Magic The Gathering / Gameplay Tropes A to I

These pages are for tropes that apply to Magic: The Gathering's gameplay and mechanics. Tropes which apply to the flavor and story should be placed here instead: Flavor and Story Tropes. (Some tropes may warrant placement on both, but please be judicious.)

Main Page | Tropes A-I | Tropes J-Q | Tropes R-Z

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A

• Abnormal Ammo:
  • Many cards imply the shooting or throwing of odd ammunition, including Acorns, Goblins, Skulls, more Goblins, Chains, Goblin Tokens... Naturally, this is especially common among Goblins.
  • Fling allows you to turn any creature into ammo.
  • It isn't clear exactly what Catapult Master fires, but it has to be something more than a big rock. Not even Wrath of God destroys creatures as thoroughly as he does.
• Abstract Eater: Chronatog eats time. In gameplay terms, that means beefing it up by skipping your next turn.
• Absurdly High-Stakes Game: Early versions of the game with the Ante rule in effect. One of the most common "house rules" in the early game was to play without ante because players didn't want to risk losing cards. Wizards quickly dropped the rule both to avert this, as well as to avoid the game being classified as gambling.
• Achilles' Heel: Each of the five colors has — at least in theory — one or two things that it is particularly bad at compared to other colors, encouraging players to make multi-color decks to cover their weaknesses.
  • Blue generally has the weakest and most mana-expensive creatures; notably, it's the only color not allowed to have "bears" (Creatures with 2 power and 2 toughness for 2 mana; the Trope Namer is the card "Grizzly Bear") without any downside. It also has the worst removal in general of any color, only having access to Forced Transformation spells which replace a creature with another one, or "bounce" spells which return cards to their owner's hand rather than killing them. (While, at this point, Blue could use a counterspell to kill the creature as it's re-summoned, this cannot be called an efficient use of resources or mana.)
  • Black is almost entirely unable to remove enchantments and artifacts. Their poor enchantment-removal is particularly punishing as it prevents them from getting rid of their own Deal with the Devil enchantments.
  • Red shares black's inability to deal with enchantments. Its reliance on aggressive, small creatures and damage-based removal is also a double-edged sword, as they get less useful as the game goes on and the average toughness of its opponent's creatures grows.
  • Green has the worst creature removal of any of the colors, instead having to rely on using its own creatures in combination with spells that force creatures to fight each other. It's also the only color that doesn't regularly have access to flying creatures, although it has creatures which can block as if they had flying (the "reach" ability typically found on spiders or archers) and various spells which can kill flying creatures.
  • White has an answer to pretty much any threat, but it is by far the worst color at drawing cards, preventing it from reliably having access to those answers.
  • Colorless cards, most often artifacts, can cover all of these weaknesses and don't require another color to be splashed in the deck. However this means that the mana cost of these cards is significantly higher than it would be compared to the same effect in-color, so they can't be relied on too much.
• Action Bomb: Blowing oneself up is a favorite tactic of red cards, particularly among goblins. Examples include but are not limited to Mudbutton Torchrunner, Mogg Bombers, War-Torch Goblin, Ember Hauler, Ib Halfheart, Goblin Tactician's suicide troops, and whichever schmuck ends up carrying the Goblin Grenade.
• Action Initiative:
  • Combat damage between creatures normally occurs simultaneously. Some creatures have an ability called First Strike, which means that their damage happens before the other one can retaliate- if the first strike damage is fatal, the victim doesn't get to deal any damage.
  • There's also the basic 'speeds' of the game. Sorcery and permanent spells can only be cast on one's own turn, during one of the two main phases, while instant spells can be cast and abilities activated at any time, including in response to other spells and abilities—in which case, the last to be played resolves first (resolutions are determined by a zone called the Stack). There are also two special exceptions that exist for purposes of gameplay: lands can be played at sorcery speed, but the land will enter the battlefield before anyone has a chance to respond to this action, and activating mana abilities can be done at any time. Neither of these special actions use the Stack. Finally, there is a special ability called Split Second which means that although they do use the stack, no activated abilities can be activated or spells cast while they are there (triggered abilities still trigger, though).
• Actual Pacifist:
  • Pacifism forces this onto a target creature.
  • Faith's Fetters can force this onto any permanent, preventing creatures from attacking or blocking while also stopping abilities.
• Actually Four Mooks:
  • The Amass ability, which creates a Zombie Army Token and gives it a +1/+1 counter - or puts a +1/+1 counter on an already-present Zombie Army Token. These tokens imply the growth of the Zombie Army, despite only being one "creature".
  • Also present in the Joke Card "Five Kids in a Trenchcoat," which is treated as being five separate creatures under certain circumstances.
• Adaptive Ability:
  • Creatures with the "Evolve" keyword gain a +1/+1 counter whenever their controller plays a creature that has higher power and/or toughness. In other words, it grows bigger in response to a bigger creature arriving.
  • A trait of the Sliver race, who then share these adaptations with any other Slivers in play, allowing them to negate threats quickly. However, as a drawback, this also includes Slivers under your opponent's control...
• After-Combat Recovery: At the end of each turn, every surviving creature has all standard damage removed from it. Certain abilities, such as Poison, bypass this with the damage staying (and sometimes getting even worse).
• Aggressive Play Incentive: Rise of the Eldrazi has a lot of big, scary creatures, many of whom possess the "Annihilator" ability to make attacking with them more advantageous. However, during playtesting, it turned out that less experienced players were hesitant about attacking because they were worried about their creatures dying and wasting the mana they invested in them. The solution was to give one of them, Ulamog's Crusher, a rider dictating that it must attack if able. This helped players see how good attacking with these creatures could be, and made them comfortable with playing more aggressively.
• Airborne Aircraft Carrier: Parhelion II is an artifact vehicle with flying which spawns two 4/4 Angel tokens (also with flying) when it attacks.
• Airborne Mook: Small creatures with the Flying ability often provide difficulties for opponents who use mostly "ground" creatures. They cannot be blocked unless the blocker has Flying or Reach abilities, but most can still block the "ground" creatures from attacking their owner. Small fliers are usually depicted as birds (typically blue or white) or bats (typically black).
• All There in the Manual: The Gatherer Web site includes all rulings on cards. As the game goes on and rules get refined, the company almost constantly changes the way game abilities are printed on cards:
  • Every set introduces new rules terms and long-standing parts of the game may have their names or the related rules changed if necessary. The concept of the "exile" zone, for example, has been in the game since the very first set, but did not receive its current name until 2009. (Exiling cards is a way of removing them from play that's more final than most methods. It used to be called "removed from the game" but was renamed for flavor purposes.)
  • The general rule is to rely on the most recent printed text of a card to determine what it does, even if someone is playing with an older copy on which its abilities are phrased differently. Without that rule, for example, casting three versions of exactly the same card with an ability summed up as "only this card and copies of it can attack" would mean none of them could actually attack.^note This is because the first card prevents every creature type except for Evil Eyes from attacking. The second is a Horror, not an Evil Eye, so it can't attack. It says only cards called Evil Eye of Orms-By-Gore can attack (though it could potentially be read as saying only it can attack). The first card is called Evil Eye of Orms-By-Gore, so it can still attack. But wait! The third card says only "Eyes" can attack. The first isn't an Eye, it's an Evil Eye, and the third isn't an Evil Eye, it's an Eye. Therefore, none of the three can now attack.
  • Subverted by the joke card R&D's Secret Lair, which explicitly bans using later printed text, errata, or the rules to 'update' cards. It's, naturally, illegal in all competitive play, and rapidly makes friendly games very unfriendly.
• All Trolls Are Different: A common, typically-green creature who usually have Hexproof, Regenerating, or both as abilities. Naturally, these abilities make them challenging to destroy.
• All Your Colors Combined:
  • Several cards unleash massive power if you are able to get (at least) one of each mana color into play. Examples include Coalition Victory, which results in an automatic victory; Legacy Weapon, which removes one permanent from the game; Door to Nothingness, which causes your opponent to automatically lose the game; and Progenitus, a 10/10 legendary creature with protection from everything. Naturally, these cards all qualify as Awesome, but Impractical.
  • Sunburst is a keyword ability on artifacts and artifact creatures which allows them to enter play with a number of charge counters or +1/+1 counters (respectively) for each type of mana used to cast the spell.
• All Your Powers Combined:
  • A number of cards, such as Experiment Kraj and Cairn Wanderer, can take on the abilities of other cards on the battlefield or in the graveyard, respectively.
  • Concerted Effort allows all of your creatures to combine their powers with each other. Odric, Lunarch Marshal later came around as a more modern version of it.
  • The Un-set card Urza, Academy Headmaster takes this up to eleven — the website listed on the card randomly selects an ability from any other planeswalker in the game when you activate one of Urza's abilities.
  • Nicol Bolas, Dragon-God copies the loyalty abilities from every other planeswalker on the field, on top of having a list of his own.
  • Creatures with the Mutate ability gain the abilities of all creatures they have mutated from/into.
• Alpha Strike: The trope name is used as shorthand for attacking with every creature you have. This doubles as a Death or Glory Attack since you won't have any creatures left to defend yourself if your attack fails to take down your opponent.
• Always a Bigger Fish: Reef Worm is just a 0/1 creature, but when it dies, it creates a 3/3 Fish token. When the Fish dies, it creates a 6/6 Whale token. When the Whale dies, it creates a 9/9 Kraken token.^note The flavor is that the worm gets eaten by the fish, who gets eaten by the whale, who gets eaten by the kraken.
• Animal Battle Aura: The "Umbra" enchantment auras, for example Bear, Drake, and Mammoth. These allow you to give any creature such an aura, as well as impart some of the abilities of the aura's shape, along with a one-time protection from destruction.
• Animal Stampede: A specialty of the Auroch creature type. They not only have Trample, but also either gain bonuses for each attacking Auroch or have abilities which allow you to find/easily play more Aurochs. (Or sometimes both.)
• Animated Armor: Haunted Guardian is a creature that's an empty suit of armor. Haunted Plate Mail goes a step further and can actually be worn by your creatures, only getting up to fight when nobody is looking.
• Animate Dead: A common black effect, present in many cards and abilities but most purely encapsulated in the eponymous card. Typically, the effect brings a creature back from the graveyard, but with a drawback, such as reduced power/toughness or only for a finite time.
• Animate Inanimate Object: March of the Machines, as well as other cards like Karn's Touch and Tezzeret the Seeker.
• Animating Artifact: The ability of Karn, Silver Golem. It turns artifacts into artifact creatures with power/toughness equal to the artifact's converted mana cost. This can lead to some unusual results, such as turning a Trading Post or Mindslaver into creatures as powerful as angels or dragons. It also isn't limited to your own artifacts, either, meaning you can use it to neutralize your opponent's artifacts for a turn.
• Anti-Air: Typically, creatures with the "Flying" ability can only be blocked by others with Flying. However, creatures with the "Reach" ability are able to do so as well. This, along with spells and enchantments which are particularly effective against creatures with Flying, is a staple of green mana. Several examples: Femeref Archers, Deadshot Minotaur, Plummet, and so on.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • Mechanics that prove too annoying or too complex to explain or track are simply not reprinted or printed on new cards, removing them from most formats. Banding is a famous one which got this treatment.
  • +1/+1 and -1/-1 counters nullify each other entirely, so a creature that has had three +1/+1 counters and one -1/-1 counter placed on it has two +1/+1 counters on it rather than four counters total. While there are a handful of cards that would care about such things, keeping track of multiple types of counters on a single creature is enough of a hassle that it's not worth doing so for the two most common counter types that simply negate each other's effects, just for such cases. (For this reason, Wizards also waits for cards that give +1/+1 counters to rotate out of Standard before printing new ones that add -1/-1 counters, and vice versa.)
  • Some old cards care about the order, not simply the contents, of a player's graveyard. Figuring out what order things that should enter can be irritating, and players might like to be able to e.g. put a card with flashback on top to remind themselves they could play it. Consequently players are given the ability to rearrange their graveyards at will in any format these cards aren't legal, since there's no way the order can be relevant (and in casual play the rule is normally ignored anyway, because the cards that make it matter are rare, unpopular, and not even very good).
  • Playing lands and producing mana are both defined as "Special Actions" which operate outside of the normal timing rules, so that they are impossible to interact with. This prevents players from disrupting them and slowing down the game. Additionally, the ability to destroy lands has been slowly but heavily nerfed, to the point where the only formats where land destruction cards are made also include other ways to obtain mana. Land destruction is still a viable strategy with a deck, it's just much less frustrating than it used to be.
• Anti-Magic: Protection, various forms of untargetability (such as the Shroud and Hexproof mechanics), and counterspell and anti-counterspell effects often work this way.
• Anti-Regeneration: Regenerate is an effect which acts as a Single-Use Shield for a creature, allowing it to survive (though become tapped) when it receives damage that would normally destroy it. Numerous spells and creature effects exist which specifically state that the creature "cannot be regenerated" including, for example, Big Game Hunter, Disintegrate, and Execute. Cards with this effect typically represent methods of death that the target would not logically be able to recover from.
• Antidote Effect: Common for card combos which, if you drew them within the same turn or otherwise close together, could be extremely powerful. However, the odds are so low that it's generally better to swap them out for cards which can individually be more impactful.
• Ape Shall Never Kill Ape:
  • Common in black spells which can instantly destroy creatures, but only if they aren't black themselves (or are artifacts). Considering Black's domain is death magic, it makes sense that black spells don't work on creatures that aren't living to begin with.
  • Also featured in white spells, which fit the spirit of the trope more directly in their reasoning for not being able to target white creatures.
• Appendage Assimilation: Goblin Chirurgeon can sacrifice a goblin in order to regenerate a creature, the implication being that the sacrificed goblin is being used for... parts.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit:
  • The limit of four non-basic land cards per deck. This limit was created after some early tournaments were dominated by players using nothing but the same three cards in mass quantities (20 Black Lotus, 20 Channel, and 20 Fireball) as a reasonable compromise between flexibility and cheese.
  • Players may only have one copy of a "Legendary" permanent on the battlefield under their control at one time. For quite a few sets, the rule instead stated that playing a second copy of that legendary permanent meant that both would be destroyed. This made Clone a relatively cheap and effective defense against legendary creatures, since if your opponent played one, you could simply Clone it to destroy it. Thus, the current rule was an updated compromise.
• Armored But Frail: Mechanics like Regenerate (now deprecated) and keywords like Totem Armor are in this vein if they are applied to creatures with 1 life. These creatures would typically be destroyed by an attack from anything, even the cherriest of taps, but these abilities allow them to survive a hit from almost anything, even the game's ultra powerful Eldritch Abominations.
• Armor of Invincibility: Artifact equipment such as Darksteel Plate and the legendary Shield of Kaldra make the wearer indestrucable.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Creatures with the "Trample" ability will deal any unblocked damage to the opposing player. (Normally, any excess damage is wasted if a creature is blocked.) There are also several creatures and spells which can attack opponents directly, regardless of if he has any creatures to block.
• Army of The Ages: The basic premise of the game, with you as the summoner.
• Art Evolution:
  • The art for the cards has evolved over the years due to both a preference for more detailed, elaborate art, and much more meticulous guidance given to the artists. For example, when the company commissioned the art for the card Lord of the Pit, they reportedly gave the artist a one-word instruction: "balrog". (This was years before The Lord of the Rings movies were made.) Under the circumstances, it came out pretty well, but today artists get multi-paragraph descriptions of what the image on the card should look like, generally designed taking into account both exactly what the card itself does and the flavor and description of the world of the current set. Nowadays comprehensive style guides and concept art are made for each set, or a consecutive block of sets that share the same setting: for example, the goblins of the Scars of Mirrodin block have a large round head with a sharp snout and long pointed ears.
  • The cards' frames themselves have been updated. All frames have become less blocky and are no longer of an equal width all the way around, and the texturing used in each has been changed.
  • Even the "new" frames released in 2003 have changed. For example, the frames used for Artifacts in 8th Edition and Mirrodin proved too difficult to tell apart from white cards at a glance, and were darkened for Darksteel in 2004. Subtle tapering was added to two-color multicolor cards for Ravnica: City of Guilds in 2006 (although, in fairness, only one two-color gold card had existed in the new frames before that) to show which colors were involved.
  • The first colored artifact in the game was Transguild Courier, from Ravnica, which was printed on the normal 3-or-more-color gold card frame. Future colored artifacts, starting with Sarcomite Myr from Future Sight (which is the first artifact to be colored by actually having colored mana in its cost), introduced a new colored artifact frame that combined the outer frame of an ordinary artifact with a colored inner frame. The first card to use this in the normal modern card frame was Reaper King from Shadowmoor. (Sarcomite Myr was a timeshifted card on a "futuristic" card frame; by the time it was reprinted on the modern card frame in Planechase, the colored artifact frame had made its proper debut in Shadowmoor and, more extensively, in Shards of Alara.)
  • In addition, white card borders (previously used to distinguish core sets from Expert-level block expansions) have been entirely discontinued.
  • As of the Magic 2015 core set, the frames have changed again, narrowing the borders slightly to allow more focus on the art, changing the font to one that is unique to WotC and adding a foil dot on rares and mythic rares to help fight counterfeiting.
• The Artifact:
  • Every card has to be indistinguishable from the back^note not counting the double-faced cards which were released starting in 2011. As a result:
    • The word "Deckmaster" still appears on new card backs, even though the Deckmaster brand ceased to exist in the mid '90s.
    • The word 'Magic' is (and always will be) blue, despite the fact that the official logo has been yellow for years.
    • There's a faint purple line on the back of every card, running through the word Deckmaster. Someone made a stray pen mark on the original card backs, and so now every card needs to have that mark reproduced exactly. (Vanguard cards, being larger and not part of the deck, didn't need to have uniform backs, so the mark is mostly absent on those.)
  • Many card abilities. When the game was new, colors were very ill-defined. Many cards were placed in colors based only on where the creature in question lives or what it does, even if its abilities as a card are completely different from most cards of that color, but cards like that remain in that color now just because of the earlier ones. Look at a list of cards from most sets and compare it to descriptions of the colors and you'll always find a few cards that don't fit the description, but they're there because they are similar or identical to really common or famous or powerful cards that were printed back when the company was still figuring this stuff out.
  • The Gatherer text for Winter Orb returned to it an old, old rule; in old editions of Magic, any Artifact could be tapped to "switch off" its effects, a rule intended to emphasize their status as sorcerous machines.
  • Templating changes have made some older cards counterintuitive. For example, when the card "Auramancer" was printed in 2001, the word "aura" was often used to refer to enchantments. In 9th Edition, local enchantments were re-templated to use the subtype, "Aura." This has caused a lot of confusion in more recent printings, since Auramancer can interact with any Enchantment, not just Auras.
  • Graveyard order: Some old cards care about the specific order of cards in your graveyard. Even though the last such card was printed in 1998, there are still specific rules defining the order that cards are placed in the graveyard, just in case.
  • Braid of Fire was designed and balanced around mana burn, where you would take damage if you had unused mana empty from your mana pool. This meant that the longer you kept Braid of Fire around without the ability to spend the mana it was making, the more damage you would take until you choose not to let it make mana. With the mana burn rule phased out, there is no downside to the card's cumulative upkeep, which left newer players confused over why such a beneficial "upkeep cost" would be printed. The only thing keeping this from being a full-on Game Breaker is that said mana is restricted for use only during your upkeep phase^note Your mana pool automatically empties between phases and steps, limiting its use to abilities, instants, or anything with flash.
  • In Commander, you lose the game if you accrue 21 damage from the same commander. Why that number specifically? Because back when the format was created as a Game Mod in 1996, only the five Elder Dragons released in Legends were able to be commanders (hence the format's other name, Elder Dragon Highlander/EDH). Each one had 7 power, and the idea was that nothing short of a god should be able to survive three hits from a dragon with godlike powers (particularly when one of those five dragons was Nicol Bolas, who would go on to become one of the most powerful planeswalkers and villains in the franchise).
• Artifact of Death:
  • Many artifacts qualify. Jinxed Idol is a good example, which keeps dealing damage to the player who controls it until he or she sacrifices a creature to hand control of it to an opponent. Nevinyrral's Disk is another which, upon use, destroys ALL creatures, artifacts, and enchantments in play, including itself. Similar is Worldslayer, an artifact equipment blade. Whenever the equipped creature (i.e. creature wielding the sword) deals combat damage to a player, all permanents other than Worldslayer are destroyed (note that this would include the creature equipping Worldslayer at that moment).
  • While not "artifacts" by the standard M:tG definition, a number of black cards qualify. Graveborn Muse, for example, is a creature but basically functions like an enchantment or artifact that lets you draw extra cards at the cost of losing life — and it's not optional. If you don't manage to kill your opponent using the extra cards, the Muse will kill you.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The AI in Duels Of The Planeswalkers generally knows what to do with each of the decks, excepting a few mistakes it'll consistently make. However, in 2013, it has no idea what to do with the Plane cards in Planechase. It'll throw mana at rolling the planar die even when a success won't actually do anything, or when the current plane favors their deck, or when it really ought to attack before doing so, or in a few cases when a success would be actively detrimental (say, bringing them closer to death by milling).
  • The '97 game by MicroProse can be even stupider-occasions abound of the AI committing suicide. Mana Flare being played against a deck that's not built to take advantage of said enchantment (which causes all lands to produce one extra mana of the same type for EACH Mana Flare in play) will result in the AI's slow death from Mana Burn. The AI will play cards like Howl From Beyond and Giant Growth on YOUR creatures and give you free kills/damage for no reason, enchant your creatures for no reason, and generally play like it's drunk.
• Artistic License – Statistics: A common complaint in the online and video game versions of the game is that the algorithm used to shuffle players' decks is flawed and biased. Some say the bias is towards "mana flood", where you get too many mana-producing cards (and not enough spells to actually use that mana with), while others say towards "mana screw", which is the exact opposite — not getting enough. In reality, the algorithm is completely incapable of either, since it does not consider what type any given card is when performing the shuffle. The reason for the perceived dissonance between physical and online play is that having to physically shuffle a deck enough to provide a truly random distribution every time would be incredibly annoying, particularly given the number of times some decks end up being shuffled in a single game. At the end of a game, most people just take their land cards, which end up all in one pile, and put them into the deck at fairly even intervals to avoid there being giant clumps of nothing but land. For practical reasons, even in tournaments, it's accepted that the deck doesn't have to be truly randomly distributed — it just needs to be random enough that a player can't predict what comes next.
• Ascended Fanon: "Mill" has been a longstanding nickname for the act of sending cards from the top of the library to the graveyard, based off of Millstone, the first card with that ability. Only in 2020 did it become an official keyword.
• The Assimilator: A common tactic of the Phyrexians. In terms of game mechanics, this manifests as them turning a target creature into an artifact, and then having their controller assume control of it.
• Asteroids Monster:
  • Maalfeld Twins is a 4/4 conjoined twin zombie. When it dies, it spawns two 2/2 zombie tokens, representing the twins splitting.
  • Worldspine Wurm is a massive 15/15 creature that spawns three 5/5 wurm tokens upon death.
  • Mitotic Slime takes this a step even further. When it dies, it spawns two 2/2 ooze tokens. When they die, they spawn two 1/1 ooze tokens.
  • Spiny Starfish is a non-fatal version. It can regenerate and, whenever it does so, it creates a weak 0/1 starfish token to represent a new starfish growing from a severed limb.
• Asymmetric Multiplayer: The Archenemy format pits a team of three against one, who is designated as the Archenemy. To help even the odds, the Archenemy starts with 40 life instead of 20, and draws from a special Scheme deck at the start of each turn.
• Attack Animal:
  • All creatures are Attack Animals for you, the planeswalker.
  • See also The Beastmaster for examples of characters who fight with pets.
• Attack! Attack! Attack!:
  • The main (and sometimes only) strategy of weenie decks, especially green and red weenies. Zerg Rush your opponents with as many cheap creatures as you can muster and hope to overwhelm them before they can set up anything stronger.
  • Certain cards have this as a drawback. Impetuous Sunchaser, for example, must attack every turn if able.
  • Other cards force this mindset onto creatures. Boiling Blood is an instant which forces a target creature to attack. Anger Turtle is a creature with this ability, while Avatar of Slaughter not only forces all creatures to attack, but gives them all double strike.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever:
  • Implied with the classic card Giant Growth, combined with Make My Monster Grow. It gives a creature +3/+3 for one turn. Gigantomancer is a creature with the ability to turn any other creature into a 7/7 for one turn. Gigantiform is an aura enchantment which turns the enchanted creature into an 8/8 with trample. Naturally, these are all green mana cards.
  • Rise of the Eldrazi features some of the largest creatures EVER printed in the history of the game.
  • The "Timmy" demographic is defined as caring first and foremost about massive creatures that can slam the opponent (or, in a broader sense, any spell with a huge, sweeping effect), and Magic sure has no shortage. The classic "biggest and baddest" is Leviathan; other notables include the devastating Dragon Tyrant, the unspeakably large Denizen of the Deep, and the majestic Godsire. The single biggest, baddest, most monstrous monster in the whole game, though? The dread goddess Marit Lage, who is so powerful she can't even be summoned by normal means.
  • The biggest in the whole game is the B.F.M. (Big Furry Monster). It takes two cards to actually play and costs 15 Black mana. And being from the Unglued set, is not legal in anything but casual joke games.
• Attack Reflector:
  • Reflecting Mirror, perhaps the oldest example in the game, is an artifact which allows you to redirect spells for twice their mana cost.
  • Deflect, Redirect, and Reroute are all this trope in spell form. Notably, these can also redirect your opponent's beneficial spells to you instead.
  • Deflecting Palm is a martial arts form of this.
• Authority Equals Asskicking: Konda, Lord of Eiganjo, The Emperor of most of Kamigawa, is literally indestructible (for plot reasons), and fights as an 8/8. (For comparison, a typical dragon is in the 5/5 range.)
• Auto-Revive:
  • Lich's Mirror allows you to start the game over with 20 life if you die with it in play. Of course, you start over with nothing in play, but your opponent gets to keep all the cards they already have out.
  • Persist and Undying are keywords, both of which are abilities that return dying creatures to play with a counter on it (-1/-1 and +1/+1 respectively), if it didn't already have one.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Many cards have spectacular, awe-inspiring effects that will almost certainly win you the game — if you ever get enough mana to actually cast them before your opponent kills you, and your opponent doesn't have a counterspell or some other cheap, efficient answer. There are so many specific examples that they have their own page.
• Awesome, but Temporary:
  • There are a number of powerful creatures who can be summoned initially for relatively low mana, but require some form of cumulative upkeep in order to keep them in play. A prominent example is Aboroth, a 9/9 creature for six mana but who gets -1/-1 cumulatively every turn. So turn one, 9/9, turn 2, 8/8, turn 3, 6/6 and so on.
  • As seen with Aboroth, Age Counters in general accomplish this. Many creatures and artifacts can be summoned for less initial mana relative to their power, but have an age counter added each turn. The cost to keep each permanent in play gets higher each turn, until it is no longer possible to keep it around any longer.
  • Fading and Vanishing achieve the same effect, with the permanent losing a counter each turn until it has to be sacrificed.

