie, rage of a hellkite.
• Fallen Hero: Garruk Wildspeaker, the original iconic green Planeswalker. A conflict with Liliana Vess saw him cursed by an Artifact of Doom called the Chain Veil. This led him to spiral down into madness, becoming more hostile and aggressive. The storyline culminated in the Magic 2015 Core Set, which saw him tracking and murdering other Planeswalkers. The set's prerelease included an oversized Garruk card meant to be played against as if it were an entire deck, in addition to his black/green card, "Garruk, Apex Predator." M15's catchphrase tied into this storyline: "Hunt bigger game."
  • The curse was finally broken in Throne of Eldraine, turning him back to his old monogreen self.
• Fanboy: Young Pyromancer has necklace with Chandra on it.
• Fantastic Firearms: Although Magic: The Gathering has historically shown guns, current restrictions mean alternatives to fire arms had to be designed:
  • In the Gothic Horror setting of Innistrad, crossbows can get pretty small, making them almost pistol-like.
  • In the Art Deco plane of New Capenna guns are alternatively replaced by magical violins (in homage to violin cases holding guns in noir movies).
• Fantastic Nuke:
  • The Golgothian Sylex was, functionally, a nuclear weapon. Its detonation ended the Brothers' War, vaporized Argoth, caused the Ice Age, and tore a literal hole in reality.
    • The Apocalypse Chime is implied to work the same way as the Golgothian Sylex, though primed to destroy Ulgrotha instead of Dominaria. It's flavor text implies that it's never been used, but one of the plane's more nihilistic villains considers ringing it from time to time.
  • Yawgmoth repeatedly dropped "stonecharger" bombs on his enemies in The Thran which not only resembled nuclear weapons in their destruction, but also caused the same sort of horror real nukes inspire in at least one of the characters.
• Fantastic Vermin: Kaladesh is home to anteater-like gremlins, who feed on ether and eagerly use their sharp, strong claws and acidic drool to dig through rock and metal to get to it. As Kaladesh's technology is heavily reliant on ether for power, they're thus the most destructive pests on the plane and can cause immense damage to the plane's infrastructure. In a twist, however, the gremlins' feeding plays an important part in recycling ether back into the environment, and the extermination of gremlin colonies is causing real harm to Kaladesh's planer ecosystem.
• Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Plenty, usually separated by Plane.
  • Kamigawa was originally feudal Japan, but is now an advanced world with tropes ripped straight out of anime, manga and Tokusatsu media.
  • Naya (from Shards of Alara) is Mayincatec.
  • The Ice Age block and Kaldheim are Vikings. Kaldheim takes it further by featuring expies of actual Norse mythological figures.
  • Jamuraa (from Dominaria) is Africa.
  • Rabiah is Arabia.
  • Innistrad is Renaissance Germany and Eastern Europe, as well as a parody/love letter to all sorts of horror tropes and cliches.
  • Theros is Ancient Greece.
  • Ravnica is a culture mishmash with Slavic/Eastern Europe/Renaissance flavor.
    • Orzhov and Selesnya resemble the Catholic Church and the Inquisition, with the Selesnya having a bit of Mayaincatec flavor.
    • Boros and Azorius have crusader and templar flavor with Slavic themed names.
    • Rakdos are cultists mixed with crazy hooligans and wandering Romani.
    • Dimir has a bit like Transylvanian vampire flavor and classic rogues.
    • Gruul have a mix of different tribal concepts from American Indians to Eastern barbarians.
    • Izzet are modern-day mad scientists and engineers mixed with Renaissance outfits and pomp.
    • Simic are less flashy and more like overachieving scientists with some megalomania.
    • The Golgari are medieval style lower class and serfs, with some Greek and Egyptian undertones (Vraska, and Jarad kind of looks like a pharoah, and they love insects and scarabs and mummification).
  • Tarkir is most of Asia, minus China and Japan.
    • The Temur Clans are Siberian natives living in Tibet-like mountains.
    • The Mardu Horde are the Mongol Horde.
    • The Jeskai Way are Tibetan Buddhists.
    • The Sultai Broods are vaguely Vietnamese with a sprinkle of Sumeria. The Sultai have the fewest human members, and so are a bit murky in their ties to real world cultures, although their nagas and rakshasas suggest ties to India. Some have suggested the Khmer Empire as a cultural inspiration.
    • The Abzan Houses are the tribes and empires of Asia Minor and Persia.
  • Kaladesh is a steampunk (well, "aetherpunk" India, with modern rather than mythological sensibilities.
  • Amonkhet takes the majority of its inspiration from Ancient Egypt, albeit influenced by the philosophies and aesthetics of Nicol Bolas.
  • Ixalan takes inspiration from the Age of Discovery, with the three main civilizations shown off in the block (the Sun Empire, the River Heralds, and the Torrezonians) being inspired by the Aztec Triple Alliance and Incan Empire, the Mayan Empire, and Medieval Spain, respectively.
  • Eldraine takes its inspiration from European fairy tales, giving it a very Arthurian England feel. The Planeswalker prince and princess Will and Rowan Kenrith even have Scottish accents in their voice lines on Magic Arena.
  • New Cappena is essentially 20's/30's Chicago if it had crime families ruled by demons and vampires.
• Fantasy Gun Control:
  • With a couple of exceptions (cards from Ixalan and a few older cards from Dominaria-focused sets show flintlocks) there has never been a realistic gun depicted on the art of a Magic card. This even extends into the crossovers; the art for the Fallout Universes Beyond set completely omits any realistic firearms from its art, opting instead to have energy weapons (such as a laser musket or plasma rifle) in their art.
  • Outlaws of Thunder Junction averts this, finally, with the mention of devices called "Thunder Rifles" powered by an energy source on the plane; however, most of the weaponry consists of knives or other items which act as conduits to sling spells during combat.
• Fantasy Kitchen Sink: With some 11,000 different cards, it's hard to think of any fantasy concepts that aren't represented.
  • Throne of Eldraine in particular reads like a checklist of every Grimm's and Disney fairy tale.
• Feathered Dragons: While most dragons in the game have the typical membranous wings, a few sport birdlike wings instead.
  • Ugin, a spirt dragon planeswalker, has feathered wings to reflect his ethereal, enlightened nature.
  • Two of the five draconic broods of Tarkir, which are incidentally born from magical tempests created as a side effect of Ugin's presence there, sport feathered wings.
    • Dragons of the bloodline of Ojutai, which are spawned from magic storms in high, cold mountains and breathe ice, have great white-and-red birdlike wings, in addition to tufts of feathers on their legs. They're enlightened, monk-like and seemingly the most civilized of the dragons that rule Tarkir, but under the surface they're condescending, racist and arrogant, and just as tyrannical as the rest of Tarkir's draconic rulers.
    • Dragons of the brood of Kolaghan, which are instead spawned on the windswept steppes and breathe lightning, have two sets of narrow birdlike wings. They're masters of the skies, and the fastest and most skilled fliers among Tarkir's dragons.
• Female Angel, Male Demon:
  • Nearly all of Magic's angels are visibly female. The overwhelming majority of Magic's demons are so freakish looking that the idea of having a gender seems a moot point. Though the gender of either is largely a moot point, as, being magically created avatars of their respective colors, neither reproduce in the traditional manner. This gets averted in Amonkhet, however, which contains wholly masculine angels to help reinforce that it's "different".
  • Razia and Serra play this trope straight, although with reason; Serra was a human female Planeswalker who created her own plane, and all Boros Angels were basically clones of Razia herself, who was female.
  • Before Amonkhet, there was a grand total of three male angels in Magic: Melesse Spirit, Gabriel Angelfire had to be retconned to be an Angel rules-wise and Malach of the Dawn only exists in alternate reality.
• A Fête Worse than Death: The signature of the Rakdos Cultists of Ravnica, as seen in the Flavor Text of Slaughterhouse Bouncer.
• Fiery Redhead: Chandra Nalaar. Literally.
• Flaming Sword:
  • The card Flaming Sword. Exactly What It Says on the Tin.
  • Sword of War and Peace and Sword of Fire and Ice are Yin-Yang Bomb variations that are technically only half-flaming, but still pretty cool.
  • Legendary creatures who wield flaming swords include Jor Kadeen, the Prevailer and Razia, Boros Archangel.
• Fisher Kingdom: judging by two of the arts shown in magic con San Diego 2024, Bloomburrow seems works like that, turning those who aren't anthropomorphic animals into them.
• Floating Platforms: Seen in both Zendikar and Serra's Realm. There are also floating buildings on Kamigawa and Ravnica.
• Fog of Doom:
  • In the Apocalypse novel, when Yawgmoth himself appears on Dominaria, he takes the form of a giant black cloud that kills anything it touches.
  • Yawgmoth has a habit of making killer fog; in The Thran, his stonecharger bombs leave behind clouds of mist that that kill anything they touch.
• Forced Transformation: Seen on a variety of cards, typically blue. Examples include Snakeform, Pongify, Ovinize, and Fowl Play, among others. The Ovinomancer is a wizard that does this to other creatures.