B

• Back from the Dead: White and black both have versions of this at play. White spells and abilities with this effect tend to be costlier (in terms of mana), more restrictive, and can typically only target your own creatures, but they are also usually true resurrection - the creature is back just as it was before (and sometimes, even stronger). Black resurrection tends to be more in the Animate Dead flavor. The creatures often come back weaker than before (minus counters, lacking their abilities, etc.), are only back temporarily, and/or require the sacrifice of another creature. However, it is usually cheaper (in terms of mana), less restrictive, and not limited to a player's own graveyard... It can be awfully fun and cathartic to bring back one of your opponent's creatures to use against them.
• Background Magic Field: Essentially the mechanic behind tapping lands for mana.
• Back Stab: The "Prowl" ability of Rogues in Morningtide functions as one of these.
• Badass Normal: "Human" creatures tend to be this, especially white mana humans. In sets that focus on them, they're usually up against all manner of supernatural and super powered entities (werewolves, vampires, mages, etc.) and are perfectly capable of coming out on top thanks to focuses on teamwork and various means of empowerment.
• Badass Pacifist: It is possible to build "mill" decks which are completely incapable of dealing damage, but still win by "decking" opponents. Generally, these decks are extremely defensively oriented, negating damage and/or gaining life to outlast your opponent while playing things like Millstone and Stroke of Genius to bleed your opponent's deck dry. Often crosses over with Lethal Harmless Powers as well.
• Balancing Death's Books: The idea behind Hell's Caretaker and similar cards. They allow you bring creatures back from the graveyard at the cost of sacrificing other creatures to "take their place".
• Banishing Ritual: There is more than one mechanic that works like this. Summoned creature cards can be, for example, returned to their owner's hand or forced to be shuffled back into the deck. The most permanent one of these is the "exile" mechanic, that removes a card completely from the game. None of these mechanics are, however, limited to any certain type of creatures.
• Battering Ram: Battering Ram is an artifact creature which, while otherwise weak on its own, destroys walls in a single hit.
• Battle Boomerang: Razor Boomerang which, despite its appearance, is considered one of the worst cards in the game. (Five mana for one damage is pitifully weak.)
• Battle Chant: Battle Hymn, which gives you one red mana for each creature you control. The idea behind it is that the more creatures you have doing the "chant", the more powerful it becomes.
• Battle Cry: A keyword ability in Mirrodin Besieged. For example, see Hero of Bladehold or Goblin Wardriver.
• Battle of Wits: Is an instant-win card. Since cards in your library are meant to represent knowledge, in this case, you win by being the most knowledgeable.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • The Cycle of Wishes, which each allows you to bring a specific type of card into play that isn't part of your current deck, Subverts it as the only drawback is needing to exile your "Wish" card. Glittering Wish is a simiar call back to the cycle.
  • Braid of Fire works on this philosophy. Its mana given/casting cost ratio makes it one of the best mana accelerants ever made. However, it was created during the days of Mana Burn, so if you could not use all of the mana it was generating, you'd take increasing amounts of damage until you lose. Subverted in modern Magic, where Mana Burn is no longer inflicted.
  • Wishclaw Talisman, a Shout-Out to The Monkey's Paw, lets you get any card you want from your library for a ridiculously cheap mana cost. The downside is that, after you use it, your opponent also gets to use it...
• Berserker Tears: Tears of Rage, which power up each of your attacking creatures by an amount equal to the number of attacking creatures.
• Bewitched Amphibians: Turn to Frog, which turns a target creature into a 1/1 blue frog with no abilities.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Insects are a common creature type for black and green, ranging in size from "a little bigger than in real life" weenies (Bayou Dragonfly, Blight Beetle) to monstrous sizes with power on the level of dragons (Ant Queen, Bane of the Living). Perhaps the largest insect is the red Lithophage, a 7/7 creature which eats mountains.
• Big Eater: There's been some debate about which creature in Magic is the hungriest. Some candidates are Doomgape (so hungry it even eats itself!), Worldgorger Dragon (immediately eats all of your permanents), and the more traditional Big Eater, Fat Ass (whose hunger is contagious, compelling any mages who summon him to become Big Eaters themselves).
• Big Damn Heroes: Several cards qualify. Some notable examples:
  • The aptly-named instant Dramatic Entrance lets you turn any given massive creature into your very own Big Damn Hero.
  • There's also Avatar of Hope, which can block anything. What's so big damn heroic about it? It costs only two mana to play when you have three life or less.
  • Angel of the Dire Hour, while expensive, can turn around a game in no time by removing every single creature that's attacking you.
  • Angel of Salvation, which not only makes a sudden appearance to haul you out of trouble, but can also protect you from potential serious harm.
• Bigger Is Better:
  • Personified in the Rise of the Eldrazi expansion, where gigantic monsters are the theme of the set.
  • See also Serial Escalation.
• Black-Hole Belly: A staple of the Atog creatures. The original eats artifacts in order to power up, but others added since then eat corpses, enchantments, lands, creatures, cards in hand, and even other Atogs.
• Black Knight: The long-time black staple Black Knight. In line with the trope not only in appearance, "First Strike" implies his prowess in combat while "Protection from White" hints at his rivalry with the (typically white) Knight in Shining Armor types.
• Black Mage: Many Instant and Sorcery focused decks are in this vein (as opposed to the Summon Magic nature of creature focused decks). Red lends itself best to this build as it is the color with the largest number of direct damage spells. Black has this secondarily, including some other Black Mage staples like poison and life drain.
• Blank Book:
  • Tome Scour forces your opponent to discard five cards from their deck. The card art features erasing pages from a book to drive the point home.
  • Curse of the Bloody Tome is similar, enchanting a player who then has to discard two cards form their deck each term. Again, the card art and flavor quote imply a book's pages being blanked out leading to lost knowledge.
• Blessed with Suck:
  • Many of the extremely mighty creatures (Darksteel Colossus, Serra Avatar, ...) have an ability that puts them back into the deck every time they hit the graveyard. Sounds great, until you realize that this is a deliberate safety measure to prevent players from discarding and reanimating them, thus circumventing paying their steep cost.
  • Back in the days of Mana Burn, generating a large amount of mana could turn into this if you weren't careful.
• Blind Seer:
  • The eponymous Blind Seer card. Despite the implied handicap, it is a 3/3 creature who can change the color of spells and permanents.
  • Similarly, the Skyward Eye Prophets are showin the card art to be blindfolded, but are a 3/3 creature with Vigilance and the ability to draw an extra card, playing it immediately if it is a land.
• Blinded by the Light: Light-based attacks in this vein are common in white. Blinding Mage taps a target creature, implying that it is has been blinded and is unable to attack. Blinding Angel can do this to the opposing player.
• Blob Monster: "Ooze" creatures, whose common abilities including splitting into multiple smaller (usually token) creatures, combining to form stronger creatures, absorbing creatures to increase in power and/or gain their abilities. Experiment Kraj is a particularly famous and powerful example, having the ability to power up your other creatures as well as use their abilities. Predator Ooze is an homage to The Blob (1958), being indestructable and gaining power/toughness each time it destroys another creature (implying that it is expanding by absorbing them).
• Blood Knight: Blood Knight. There's also his predecessor, Black Knight.
• Blood Lust: Blood Lust is an instant which sacrifices a creature's toughness (down to 1) for a +4 increase in power.
• Blood Magic: A specialty of the black Planeswalker Sorin Markov. In effect, it takes the form of draining your opponent's life, placing curses, and, at the highest levels, mind control (which is usually more of a blue staple).
• Blood Oath: Implied by the sorcery Sign in Blood. You trade two life to draw two cards...or inflict it onto your opponent instead.
• Bloodsucking Bats: Bloodhunter Bat, which steals two life from your opponent and gives it to you when it enters play.
• Blow You Away: Wind-based spells and abilities are a staple of green magic. They tend to be especially devastating to creatures with Flying, such as Hurricane.
• Blue Means Cold: While primarily associated with water, blue magic has many icy elements as well. For example, Ice Cage, Frozen Aether, and Flashfreeze are all blue spells.
• Body of Bodies:
  • Implied with Phyrexian Rebirth, which destroys all creatures and then puts a token on the battlefield with power/toughness equal to the number of creatures destroyed.
  • Diregraf Colossus gets a +1/+1 counter for each zombie in your graveyard, implying that their corpses are being added to it for greater power.
  • Perhaps most explicit with Corpse Cobble, which lets you sacrifice creatures to create a zombie token with their combined power.
• Body Sled: Goblin Sledder sacrifices another goblin to gain +1/+1. The card art really drives the idea home.
• Bolt of Divine Retribution:
  • Extremely popular among white magic. Lightning and Holy Hand Grenades are the two most common forms, typically destroying creatures outright and sometimes sweeping the board entirely. Divine Retribution and Wrath of God are two prime examples, both depicting lightning in their card art as well.
  • Lightning Bolt itself is an ever-popular red direct damage instant, trading one mana for three damage.
• Boogie Knights: Knight of the Hokey Pokey gets a bonus if you do the Hokey Pokey!
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Specific Cards:
    • If you were to imagine the most powerful (and expensive) cards in M:tG history, you might picture behemoth creatures stomping everything in their path or board-sweeping spells that can win the game in a single turn...but you'd be wrong. Enter the infamous and legendary "Power Nine" - nine cards consisting of six artifacts, two sorceries, and one instant. The single most powerful, expensive, and most frequently banned/limited card in the game's history is Black Lotus: a flower artifact that gives you three free mana, once. This lets you break one of the fundamental rules of the game — "Since you can only play one land per turn, the amount of mana you have is equal to (or, if you missed a land drop, less than) the number of turns you've had." In other words, this card allows absurd Sequence Breaking, allowing you to get more powerful spells into the game before your opponent can reasonably defend against them. Zvi Mowshowitz, a tournament player, designer for Wizards of the Coast, and eventual Magic Hall of Famer, once said there was not a single deck that could be built that could not be improved by adding a Black Lotus to it.^note He was wrong, but this was before someone invented the Manaless Ichorid and Oops All Spells archetypes, both of which use Loophole Abuse to win without getting mana from lands. The other five artifacts, the "Moxen", are each an artifact which can generate one colored mana each turn. Even that proved to be too powerful^note Remember how "You can only play one land a turn"? The Moxen are Artifacts. They produce mana like Lands, they tap like Lands, and they cost zero mana like Lands... but they're Artifacts, and you can play as many of them per turn as you darn well please!, and they had to be banned/heavily restricted in every format. Finally, the instant of the Power Nine, Ancestral Recall, allows you to perform the simple act of drawing three cards for one mana. Again, so simple, yet so powerful that it had to be banned. (Properly-balanced versions of this card cost five times as much mana, if 0.00005 times the money.)
    • Basic Lands. They give you the mana to cast other spells, and are the most reliable way to get mana. Each basic land gives you one mana of its color and can be used as soon as it's played. There are many varieties of lands that give you life, damage your opponent, or give you a choice of different mana types, but they almost always have some additional disadvantage: life to play, only giving colorless mana, or not being usable on the turn they enter the field.
    • Unsummon and similar cards removes a creature from the game for only one mana, but your opponent can still use that card later. If you use it on a creature with high mana cost, your opponent will have to spend all that mana again, and if you use it on a creature with loads of counters, you've reset them to their base power and toughness.
    • Isamaru, Hound of Konda is a legendary creature. These types of creatures, which you may only have one of the battlefield at a time, are usually gods or dragons or some other monstrously powerful behemoth, usually with abilities that make it even more of a threat. Isamaru is a mere 2/2, with no abilities... but only costs a single white mana to cast. This has led to Isamaru becoming perhaps the single most used legendary creature in the history of the game, and he gets even better in the EDH/Commander formats.
    • Swords to Plowshares. For a single white mana, it removes a creature from the game and gives its owner its power in life points. It is the cheapest "removal" spell in the game in terms of mana cost, makes it difficult for your opponent to get that creature back since it exiles the creature rather than destroying it, and has only a very minor downside in giving your opponent some Hit Points back in Equivalent Exchange.^note That seems like a poor trade if you're a new player, but think of it this way: What if the creature you got rid of was the only thing keeping your opponent in the game in the first place? Or the Cosmic Keystone around which his entire plan revolves? No amount of extra Life is going to save him now. If a player has a source of white mana, expect to this card in their deck.
  • Decks and Strategies:
    • The early metagame had long been dominated by big flashy spells ("Channel Fireball", "Blue Eater", etc.) and powerful creatures (Dragons, Angels, Demons, etc.). Then, in 1996, Tom Chanpheng won a world championship using what he called his "White Weenie" deck. The idea was to build a deck focusing on cheap, easy to summon creatures that most serious players ignored, known as "Weenies." The strategy is that a big, flashy spell which takes a long time to set up is no good if that player has already been defeated by a Zerg Rush of weenies. A few nearly one-sided tournaments later, the "weenie" archetype that we (Magic players) all know and love was born.
    • Token decks are similar to Weenies. Unlike regular creatures, tokens are, more often than not, designed to just keep coming. And coming. And coming. They seldom have any abilties, and seldom more anything more complex than flying, but when you have an army well into the triple digits, the fact that it's a bunch of tiny 1/1s is hardly relevant. And we didn't even mention empowering this horde...
    • Blue-White control decks take this trope to its most literal meaning. With a slew of cheap blue counterspells and white removal, you effectively render your opponent impotent throughout the entire match while either digging up your own combo or pinging him with consistent yet hard to remove damage. As expected, when your opponent has to face the likes of Render Silent and Silence every single turn, it gets hilariously annoying and boring for them, especially if you just wiped the field (so they don't have any existing stuff to use either).
• Boss Battle:
  • Most decks will include at least one (if not a few) extremely powerful creatures which require a lot of mana and/or other difficult-to-meet summoning conditions to use as late-game closers, invoking an idea similar to a boss battle at the end of a match.
  • The Archenemy format pits a team of players against a single opponent. To even the odds, the Archenemy has a larger amount of life and a separate deck of schemes to give himself and advantage or impose a disadvantage on the team.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: There are a number of low mana cost creatures which don't look like particularly powerful at first glance, but can quickly become very difficult to defeat once they hit the board. To note some prominent examples:
  • Psychatog is a mere uncommon, three mana, 1/2 who can quickly become one of the most devastating creatures in the game. By discarding cards from your hand, removing cards from your graveyard, or a combination thereof, you can beef Psychatog up with +1/+1 counters. Its superb offensive and defensive potential let it assert aggressive pressure all by itself, which frees up space for more reactive cards to shut down an opposing deck before it can get rolling—and since it synergizes well with card draw and mill, it also fits well into decks designed to "go off" very quickly. Further, since it can consume an entire graveyard and hand, it can easily reach 20/20 late in the game. Finally, if all of that power potential alone doesn't do it for you, its abilities to discard and/or remove at will benefit all sorts of decks, including those built around the Madness keyword or Animate Dead, just to name a few. A combo deck featuring Psychatog with Upheaval (which returns all permanents to their owner's hand, giving plenty more discard options to beef up Psychatog) was the dominant deck of the 2002 World Championship.
  • Tarmogoyf was thought to be a Joke Character, printed in Future Sight so that its reminder text could be used as Foreshadowing for the then-unreleased Planeswalker and Tribal card types. However, it turned out to be so effective that it's now considered the best pure beatstick creature of all time. For two mana, it's easy for it to become at least a 2/3, which is already ahead of the curve, and can get as big as 8/9 depending on the deck.
• Brain Bleach: With the idea that the deck is your sanity and your hand is your memory, any cards which discard from either act as this. This can even be beneficial, as your graveyard is a frequent power source and many cards can be more cheaply summoned from the graveyard than they can be played directly from your hand. Bonded Fetch is a particularly flavorful example.
• Brain Food: Appetite for Brains allows you to exile a card from your opponent's hand. The idea behind it, with the idea that a player's hand represents their memory, is that you're eating a portion of their brain.
• Brainwashing: A staple of blue cards (such as Mind Control) is to gain control of your opponents' creatures (and other permanents). Red features a temporary version of this (e.g. Act of Treason) that allows you to attack with your opponents's creatures.
• Briar Patching: An Exploited trope in the metagame. Most commonly, it involves leaving lands uptapped with cards in hand at the end of your turn. Your opponent will almost always believe you have an Instant ready to play to counter whatever they are attempting to do. A prime example is the classic blue Counterspell. Many players, upon seeing two untapped islands and a card in hand, will be rather hesitant to play a spell, regardless of what you might actually have.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory:
  • While it's entirely possible to build decks on a budget, Magic is expensive for the serious player or collector. Prices for tournament-winning, in-print single cards routinely exceed $20, and sometimes even approach/exceed $100. On top of that, the most popular and common tournament formats rotate new sets in and old sets out each year, serving the dual function of keeping the game fresh and keeping Wizards in business selling new cards.
  • Exaggerated by Dual Lands and Fetch Lands. You can spend a bunch on whatever's dominating the meta right now, but what happens if you just don't draw the right lands you need and can't play the spell? Enter the original Dual Lands — they count as two types of Basic Land at once, they can tap for either color, and they have with no drawbacks — as well as the Fetch Lands — you pay 1 life and sacrifice the land to replace it with an actual land of your choosing. Why are these so powerful? Because the entire Lands system is a Necessary Drawback that deliberately slows down the game, an Achilles' Heel that newer players are intended to exploit against experienced ones... And these lands close that loophole. Believe it or not, really good lands are the real way of buying victory. ...Which is why the Fetch Lands tend to cost $20 a pop, and original Duals $400.
  • Inverted with the "Limited" tournament format, where the price of entry (around $20) includes several packs of cards, which the tournament participants must then make decks out of (in some versions, the player is limited to whichever packs were given him at random; in others, the players pass the packs around the table and pick a single card). In the end, cards are kept (though rares are sometimes put aside to be handed out, with higher ranking participants getting first pick). Because cards are chosen non-randomly, this is actually a cheaper method of obtaining the cards you want.
  • Duels of the Planeswalkers and its sequels. While you can unlock any and all of the cards in the game through gameplay, you can also buy DLC that unlocks the thematic decks of the planeswalkers featured in the game. Doing this unlocks all the cards in that deck, meaning you can now use them to customize yours. And since the latest (and now persistent) version is Free to Play, this borders on Allegedly Free Game territory.
• Broke the Rating Scale: The "Storm Scale" is a 10 point system used by head designer Mark Rosewater to determine how unlikely he thinks it is for a particular mechanic to return to Standard format. It is named after the infamously unbalanced Storm mechanic, which received a 10 ("never say never, but this is pretty close to never".) Receiving an 11 and breaking the scale is the infamous "Bands with Other".
• Broke Your Arm Punching Out Cthulhu: A trait of the Eldrazi. If even the weakest of their type attacks, you will have to sacrifice a permanent, even if you kill it. Emrakul, the Aeons Torn, will cost you six permanents, meaning that even if you're able to kill the creature, you will have lost most if not all of your board presence.
• Broken Angel: Angels are typically a white specialty, being some of their most powerful creatures. Fallen Angel is a frequently reprinted angel who has turned to black mana. Depending on the card art, she either has amputated or broken wings, while still retaining the power of a lesser angel.
• Brought Down to Normal:
  • Numerous cards exist which remove the abilities of target creatures. For instance, Crash Landing targets creatures with flying while Blood Moon turns all non-basic lands (which notably can do things like create more one one type of mana, or have special powerful effects) into basic, mundane mountains.
  • Humility is perhaps the ultimate version of this in the game, as it makes every creature have base power and toughness 1/1.
• Brown Note Being: Nemesis of Reason. Whenever it attacks, it also forces the defending player to discard the top 10 cards from their deck, which represents their "sanity".

C

• Calling Your Shots:
  • You must do this for every card you play in accordance with the rules. The first step in casting a spell is to announce it which includes naming all its targets, costs, and modes. Not announcing your spells properly is a rules violation since it is considered public information that you need to present to your opponent fully.
  • Several cards reward you for doing this in specific ways, including Conundrum Sphinx, Mindblaze, and Mise, among others.
  • A famous example of a Called Shot is Gabriel Nassif's Cruel Ultimatum from the quarterfinals of Pro Tour Kyoto in 2009. With no cards in hand and on the brink of losing the game, he picked up the top card of his library without looking at it and arranged his lands to produce two blue, two red, and three black mana: "My Cruel Ultimatum mana." Lo and behold, he flipped the card over to reveal...Cruel Ultimatum, the one card he needed to win the game and advance to the finals.
• Call to Agriculture: Implied in one of the iconic white spells, Swords to Plowshares. For a single white mana, it removes a creature from the game and gives its owner its power in life points. The implication is that you're sending that creature away to work a farm, removing it from battle while providing your opponent life. (A trade-off most players will gladly accept forcing onto their opponents.)
• Caltrops: Caltrops is an artifact card. When in play, it deals one damage to all attacking creatures.
• Came Back Strong:
  • Tuktuk the Explorer, combining this trope with Magikarp Power. As a three mana 1/1, Tuktuk is well below the power curve. However, if he is sent to the graveyard, you place a 5/5 token into play called "Tuktuk the Returned".
  • "Undying" is a keyword with this effect. If a creature with "undying" is sent to the graveyard from the battlefield, it returns to the battlefield with a +1/+1 counter. (If it is sent to the graveyard again, it stays dead.) Undying Evil is a spell which grants any creature "undying".
• Came Back Wrong: Common in black spells which can return creatures from the graveyard, often more cheaply than the normal summoning conditions for those creatures, but they are often weaker in some way. (Reduced power/toughness, they cannot use their abilities, they are only able to return temporarily, etc.)
• Canis Major: Hollowborn Barghest is a massive demonic dog, with power on the level of gods and dragons.
• Cannibalism Superpower:
  • Implied with Mimeoplasm. When it enters play, you exile two creatures from your graveyard. Mimeoplasm becomes a copy of one of the cards (power, toughness, abilities) with a number of +1/+! counters equal to the power of the other card.
  • Unsurprisingly, the card Cannibalize lets you do this to your own creatures or enforce it on your enemy.
  • A large number of black creatures (and some of other colors) let you sacrifice a creature to make it grow in size, most of which is implied if not outright states in the fluff. Examples include Blood Bairn, Phyrexian Ghoul, and Bloodthrone Vampire.
• Captain Obvious: The reminder text in Portal sets tends to be this way more than in any other card, with cards that draw stating "you draw from your deck", or Last Chance saying "you don't lose if you've already won".
• Card Battle Game: Most video game adaptations, including the MicroProse Shandalar game and Duels of the Planeswalkers.
• Card Cycling:
  • Mulligans: Replacing the first drawn cards if they're bad, which has gone through multiple versions:
    • The first was "all land/no land", which was single-use per game. If a player drew either none or all lands in their opening hand, they'd reveal that hand to their opponent and shuffle it back, drawing a replacement hand of seven cards.
    • The rules that all other mulligan variants are based on are the "Paris Mulligan": If you are not satisfied with the initial seven cards, you may shuffle them back into the deck and draw a new starting hand, with one fewer card. This option may be repeated until you have no cards in your starting hand. Newer versions involve something like the Scry mechanic. Scry 1 being: "Check the first, a.k.a 1st card of the library, a.k.a pile to draw from, and choose whether to move it to the bottom of the pile.":
    • "Vancouver" style is Scry 1 after finished mulligan-ing.
    • "London" only practically, not functionally, reduces card draw each time. Instead, the mulligan repeatedly draws the same starting number of cards, 7, just that it treats it as if the draw had already been scried for the number of mulligans. having to place the same number of cards from the hand to the bottom of the deck after having concluded the mulligan-ing.
  • The ([Type]-)Cycling mechanic, for a cost, usually some Mana, to discard the card and draw some amount of (Type) cards, and comes in regular, a.k.a any-type, or Types such as Land or Sliver. Such as Starstorm: "Cycling 3, Discard this card: Draw a card."
• Carnivorous Healing Factor: A card printed as part of a The Lord of the Rings crossover set, Shelob, Child of Ungoliant, is capable of creating copies of creatures that are killed by it or other spiders, except they become Food tokens, artifacts that can be sacrificed to gain three life or trigger other abilities.
• Cast from Hit Points:
  • Aside from the infamous Channel-Fireball combo, planeswalkers fall under this as well: Some of their ability require the removal of loyalty counters. These same counters effectively act as their life totals; once they're out of counters, they're gone. Most also invert this trope by having abilities that give them loyalty counters as well, as well as a few with abilities that do nothing to their counter totals.
  • Phyrexian mana symbols from New Phyrexia: For each Phyrexian mana symbol in a cost, you can pay 1 mana of the specified color, or 2 life.
  • Some spells and abilities work like this by default, or as a way to enhance their effects.
• Cast from Money:
  • Gild and King Macar, both riffs on the King Midas myth, create "Gold" artifact tokens that can then be sacrificed for mana of any color.
  • The Ixalan sets have Treasure tokens, which are basically the same as the Gold tokens above, except with the Obvious Rule Patch that you must tap them before sacrificing them for mana.
• Cast from Sanity:
  • This is the case for decks built around the keyword abilities Hellbent, Madness, and, to a lesser extent, Dredge. Sanity is represented by the cards left in your hand and in your library; an empty hand is unstable, an empty library is when a planeswalker is going to completely lose their mind. Madness allows you to sacrifice short-term sanity to play the card you're discarding cheaply^note in fact, it can only be used when you’re discarding the card anyway, so it’s a case of “use it or lose it”; Hellbent denotes cards that gain an advantage when your hand is empty; and Dredge allows you to affect your long-term sanity to recur things from your graveyard.
  • This idea has gained new life in Commander due to that format's restrictions (100 minimum card deck limit, only one copy of anything besides basic lands). Cards, especially Commanders, that let you cast from your graveyard are infinitely more useful, especially when combined with a "discard" heavy deck. Get as many cards as you can into your graveyard and you can basically use it as an extra large "hand" thanks to the abilities of Commanders like Muldratha, the Gravetide (which regularly makes "top Commander" lists for this reason) and Kess, Dissident Mage allowing you to cast directly from it. The downside and, hence, biggest risk, is that it makes you more vulnerable to "decking out" (ie, in terms of flavor, "going insane") if your opponent can force you to mill.
• Casting a Shadow: Lies within black's purview, examples including Grasp of Darkness and Blanket of Night.
• Catapult to Glory: Common among goblins, such as Goblin Bombardment, as well as giants who sometimes act as the catapault.
• Catch and Return:
  • Blue has a number of spells in this vein, including Redirect, Commandeer, and Rebound.
  • Red also has a few, but befitting the color's nature, they tend to emphasize the "catch" part less and the "return" part more. Examples include Reverberate (which copies and returns the spell) and Wild Ricochet (which catches, copies, and returns).
• Cave Mouth:
  • The card Howling Mine looks like this most of the time, Depending on the Artist.
  • Mouth of Ronam is a more literal version of this, being a cave that can be activated to crush another creature in its jaws.
• CCG Importance Dissonance:
  • Gerrard Capashen is the hero of the Weatherlight saga, which spanned across years of the storyline. When he was eventually printed as a card, it was laughably underpowered.
  • Karona, False God, who emerges in Onslaught block as a physical manifestation of Dominaria's mana formed from the fusion of the powerful and iconic legends Phage the Untouchable and Akroma, Angel of Wrath, is far less useful than she has any right to be as well—so much so that head designer Mark Rosewater publicly apologized for how lame she was:
    That card is an embarrassment to card design. I actually had zero to do with the card and I'm still embarrassed. We took two iconic beloved cool legends and combined them into a pile of, well a word I'm not allowed to use on this site. Of all the balls dropped with the design of legendary characters, this is one near the top of the list. My humblest apologies.
  • Yawgmoth, the Big Bad of Magic and, as ruler of Phyrexia, the equivalent of Satan, has never gotten his own card, at least until the Modern Horizons set... though the card he got there depicts him prior to his ascension to godhood.
• Chain Lightning:
  • Chain Lightning itself is an interesting example in that the spell's first target (or the target's owner) gets to choose the next target. As long as each player is willing and able to spend red mana on the spell, the process repeats itself.
  • Arc Lightning allows the caster to spread a set amount of damage to multiple targets. The card art shows a lightning bolt arcing from one target to the next.
• Changeling Tale: Crib Swap exchanges a creature for a 1/1 changeling.
• Character Name Limits: The card name Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar was so long that it would not fit unless the designers removed the mana symbols which would go next to the name.
• Charged Attack: Planeswalker cards. They can use one ability a turn, some of which increase loyalty, while the more powerful ones decrease it, and with very few exceptions, must 'charge' for several turns before they can use their 'ultimate' ability.
• Chekhov's Gun:
  • You know those useless snow-covered lands from Ice Age? Not so useless as of Coldsnap — 11 years later!
  • Poison counters. Nearly pointless at first, given a bit more oomph in Future Sight, then turned into a powerful threat (and plot point!) in Scars of Mirrodin.
  • In an example that borders on Brick Joke: Steamflogger Boss references Riggers and Contraptions, but no other such cards were printed (barring one that was retconned to have the Rigger subtype)... until the Unstable joke set, which was released ten years after Steamflogger Boss's debut!
• Cherry Tapping:
  • The entire damage-dealing strategy behind Weenie and Token decks. Attacking with a 1/1 creature/token is about as pitiful as it gets...but when you're Zerg Rushing with more of them than your opponent has life remaining, it doesn't really matter.
  • The interplay of certain decks can lead to this quite easily:
    • One early tournament, before the rule placing a four card limit on everything but basic lands, was won by a player who loaded up his deck with nothing but Swords to Plowshares, Llanowar Elves, Plains, and Forests. Eventually, his opponents would be out of creatures and at a ridiculous life total. Then in went the elves...60...59...58...57...
    • One tournament match had a player with a Lord of the Pit based deck square off against a player with a Clone based deck. The Clone player was basically stuck either allowing his opponent to drain his life with direct attacks from Lord of the Pit, or he Clone it, but wouldn't be able to pay its sacrifice upkeep, and would then be killed by his own cloned Lord of the Pit...
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Starke of Rath. Merely tapping him allows him to destroy creatures and artifacts...but then he switches to the controller of that permanent's control.
• Circling Vultures: Circling Vultures is a one black mana 3/2, but requires you to exile the top creature from your graveyard each turn. If you can't, Circling Vultures is destroyed. The idea is that Circling Vultures is feeding on the creature's corpse, and starve to death if there isn't one.
• Clam Trap: A speciality of Giant Oyster. It can clamp onto a tapped creature and keep it tapped (which prevents it from doing much) while also slowly killing it by putting a -1/-1 counter it each turn. It can also release the creature, which removes all -1/-1 counters from it. The idea is that the clamped creature slowly drowns, but is able to swim back to the surface for air if released.
• Claustrophobia: Claustrophobia is an enchantment which taps a target creature and prevents them from untapping. The idea is that you're trapping the creature in a tiny space.
• Climactic Battle Resurrection:
  • Yawgmoth's Will allows you to bring back anything from your graveyard, and potentially everything if you have the mana required.
  • Twilight's Call brings back every creature from the graveyard for both players. If you play something like the cheap Tormod's Crypt to clear your opponent's graveyard first, this has no downside.
• Clingy Costume: Living Armor and Grafted Wargear are artifact equipment which, once applied, cannot be removed without killing the creature.
• Clock of Power:
  • "Armageddon Clock" is a 6-mana Colorless Doomsday Clock artifact that will deal damage to each player the more it has Doom counter on it. Each player can try to destroy it or remove the Doom counter to prevent damage inflicted to them.
  • "Blood Clock" is a 4 mana Colorless artifact that allow each player to return a permanent they control to its owner's hand.
  • "Clock of Omen" is a 4 mana Colorless Artifact that allow you to tapped two untapped artifact you control to untap another artifact you control.
  • "Grindclock" is a 2 mana Colorless Artifact that allow you to mill cards from your or your opponent's deck whenever you untap it.
  • "Midnight Clock" is a 2 Colorless 1 Blue mana artifact that after 12 Counters are put on it, shuffle your hand and graveyard into your deck, and then you can draw seven cards.
  • "Trenzalore Clocktower" is a Legendary Land that allow you to allow you to shuffle your hand and graveyard into your deck, and then you can draw seven cards if you remove 12 counters on it and control a Time Lord.
  • "Unwinding Clock" is a 4 Colorless Mana artifact that allow you to untap all artifacts you control during each other player's untap step.
  • "Sand of Time" is a 4 Colorless mana hourglass artifact that skip each player's untap step but then will untap all other spells and permanent on that player's turn, thus countering some of the effects that trigger during that step.
  • "Time Sieve" is a 2-cost Blue and Black mana hourglass artifact that will tap itself to sacrifice five artifacts to take an extra turn.
• Clockwork Creature: "Clockwork" is a common artifact creature type which tend to come in two flavors. One come onto the battlefield with counters, and each time they attack or block, a counter is removed. Once all of the counters are gone, they are sent to the graveyard with the idea being they "unwound" while moving. The other come onto the battlefield with no power but some toughness, and can be "wound up" via tapping or spending mana to add +1 counters.
• Clone by Conversion:
  • Essence of the Wild, once in play, causes any other creatures you play to become copies of it.
  • Metamorphic Alteration is an enchantment which allows you to turn the enchanted creature into a copy of any other creature. While this main use is to copy the strongest creature on the field, you can also cripple your opponent by turning their strongest creature into a copy of the weakest...
• Clown-Car Grave: Common in black decks, with their enchantments giving them option to turn their own creatures into zombies as well as some of their creatures being able to return from death/being cast from the graveyard on their own. For example, it is possible to play something like Doomed Dissenter, sacrifice it to summon a zombie token, which activates its ability creating another zombie token (which is stronger than Dissenter itself), then bring it back from the graveyard through one of a plethora of means, giving you three creatures out of one body (and potentially more if you repeat the process).
• Collectible Card Game: Trope Maker, Trope Codifier, and Genre Popularizer.
• Color-Coded Item Tiers: It eventually coded the card rarities. Black means common, silver means uncommon, gold means rare, and orange means mythic rare.
• Color-Coded Wizardry: The players themselves with their "color" being determined by the primary mana of the deck they're using. Alice might be referred to as a "blue/white" player, while Bob is "red/black", and Charlie is "mono-green". The players don't usually dress exclusively in these colors, however.
• Combat by Champion:
  • The "Exalted" keyword ability is based on this idea. It gives power boosts to creatures which attack alone.
  • Dueling Grounds enforces this. While the enchantment is active, only one creature may attack per turn, and only one creature may block per turn.
  • The Archenemy scheme Choose Your Champion functions like this, allowing only one of your multiple opponents to cast spells and attack with creatures until your next turn.
• Combat Medic:
  • Combat Medic itself is a solely defensive card, able to be used for damage prevention and blocking only.
  • Battlefield Medic is a creature that can tap in order to prevent damage to other creatures.
  • Frontline Medic is a creature with more emphasis on the "combat" portion of the trope. If it and two other creatures attack, all are indestructable for that turn. It can also be sacrificed to block an opposing spell.
  • Most "Cleric" type creatures qualify, at least Downplaying the trope. Many are associated with damage prevention and life gain.
• Combined Energy Attack: Employed in numerous ways:
  • Affinity: The card's cheaper for every X you control, where the card has affinity for X. A variant exists with three cards in Urza's Saga where they count a particular card type.
  • Domain: There are five basic land types. Control 1, you get an effect of 1. Control 2, you get the effect of 2. Et cetera.
  • Spells with Evoke let your creatures combine to help pay the cost of those spells.
  • Last Stand (and similar): These cards count the number of a given basic land type. (Last Stand counts all five.)
  • Exalted: Like the aforementioned cards, only it only applies when exactly one creature attacks, and it gets stronger for every other creature.
  • Allies: Allies have abilities that activate when an ally comes into play, count your allies, or both.
  • "Lords" invert this, granting more power to each creature of the same tribe, or something similar.
• Combining Mecha:
  • The four Chimerae of Visions (Iron-Heart, Brass-Talon, Lead-Belly, and Tin-Wing) emulate the "expansion pack" variety. You can sacrifice one to add its stats and abilities to another Chimera. Amusingly, this includes Changelings and Theros's biological Chimerae.
  • Artifact creatures with the modular ability are 0/0 creatures that enter the battlefield with +1/+1 counters. When they die, they can transfer those counters to another artifact creature to power it up.
  • Mechtitan Core can fuse with four other artifact creatures or Vehicles to form its namesake Mechtitan, a 10/10 token of all colors with flying, vigilance, trample, lifelink, and haste. Its showcase alt art even shows the Core combining to form its full body!
• Comeback Mechanic:
  • The randomness inherent in a shuffled deck of cards provides a natural comeback mechanic when combined with the mana system: it's always possible for your opponent to hit a string of unlucky draws.
  • The "Fateful Hour" mechanic gives cards additional, usually powerful, effects which only kick in when their controller has 5 life or less remaining.
• Com Mons: A good portion of the historically "bad" cards are all Common rarity. Almost all of them are creatures that would have been fair at half their mana cost, and most never see any significant use unless a player is looking for a challenge. That said, many have found new life thanks to the Limited "Booster Draft" tournament format, in which players "draft" new decks from previously unopened booster packs. As "Common" rarity cards make up the bulk of these packs, players have no choice but to try and use them.
• Competitive Balance: Keeping this has been an ongoing issue for the series since its very inception. To note:
  • "Balance by Rarity" was the initial plan for the series. When the game was first released, it was known that cards such as Black Lotus, Ancestral Recall, Timetwister, and the Moxes were game-breakingly powerful if present in sufficient quantities. However, they believed that since most players would only buy a starter deck and a couple of boosters, their power would never become an issue. This is especially evident when you look at the initial deck construction rules: 40-card minimum for decks, and no maximum for any individual cards. The deck of nothing but Black Lotus/Channel/Fireball was 100% legal, and that's not even the most powerful deck you could build. Constructed tournament later evolved to have a 60 card minimum limit and a maximum of 4 individual non-land cards, thus effectively removing the imbalance.