• Foregone Conclusion: The storyline of Coldsnap, released years after Ice Age and Alliances to give that block a "proper" block format (and conclusion). The press release teaser info explicitly said, "We know the Ice Age ended... but how?"
• Forgotten Friend, New Foe: Volrath, villain of the Tempest block, was once Gerrard's adoptive brother before they bitterly parted ways in their youth.
• Formerly Sapient Species: Long ago, much of the plane of Dominaria was ruled by the Elder Dragons, immensely powerful and intelligent beings who were often skilled magic-users and the rulers of entire humanoid civilizations. They eventually all but wiped themselves out in internecine warfare, with the losers being stripped of their legs and wings to become the wurms, mindless beasts resembling massive snakes. The winners also regressed over time; modern dragons, while still technically sapient, are little more than feral predators with lifestyles limited to hunting, gathering treasure and defending their territories, while some fell still further and became drakes, smaller creatures with no forelimbs and which are now purely animalistic beasts.
• A Form You Are Comfortable With: Old-generation planeswalker are also shapeshifters, capable of changing their appearances at will. Most of them generally opt to stay in the form they look like just before their ascension though.
• For the Evulz: Nicol Bolas, apparently.
• Frankenstein's Monster:
  • Frankenstein's Monster
  • And this.
  • Innistrad has the skaab, which are stitched-together zombies.
• From Bad to Worse:
  • Zendikar is a Death World in Zendikar. Then it ramps up in Worldwake. By Rise of the Eldrazi, the whole plane is under attack by Planet Eater Eldritch Abominations, and the world becomes even more violent in its efforts to destroy them.
  • Innistrad's Gothic Horror setting was scary to begin with; when the guardian angel Avacyn mysteriously disappeared, the monsters got more powerful.
    • And it gets even worse in Shadows Over Innistrad when Avacyn goes mad and turns against humankind.
• From a Single Cell: Phyrexia is able to rebuild itself from just a single drop of oil, as seen in the tragic fate of Mirrodin. This is Lampshaded with Phyrexian Rebirth.
  As long as one drop of the oil exists, the joyous work continues.
• Full-Boar Action: Boars, like most wild beasts, tend to be Green (the color of nature), Red (the color of chaos and emotion) or both, a combination that usually results in fierce and powerful, but often simple-minded and easily riled, creatures. As a general rule, Green boars are focused around strength and vitality, while Red boars are themed around aggression and crushing power. They're usually characterized as powerful, short-tempered and fierce, and tend to be quite strong. Also, since they're essentially walking pork, many can also be sacrificed in order to gain a bit of life. "Loyal in battle, hearty in stew."
  • Archetype of Endurance is a magical boar embodying strength and survival, and is described in its flavor text as an elusive survivor that hunts those who think they are hunting it.
  • Bladetusk Boar has massively overgrown tusks and shares a taste for human meat with the minotaurs that live in its territory.
  • Illharg, the Raze-Boar, is a giant boar god worshipped by the Gruul Clans of Ravnica, who believe that he will come one day to herald the End-Raze a great rampage that will level the world-city and replace it with a global wilderness.
  • Innistrad is home to immense and truculent boars in its vast, trackless forests. Some of them grow so large that they can eat entire cottages whole.
• Full-Conversion Cyborg: The Unstable joke set introduces the Order of the Widget, a group of well-intentioned but rather insane artificers who replace body parts to function better. Many consist of little more than a head and a limb or two mounted on a clockwork or steampunk mechanical body; their leader, the Grand Calcutron, is enhanced to the point of being completely immobile and no longer actually counting as even an Artifact Creature in game terms, but just an Artifact.
• Fungi Are Plants: Saprolings are small, weak creatures intended to represent animated scraps of plant matter. In practice, they alternate on being visibly vegetal, clearly fungal, or of indeterminate appearance between sets. They are also strongly associated with the thallids, which are clearly fungus people.
• Funny Animal: From the more conventional Nacatl (cat people) and Leonin (lion people) to the somewhat more creative Loxodon (elephant people) and Rhox (rhino people). So, in other words, Magic has them in droves.
• Fur Bikini:
  • One of the Elvish Ranger cards had this on the artwork. The fact that it was also a decent creature card guaranteed it some Tournament Play.
    • Best Known for the Fanservice: Elvish Ranger actually has an alternate art. Good luck finding anyone who cares about it.
• Furry Confusion: Ajani (a sentient lion man) gets this is spades when he travels to Bant where the pack animal of choice are Leotau (very large lions with hooves).