  • Modern Magic still has balance by rarity as a rarity level above rare, called mythic rare, was added in the Shards of Alara expansion. (One in eight booster backs has its one rare replaced by a mythic rare). It should be noted that rarity balance exists in limited formats, such as booster draft and sealed deck, where certain powerful cards could easily help the player to win but they may well not get one of these cards, let alone multiple copies, but does not exist in constructed play where people will spend whatever it takes to win.
  • In limited formats, there is the BREAD principle, which describes what card to draft - Bombs, Removal, Evasion, Advantage, and Dregs. While Removal, Evasion, Advantage, and Dregs cards are available in every rarity, Bombs are usually in the rare slot. A deck with a good amount of bomb and removal cards usually has a considerable upper hand. Whether a player obtained those cards by luck or by skills is something that is often discussed in MTG boards. Large amounts of removal can make up for a lack of bombs by ensuring you can always get rid of whatever overpowering creature is thrown out by your opponent. The greatest of bombs tend to be cards which are immune to removal, either non-creatures which thus naturally evade anti-creature removal spells, creatures which are somehow immune to removal due to protection, shroud, regeneration, or similar effects, or bombs which act as removal themselves. On occasion, some uncommons can be bombs as well, the most common example being spells which deal X damage to target creature or player, making them both removal and potentially capable of finishing off an opponent in the late game out of nowhere; Fireball is perhaps the most infamous such example, due to its ability to split up its damage, allowing it to act as mass removal as well.
  • A cause of "Situational Advantage" also frequently arises. As cards "rotate" (new ones are printed, older made illegal in most common formats) for a good portion of environments, there will arise one or two "Dominant" decks that prompt development of counter-decks aimed to specifically combat these dominants. Said "counter" decks are less powerful overall, so any (semicompetent) deck but the dominant actually has a good chance against it. A third category are "Rogue" decks, which will beast the highly specialized "counter" decks, but still fall to the "dominant" decks. The resulting rock-paper-scissors deck choice process is known as metagaming.
  • The "Luck-Based" balance gets a bit worse when one considers cards like Enlightened Tutor, which lets you reshuffle your deck, with the artifact or enchantment of your choice on top. When you consider that many of the big game breakers are artifacts or enchantments, and Enlightened Tutor costs one white mana and can be played just before you draw, yeah. Enlightened Tutor, by the way, is legal in Legacy.
  • Early MTG was characterized by overestimating the power of creatures. Because, naturally, you had to kill people with creatures, it was assumed they would be the dominant force in the card game. Because of this, creatures were relatively overcosted, meaning that in the earliest "fair" tournaments (that is, cards printed with "organized card game" in mind as opposed to "limited product experiment"), "control" decks, which featured heavy counter-spells and removal, all of which cost much less mana than the creatures they destroyed, dominated the game.
  • Another infamous case of "Underestimated Power" occurred when players realized that no matter how much life they lost, they could still win as long as they didn't hit 0. Enter Necropotence. When they designed this card, they thought that players would value their each life point they had and was expected that you'd balance out the life loss with life-gaining cards, never overuse them. Players, on the other hand, realized that 1 life for 1 card is a hilariously good trade, especially since you could use Necropotence's ability indefinitely and draw an obscene amount of cards, digging out complex combos whose lack of consistency (due to needing to draw them one by one) was their only real flaw. Wizards has since learned from this and any subsequent cards that gave you draws had either obscene mana costs, required some other cost (such as sacrificing creatures), or could only give you one extra card per turn. "Life payment" as a drawback in general has seen a massive decrease in the stuff it allows you to do, as any effect that is triggered by it is also usually tied to some other cost (mana, sacrifices, or discards) or generally are not that game-changing.
  • The power of drawing cards and free mana were also comically "Underestimated" in early game design. For Drawing, Wizards originally released a cycle (a set of 5 cards with an overarching theme across all five colors) called "boons" that granted you 3 things for the cost of 1 mana. The blue one gave you 3 draws while the others only did damage, buff creatures, a little extra mana, or gave life. To this day, Ancestral Recall (the blue boon) remains the only one to have never been reprinted and is part of the infamous Power Nine. As for free mana, the most well known example is the Black Lotus, but even attempts at balancing it have been met with failure; Lion's Eye Diamond, a heavily Nerfed version of the Black Lotus that was intended to be completely unusable due to making you discard your entire hand, was still heavily restricted in the formats where it was legal. Wizards has since given up trying to make a balanced version of the thing.
• Complexity Addiction:
  • The "Johnny/Jennie" player "psychographic" is defined by this. They are motivated by a desire to see their convoluted deck concept or some Awesome, but Impractical card actually win something, even if picking up a tried-and-true cookie-cutter meta deck would have a higher success rate.
  • This (referred to as "Complexity Creep") is someting that Wizards actively tries to avert with the cards themselves. The rules needed to deal with thousands of different cards make for an imposing document. The spiraling increases in complexity put the game at risk of being impossible for any potential customer to understand. To combat this, they created the Type 2 (or Standard) format, which is theoretically immune to complexity creep as only the last two years of cards are allowed, so the complexity relative to older cards doesn't matter.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard:
  • The boss characters in the Duels of the Planeswalkers games often have decks that are considerably stronger than the default characters' decks (most of them can't be unlocked either). Karn in particular uses several cards that are outright banned in nearly every format in the physical card game and is capable of killing you on turn 3 in a game where most games tend to go more than 10 turns. If you manage to win against him, it's likely because you got lucky.
  • The encounters in Duels of the Planeswalkers 2013 take it even further. Given that the opponents in these games follow a certain pattern, you can expect them to have more than four copies of a card in their deck. In some cases, their decks literally only consist of basic lands and one type of creature card.
• Confusion Fu:
  • A common Red tactic. Casting from the top of its library, transforming creatures into other, random creatures, and gaining boosts based on random effects, such as coin flips, are all within the Red arsenal.
  • On the metagame level, this is intrinsic to "Rogue" decks. Every deck has certain things it struggles to deal with, so there's a 'sideboard' of 15 cards that can be swapped into the deck between games to help deal with the opponent's deck in any given match. A good Rogue deck user can devastate a tournament by using new strategies that players don't have a way to counter even with their sideboard.
• Conservation of Ninjutsu: In a weird way, the Exalted effect can become this. Cards with exalted give +1/+1 to attacking creature the player controls, but only when it's attacking by itself. Many cards with this ability are mere 1/1s — not very scary by themselves, but get a handful and you can attack with a nice big 10/10 in no time.
• Continuing is Painful:
  • Lich's Mirror effectively allows you to have a fresh start to the game. Emphasis on "you", because however nice the new hand and 20 life is, you've removed all of your resources from the battlefield. Unless you planned ahead and eliminated your opponent's resources beforehand, expect them to crush you in a couple of turns.
  • Karn Liberated Inverts the trope. His ultimate ability literally restarts the game. However, instead of causing an endless loop of the same thing, he puts anything he exiled under your control, including other people's creatures, enchantments, artifacts, and so on. If you did a good job of protecting him while he was exiling things, you can end up with anything from a decent advantage to an army that can win the game in one turn.
• Continuity Cavalcade: The Time Spiral block brought back and/or referenced dozens of old, often famous cards from Magic's earlier days, including cards and mechanics which had been out of print for years. Its sequel, Planar Chaos, instead focused on alternate universe cards with similar though ultimately different functions. The final set in the block, Future Sight, gave a taste of cards and mechanics which would get much more focus in future blocks.
• Continuity Drift: as Wizards' understanding of the game is refined, some classic spells are retired and replaced by (generally) less-powerful versions. Counterspell has been phased out in favor of Cancel, Lightning Bolt for Shock, and Terror for Doom Blade. (In the case of the final two, it's hard to answer which is strictly worse, because one has versatility and the other permanence.) In some cases this can even result in cards moving color—Disenchant (formerly a signature White spell) to Naturalize, Prodigal Sorcerer for Prodigal Pyromancer.
• Continuity Nod:
  • Every card from the Time Spiral set has at least one. Some are obvious, like Wheel of Fate revisiting Wheel of Fortune; some are downright oblique, like Plated Pegasus, which combines an obscure card from Mirage with an obscure card from Tempest.
  • The Dominaria set is an extensive love letter to many of Magic's earlier blocks, and the set's filled with callbacks to earlier sets. This article lists off some of the more obvious ones.
• Controllable Helplessness: Certain older cards had an issue colloquially known as "Sage Owl Syndrome. These cards, including the owl, let you look at the top few cards of your deck and let you rearrange them as you see fit. Unfortunately, older versions forced you to keep all the cards on top, so if literally none of them could help you (often by not being lands that you need to cast your spells, both in your hand and coming up in your deck) you knew you had several turns coming where you can do absolutely nothing. Sure, you could determine the exact useless cards you draw, but you had no hope for actually useful cards. For this reason, newer versions of this effect let you put some or all of the cards in your graveyard or the bottom of your deck.
• Cool Gate: Door to Nothingness takes this form. It is certainly "cool" in that, if you can afford its steep ability cost, you'll automatically win the game.
• Cool of Rule: Naturally, given the game's strict (though not without the occasional loophole to abuse) rules, any "outside the box" winning deck can be this. Hulk Flash, which can grant a Turn 0 win, and Caw-Blade, one of the few truly "unbeatable" decks, both qualified. Of course, in order to keep a semblance of competitive balance, the rules are usually changed to ban or restrict cards from such decks once they become dominant.
• Cosmetic Award: Arena has "card style" reward cards given for participating/winning certain low-value/free special events. All these do is alter the artwork on the cards and have no actual in game effect at all. Some of the "differences" in cart art are quite substantial, while in other cases they barely count as differences at all.
• Counterspell:
  • Counterspell, the Trope Namer, is the oft-reprinted, classic, somewhat infamous yet always iconic, blue mana spell which counters anothers spell. It is the "strictly better" predecessor the functionally identical Cancel, which costs one more mana.
  • Mana Drain became an even better version of Counterspell, which not only counters the target spell, but adds its mana cost to your mana pool. Due to the Mana Burn rule in effect at the time of its first printing, this was considered a substantial drawback. However, that rule was removed for Magic 2010, unleashing Mana Drain drawback-free.
  • Pact of Negation allows you to counter a spell for zero mana...on the current turn. Next turn, must pay five or else lose the game. It sounds like a bad trade, but has become a popular "combo protection" card. You don't have to worry about paying that five mana if your ultimate combo goes off and wins you the game on this turn...
  • Last Word is a counterspell which cannot be countered by other counterspells...expect to see it show it up a lot in any blue vs. blue match.
  • Counterspell heavy decks have earned the nickname "Permission Decks" on the metagame level. They are so called because any time an opponent casts a spell, the Permission deck player almost always has the option of countering it, so if they decide it's not worth it, they are granting their opponent "permission" to cast it.
• Cowardly Sidekick: Norin the Wary was quoted in several flavor texts as this sort of character before getting his own card with a very appropriate ability - he "runs away" whenever either player does anything. Originally a Joke Character, Magic players characteristically found a way to make him lethal by combining him with something that triggers as cretures enter or exit play. Since he's all but guaranteed to enter and exit every turn, playing him along with something like Confusion in the Ranks or Purphoros, God of the Forge makes him legitimately dangerous. And because his ability is so easy to trigger, he is extremely difficult to deal with permanently. (It takes something so situational that most serious players won't be running it, like Pull from Eternity. He also makes for a hilarious and frustrating Commander in that format.
• Crack is Cheaper: Magic is expensive. Prices for tournament-winning, in-print single cards routinely exceed $20, and sometimes even approach/exceed $100. On top of that, the most popular and common tournament formats rotate new sets in and old sets out each year, serving the dual function of keeping the game fresh and keeping Wizards in business selling new cards. Finally, the most expensive Magic cards, the overpowered legends from the game's early days, can easily sell for over $1000. A mint condition Black Lotus from the Alpha set sold for a record price of $166,100 at auction in March 2019.
• Cranial Plate Ability: Cranial Plating is an artifact that applies this to a creature. The equipped creature gains +1/0 for every artifact you control, meaning you can get a very strong creature in any artifact-heavy deck.
• Crazy Cat Lady: Three cards represent Crazy Squirrel Men: Deranged Hermit, Nut Collector, and Squirrel Wrangler. Each has the potential to put numerous 1/1 Squirrel tokens into play.
• Creator Cameo: Richard Garfield himself has a card in Unhinged. Former art director Jeremy Cranford has one too, albeit less flattering.
• Creepy Doll: Creepy Doll is a card and a Shout-Out to the trope-naming Jonathan Coulton song. Mechanically, it is an indestructable artifact creature which has a 50/50 chance of destroying any creature it damages.
• Crippling Overspecialization: Many combo decks can fall prey to this. Each is generally built to set up one specific combination of cards, but if one of those cards is destroyed, they are left with a sub-par deck. Combo decks are strong vs. "raw power/aggro" decks because comboed cards will dismantle an equal number of individual cards without synergy (even though said cards tend to be stronger individually), and are vulnerable to control decks that systematically block or remove the components of a combo. Extreme examples are more popular among casual players, who don't care nearly as much about a reliable win/lose percentage as about the fact that it's absolutely hilarious to use a finishing attack featuring, for example, an unblockable attacker whose power and toughness grow by a factor of 32 every turn.
• Critical Existence Failure: A common adage among players is that the only life point that matters is your last one. It was this revelation that made Necropotence decks powerful.
• Critical Status Buff:
  • The Dark Ascension expansion has some cards with the Fateful Hour mechanic. These cards have additional effects which activate if you have 5 or less life remaining.
  • Near Death Experience automatically wins you the game...if you start your turn with exactly one life remaining.
  • Avatar of Hope is a powerful creature who can be played very cheaply (just two white mana) if you have three or less life remaining.
  • Death's Shadow is a creature which grows stronger as your life total gets lower. If you have 13 or more, it dies as soon as it is cast. At 12, it is a mere 1/1...get down to just one life, however, and it becomes a 12/12 behemoth that costs just one black mana to cast. And since it is a black mana creature, and black mana has the most cards which trade life points for various, it is easy to set up such a situation.
• Crutch Character:
  • All but the most gimmicky decks tend to have a few weaker, low-mana cost creatures that can be played in the early game as a first line of defense and to chip away at the opponent's life if they do not have such creatures. "Bears" are extremely popular, an archetype named after the ever-popular original Green Grizzly Bears, they are two-mana 2/2 creatures with no abilities which offer a great mana/power balance for this purpose. Creatures in this mold now exist for every color except Blue. As the game progresses, they fall well behind the power curve, but still have their uses as chump blockers and sacrifices.
  • Weenie and Token decks are built almost entirely around these "crutch" creatures. The goal is to get as many of them into play as quickly as you can and Zerg Rush your opponent. If you fail to do so before they can get more powerful creatures or spells into play, you can expect a decisive defeat.
• Crystal Prison: Amber Prison, which "traps" a target permanent and does not allow them to untap.
• Cue Card Pause: The wording on the card Book Burning caused a rules snafu in line with the trope. The first line reads "Unless a player has Book Burning", which could be a clause in itself, leading some players to insert a nonexistent comma between that and the other half of the clause "deal 6 damage to him or her". Some players argued that the card damaged a target player and did the other clause (put the top 6 cards of their deck into their graveyard) unless they could produce a copy of Book Burning, instead of its actual effect of "milling" 6 unless someone takes 6 damage. The official wording was changed quickly, but that version of the card is the only one that was ever printed...
• Cursed with Awesome: Skullclamp was originally +1/+2 and "When equipped creature dies, draw two cards." Then it became +1/+1. Then it became +1/-1, meaning you can turn any creature with one toughness into two cards. Players took notice.
• Cute Is Evil: Played for Laughs with the Un- set joke cards Infernal Spawn of Evil, Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil and Infernius Spawnington III, Esq., which were released set by set. As a bonus, it's also a joke about card artist Ron Spencer only drawing hideous monsters.
• Cute Machines: Most Myr creatures are cute, miniature artifact creatures. Don't let that fool you however, as most have tap effects which do things like boost your other creatures, give you extra mana, or even directly damage your opponent, making them potentially lethal.
• Cutting the Knot: The credo of Zvi Mowshowitz, multi-time Magic tournament winner and hall of famer, fits quite nicely. He tends to live up to it as well, as many of his winning decks have been hyper-aggressive "Aggro" decks, with some of them winning on turn 3 or 4.
  "If brute force doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough. Why not use more?"
• Cybernetic Mythical Beast: The game is positive rife with "artifact" versions of mythological creatures. Some notable examples:
  • Dragon Engines are the bio-mechanical Phyrexians' answer to classic dragons. Though weaker than virtually any other true dragon, as artifact creatures, they can be powered up with extra mana. Ramos is a legendary dragon engine reprogrammed to serve as a protector. It is significantly stronger and can be powered up with +1/+1 counters merely by playing spells. Its ability allows it to exchange five counters for two of every mana type. Very much Difficult, but Awesome, as it then allows you to play many otherwise Awesome, but Impractical spells.
  • Clockwork Gnomes are artifact creatures which can repair other artifact creatures.
  • Platinum Angel is an artifact angel whose ability prevents you from losing the game while she is in play.
• Cybernetics Eat Your Soul:
  • Ashnod's Transmogrant powers up a target creature by permanently transforming it into an artifact creature.
  • Unstable's Order of the Widget engage in heavy, often ridiculous cybernetics projects. If you've ever wanted to attack someone with a toaster, now is your chance.

D

• Damage-Increasing Debuff: Plenty of cards, including Wound Reflection and Curse of Bloodletting, which double your opponents' pain.
• Damage Over Time: Several cards deal damage during a player's "Upkeep" step, in contrast to most cards which can only deal damage once at a time.
• Damage Reduction: The "Absorb" mechanic allows creatures which have it to simply ignore a certain amount of damage they receive.
• Damage Typing: The game features numerous types, including:
  • Normal damage, which is dealt by standard attacking creatures and most direct damage spells, is removed from creatures at the end of the turn as long as it is not lethal.
  • Creatures with the "Wither" ability deal damage to creatures in the form of -1/-1 counters. These remain unless cleared by a special effect or ability.
  • Creatures with the "Deathtouch" ability automatically destroy any creature they damage, no matter how much damage is done.
  • Some creatures and abilities add "Poison" counters to their opponent. If you acquire 10 poison counters, you lose. Early the game's history, this was a fairly useless ability as, unless you built your entire deck around shooting for this win condition, such decks tended to be suboptimal compared to doing straight-up normal damage. Poison became much more effective with the introduction of the "Infect" ability, which causes creatures to deal wither damage to other creatures and poison damage to players.
  • Each of the five mana colors can be considered its own damage type, as many cards exist which give you and your creatures protection from damage of certain colors.
• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Slight changes to similarly functioning cards between sets can lead to this effect on the metagame level. For example, plenty of blue players used to saving two mana at the end of their turn so that they can play a Counterspell during their opponent's turn only remember too late that the current set features Cancel instead, the same effect but requiring one more mana.
• Dangerous Forbidden Technique:
  • Applies to quite a few combo decks, especially combos that are Cast from Hit Points. (Channel-Fireball is a good old-school example: you pay all of your life, but the resulting fireball kills your opponent in one shot.) What makes them so dangerous is the likelihood that if they fail to kill the opponent dead then and there, the Cherriest of Taps will be your doom.
  • The aptly named "Suicide Black" decks are the epitome of this trope. Flavor wise, it is the color that most often deals in Necromancy, Black Magic, and Deals with the Devil. Mechanically, these show up as sacrificing creatures, discarding cards, and paying in life points to acquire and/or beef up your other spells. Flooding the field with creatures like Carnophage is a staple of such decks. Win quickly, or else your own creatures and spells will drain your life. Wizards has referred to it as "tearing your arm off and beating your opponents to death with it before you bleed out".
  • Final Fortune gives you an extra turn after your current one, but if you fail to win the game by the end of that turn, you automatically lose the game. As Magic players are wont to do, they quickly found ways to lessen the "danger", such as by playing it with Platinum Angel, who prevents you from losing the game as long as it is in play. Another is Sundial of the Infinite, which if you play it during that second turn, exiles Final Fortune and prevents the "turn losing" from happening while you still get the bonus turn.
  • Demonic Pact gives you relatively cheap access to three abilities, which you get to play once each at the start of your upkeep - deal four damage and give you four life, force your opponent to discard two cards, and draw two cards yourself. Each turn, you must apply one of its effects. Once you've applied those three, the fourth is "lose the game". Better hope you've won it before then (or have found a way to transfer it to your opponent...)
• Darkest Hour:
  • Darkest Hour is an enchantment which turns all creatures in play black.
  • Hour of Devasation◊ removes the Indestructable ability from creatures that have it and then proceeds to deal five damage to every creature in play. It can destroy literal gods. The portion of the story from which it gets its flavor is very much in line with the trope.
• Dead Man's Switch: A number of cards "activate" when the opponent performs a certain action, often destroying that card in the process but inflicting something even worse onto the opponent. Standstill, for example, allows you to draw three cards if your opponent casts a spell. Since playing any card other than a land counts as "casting a spell", this can really make them hesitate.
• Dead Weight: Most zombies are relatively "small" creatures, meant to be summoned quickly and easily, and thus highly disposable. Gluttonous Zombie is an exception, being a 3/3 with Fear (meaning it can only be blocked by other black creatures). Corpulent Corpse is its close cousin.
• Deader than Dead:
  • Early versions had the "removed from the game" zone, which was supposed to this trope compared to simply being "dead" in the graveyard. It was far easier to interact with the graveyard than this zone, but players still found ways. The Unhinged card AWOL lampshaded this fact by introducting the "absolutely-removed-from-the-freaking-game-forever zone".
  • A rules change finally addressed this, and created the "Exile" zone to replace the "removed from the game" zone. While they exist, means to return a card from exile are very few and far between. Usually, once something is exiled, it is deader than dead. One exception are cards which cause temporary exile, such as Necropotence and Oblivion Ring.
  • Some cards, such as Eradicate and Deicide, take exiling even further. Not only is the target exiled, but you get to search your opponent's deck, graveyard, and hand for any copies of that target card and exile those as well. It's less about those cards being dead and more about having their very concept deleted from existence.
  • A somewhat less extreme example is the difference between "destroy" and "destroy; can't be regenerated" or "buried." Regeneration allowed a creature that would be destroyed to survive, to account for the kinds of damage where it wouldn't matter how potent a healing factor a creature had, the "can't be regenerated" rider was added. This was later streamlined to "buried," a card that "destroyed" something allowed regeneration, a card that "buried" something did not. Regeneration ultimately became too clunky and complicated a mechanic, and was phased out, taking with it the difference between destroyed and buried.
• Deadly Dodging:
  • An ability of Shield Dancer, which can block an attack creature and then deal the damage it would have done back to that same creature.
  • Carom allows you to reflect incoming damage onto a new target, while also allowing you to draw a card. Reroute is very similar.
  • Mirror Strike allows you to redirect unblocked damage onto your opponent instead.
• Death Activated Super Power:
  • Tuktuk the Explorer, as a three mana 1/1, is well below the power curve. However, if he is sent to the graveyard, you place a 5/5 token into play called "Tuktuk the Returned", implying that he died and Came Back Strong.
  • Though certainly not exclusive to them, this is a trademark trait of Phoenix type creatures. Virtually all of them have abilities activated upon death.
• Death of a Thousand Cuts: While damage is removed from creatures during each turn's cleanup step, it is possible to destroy a creature with multiple instances of 1 damage over the course of a turn. The same is true of dealing with players or planeswalkers, which don't recover their Hit Points (life and loyalty, respectively) each turn. The card Death of a Thousand Stings references this trope almost verbatim, dealing 1 point of damage per use but recyclable potentially infinitely.
• Death or Glory Attack:
  • Attacking with all of your creatures in a single turn (referred to by players as an Alpha Strike), especially late in the game. Either you defeat your opponent, or you leave yourself defenseless.
  • Pact of Negation is a zero mana instant which acts as a Counterspell. However, on your next turn, you must pay five mana or lose the game. It sounds like a bad deal, but it has become a popular blue "combo protector". You won't have to worry about paying that mana if your ultimate combo goes off and wins you the game on this turn...
  • Final Fortune is similar, giving you an extra turn but causing you to lose the game at the end of that turn if you don't win it before.
• Deck Clogger:
  • There are two major categories of cards: lands and spells. Lands generate mana, which you need to cast your spells. You hope to draw a good balance of them — if you get too many of one category, extras won't be useful, and only serve to waste draws. At worst you end up mana screwed (you have plenty of spells, but not enough mana to cast much) or flooded (you have plenty of mana, but lack spells to use it for). The game's creators argue that this is a feature, not a bug, as it means a beginner can get an occasional win against a stronger opponent who was screwed/flooded. With that said, they don't want the game to be outright unplayable for the screwed/flooded player either.
  • The game has several Luck Manipulation Mechanics, e.g. scry letting you manipulate the top cards of your deck, to keep you from drawing cards you don't need at that point in the game.
  • Some Manipulating the Opponent's Deck effects, such as the Fateseal mechanic, aim to make the opponent draw cards that won't help them much. Cards that return stuff to the top of an opponent's deck also disrupt the opponent's next draw.
  • While the normal, black-border rules don't allow you to put undesired cards into your opponent's deck, some supplementary cards feature such mechanics:
    • The Self-Parody set Unhinged introduces Letter Bomb, which shuffles itself into an opponent's deck. It not only shuts down a draw, but deals 19.5 damage when someone is unfortunate enough to draw it. Since the starting life total is 20 and Letter Bomb is too expensive to be cast early, this will probably kill them immediately.
    • The playtest card Gunk Slug shuffles three Gunk cards into an opponent's deck. All you can do with one of them is pay 4 to discard it and draw a new card.
• Defeat Means Playable: In each edition of Duels Of The Planeswalkers, you unlock each deck by defeating an AI opponent using it in campaign mode, except two starting decks.
• Defense Mechanism Superpower: A common trait of white mana cards. For example, Righteousness massively and cheaply boosts a blocking creature by +7/+7. Smite similarly destroys a blocked creature.
• Defend Command: Defensive Stance, an enchantment which adds -1/+1 to the target creature.
• Dem Bones: Skeletons of all sorts are, rather unsurprisingly, a common black creature type and are often tied to the "regenerate" mechanic. Drudge Skeletons is the classic example, though there are many others.
• Denser and Wackier: Elder Dragon Highlander AKA Commander, as compared to Standard and the Eternal formats. This is defined almost entirely through card count limits. In most formats, the minimum size of your deck — and, for the sake of efficiency, the maxiumum size of your deck — is 60 cards, and you can have up to 4 copies of anything that isn't a basic land. Therefore, a deck can be 24 lands and (4 copies of) nine spells; and if your deck relies on one of those spells to work, you have about a 50% chance of getting it in your opening hand. Commander, on the other hand, is 100 minimum deck size and only one copy of any non-basic-land card (hence "Highlander" — "There can be only one").^{So why "Elder Dragon"?}The "Elder Dragon" part is what is today called the "Commander" — a single Legendary creature whom you can cast at all times, and whose color identity determines which colors you can use in your deck. Originally, this Commander could only be one of the five Elder Dragons from the "Legends" expansion, but this rule was dropped for greater gameplay freedom. As a result, the format is more of a bells-and-whistles-and-the-kitchen-sink experience, where games take longer and silly things are more likely to happen.
• Depending on the Writer: Or rather, Depending On The Design Team. For entire sets. The company is always struggling to deal with Gameplay and Story Segregation, and exactly how the game is supposed to represent an actual wizards' duel. At the moment they seem to have settled on a balance the company likes, but it still changes a little with every new set, partly as they iron out tiny details and partly as another potential way to add variety to the game. A few examples of the ways this goes back and forth:
  • Early in the game, many big blue creatures (like Sea Serpents) could attack players that didn't control any islands only with difficulty, if at all, to symbolize that they were natural aquatic monsters and therefore couldn't leave the water. That effect still appears occasionally, but is much rarer now, partly because designers have decided it's less fun to have creatures with such severe restrictions on attacking and partly because the idea that lands actually represent physical terrain on which creatures are fighting raises more questions than it answers. (For a time, Merfolk were taken out of the game for this flavor reason, until they decided to use the Fredericka Bimm Method of merfolk shapeshifting.)
  • Creature types have come and gone and been standardized several times. At the moment, humans are the Jack of All Stats: represented more or less equally in all colors, but with no Human-specific racial bonuses. Most colors have one characteristic race^note Merfolk for blue, zombies and vampires for black, goblins for red, and elves for green full of small, cheap, quick and/or utility creatures, each color has one iconic race^note Angels for white, sphinxes for blue, demons for black, dragons for red, and hydras for green, and a few other creature types are much more common in one or two colors than the rest. The thing is, this leaves many creature types from fantasy stories or previous Magic sets unused just because that design space is already taken. Orcs, for example, appeared in early sets, but they eventually fell into the niche of "like goblins, just a little taller" and stopped being used soon after that. Merfolk didn't appear for a long time for the same reason that sea monsters' inherent weakness was dropped, but as soon as designers figured out that they could be bipedal — sort of like Fish People, but not as ugly — they were brought back.
• De-power: Numerous cards exist which weaken creatures and/or remove their abilities. Humility is an especially notable one, as it reduces all creatures to 1/1 and strips their abilities.
• Desperation Attack:
  • The Dark Ascension expansion has some cards with the Fateful Hour mechanic. These cards have additional effects which activate if you have 5 or less life remaining.
  • Near Death Experience allows you to win the game if you have exactly one life left when you play it.
  • Soulblast destroys every creature you control but then deals damage equal to the total power of the creatures sacrificed. With enough creatures, it can be a One-Hit KO...unless your opponent has some cheap way to block or redirect it. At that point, you'll be defenseless.
• Detachment Combat: Tetravus invokes this idea. It enters with three +1/+1 counters, which can be turned into 1/1 creature tokens. The idea being that Tetravus detaches into four separate creatures. It later received updates in Pentavus and Triskelavus (whose tokens get Flying).
• Dexterity Challenge: Cards that require physical actions from players are referred to as dexterity cards:
  • The game's Early-Installment Weirdness period had two cards featuring dexterity challenges: Chaos Orb and Falling Star, which you flip onto the battlefield from a height of at least one foot, after which they destroy every nontoken thing they touch (Orb) or tap and deal damage to every creature they touch (Star). However, these cards turned out to cause rule and logistical issues^note There wasn't a clear rule whether players could move their cards when Orb/Star is activated to minimize the potential damage. Alternatively, a player could just spread their cards out from the get go, making the game unwieldy., and they also make the game less accessible for disabled players. For these reasons, R&D quickly stopped making black-border dexterity cards, and banned both Chaos Orb and Falling Star from all formats.
  • Dexterity cards live on the Self-Parody acorn cards intended for casual play, where their goofiness makes more sense. They offer all sorts of mini-challenges, such as a staring contest with your opponent, balancing a card on your head and using your own hands as game components.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Combo decks, especially ones you've devised yourself. They can very easily be hampered by Crippling Overspecialization if something goes wrong, but if it works out, you can expect a quick and decisive victory.
• Digital Tabletop Game Adaptation: The free-to-play Magic: The Gathering Arena implementation. There's also the older Magic: The Gathering Online, which is not free-to-play, but has a redemption policy for collections of virtual cards.
• Dinosaurs Are Dragons: Averted. They are distinct creature types with their own traits. Cards which affect creatures with the type "dragon" do not affect dinosaurs creature types, and vice-versa.
• Dirty Coward: Norin the Wary "runs away" whenever any player does anything.
• Disadvantageous Disintegration: Decks which involve the heavy use of the graveyard are best served avoiding cards which "exile" targets instead of destroying them for this reason. The eponymous Disintegrate is one such example.
• Discard and Draw: The Trope Namer, providing numerous examples. Some of the more prominent are below:
  • From a metanarrative perspective, your deck is all the spells in your memory, while your hand is what spells you've brought to mind right at that moment. Spells that force a person to discard cards strongly imply elements of Mind Rape, and are named accordingly. (Mind Rot, Mind Twist, Mind Shatter, etc.) Black tends to be very effective at this.
  • "Cantrips" are spells which, in addition to their primary effect, also allow you to draw a card, effectively replacing themselves after you cast them.
  • Out of Magic's five colors, two opposing colors stand out as being the experts of this: blue and red. Due to their opposing nature, their take on this trope are also opposites from both flavor and mechanics stand-point: Blue, the analytical, usually draws first, chooses the best cards for the situation, then discards the unwanted ones (example: Compulsive Research). Red, the impulse-driven, however, usually abandons whatever's on its mind while chasing novel ideas (examples: Wheel of Fortune, Mindmoil). As a special note, the Izzet (a Blue/Red aligned faction on Ravnica) naturally also excel at this, though they usually draw before discarding. In fact, they love their discard and draw so much that some cards weaponize it (like Blast of Genius and the "Jump-start" mechanic, seen here).
• Disc-One Nuke:
  • Throughout the game's history, cards like Tolarian Academy, Sol Ring, and Black Lotus that allow you to play other, more powerful spells in the early turns have been consistently dominant, comprising a large portion of the game's banned cards.
  • Kird Ape is an infamous red mana 1/1 who gains +1/+2 as long as you control at least one forest. Its infamy comes from a dominant green/red deck that combined it with Giant Growth, Berserk (which also gives it Trample), and Fork to give you a 20/6 trampling behemoth for just four mana, far too early in the game for your opponent to conjure an appropriate defense. (Even if you could only get Kird Ape and one of the other cards, it still made for a significant early game advantage). Berserk and Fork were both heavily resticted for nearly a decade after while Kird Ape was banned for several years as well.
• Dishing Out Dirt:
  • A highly destructive specialty of red magic. Take for example Earthquake and Stone Rain. Koth of the Hammer is a red-aligned planeswalker who can literally make your mountains attack.
  • White magic is a secondary user, often crossing over with marble and dust. Nahiri, the Lithomancer is a white-aligned planeswalker being capable of manipulating rocks in all forms, and is particularly efficient at melting them to forge weapons from the ore within.
• Disintegrator Ray: Disintegrate is a classic red mana spell. Its damage is limited only by how much mana you have, allowing you to either nuke a big creature (while also preventing it from being resurrected) or simply obliterate your opponent.
• Dispel Magic: "Disenchanting" (destroying enchantments and artifacts) is a standard effect seen often on green and white spells. Just about every expansion has a Naturalize and Demystify variant.
• Ditto Fighter:
  • A standard ability often seen with the Shapeshifter creature type. Clone is a classic example, allowing you to copy an opponent's creature or double up on one of your own. Renegade Doppelganger is similar, but can only copy a creature entering the battlefield under your control.
  • Rite of Replication allows you to create a copy of any creature on the battlefield. For five extra mana, you can create five of them.
• Doom Troops:
  • Creatures with the "Intimidate" keyword can only be blocked by creatures of the same color or by artifact creatures. It replaced the much older mechanic, "Fear", which was the same ability but keyed specifically to black or artifact creatures.
  • "Menace" is similar. Creatures with Menace are too scary to be faced alone, and can only be blocked by at least two defending creatures.
• Doomsday Device: Plenty to go around:
  • Plague Boiler. Three turns after it's played, everything in play that's not a land is destroyed.
  • Nevinyrral's Disk is an artifact which likewise destroys everything in play other than lands, including itself.
  • Oblivion Stone can be tapped to put "fate" counters onto target permanents. When its second ability is activated, it destroys everything without fate counters.
  • Even the joke set Unhinged gets one with the World-Bottling Kit.
• Double Knockout:
  • It is possible for a game to end in a draw if both players are simultaneously reduced to zero life.
  • Happens very frequently with creatures. If a 2/2 attacking creature is blocked by another 2/2 creature, both are destroyed. Many abilities and effects can get around this, however. For example, if the attacking creature has First Strike, its damage will be dealt "first", destroying the blocking creature without taking damage itself.
• Doppelgänger Attack:
  • Nacatl War-Pride, which when it attacks makes a temporary copy of itself for each creature the defending player controls.
  • The Myriad ability, designed for the four-player "Commander" format, causes creatures that have it to create token copies of themselves when they attack; these copies, and the original creature, each attack a different player. The tokens go away at the end of combat regardless, but the original creature will stick around, assuming it wasn't killed by combat or another effect.
• Double-Edged Buff:
  • This is part of Black's Power at a Price ethos — buff your creatures, while paying some sort of ghastly penalty. While this often takes the form of Cast from Hit Points, examples of other "tradeoffs" include Animate Dead, where you can bring a creature back from any graveyard (even your opponent's) for just two mana at the cost of that creature having -1 power, and Summon Undead, where you discard three cards in order to place a creature from your graveyard back onto the battlefield.
  • White magic tends to be the exact opposite of Black. Instead of increasing power, it often sacrifices power in order to increase toughness in creatures it controls (Ex. Sworn Defender), making them more durable. It can also eliminate enemy creatures as threats for far less mana that the "creature destruction" cards of other mana colors, but instead gives something else positive to the controller of that player. (Ex. Swords to Plowshares, which exiles a target creature but gives its controller life equal to that creature's power.)
  • Final Fortune, the caster takes another turn after the current one, but at the end of that turn, they will automatically lose the game.
  • In the Vanguard variant of the game, each player starts with a special character card that grants the player with a special ability but alters their starting/maximum hand size and their starting life. The better the ability, the less cards and/or life the character begins with. It is possible to get a better hand size or life to start with, but that means that the ability given is rather weak compared to others.
• Do Well, But Not Perfect: A strategy strongly advised in the in free-for-all multiplayer formats. Since you have multiple opponents to worry about, appearing to be the strongest player is a good way to get them to gang up on you and eliminate you first. Holding back creatures and pieces of your combo until you have a means to counter multiple opponents is commonplace.
• Dracolich: Undead dragons — generally represented as creatures with both the Dragon type and either the Zombie or Skeleton types — are not uncommon. Several prominent examples:
  • Bladewing the Risen is a classic example who is not only a powerful legendary creature, but can bring another dragon back to the battlefield from the graveyard and/or power up other dragons.
  • Skithiryx, the Blight Dragon is another who comes with Infect, can gain Haste, and can be Regenerated.
  • Vampiric Dragon is a vampire variant. Whenever it destroys a creature, it gains a +1/+1 counter.
• Draconic Abomination:
  • Worldgorger Dragon isn't typed as "Nightmare Dragon" for nothing. When it comes into play, all other permanents you control are exiled for as long as it remains in play. Essentially, nothing else can exist alongside it as long as it is there.
  • The Ur-Dragon is a massively powerful draconic Eldritch Abomination. While its flavor really drives the point home, it qualifies mechanically as a 10/10 with flying, allows you to play other dragons more cheaply, while also allowing you to draw a card whenever a dragon under your control attacks.
• Drafting Mechanic: The Booster Draft format, where eight players open a pack of cards, take a card, pass the rest and repeat until out of cards. Then they do the same two more times before making a deck out of the cards they picked (and any number of basic lands).
• Dragon Hoard:
  • The eponymous Dragon's Hoard is an artifact which accumulates "gold counters" every time a dragon enters the battlefield under your control. You can then remove the gold counters in order to draw cards. Additionally, Dragon's Hoard can be tapped to add one mana of any color.
  • Covetous Dragon requires that you have a hoard (in the form of controlling artifacts) in order to exist. If you do not control at least one artifact, it is sacrificed.
  • Hoarding Dragon allows you to search your deck for an artifact, which is then exiled. When Hoarding Dragon leaves the battlefield, you may then add the exiled artifact to your hand. The idea being that the dragon hoarded the artifact, which can now be recovered since the dragon is gone.
• Dragon Rider: Kargan Dragonlord uses the "leveling" mechanic to achieve this. He starts off as a simple 2/2 human warrior, who then upgrades to riding a small dragon, becoming a 4/4 with flying. At max level, he gains a monstrously powerful dragon, becoming an 8/8 with flying and trample.
• Draw Extra Cards: Most card draw effects cost more than just mana to use. In order of cost:
  • Accumulated Knowledge: Instant spell costing 1 blue mana and 1 other mana to:
    Draw a card, then draw cards equal to the number of cards named Accumulated Knowledge in all graveyards.
  • Ancestral Recall: Instant spell costing 1 blue mana to have any player draw three cards.
  • Slay is an instant spell costing 1 black mana and two other mana and a green creature to destroy before it can draw a card.
  • Phantom Strike costs 1 black mana and 1 other mana and the presence of a Spirit in hand to reveal or trading 3 more other mana to remove the reveal cost, along with a creature to destroy, before drawing a card.
  • Dregs of Sorrow costs 1 black mana and 4 other mana, and a player-selected amount from 0 and up. That amount is an additional other mana cost, a requirement of non-black creatures to destroy, and also the number of cards to be drawn after all the destruction.
• Dream Stealer: The eponymous Dreamstealer card. Whenever it deals damage, it "steals dreams" in the form of forcing the opponent to discard cards.
• Druid: A common green mana creature type. They commonly have abilities which generate mana or power up your other creatures.
• Dual Wielding:
  • The flavor behind the Double-Strike keyword ability, which allows a creature to attack twice - once as First Strike and again as a standard attack.
  • There is generally no limit to the amount of artifact equipment you can pile onto one creature. Equip two weapons onto them, and it becomes this trope. Or three, or four, or...
• Dynamic Entry: The aptly named Dramatic Entrance, an instant which allows you to put a green creature from your hand directly into play.