• Fusion Dance:
  • In the Onslaught storyline, Phage and Akroma merge to become Karona the False God, a living embodiment of Dominaria's mana.
  • Dracoplasm fuses multiple creatures together to form a giant dragon.
• Fusion Dissonance: The Innistrad block drew heavily on Lovecraftian imagery and saw the return of Emrakul and the Eldrazi. The block also introduced the "Meld" mechanic, where if you had certain cards in play, they would fuse into some horrific abomination of nature. For instance, the angels Bruna and Gisela would meld to form Brisela.

G

• Gadgeteer Genius: Magic has had its share of artificers.
  • Jhoira◊, depicted here in all her Tinkering glory.
  • Venser◊, although best-known now for his teleportation abilities, was originally an artificer, salvaging scrap from the swamps of Urborg and building machines.
  • Urza, the Chessmaster himself, was famous for his gadgets.
  • As was his brother, Mishra◊.
  • Urza's protege, Tawnos◊.
  • Slobad is remarkable as he is not merely smart by Goblin standards (which is hardly an accomplishment), but smart. Period.
  • Tezzeret's entire shtick. He sympathizes more with machines than people.
  • Arcum Dagsson◊.
  • Daretti's failed experiment costed him his legs.
  • Most people on Kaladesh would qualify. Creating Magitek is the only form of magic allowed there.
• Gaia's Vengeance: Typical green schtick, seen in Invasion, Worldwake, and so on. There's also cards like Gaea's Avenger, Gaea's Revenge, Avenger of Zendikar, etc.
• Gargle Blaster: No thanks.
• Gambit Pileup: Occurs during the original Ravnica trilogy when it turns out that all of the guilds are trying to conquer the plane.
• Gambit Roulette: Nicol Bolas' ploy to free the Eldrazi certainly counts. To release the Eldrazi, he required the presence of three different planeswalkers at the Eye of Ugin, as well as having one of them use Ghostfire to trigger the failsafe mechanism. He could only be certain that his own minion (Vol) would be there, but to lure the other two, he combined elements of his own meticulous planning, as well as a simple stroke of luck. He even said so himself!
  Bolas: I didn't send you to ensure no one entered the Eye. I sent you to ensure they did. Do you think it a coincidence that two planeswalkers arrived there when they did?
  Vol: You sent me to fester? As a helpless proxy? You knew they would come?
  Bolas: I knew the girl would come. The other-I had to play the odds.
• Genius Loci: A relatively common concept mechanically are lands that can temporarily turn into creatures, and this is usually how it manifests in story. The best example of the trope is probably Vitu-Ghazi, the guildhall of the Selesnya Conclave. It tends to get animated Once an Episode during Ravnica storylines.
• Gentle Giant: Karn, a huge golem made of pure silver who dedicated himself to pacifism. And not technical pacifism, either. Many green creatures can also be considered gentle unless you offend them or their controllers.
• Genre Shift: The first two sets of the Zendikar block are about adventure and survival on a Death World. The last set turns it into a Cosmic Horror Story.
• Giant Enemy Crab: Giant Crab (stepping on a boat), Fortress Crab (cottage-sized) and especially Wormfang Crab (walking over mountains). They're all defense.
  • With Zendikar Rising, we have perhaps the giantest enemy crab yet: Charix, the Raging Isle, an island sized beast with a whopping 17 toughness.
• Giant Spider: The smallest spiders tend to be large enough to win a fight with an average goblin. Medium-sized spiders can tangle with elephants. The biggest ones can eat dragons for breakfast.
• Glacial Apocalypse: The Ice Age was a period of Dominaria's history started in consequence of the Brothers' War, when Urza ignited the Golgothian Sylex, devastating a continent, annihilating Mishra's forces, igniting his own Planeswalker spark, and ushering in a period of plunging global temperatures. The period immediately following the blast, referred to as the Dark, saw four centuries of slowly cooling temperatures, dwindling resources and shrinking civilizations, while zealotry and despots rose to power to lead increasingly lost and frightened people. The Dark culminated in the Ice Age, which lasted over 2000 years and saw the gradual collapse of much of civilization as glaciers covered great swathes of land and primordial monsters such as dragons, mammoths and dinosaurs roamed the world. When the Ice Age eventually ended, however, the ensuing Thaw also proved incredibly destructive — the rise in warmth and humidity fostered widespread plagues, while floods and rising sea levels spread further devastation and caused the continent of Terisiare to fragment into an archipelago of islands.
• A God Am I: Several of them. Some are just delusional about their supposed godhood, and some are very much not delusional about their actual godhood...and are total jerks about it.