E

• Early-Installment Weirdness: Alpha and the first few expansions contained...
  • ...some truly bizarre mechanics that either weren't followed up upon or were dropped early. Examples include flipping cards over in the air, dividing creatures into two different groups that can't ever meet, subgames and playing for ante.
  • ...cards with effects which are now considered uncharacteristic of their color, such as blue direct damage and red damage prevention.
  • ...issues with balance; cards tended to be either insanely powerful or extremely weak.
  • ...rather informal wording which seems strange when contrasted with modern cards.
  • ...cards based on Public Domain Characters and stories, with flavour text quoting things like The Bible or William Shakespeare plays, as opposed to creating an original story and basing the cards around that. Even the first expansion was based entirely off of characters and themes from Arabian Nights.
  • Many rules and keywords have been added, altered, or removed over time. For example, the ability of Regeneration (a complicated scenario in which a permanent is tapped and removed from combat instead of dying) has been largely replaced by Indestructible (if the a permanent would be destroyed this turn, it doesn't instead). Banding was a keyword since the very first set, and the first rulebook's explanation on Combat even had a section dedicated to how it works, but it proved so unpopular that it was removed entirely in 1999.
  • Cards in the Alpha set are physically different from every set printed after due to their card corners having a rounder shape that was adjusted for Beta.
  • Generally speaking, there are a number of specific points where rules or thematic conventions were revised, making everything from before that time stand out as dated. With a game over 25 years old and still going, cards from the game's 12th year and earlier can still feel the force of this trope. A few examples:
    • Mirage saw set releases formalized into a "block" structure of a large set followed by two sets that expanded on it. Mirage was also the first set designed with Booster Draft in mind.
    • Classic Sixth Edition massively overhauled the rules. It eliminated the card types of Interrupt and Mana Source, changed Summon cards to Creature cards (so that the card type of the spell and the game object they create matched), formalized card templating to be less conversational, and created "the stack," the centerpiece of the game's modern rule set.
    • 8th Edition changed the game's default frames to be completely different from previous cards. The frames would be slightly revised again in Magic 2015 to incorporate anti-counterfeiting measures like a holofoil stamp and a proprietary font.
    • Magic 2010 changed how card rarities worked, making Rare cards more common and adding Mythic Rare cards at Rare's previous rarity.
    • Battle for Zendikar changed the block model to 2 sets, rather than 3.
    • Dominaria removed the idea of blocks from the game entirely.
  • During the first decade game, White and Black both had access to revival spells, with the idea being that White used "true resurrection" (revival with no strings attached) while Black used necromancy to revive creatures with some drawbacks (the creature dies again if the enchantment is removed, or it comes back as a zombie, etc). Over time, revival became one of the defining aspects of Black, which led Black revival cards slowly losing their drawbacks over time, while White revival cards became much rarer and also more expensive than their Black counterparts. Other examples of color-dissonance in old cards include Black cards that could destroy Artifacts (like Phyrexian Tribute), and Red cards like Anarchy and Apocalypse that could affect all permanents (including Enchantments which Red isn't supposed to touch).
  • Artifacts changed a lot from the early game both from a flavour and a gameplay aspect. Artifacts were initially conceived as magical items created by wizards, with their casting cost being the energy required to start them up. Continuous Artifacts needed to be untapped to apply their effects, as being tapped would "turn them off", early White cards like Demystify could destroy both Enchantments and Artifacts because Artifacts were by definition enchanted, and the distinction of being an Artifact Creature fell solely on artificial beings like golems which are moved by magic. From a gameplay design perspective, Artifacts were the only cards that did not require colored mana so that they could be splashed into any deck, and their effects were either unique or costed more than equivalent effects from colored cards, and they were also divided into Mono (need to be tapped to activate their abilities), Poly (require a cost other than tapping to activate to activate their abilities), and Continuous (exert a continuous effect while untapped).
    
    Over time, Artifact simply became the game's term for any inanimate object, even those that are entirely mundane, and the flavour of them being magical items became lost. White generally lost the ability to remove them and instead became "friendly to artifacts" like Blue, the rule about Artifacts needing to be untapped to work was removed in 1995 along with the Mono, Poly, and Continuous subtypes, and the introduction of colored Artifacts made the distinction between Artifacts and Enchantments something based purely on flavour rather than gameplay.
• Eat the Summoner: Feaster of Fools has both Convoke, which allows you to tap other creatures to help pay its casting cost, and Devour, which allows allows you to sacrifice other creatures in order to power it up with 1/1 counters. The DCI later made a ruling to clarify that yes, Feaster of Fools can devour the creatures that convoked it.
• Eldritch Abomination: So, so many. Mechanically, they tend to be copiously mana heavy to summon, and even then likely have other casting costs associated (pay life, sacrifice creatures, etc.) They often have "Horror" or "Nightmare" in their creature type, and often have keywords like Indestructable (cannot be destroyed by normal means) and Annihilator (defending player must sacrifice creatures when the creature attacks). The Eldrazi are perhaps the purest example in the series, and comprise some legendarily powerful creature cards.
• Elemental Barrier: The six "Circles of Protection", one for each color as well as a sixth covering artifacts. These are enchantments which can protect their controller from damage from any cards of the corresponding color.
• Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors: The Color Wheel is probably the most well-known non-traditional version in gaming. The game has five colors associated with land forms, creatures, and most importantly a style of play. Adjacent colors tend to share strengths and play styles (red and black are both great at killing creatures, for example), but are opposite/opposed to the two other colors (white likes to prevent damage, red likes causing it, while black will simply bring a dead unit back to unlife).
• Element No. 5:
  • The Eldrazi. They were the first non-artifact spells to be colorless and contain some of the most expensive and powerful creatures in the game. They are also effective against all colors through spells like All Is Dust and Emrakul's protection from colored spells, showing that they defy the usual rock/paper/scissors system.
  • During development of Planar Chaos, a sixth color was proposed - purple. The element would represent cities and urbanization, and would be situated between blue and black, opposite of green. Its mechanics would have included counterspells which only delay rather than cancel, among other things. Downplayed in that it would have been presented as equal (rather than superior in the spirit of the trope) to the other colors, having always been there.
• Elephant Graveyard: Is a card. Ironically, it keeps them from dying.
• Elite Zombie: Zombies are a creature type almost exclusively associated with black and are meant to be easy-to-summon, very expendable minions. However, some zombies pack enough punch to qualify as elite, for example, Balthor the Defiled, Dakkon Blackblade, and Thraximundar.
• Emotions vs. Stoicism: The primary conflict between red and blue mana, respectively, and secondarily with green and white. Mechanically, this shows up with red gaining power from "emotional" outbursts like Fit of Rage and Avatar of Fury while blue gains power from remaining stoic, such as with Stoic Rebuttal and Controlled Instincts.
• Empathic Shapeshifter: Unstable Shapeshifter, who automatically becomes a copy of each creature entering play.
• Empowered Badass Normal:
  • Muraganda Petroglyphs from the Future Sight expansion grants a large bonus to creatures without abilities.
  • Woolly Thoctar is a 5/4 for a mere 3 mana.^note That's partially balanced by each of those 3 mana being of a different color; the only deck that can play this card at any time, much less on Turn 3, is one that was designed specifically to do so.
  • Common among white mana humans in sets which focus on them, such as Innistrad. Individually, they tend to be weaker than all of the threats they are up against, but have access to some of the cheapest means of empowerment as well. (For example, Sharpened Pitchfork, which can only be equipped by humans, and the classic Wooden Stake, which allows any equipped creature, no matter how weak, to destroy vampires.)
• Empty Levels: Cards with the "Level Up" keyword can be "leveled up" by spending mana. These usually have a small gap (usually 1 or 2, and rarely 3) for the first effect, and large gaps (sometimes reaching 12 or more) for the second ability. Everything else in-between does nothing but chew up your mana for the turn, and since these creatures are very rarely immune to creature removal and it's blatantly obvious to your opponent when you'll get the final level-up that matters, they can save their removal until you've wasted as much mana as possible.
• Enemy Summoner: Any creature your opponent plays which can generate tokens or copies of itself qualifies.
• Enemy to All Living Things: Phage the Untouchable. Whenever she deals damage to a creature, it is destroyed. If she deals direct damage to a player, they automatically lose the game.
• Energy Ball: Ball Lightning is an interesting example in that it's actually a creature, but plays more like a spell. It has both trample and haste, which allows it to hit hard with its 6 power on the turn you play and the damage can't be negated with a chump block. However, it has only one toughness, and even if it survives its attack, it is sacrificed at the start of your next turn.
• Entropy and Chaos Magic: Black and red mana, respectively. Black has numerous "power at a price" and withering/decay sorts of effects in line with entropy. Red meanwhile has the most "chaos" at its disposal, ranging from blowing things up (including its own creatures quite often) to using luck to determine success (coin flips, dice rolls, etc.).
• Equippable Ally: Many cases:
  • Artillerize involves basically turning a creature into a missile (in-game, this translates as sacrificing a creature to fuel a direct-damage spell).
  • Another way to invoke this trope involves Bludgeon Brawl, which causes all non-creature artifacts to be treated as equipment. When combined with Liquimetal Coating, which turns a non-artifact permanent into an artifact, it's possible for a creature to literally pick up a Planeswalker and smash things with him/her.
  • There's also the Living Weapon mechanic from the Scars of Mirrodin block, where Equipment cards with the ability enter the battlefield already attached to a newly-created 0/0 Germ token. Moving the Equipment "kills" it (that is, causes the Germ token attached to it to die). With the current policy that creatures can't be Equipment, this mechanic is the closest we're likely to get.
  • The Theros block, based on Classical Mythology, has introduced the "Bestow" mechanic. Creatures with Bestow can be "hard-cast" as mooks, or bestowed as a Status Buff on a pre-existing mook, who gains the bestow-creature's power, toughness and abilities. This can result in a totem-pole of enchantments riding around on a single creature. And, if that creature is killed, all the bestow guys "fall off" and become creatures in their own right.
  • Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty does this with the Reconfigure mechanic. These are artifact creatures which enter play like any other creature, but can later be "reconfigured" for a certain mana cost to attach them to another creature and bestow effects upon it similarly to equipment, and "fall of" whenever their host dies, similar to Bestow above.
• Equivalent Exchange: A key part of the game, every spell you cast or ability you activate has some sort of exchange going on. Even the most simple of cards require you to generate mana and fill precious deck slots with the given cards to work. Some more elaborate spells ask for more tangible costs such as life payments, discarding cards, or sacrificing permanents. Most of the game's problems have come from cards doing far more in return for what you paid for them...
• Every Man Has His Price: Gwafa Hazid, Profiteer can "bribe" creatures you do not control, preventing them from attack or blocking. This can even include ancient horrors and full blown Eldritch Abominations.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • The entire Shadowmoor block is this to the preceding Lorwyn block. As a result, several cards from the former are darker versions of cards from the latter (as an example, Incremental Blight and Incremental Growth).
  • Evil Twin copies a creature on the battlefield and has the ability to kill the original.
• Evil Evolves: A hat of the Phyrexians, who are constantly making improvements to their mechanical fighters while they use the flesh of fallen enemies to create new soldiers. Mechanically, they've been expanding in every set in which they are included, growing past a mono-black race to have factions of every color and expanding their access to abilities exponentially.
• Evil Is Not a Toy: A speciality of the "demon" type creatures, who are often quite powerful but have significant drawbacks or trade-offs to their use. Some prominent examples:
  • Lord of the Pit is perhaps the oldest example in the game, going all the way back to the Alpha set. A 7/7 with Flying and Trample, it requires that you sacrifice a creature each turn or else it deals 7 damage to you. Archdemon of Greed is mechanically identical, though it is a 9/9 creature and deals 9 damage to you if you cannot make a sacrifice.
  • Bloodgift Demon and Griselbrand both have abilities which allow you to trade life for knowledge (in the form of drawing cards).
  • Abyssal Persecutor is a 6/6 with Flying and Trample for a mere four mana...though as long as it is in play, its controller cannot win the game and the opponent cannot lose.
  • Rakdos the Defiler forces the opponent to sacrifice half their non-demon creatures in play when it deals damage. However, it requires its controller to make the same sacrifice in order to get it to attack in the first place.
• Evil Knockoff: Common among the Phyrexians. They can do this rather directly with things like Phyrexian Metamorph, or, as seen most prominently in Scars of Mirrodin and Mirrodin Besieged, Phyrexian versions of classic creatures of other types (Ex. Hydra, Black Knight) which have extra abilities (can replace some mana with life in its casting cost, the Infect ability, respectively).
• Evil Luddite: Green's dark side tends to function in this vein. Green is the color that most reveres nature and tradition, and thus tends to oppose significant change and rejects technology. Mechanically, this manifests as green having by far the most artifact destruction spells and abilities.
• Evil Plan: The casual format "Archenemy" has one player as the, well, Archenemy who sets Schemes in motion, against a coalition of players.
• Evil Sorcerer: Blue and black mana play deeply into this trope's archetypes. Blue's spells take the form of Mind Rape, manifesting mechanically as the cancellation of opponent's spells, forcing them to skip their turn or playing it for them (mind control), forcing them to discard from their hand (memory), and forcing them to discard from their deck (sanity). Black tends to be of the more visceral Body Horror variety, manifesting mechanically as draining the opponent's life, forcing them to sacrifice creatures, bringing their own creatures back to life to use against them, etc.
• Evil Tainted the Place: Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth is the final resting place of the game's original Big Bad. The card turns every single land in the game into a black mana-powering Swamp.
• Evil Twin: Evil Twin is a creature which enters as a copy of any other crature on the battlefield, with the added ability of being able to destroy the creature it copies at any time. This allows you to double up on a strong creature of your own, or copy one of your opponent's creatures, then destroy it.
• Exact Words: The game practically runs on this trope. Many rules depend on exactly how things are worded, and slight changes will completely change the effect of the card. Expect tons of Loophole Abuse if the wording on the card is vague enough to be open to any sort of interpretation. Some prominent examples:
  • Indestructible permanents can't be destroyed...but they can still be exiled (a stronger effect that pushes the card into the 'exile zone', outside the normal game), bounced back into the player's hand, and (in the case of creatures) weakened with minus effects applied to toughness to the point that they die on their own.
  • Hexproof creatures can't be targeted by spells or abilities an opponent controls...but their controller may be forced to sacrifice them. Likewise, an effect may be untargeted, affecting all creatures on the battlefield indiscrimiately.
  • Similarly, there are effects that deal damage and those that cause loss of life. An effect protecting from damage won't help against loss of life. There are also effects that reduce a creature's stats, potentially even fatally, but these aren't considered to be damage and so won't activate corresponding effects, such as Deathtouch.
  • Many, many of the creative combo decks and lockdowns are result of this trope combined with a lack of creator's foresight.
  • Myr Superion is a two mana 5/6. However, those two mana must be generated by other creatures. However, if you reduce its casting cost to zero (there are many, many possible means available), you don't need any other creatures to play it, removing its only drawback.
  • Chaos Orb, now permanently banned in every format, is a prime example from the game's early days. To note some of the ways in which its wording has been twisted:
    • Players were using it to take out their opponent's lands, which could be much more crippling than its intended use on permanents as it deprived them of mana. Errata was issued stating that it only affected permanents.
    • Players were dropping it onto opponent's graveyards and even decks, leading to an instant loss by decking when the opponent next needed to draw a card. Cue errata: "Cards that are in the game but not on the battlefield, such as those in the Library and Graveyard, can't be affected."
    • There is the (likely apocryphal) tale of the player in an early tournament who tore his Chaos Orb into tiny pieces and then scattered them across his opponent's side of the battlefield. This, of course, led to the Unglued card Chaos Confetti.
    • Even the errata got the "Exact Words" treatment. Wizards issued the following: "If you have sleeves on cards, they count as the cards." Cue players putting their cards into the largest sleeves they could find in order to increase Chaos Orb's surface area.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin:
  • The enchantment cards Fear, Lifelink, Vigilance, and Indestructibility give the enchanted creature the abilities Fear, Lifelink, Vigilance, and Indestructible, respectively.
  • Fear is a special case, as the ability was originally unnamed — when the designers decided to create a keyword for the common "this creature can only be blocked by artifact and/or black creatures" ability, they named it after the original card that granted the ability.
• Expansion Pack: A new expansion set is released every three months or so.
  • From 1996 with Mirage to 2015 with Dragons of Tarkir, three of these expansions took place in the same setting and built somewhat on the mechanics of the previous ones, forming a "Block" of one large expansion and two smaller ones (usually). The fourth was a "core set" released in the summer designed to introduce new players to the rules and reprint certain mainstay cards to keep them in circulation.
  • From 2015 with Battle for Zendikar to 2018 with Rivals of Ixalan, they followed a two-block paradigm that replaced the Core Set with an additional expansion, and did two blocks of two sets per year instead of just one. However, this rapidly proved unpopular, leading to...
  • The three-and-one model, with three large-set expansions and the reintroduced core set, which continues into the present (though the core set was later removed again in favor of another expansion). There have still continued to be several expansions that tie into each other unofficially, like the year-long buildup to War of the Spark that included elements of the previous two blocks (as they all took place on Ravnica); the double-feature of Innistrad sets Midnight Hunt and Crimson Vow; the Dominaria focused sets Dominaria United and The Brother's War, and the New Phyrexia sets Phyrexia: All Will Be One and March of the Machine.
  • Naturally, this doesn't include the various supplemental sets that aren't always legal in all formats or attempt to introduce new ones. Usually these come in the form of a large, draftable set in the summer that ties directly into commander or modern formats, like the Horizons or Masters sets, or major Universes Beyond sets like The Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, and Fallout.
• Expansion Pack World:
  • The game's early sets almost all took place within the plane of Dominaria, with each new set being in previously unmentioned regions.
  • The game has now settled into "Expansion Pack Multiverse" territory. Most tend to feature new planes, though some revisit old planes as well.
• Explosive Breeder:
  • A trait of Slivers, a Hive Minded race which can share their abilities with other nearby Slivers. In particular, Sliver Queen can pump out 1/1 Sliver tokens with ease.
  • A trait of Goblins as well, who are born in "litters". This explains their tendency toward suicidal tactics, since they have plenty to spare. Exemplified by cards like Empty the Warrens, whose 1/1 Goblin tokens are implied to be children.
  • Scute Mob is one green mana 1/1 that takes the form of a swarm of beetle-like creatures. If you control five or more lands, they "explode" to a 5/5 creature.
  • Scute Swarm generates a generic 1/1 insect token on landfall. However, if you control six or more lands, it creates a copy of itself, including its effect to replicate itself. Left unchecked, the swarm can multiply exponentially with each land that you play.
• Exponential Potential: With over 10,000 unique spells/permanents to use in deckbuilding, and new ones created every time a new Expansion Set is released, there's always some new spell or permanent that does something unique to change the face of the metagame, whether overtly like a Power card, or subtly like some of the more common-yet-effective cards. Sometimes, new cards are introduced which, when combined with older cards in Legacy and Vintage formats, lead to game-wrecking results. A few prominent examples:
  • Grindstone and Painter's Servant combine to form an instant decking win combo. Use Painter's Servant to turn all not-in-play cards to one color, then use Grindstone, choose that color, and watch as your opponent draws and discards their entire deck.
  • Dark Depths and Vampire Hexmage combine to give you 20/20 Flying and Indestructable creature, potentially as early as your first turn if you have some complementary set-up cards. Play Dark Depths and then Vampire Hexmage. Use the Hexmage's second ability to remove all of the counters from Dark Depths. Since your opponent will lack the mana at such an early stage to disrupt the combo, you'll waltz to a decisive victory.
• Extra-ore-dinary: Extremely common among artifact creatures. While they tend to cost more mana than colored creatures of equivalent power/toughness, that mana cost can be paid by any type of land. Metalwork Colossus is a prime example, who can also be summoned for less mana if you control other artifacts.
• Extra Turn:
  • A staple of blue mana. Most infamously this includes Time Walk, a member of the banned "Power Nine", which gives an extra turn for a piddly two mana. Time Warp is the same basic ability, but is more balanced by costing three additional mana. Time Stretch gives you two extra turns, but is balanced by requiring a whopping 10 mana. Walk the Aeons is basically Time Warp with the added bonus of "Buyback", meaning it could theoretically be played an unlimited number of times, though the sacrifice of three islands for each use is pretty hefty. Lighthouse Chronologist uses the Leveling mechanic, and at max level, gives you an extra turn at the end of every turn. (Though being a creature without any special protections, it is difficult to get him to this point.)
  • Red gets in on this as well with Final Fortune. An extra turn for just two mana is what got Time Walk banned...but Final Forture's balance comes in its drawback - you lose the game at the end of that extra turn if you haven't won it before then. Relentless Assault (and other, similar, mostly red cards) Downplay it by give you extra combat steps rather than full turns.
  • Stitch in Time is cheaper to cast than all but the original Time Walk, though this is balanced by only having a 50/50 chance of working.
• Extreme Omni-Goat: Though reptilian in appearance, the Atog creature type (an anagram of "Goat") is well known for "eating" things in order to power up. These include artifacts (ex. Atog, the original), enchantments Auratog), lands (Ex. Lithatog), the dead (Ex. Necrotog), time (Ex. Chronatog), and even other Atogs (Ex. Atogatog). There is very little in the game that some form of Atog doesn't eat.