• God Is Dead: A major part of the Planeswalker Samut's backstory was witnessing Nicol Bolas murder all but one of her home plane's gods, then drag their zombified corpses to Ravnica.
• God of Light: Solar deities are strongly associated with White mana, the color of magic linked with light, daytime, law, order and civilization. They range from patrons of civilization and morality to Knight Templars and arrogant tyrants.
  • Tal was a solar deity worshipped by the humans of Terisiare during the Dark, an age of crumbling civilizations in the leadup to a Glacial Apocalypse. He does not make any in-person appearances in the story, but his church was a fanatical Anti-Magical Faction determined to hold the remnants of civilization together but willing to go to extreme and bloody lengths to do this.
  • Heliod is Theros' god of the sun, the chief of the gods, the lord of light and the king of creation. He is also an arrogant tyrant who sees all others as beneath him. He is bitter enemies with Erebos, the God of the Dead, who came into being from Heliod's shadow when he tore it from himself and cast it into the Underworld.
  • The Threefold Sun is the primary deity of the humans of the Sun Empire of Ixalan. He makes no in-person appearances, but the Ixalani consider him the patron and protector of their civilization and worship him in three aspects — the creative aspect of Kinjalli, the Wakening Sun, which baked the first humans from clay and is associated with order and structure; the sustaining aspect of Ixalli, the Verdant Sun, which fosters growth and is associated with fertility and growth; and the consuming aspect of Tilonalli, the Burning Sun, which is associated with ferocity, fire, passionate emotions and war. It is bitter foes with Aclazatoz, the bat-god of the night and creator of vampirism.
• A God Is You: Flavor-wise, the players take the roles of planeswalkers.
• God of the Dead:
  • Among the gods of Theros, two of the trope's basic archetypes — the god of death and the god of the dead — are filled by one of the Black-aligned gods.
    • Erebos, God of the Dead, serves as a Hades analogue and rules over the shades of the departed in the Underworld. A bleak and forbidding figure, Erebos permits nobody to avoid or escape from his realm, and uses his impossibly long whip Mastix to snare reluctant souls and pull them into death.
    • Athreos, God of Passage, is derived from Charon and serves as the primary ferryman of Theros's dead, carrying them across the Five Rivers that Ring the World and into the Underworld that lies beyond.
  • Egon, God of Death, is Kaldheim's ruler of the dead. He rules Istfell, the realm of the unworthy dead, although his power over the local spirits is limited by their eternal apathy.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The Gods of Theros have strength directly tied to the number of worshipers the god has. In an example of Gameplay and Story Integration, the Gods cease to be creatures^note but continue to be indestructible legendary enchantments when their controller does not have enough devotion to that god's color(-s)^note Measured by the amount of colored mana symbols among permanents that player controls.
• Godzilla Threshold: Let's be honest, nearly everyone's threshold involves Nicol Bolas in some way but it was seen no better than in Ravnica during War of the Spark. Keep in mind, Ravnica's entire existence is based off of the 10 guilds essentially being in an endless Cold War with each other, always on the brink of an outright war. Nicol Bolas arriving and kicking off his massive plan had the Ravnica Guilds actually drop everything and outright join forces, something that would've been unheard of in normal circumstances.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: Averted; all five colors of mana have had heroes and villains.
• Gothic Horror: Innistrad was a top-down design based around this. Zombies, Werewolves, and Vampires are all vying for control against the last bastions of humanity.
• Got the Whole World in My Hand: This artwork◊ for New Phyrexia shows Mirrodin in the clutches of Phyrexia.
• Got Volunteered: Played for Laughs when groups of goblins need a volunteer, as seen in the flavor text of Goblin Hero and Skirk Drill Sergeant, whose flavor text is of the officer in question ordering a subordinate to volunteer.
• Grapes of Luxury: In "Wilds of Eldraine 5: Broken Oaths", while sneaking into the castle of the witch Eriette, Ruby speculates that she's probably in the throne room having people feed her grapes. Kellan asks why she would be doing this, and Ruby answers that she's not entirely sure, but it seems like in this situations the villain always default to the grapes.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Yawgmoth is the Greater-Scope Villain to Volrath's Big Bad in the Rath saga.
• The Grim Reaper:
  • Midnight Reaper is a Zombie Knight who wields a scythe, wears a concealing black hood, rides a black horse, and deals damage to you when a creature dies in exchange for letting you draw a card.
    No one welcomes his visit, yet all must grant him tribute.
  • Spectres are usually depicted as hooded and robed figures, often carrying either scythes or staffs or polearms of some kind. Reaper of Night and Scythe Specter lean especially hard into this imagery.

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