F

• Faction Calculus:
  • The five colors of the standard color wheel rather neatly fit along a spectrum. Green, the color with by far the most large creatures, is on the Powerhouse extreme, then White, then Red in the middle as the most Balanced. The "Subversive" swing then starts with Black and then reaches Blue, the most spell-heavy/creature-weak color, on the opposite end of the spectrum.
  • The allied color pairs can be fitted into five factions rather neatly:
    • White-blue is the Powerhouse. Among the allied color pairs, it's the one most inclined towards Control, a strategy that focuses on slowing the game down and not summoning units or attacking until mid to late game. Moreover, the units these decks do summon tend to look like what would be called "elite" in other games: since the units these decks use are few in numbers, the said units are usually either large or hard to stop, often both.
    • Blue-black is the Subversive. They're the colors most associated with evasive creatures, and they're also the sole colors capable of messing with their opponents' hands and libraries. As a result, they are able to undermine their opponents' plans in ways that no other color can.
    • Black-red is the Glass Cannon. They're the colors that frequently power up their spells and abilities via paying life or sacrificing stuffs. This gives them incredible firepower at times, but the fact that their spells and abilities often damage themselves can markedly reduce their longevity.
    • Red-green is the Horde in a sense. They're the color combo that favors Aggro the most: Aggro can be summed up as a strategy where the player just says "I'll throw all of my spells and creatures out as quickly as possible and overwhelm my opponent. This will probably screw up my late games, but that doesn't matter if I've already overwhelmed my opponent." Because of this, they tend to lose if they fail to leave their opponents dead (or at least close to dead) within the first five turns.
    • Green-white, situated between White-blue and Red-green, is the Balanced. They tend to put out lots of creatures, and have many spells and enchantments that buff or protect those creatures. They can't go fast like Red-green, but are certainly nowhere as sluggish as White-blue. There's a reason why mid-range decks are so strongly associated with these two colors.
  • Each enemy color pair, meanwhile, tends to in some way resemble the allied color pair that opposes its shared ally, but does what the said allied color pair does in a different way:
    • White-black has blue as their common ally, and tends to be like blue - slow and subversive. Being the faction pair with some of the strongest lifegain also allows them to establish a "grinder" style by way of Life Drain effects. It can be aggressive like Red-green, but while Red-green goes Aggro via lots of damaging spells (Red) and creature pumps (Green), White-black goes aggressive... mainly via Weenie, a Zerg Rush style strategy that involves summoning lots of small creatures to overwhelm opponents.
    • Blue-red has black as their common ally, and is often subversive and cannon-ish. Much like Green-white, it can go Balanced and play the game of "let's focus on putting my stuffs onto the board and protect/buff them". For Green-white, the "stuffs" in question are usually creatures and supportive enchantments, while for Blue-red, the "stuffs" tend to be weak creatures (that have good abilities) plus artifacts backed with spells, and often with the goal to set off unstoppable combos.
    • Black-green has red as their common ally. Like red, it's often self-destructive and overly aggressive, which tends to result in lots of its cards ending up in the graveyard very quickly. Unlike red (and like White-blue), it is capable of a good Powerhouse strategy... since they're the colors most able to exploit the cards that got sent to the graveyard earlier, not to mention all the black or green creatures that grow as their controller gets more cards in graveyard.
    • Red-white has green as their common ally. It, utterly unlike Blue-black, loves combat (while blue and black prefer to just bypass defense using their evasive abilities). Unlike green, who prefers to pump up its creatures' stats to overpower its opponents, Red-white favors combat tricks: It's no coincidence that first strike is mainly a red-white ability. Of course, red and white both seem to have a love for equipment...
    • Green-blue has white as their common ally. It is, in a way, much like Black-red, having a lot of powerful units and effects (for starters, green and blue are the colors that, on average, have the most oversized creatures). But while Black-red prefers to access its powerful things by paying its life and sacrificing stuffs, Green-blue accesses its powerful things using green's ability to gain extra mana and blue's ability to draw extra cards. Result? Green-blue has access to spells and abilities powerful like Black-red's, but unlike Black-red, it doesn't cut its own arm off while accessing them.
• Fake Ultimate Mook:
  • Anything really big has Awesome, but Impractical written all over it, though this just makes for players finding ways to cheaply get it into play (Animate Dead is popular method).
  • Mana cost aside, there are numerous ways of having a creature turn into this. Many potentially powerful creatures are ruined by drawbacks like echo (pay their casting cost again on the turn after you play them or sacrifice them), cumulative upkeep (pay an increasing cost every turn or sacrifice them), and many, many more.
  • Creatures also have the built-in disadvantage of being killable. Most creatures, whether they cost one mana or nine, can be killed with a removal spell that only costs two or three mana. This is why the most successful creatures in Magic are either relatively cheap, resistant to removal, or have an impact on the board even if they're killed right away.
  • There are also creatures that have intimidating-looking art but are subpar in terms of stats. Hill Giant is a good example.
  • A zig-zagged example is Segovian Leviathan, a card whose artwork shows it being so large, its eyes dwarf nearby whales. Its statline? 3/3, the same as a mundane elephant and completely unremarkable, especially compared to most Leviathans. A later expansion would reveal that, in fact, Segovia is about 1/100 the size of most planes, and the Segovian Leviathan is indeed roughly the same size as an elephant - it only looks big because it's next to whales the size of goldfish.
• Fallen Angel:
  • While still being white mana and having the creature type of "angel", the "Phyrexianized" angels of New Phyrexia (formerly Mirrodin), such as Shattered Angel, qualify.
  • Bruna and Gisela both became currupted by the Eldrazi, and can even become a full Eldrazi Angel by combining into Brisela
• Familiar: The creatures that you, essentially a planeswalking wizard, summon qualify. They are under your command (though though some have drawbacks to this arrangement).
• Fan Speak: Magic players have created an extensive vocabulary of slang terms and technical jargon. This Useful Notes pages has some examples.
• Fantastic Nuke: Plentiful examples. To note some of the more prominent:
  • White magic has the most of these, often crossing over with Holy Hand Grenade and Bolt of Divine Retribution. Examples include Wrath of God and Armageddon.
  • Red gets a few as well, including Obliterate and Apocalypse. It also gets Worldfire, which doesn't just destroy, but exiles everything but each player's deck while also reducing both to one life.
  • Black gets Damnation, which is alternate universe version of Wrath of God.
• Fantasy Metals: Darksteel. Anything made of it or equipping it (as is the case for Darksteel artifact equipment) tends to be Indestructable, removing the most standard method of destroying it. Flavor wise, it can't even be forged. It requires Retconjuration to warp reality so that the item just so happens to have been in the desired shape all along.
• Fastball Special:
  • Stone Giant, among others, can be tapped to hurl a creature into the air to attack your opponent directly or block an enemy flyer. This is generally not a survivable experience for the creature.
  • This is the entire concept behind Fling and similar cards.
  • Slaying Mantis combines this with a Dynamic Entry as you throw it onto the battlefield from at least 3 feet away. Any enemy creature it touches on the way down, it fights — potentially a suicide mission, but it can really make a dent on a crowded board.
• Faux Flame: Ghostfire is not unlike the classic Fireball, even including a red mana in its casting cost, but is explicitly "colorless". This means it can get around "Protection from Red" abilities.
• Fearful Symmetry: Common on the competitive scene, especially at the start of sanctioned tournaments, where many players may be using identical decks that did well in previous tournaments. As such, many players keep "silver bullets" (cards which are strong against their own deck) in their side-deck to swap in for mirror-matches.
• Fearless Undead: The "Fear" keyword, which almost exclusively appears on black creatures, means that creatures with it cannot be blocked except by artifact creatures (who don't feel fear) and other black creatures (who either can't feel fear or simply wouldn't be afraid).
• Feed It with Fire:
  • Fungusaur gets stronger (in the form of adding +1/+1 counters) every time it survives taking damage. As highlighted in its flavor text, this damage doesn't have to come from the opponent...you can beef it up by damaging it yourself.
  • Phytohydra converts damage directly into power and toughness. Like above, this damage doesn't have to come from the opponent...
• Festering Fungus: Thallid is a fungal creature type, mostly green and sometimes black. Their mechanical hat tends to be that you can add one "spore" token to them each turn. You can then remove these tokens once they've reached a certain number (most commonly three) in order to deal damage or create Thallid spawn tokens. For example, take the classic Thallid or Thallid Devourer.
• Field Power Effect: Dozens of such spells which boost and debuff creatures, most often based on color or creature type.
• Fiendish Fish:
  • Fish are a distinct creature type in-game, and many grow huge and monstrous — the Devouring Deep, Dandan, and Fleet Swallower are all good examples of this.
    "Catch good today. Start replacing crew tomorrow." Faysal al-Mousa, fisher captain, Flavor Text for Dandan.
  • While leviathans — some of the largest monsters in the seas — are a distinct creature type, some, such as Kiora's Dambreaker and the Stormtide Leviathan, resemble monstrous fish of immense size.
• Fiery Salamander: Naturally, a distinct red creature type. Examples include Scalding Salamander, Pyric Salamander, and Flowstone Salamander.
• Fight Like a Card Player: As the cards basically represent wizards dueling with spells, summoning and attacking with monsters, and drawing power from the land.
• Fighting a Shadow: A trait of the Eldrazi Titans. The cards representing them which can be summoned to the battlefields are merely "physical shadows" they use to operate within a plane. If destroyed (difficult but not impossible), they are shuffled back into the owner's deck, meaning they will return if the game goes on long enough. However, this ability is sneakily used as a drawback, since they don't leave behind a corpse to reanimate.
• Fireballs: The iconic red direct damage card. It has been reprinted in some form in most sets and was part of one of Magic's earliest game-breaker combos - the Cast from Hit Points based Channel Fireball Deck.
• Fire Keeps It Dead: Red (the color representing fire) creature destruction spells tend to include this by not merely destroying the target, but preventing it from being regenerated and/or exiling it so that it cannot be brought back to life. Incinerate, Disintegrate, and Scorching Lava all provide examples.
• Fire Purifies:
  • Red gets a number of spells in this vein, such as Cleansing Beam and Burn the Impure.
  • Archangel Avacyn starts off in a protective role, with ability that makes your other creatures indestructible. However, when one dies, she transforms into Avacyn the Purifier, gaining +2/+1 and immediately dealing 3 damage to every other creature and opponent.
• First-Player Advantage Mitigation: To mitigate the first player's tempo advantage, Wizards eventually added the rule that the starting player skips the draw step of their first turn.
• Fish People: Merfolk are the classic blue standard creature. They have scales all over their bodies and typically have humanoid legs instead of fins. In gameplay terms, they're relative in power and toughness to equivalent human creatures, though frequently more magical.
• Fix It in Post: Parodied in the Unhinged card Granny's Payback, in which the art depicts an elderly woman slaughtering people despite the actual effect of the card being life-gaining. The flavor text is a snippet from development notes simply stating: "We'll fix it in the flavor text."
• Flaming Meteor: Star of Extinction. Mechanically, it destroys a land and deals 20 damage to everything other than the players, typically killing everything in play.
• Flaming Sword: Numerous artifact examples which typically increase the power of the equipping creature, sometimes with other effects as well including First Strike, Protection from Red, forced discards when striking a player, and more. Examples include the classic Flaming Sword, Sword of Fire and Ice, and Ghostfire Blade (which is an invisible flaming sword well suited for colorless creatures).
• Flavor Text: Famous for it.
• Foreshadowing: The game has actually had numerous examples.
  • Tarmogoyf gets stronger for every type of card in your graveyard. The card explicitly pointed out that "Planeswalker" and "Tribal" cards would count... At least, once cards of those types were actually published.
  • Speaking of which, Tarmogoyf came from the "Future Sight" set, which — as suggested by its name — included cards that hinted at the game's future. Though released in 2007, Chekhovs Guns planted in the set are still firing as of 2021.
  • Sword of Kaldra, Shield of Kaldra and Helm of Kaldra can be combined to summon someone named Kaldra. They were published in that order, with the Shield explicitly mention the as-yet-unreleased Helm.
  • Similarly, Renowned Weaponsmith has an ability that references two specific other cards from the Tarkir block. At the time of release (Fate Reforged was in between Khans of Tarkir and Dragons of Tarkir), Vial of Dragonfire didn't exist.
• Flechette Storm: Numerous examples including Rain of Blades which damages each attack creature, Wing Shards which forces an opponent to sacrifice a create and can be repeated, and implied with Serrated Arrows which adds up to three -1/-1 counters to target creatures. Cards in this vein are popular "anti-weenie" measures as they can destroy a large number of small creatures quite easily.
• Fleeting Demographic Rule: Mechanics which are heavily used in one set are often slowly phased out of the next several, sometimes disappearing from the current metagame entirely, before being brought back again several sets down the line. A notable example is multi-color cards, which will be the main focus of certain sets (2005's Ravnica: City of Guilds, 2008's Shards of Alara, and 2012's Return to Ravnica, for example) while sometimes disappearing entirely in between. Justifed for game balance purposes, since a common format for sanctioned tournaments allows only cards from a certain number of the most recent releases to be used, about two years or so. Older cards are periodically rotated out of the whitelist, so one of the easier ways to maintain balance is to make sure some newly-released cards fill similar niches to ones that were recently rotated out.
• Flesh Golem: Common in Black and sometimes Blue. Some notable examples:
  • Frankenstein's Monster is virtually this, since the concept behind the card is that the creature is being stitched together from any number of various creatures from your graveyard, not necessarily humans.
  • Sutchered Ghoul is similar, exiling creatures from the graveyard when it enters play and gaining power/toughness equal to the number of creatures exiled, implying that it was stiched together out of them.
  • Skaabs are a blue-aligned version native to Innistrad, which require a creature to be exiled from the graveyard in addition to their mana casting cost.
• Flight: The Flying ability. Flying creatures can only be blocked by other creatures with Flying or those with the Reach ability. Dragons and Angels typically possess flying and are among the most powerful creatures in the game. Many lesser Blue and White creatures also have it. Green has by far the fewest creatures with Flying throughout the series, but they also have the most creatures with Reach (Spiders, Archers, etc.) as a counter.
• Flower Motifs: "Lotus" cards produce mana, and exist in just about every type possible. The most famous is the legendarily overpowered Black Lotus, creating three free mana at no cost.
• Flunky Boss: Krenko, Mob Boss as the commander in the Commander format. He creates a 1/1 goblin token for each creature of the goblin-type you have in play. Since Krenko himself is a goblin, you're always guaranteed to create one, and they grow exponentially from there as the goblin tokens qualify as well. Combined with plenty of other goblins in support, you'll be able to Zerg Rush your opponent(s) in short order.
• Foe-Tossing Charge: The implication of the "Trample" ability. Normally, any Power of an attacking creature beyond the Toughness of a defending creature is simply lost. However, if the attacker has Trample, the excess damage is applied to the defending player.
• Forced Transformation:
  • Forced transformations are the basis for a number of spells. For example, Ovinize turns a target create into a 0/1 sheep for the rest of the turn. Snakeform turns the target into a 1/1 snake for the rest of the turn. Humble is similar in effect, without actually transforming the target.
  • Mass Polymorph, effectively, turns all of the creatures you have on the battlefield into other creatures from your deck at random. With some luck, you can turn a handful of "chumps" into much more powerful creatures.
• Forest Ranger: Elves, typically Green, fill this niche. Mechanically, the after have the Reach ability (implying archery skills) and some, like the classic Llanowar Elves, can produce Green mana, implying a connection with nature.
• Fountain of Youth: The eponymous Fountain of Youth card. It is an artifact which can be tapped to gain life.
• The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Baron von Count has an ability that reads "Destroy target player". However, since he comes from one of the "Un-" sets, he's not tournament legal.
• Fragile Speedster: Some "weenie" decks, particularly Green Weenies. Zerg Rush your opponent to win quickly or else bear witness to how fragile your deck really is.
• "Freaky Friday" Flip: Some spells and abilities can inflict this effect, exchanging players' cards-in-hand, permanents-in-play, or even life totals, the last one being a popular trick in combo decks.
• Fungus Humongous: Sporoloths are a large Green fungus creature type. Their typical ability is to be able to create "spore" tokens which can be removed to create Saproling (smaller fungus creature) tokens.
• Fusion Dance: A number of cards can be "fused" together to create other, more powerful creatures. Visions has a notable cycle of four mechanical chimeras — Brass-Talon Chimera, Iron-Heart Chimera, Lead-Belly Chimera, and Tin-Wing Chimera — each possessing a unique ability. Each chimera can be sacrificed to give its ability and a stat boost to one of the other three, representing the chimeras fusing into a single combined monster. The background of each card's art shows a sketch of the combined entity they can become.
• Fusion Dissonance: The "Meld" mechanic fuses creatures and can lead to some particularly disturbing results. For example, the angels Bruna and Gisela meld to form the Eldrazi Angel Brisela.

G

• Gaia's Vengeance: Very common with Green creatures and spells. Some notable examples:
  • Naturalize is an oft-reprinted classis which destroys a target artifact or enchantment.
  • Gaea's Avenger is a treefolk creature which grows in power/toughness equal to the number of artifacts your opponent has in play.
  • Gaea's Revenge is a massive treefolk creature with a number of powerful abilities, including outright immunity to non-Green spells.
  • Trample Civilization Underfoot is the name of a Green/White Archenemy deck with this trope as its theme.
• Gambit Pileup: Due to the nature of the stack, players can find themselves fighting a mini battle in which they're undoing each other's move, for example:
  Player 1: Shock on Player 2's Merfolk Looter.
  Player 2: Unsummon on Player 2's Merfolk Looter.
  Player 1: Counterspell on Player 2's Unsummon.
  Player 2: Counterspell on Player 1's Shock.
  Player 1: Counterspell on Player 2's Counterspell.

  And so on. If they do this by piling the cards onto each other (or playing online), then the trope is being played literally.

• Game-Breaker: Invoked.
  • Lampshaded on Deep Analysis, whose art depicts the famously powerful (in its heyday) Masticore with the flavor text "The specimen seems to be broken."
  • Exploited with "From The Vault: Exiled", a boxed set of specially-foiled versions of famous Game Breakers.
• Game-Breaking Bug: Happens in spirit with typos on cards and in the online version of the game. To note some examples:
  • Hostage Taker is missing the vitally important word 'other' in its rules text, meaning if there were no other targets in play it was required to take itself hostage, triggering an endless loop that, per the rules for inescapable loops, ended the battle in a draw. This was corrected in the online rules text before the card hit even hit stores.
  • Fatespinner is a fairly mundane card which calls on the opponent to pick a handicap each time they get a turn. The problem? When the card was first added to the online version of the game, it didn't provide them with a way to resolve that decision, and they could do nothing but wait for their time to run out and automatically lose. Needless to say, decks built around doing nothing but getting that card into play became wildly popular over the next few days to the point that they had to ban the card online until they could fix it.
  • The original wording for the ability of Floral Spuzzem reads that that the Floral Spuzzem itself (not the player) got to decide which card got targeted by its effect. Guess how long you'd have to wait until a piece of cardboard spoke up to give you its opinion on the matter?
• Game Lobby: Magic The Gathering Online works with a lobby. Since it's relatively popular, and only up to two players can play a single game (so far), this is a pretty good way to work.
• Gameplay and Story Integration:
  • Early sets tried to enforce this to a degree with mechanics such as islandhome, which stopped sea-based creatures from attacking opponents who don't control an island, and causing them to cease to exist if their controller controls no islands.
  • The evolution of block and block design has also begun to reflect this. Later blocks may introduce new mechanics (Fateful Hour) to reflect the plot (From Bad to Worse), or for that matter remove them (Devotion going largely absent from the third Theros set to reflect muggles' growing disaffection with their pantheon of gods). Heck, "Rise of the Eldrazi" completely changed the environment and is intended to be drafted as a stand-alone set!
  • Flavor Judge, a joke card from the "Unsanctioned" set, enforces this by allowing you to counter an opponent's spell or ability targeting your creature if, as determined by someone outside the game, the interaction does not make sense story-wise.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • Islandhome is gone. First off, they decided they didn't want it keyworded and would prefer just to spell out the sentences. Secondly, it was a rather clumsy and unpopular mechanic, and Wizards' current policy is to ignore moments of Fridge Logic in favour of gameplay. (After all, you are a wizard!)
  • Another common example are Equipments, a subtype of Artifacts that can be, well, equipped to your creatures. Sometimes it works well, but at others it results in humongous axes being wielded by a little bird, or a creature wading into battle wearing a chair, or magical armor being worn by a tree. Indeed, under the right circumstances you can put Cranial Plating on a mountain.
• Gamer Chick:
  • Spike, Tournament Grinder is an Unstable set card representing a female Magic player.
  • As the game has grown over the years, so has the number of female players. In response, Wizards has expanded the names of their "Player Archetypes" to include female versions of each name: Timmy/Tammy, Johnny/Jenny, and Melvin/Melanie. (Spike and Vorthos are considered unisex.)
• Gathering Steam: Under normal circumstances, each player is only allowed to play a single Land card per turn, and your most powerful spells might even take multiple combinations of multiple mana to perform.
• Genius Loci: "Manland" is the slang term for a land which can turn itself into a creature. Examples include Blinkmoth Nexus, Hostile Desert, and many more.
• Gentle Giant: Karn, Silver Golem is massive enough to kill giants and even some dragons...but is a pacifist who refuses to harm any other living thing. Mechanically, this is represented by his power becoming zero and his toughness becoming eight whenever he blocks or is blocked, essentially negating all but the most powerful opponents.
• Geo Effects:
  • Basic Lands enable you to play virtually all other spells in the game via drawing the magic used out of them, represented mechanically via "tapping".
  • Certain creatures of one color gain additional powers if you control lands of another. Wild Nacatl (a one Green mana 1/1 who gains +1/+1 for each mountain or plain you control) and Kird Ape (a one Red mana 1/2 who gains +1/+2 if you control a forest) are potent examples which were each banned for a time.
• Giant Enemy Crab: Several examples as large Blue creatures, including the eponymous Giant Crab. Wormfang Crab is another, being so large it can step over mountains. This represented mechanically by it being unblockable.
• Giant Eye of Doom: Evil Eye of Orms-by-Gore and Evil Eye of Urborg. When in play, non-"Eye" creatures you control cannot attack, but the former is virtually unblockable while the latter destroys any creatures who block it.
• Giant Flyer: Anything "big" with the Flying ability qualifies, but a few examples stand out:
  • Merit Lage, summoned from Dark Depths, is the largest flyer in the game to date at 20/20.
  • Emrakul, the Aeons Torn is a flying Eldritch Abomination. At 15/15 and with the ability to take an extra turn after it is played, it usually ends the game when it is played.
• Giant Foot of Stomping: Crush Underfoot gives any "giant" creature you control the ability to destroy a target creature in this fashion.
• Giant Spider:
  • The standard Green Giant Spider is a classic, having been printed in every set from the game's start until Magic 2013 and still holds the record for the longest continuous run of any non-basic land card. It is a 2/4 with Reach.
  • Goliath Spider is the largest spider in the game at 7/6.
  • Dragonlair Spider is a 5/6 which spawns Insect tokens. Those insects are not spawns of the spider; they're scavengers eating the bits of dragons that the spider discards.
• Glass Cannon:
  • Many combo decks, as well as many linearly-focused decks like the Affinity deck of the Mirrodin era, are incredibly powerful if the opponent has no way to interact with them, but vulnerable to being completely shut down by a single "hoser" card that can disrupt them in the proper way.
  • Lots of creatures have large power, but only one toughness. There's also a literal Glass Golem. (While not exactly one toughness, most direct damage cards deal 2 or more damage, and it's not uncommon to see a 1 mana creature have enough attack to take a Glass Golem down).
  • Force of Savagery Has a whopping 8 power but 0 toughness, meaning it dies as soon as it enters the battlefield unless it is buffed in some way (such as something like Leyline of Vitality.
• Glory Seeker: Is a card.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The Gods of Theros block only unleash their full power as long as you maintain sufficient "devotion" to that God's colors.
• Golden Snitch: Alternate win condition cards can be sprung without warning. Even decking can be considered this, if the winner was at 1 life and the loser was at a whole lot more. Many of these alternate wins are hilariously impractical and for all the time and resources you spend setting one up it's usually just easier to win the old-fashioned way, but Rule of Cool means people love these things anyway and will often bend over backwards to pull one off. A partial list of individual cards that create alternate win conditions can be seen below under Instant-Win Condition.
• Grave Robbing: Reanimating creatures from the graveyard in this fashion is a staple of Black. Animate Dead is the classic example, but there are many other means as well. Emphasis on the "robbing" part as well, as often, the creatures don't need to be from your own graveyard...
• The Great Exterminator: You can become this with the Exterminatus card from the Warhammer 40,000 set. Based on that series' act of so utterly destroying a habitable planet as to render it a "Dead World" (typically to prevent the spread of infection or heresy), it destroys all non-land permanents and even strips the "Indestructable" effect from opponent(s) cards to ensure they are destroyed as well.
• Griefer: The New Phyrexia expansion was intentionally designed with Griefing in mind, and contains many cards that are intended to make your opponent feel bad. For example, Shattered Angel takes something they normally feel happy about (getting more mana) and makes them feel bad about it (by making you gain life every time they play a land); there's a similar dynamic with cards like Consecrated Sphinx, Suture Priest, Invader Parasite, and so on.
  
  And while most sets have spells that kill or disable your opponent's stuff, in New Phyrexia they have added effects that rub your victory in their face, as with Numbing Dose, Victorious Destruction, Psychic Barrier, Glissa's Scorn, Enslave, Phyrexian Ingester, etc.
  
  Or, as development team member Tom LaPille puts it:
  Our vision of New Phyrexia—as created by Aaron Forsythe and Ken Nagle, the two players in R&D with the strongest griefing tendencies—is one of all-upside griefing that leaves your opponent not knowing what they're supposed to do and feeling a little bit violated. Phyrexia doesn't destroy all the creatures on the battlefield; it destroys all the creatures on the battlefield and rips some out of your library to boot. Phyrexia doesn't just exile a permanent. It disallows the opponent from casting every other copy.
• Grievous Harm with a Body: A staple ability of "giant" type creatures, which typically reads something like "sacrifice a creature: [This Card] deals damage equal to the sacrificed creature's power to target creature or player". The implication being that the giant either throws the other creature or uses them as a club. Stone Giant is a classic example, having been around since Alpha. Others include Brion Stoutarm and Bloodshot Cyclops.

H

• Hands Looking Wrong: The card art for Ghostly Flicker shows a soldier looking at his hands as his body becomes ghost-like.
• Harmless Freezing: Ice-related cards, such as Ice Cage and Frost Breath, tend to paralyze creatures without harming them, and the effect is usually temporary.
• Heads or Tails?: Magic has dozens of cards which require a coin flip, primarily in Red and with artifacts. However, these tend to be some of the least popular cards in given sets as players shy away from their inherent randomness. Mark Rosewater explains more here.
• Healing Potion: Life gaining effects frequently take the form of potions or elixirs. Examples include the Alabaster Potion and the Elixir of Vitality.
• Hellfire:
  • Hellfire itself is a card. It wipes out all non-black creatures (being a black spell, it's assumed that most if not all of your own creatures will be exempt) at a price.
  • Demonfire is in the same vein. If it kills a creature, that creature is rendered Deader than Dead.
• Herd-Hitting Attack:
  • Chaos Orb is a classic. After playing it, you flip it over in the air over the battlefield and destroy anything it lands on. It was so hated and abused (targeting the opponent's lands, their graveyard, their deck...) that it remains one of the few cards to be permabanned in all formats.
  • Cards which can spread out a small amount of damage in this vein are popular anti-Weenie measures. Serrated Arrows is an example which adds up to three -1/-1 counters to target creatures.
• Hero Killer: Tsabo Tavoc has both Protection from Legendary Creatures and an ability which allows her to destroy legendary creatures.
• Heroic Resolve: Hero's Resolve massively boosts a target creature's toughness.
• Heroic RRoD: Cards like Berserk, which make a creature stronger for one turn, then destroy it at the end of that turn.
• Highly Specific Counterplay: Magic has several pretty narrow counter cards. However, note that some of these are/were less narrow in specific environments. For instance, Melira's anti-Infect abilities were not Highly Specific in the card's home block Scars of Mirrodin, where Infect and poison counters were major mechanics.
  • City in a Bottle prevents all players from casting cards from the Arabian Nights expansion. Now that there are more than 200 non-Arabian Nights sets, this is Highly Specific. Similarly, Golgothian Sylex gets rid of all Antiquities cards (including itself), and Apocalypse Chime destroys all Homelands cards.
  • Legends brought us the cycle of basic landwalk hosers. Each of these enchantments turns off one type of basic landwalk and does nothing else. All of them are Highly Specific, as even the most common type only appears on 40 creatures, and only a handful of cards can grant landwalk. Landwalk as a whole has been obsoleted, so the basic landwalk hosers will only get more specific with time. However, even within this cycle, Great Wall stands out. It's the one that lets you block creatures with plainswalk, of which there are only four, only one of which was around when Great Wall was released (and it was weak).
  • Shelkin Brownie has the ability to remove "bands with other" abilities from creatures. At the time it was printed, there were literally zero creatures with printed "bands with other" abilities — only a creature that can create tokens with a "bands with other" ability, and a cycle of lands that can grant your Legendary creatures "bands with other legends". The only creature that was ever printed with the ability was a Joke Character card from the set Unhinged, and those Self-Parody cards aren't usable in any but the most casual formats.
  • Melira, Sylvok Outcast protects you from Infect and poison counters, which are mentioned by about 70 (out of over 20,000) cards.
  • Ertai's Trickery can only counter spells that were kicked. Less than 200 spells can be kicked, and even then, the opponent has to choose to kick them.
  • Hisoka's Defiance can only counter Spirit or Arcane spells. There are 93 Arcane spells and a few hundred Spirit spells — not as rare as some of the other examples, but still pretty specific.
  • Deicide is designed to counter Gods who are enchantment creatures, of which there are 22. At least it can also exile regular enchantments, even though it does less if you use it for that.
  • Goatnapper lets you control target Goat until the end of the turn. There were only two Goat creature cards at the time of its release. The block also introduced changeling, which makes a creature count as every creature type — including Goat. This made the card a bit more versatile, but it's still not much. Goat creatures and creatures with changeling are very rare.
  • Creatures with horsemanship can only be blocked by other creatures with the ability. There are only 36 of these, which effectively makes them Highly Specific Counters to each other.
• History Repeats: Literal example in the Time Spiral block, which brought back lots of old cards and themes as part of its "time" gimmick.
• Hit Points:
  • 20 for each player to start, though it can get very low, very high, and some cards even let the player keep going with 0 or less.
  • Creatures have these in the form of toughness, which resets each turn as long as they take less-than-fatal damage.
  • Planeswalkers have Loyalty points which work a lot like the player's hit points.
• Hive Mind:
  • The sliver race. Slivers don't just have Haste, their abilities generally read like "All Slivers have Haste"; there is at least one sliver for every ability with a name and even some slivers with no ability, they just exploit others'. Naturally there was also the Sliver Queen, to which succeeded the Sliver Overlord, to which succeeded the Hive Mind itself, with its newfound consciousness.
  • The Selesnya Conclave apparently also has a weak Hive Mind of some sorts. Hinted at by the Convoke mechanic.
  • The Hive Mind card causes players to share spells.
• Hold the Line: Hold the Line gives all block creatures a massive +7/+7 boost until the end of the turn.
• Hollywood Prehistory: The plane of Muraganda pulls heavily from this aesthetic with dinosaurs, classic cave men, and wooly mammals. Mechanically, it has stronger than usual connections to Red and Green mana. Muraganda Petroglyphs are cave art like symbols which grant +2/+2 to creatures without abilities.
• Holy Hand Grenade: A signature of white mana, along with Holy Is Not Safe. To note:
  • The creators went full blown Old Testament when it comes to white direct damage and mass removal. To note some specific examples:
    • Fire and Brimstone deals equal damage to both players.
    • Armageddon destroys all lands.
    • Wrath of God destroys all creatures.
  • Several white "spot removal" spells also qualify, such as Devouring Light (which exiles a target creature) and Smite (which destroys an attacking creature when it is blocked). The card art really drives the connection home.
• Homage:
  • The subjects of the Repentant Vampire and Gallantry cards from Odyssey are Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, respectively.
  • Time Warp has the flavor text "Let's do it again!"
  • The entirety of Theros, based as it is on Classical Mythology.
• Hot Potato: Measure of Wickedness must be handed off by the end of the controlling player's turn or else it costs them 8 life.
• HP to One:
  • Worldfire does this to each player, in addition to exiling their hands, permanents, and graveyards.
  • Master of Cruelties, if unblocked, has this effect on the opposing player.
  • Vraska's final ability does this to the opponent.
  • Near Death Experience turns this into a good thing to have happen to you. If you have one life point left during your Upkeep step, you automatically win.
• Human Sacrifice:
  • The five "Heralds" of Alara, who sacrifice three creatures to bring forth a great monster. Of course, Magic being what it it is, most of the sacrifices probably won't be strictly human...
  • The Dark Ascension set includes cards which get bonuses from specifically sacrificing humans. Examples include Ravenous Demon and Skirsdag Flayer.
• Humans Are Average: Enforced by the game designers. Humans tend to be the most basic race, appearing in all colors, having average power and toughness, having weaker or no inherent abilities while costing relatively less mana compared to similar "sized" non-human creatures, etc.
• Humans Are Special:
  • There are far more human Planeswalkers than any other race.
  • Humans are one of the very few races to exist in meaningful numbers across all five colors, giving them unparalleled diversity and adaptability.
• Humongous-Headed Hammer: Colossus Hammer is an equipment that gives a creature a massive +10/+10 buff, but is so heavy that it prevents the creature from flying. The artwork depicts a dwarf carrying a warhammer with a head alone that's bigger than his entire body.
• Humongous Mecha: "Colossus" creatures are typicaly artifact creatures taking the form of massive automatons. They usually have immense power and toughness, sometimes are indestructable, but have high mana costs which can frequently be reduced if you control a good number of other artifacts. Darksteel Colossus and Metalwork Colossus are notable examples.
• Hydra Problem: A staple of "big" Green mana creatures. Mechanically, this shows up in several ways such as the hydras becoming stronger by surviving damage, or splitting into smaller Hydra Tokens when killed.

I

• I Fight for the Strongest Side!: Ghazban Ogre switches to the control of the player with the most life at the start of every turn.
• I'm a Humanitarian:
  • Village Cannibals, a Human creature which gets a +1/+1 counter when another Human creature dies, "eating" their corpse.
  • Spike Cannibal, which eats all the other Spikes when it enters the battlefield.
• Immortal Breaker: Godsend, Elspeth's sword (and later spear), accomplishes this mechanically by exiling any creatures who block or are blocked by the equipped creature. Further, the opponent cannot play any copies of any creatures exiled in this fashion, either.
• Immortality Inducer:
  • Fountain of Youth is a cheap method to increase a player's life, and can be used repeatedly.
  • Elixir of Immortality works on two levels. First, it gives five life when tapped. Second, it allows you to shuffle your graveyard back into your deck, averting a loss by decking.
  • Eternity Vessel essentially gives an "immortality by stasis" version. It enters play with a number of charge counters equal to your life total. Whenever you play a land, you have the option of resetting your life total to the number of counters.
  • Platinum Emperion is an artifact creature which allows you to ignore life loss for as long as it is in play.
  • Platinum Angel prevents you from losing the game for as long as it is in play, with a loss by concession being the sole exceptions.
• Immunity Disability: The "Shroud" ability prevents permanents from being targeted. This is useful protection from enemy spells...but also prevents them from being buffed as well.
• Impossibly Cool Weapon: Worldslayer is a humongous sword which destroys all permanents on the battlefield whenever it used.
• Improbable Power Discrepancy: Countless examples with respect to a creature's stats being disproportionately high or low in relation to other cards. To note a few specific examples:
  • The simple Horseshoe Crab is a 1/3 creature. Compare that to the 1/1 Llanowar Elves (armed and trained elven warriors) or Yellow Scarves Cavalry (an entire cavalry regiment).
  • The 1/1 Akroan Crusader, essentially a generic soldier of Ancient Grome, would be destroyed by Sanctuary Cat, a 1/2 simple house cat.
  • Traveling Philosopher, an explicitly non-magical human advisor, has the same power and toughness as a Grizzly Bear.
• Improvised Armor: The eponymous card grants surprisingly effective protection.
• Improvised Weapon: Bludgeon Brawl allows your creatures to use any non-creature artifact as improvised weapons.
• Incendiary Exponent: Guise of Fire allows you to set a creature on fire, increasing its power at the cost of toughness.
• Increasingly Lethal Enemy:
  • Since as a game goes on players tend to have more and more mana, cards with activated abilities that only require mana can become problematic if the game drags on. A common example are shades, which can be pumped for mana.
  • Primordial Hydra has power and toughness that double every turn, and after it has been on the field long enough to get 10 power, it has trample, making it impossible to chump block.
  • Kalonian Hydra doubles the number of +1/+1 counters on it and every other creature you control whenever it attacks, potentially applying this trope to your entire board if it keeps attacking unhindered.
• Infernal Retaliation: Deadapult allows you to sacrifice a zombie creature in order to deal direct damage to a target creature or player. The card art implies that you do so by setting it on fire and sending it at them.
• Instant-Win Condition:
  • While there's plenty of combos and such that can win in one good punch, there's a fair amount of individual cards that provide you with alternate win conditions.
  • "Decking" is the original instant win condition. If a player must draw a card but has an empty library, they lose. Under most circumstances, this is harder to accomplish than simply getting your opponent's life to 0, so "decking" is a rare occurrence. However, there are plenty of ways to set up your deck to deliberately cause this for your opponent (a tactic generally known as "milling"). Cards such as Millstone, Halimar Excavator, Rise of the Eldrazi's Keening Stone, and any other Ally card are all useful unless your opponent has a card that allows them to shuffle their graveyard back into their hand. (Even if they do, the original Feldon's Cane has to be exiled from the game after use, and the fancy mythic rare Eldrazi that can do this for free are, well, mythic rare.)
• Intangibility:
  • Creatures with the "shadow" keyword. In function, they can only block and be blocked by other creatures with shadow.
  • Turn to Mist is a spell which causes a temporary version of this to an attacking creatures. The creature is exiled and returned to play on its controller's next turn.
• Intentionally Awkward Title:
  • The name of the game itself. You can either call it "Magic" (and risk confusion) or "Magic: The Gathering" (which is harder to say). The reason it's called "The Gathering" is for trademark reasons; the word Magic is too generic to be trademarked, and magic card tricks are pretty common, so the name was to apply to the Alpha/Beta/Unlimited sets. Richard had planned sequels named "Magic: Ice Age" (which was eventually released as Ice Age block) and "Magic: Menagerie" (which was released as Mirage block). However, the game was so popular that the company demanded an expansion pack much earlier than expected, resulting in Arabian Nights and, eventually, the "sets" we know and love today; the requirement that every card have identical back sides means that we're still stuck with "Magic: The Gathering" as the full name. (Not to mention a million angry fans would descend upon Wizards' offices in hordes if they ever changed it.)
  • The one time that there was an actual "gathering" in Magic canon in reference to the title was in the Scourge novel, where Karona gathered godlike figures representing the five colors of mana in a five-point circle reminiscent of the game's logo.
• Interface Screw:
  • The preview of the Rise of the Eldrazi set did this to your browser!
  • Reality Twist creates a version of this in-game by switching the colors of mana produced by lands, making it difficult or impossible to cast spells.
• Invincible Minor Minion: Darksteel Mutation turns a target creature into an indestructable 0/1 beetle. This can be used defensively to turn one of your creatures into an unkillable blocker, or offensively to turn an opponent's powerful creature into a harmless little bug.
• Invisibility:
  • Invisibility is a card itself, and in function, it enchants a creature so that it cannot be blocked by anything except for Walls.
  • Other already "invisible" creatures exist, such as Invisible Stalker, who come with the "hexproof" keyword for the same basic effect.
• Invisibility Cloak: Cloak of Invisibility is an enchantment which makes a target creature unblockable except by walls.
• Involuntary Shapeshifting: Numerous cards exist which turn creatures into other, usually less threatening, things. A classic example is Turn to Frog.
• I Shall Taunt You: Goblin Diplomats can be tapped to force all of your opponent's creatures to attack if possible. The implication (furthered by the card art) being that they essentially taunt them into doing so.

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