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Magic: The Gathering

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alt title(s): Magic The Gathering
The back of Magic's cards hasn't changed since its inception in 1993 (except for a close call with the "Arabian Nights" expansion) and is meant to represent the cover of a Spell Book.

Magic: The Gathering is a Collectible Card Game, produced in 1993 by Wizards Of The Coast (eventually the owners of that other great geek game, Dungeons And Dragons). It was the first Collectible Card Game, more-or-less the Genre Launch, and even today it is by far the most popular CCG.

At the core of each deck is a story, a clash between wizards—the players themselves, who are described in game parlance as "planeswalkers." These planeswalkers deploy a wide array of spells, creatures, artifacts, and enchantments as they vie for dominance across entire realms ("planes").

The basic play of the game is as follows: Each player starts with a deck of cards (referred to within the game as a "library"), and draws a hand of seven to begin with.

Each turn, the player whose turn it is:
  • Untaps all permanents they control.
  • Draws a card.
  • May play one land from their hand. In general, lands generate mana (though there are other sources of it, and some lands do other things instead).
  • May play any number of spells from their hand, as long as they have the mana to cast them.
  • May attack, once, with any number of creatures they control.
  • If they have more than seven cards in hand at end of turn: discard cards from hand until they are back down to seven.

The game can be won in any of the following ways:
  • Reducing your opponent's life total from 20 to 0 (by far the most common)
  • Emptying your opponent's library (known as "decking" him, or alternatively "milling" him, after Millstone, one of the earliest cards to support such a strategy); he will lose when he is unable to draw a card when required (which can be a Golden Snitch if he's at 200 life and you're at 1)
  • Through the use of a variety of cards which set up alternate win conditions (more about these later).

The cards in Magic are associated with one of five "colors", each with its own basic land (in parentheses):

The colors are arrayed in a "color pie." Each color has two allies, the colors next to it, and two enemies, the colors across from it. The color wheel follows the order seen above (white-blue-black-red-green). The mechanics of the cards often reflect these relationships; white, for example, has a number of creatures with "protection from black" or "protection from red", as well as creatures who are stronger or have extra abilities when associated with Green or Blue. Complicating this, though, are less-common multi-color cards, which mix colors and so bring the strengths of both, sometimes compounding or removing the individual colors' weaknesses. Two-, three- and all-five-color cards have been published, in varying combinations; while the obvious solution would be to have gold cards centering around a single color and its allies (Green, Red and White, for instance), even opposed colors have gold cards (red/blues, green/blacks, black/whites, etc).

Often, the colors are referred to by their initials: WUBRG. "U" is used for blue, since black has already taken "B". (Black is, after all, the selfish color.) The balance between them and resulting Faction Calculus is one of the defining features of the game.

"Tapping", where one turns a card to a 90-degree angle, represents the usage of the card's available resource (whether extracting mana from a land or attacking with a creature). Players untap all their permanents at the beginning of their turn. Wizards Of The Coast has issued a controversial patent on the "tapping" mechanic, and can legally challenge any card game which involves turning cards to a 90-degree angle to show that the card has been expended somehow.

Each card also has (at least) one of eight card types:
  • Lands are cards that represent your sources of mana, the magical energy you use to do just about everything in the game; it is almost impossible to design a deck without Lands in it (and can be just as difficult to play the deck if you don't draw enough of them during the game). Lands are "tapped" to produce mana, and/or may also have other abilities. Lands don't cost mana to play, but only one may be played per turn. The Boring But Practical foundation of Magic for nearly two decades, Lands have recently been put in the spotlight gameplay-wise and graphically fancified up by the Zendikar set.
    • Mana comes in the five colors; there is also colorless mana. most lands tap for a specific color or colors of mana, and each spell has specific requirements about what color or colors of mana can be used to pay for it. Colored mana can be used to pay for colorless costs, but not vice-versa.
  • Creatures are the most common type of card — one set was even entirely composed of creatures — they represent the magical army summoned by the player/planeswalker to do battle on their behalf. They have two numerical values associated with them, found in the bottom right corner of the card and separated by a slash: "power", the amount of damage they deal in combat, and "toughness", the amount of damage it takes to destroy them. As a rule, any damage a creature takes only lasts until end of turn, and it goes away if the creature is still alive at that point. This leaves it completely unhurt again at the start of the next turn; however, all damage taken over the same turn does add up. Creatures are the most popular aspect of Magic, and most decks use them; the few that don't are often notorious for that reason, and treated with some skepticism by newer players. (For the curious, the second-most-popular aspect of Magic, and the only other theme to get an entire set built around it, are the Gold multicolor cards.)
  • Artifacts and Enchantments are the other "permanent" cards, representing magic items and spells with lasting effects, respectively. Originally, Artifacts exclusively had colorless mana & activation costs, meaning that any deck could employ them, and provided only those features which Word Of God felt any color should have access to. For instance, there are a number of artifacts which can be tapped to produce various combinations of colored and colorless mana. Meanwhile, Enchantments were always colored and could thus be more powerful/specific. The rules have blurred recently, with increasingly powerful artifacts that feature colored mana costs. Both types of card might feature abilities that need to be "activated" (by paying mana for them) or abilities that are "always on." Artifacts are often also creatures, and these "Artifact Creatures" have the strengths (and weaknesses) of both card types.
  • Instants and Sorceries are the non-"permanent" spells, in that they provide single-use, on-the-spot effects and go immediately to the discard pile when they've done their task. The primary difference between the two is when they are allowed be played; instants may be cast at any time, while sorceries (along with creatures, enchantments, artifacts, an planewalkers) may only be cast during your own turn, while not in combat. There used to be two other categories of non-permanent spell that were similar to instants. An "Interrupt" was even faster than an instant, hence they could interrupt any other spell as it was being being cast. A "Mana Source" was Exactly What It Says On The Tin, which also had "faster than instant" speed, as you could cast a Mana Source spell while you were paying the cost for another spell that you'd already started casting. As part of a major overhaul of the game rules, both of them have since been folded into the Instant category.
  • Planeswalkers are a new card type, representing a temporary ally in the form of another powerful wizard — a planeswalker like yourself — whom you can call on for aid. They come into play with a particular amount of "loyalty" (read: Hit Points), and, on each of your turns, can use one of their abilities at the cost of gaining or losing loyalty. They can also be attacked like players, which also damages their loyalty. Planeswalker cards can basically be thought of as a Guest Star Party Member whose deck is represented by the character's on-card abilities.
  • Tribal is a special type found on non-creature cards (e.g. Tribal Instant or Tribal Enchantment) that have creature subtypes.

Cards often also have subtypes, which are types within types. Common subtypes include, but are not limited to:
  • Creature Types: Every creature has at least one creature type. Creature types can have a significant effect on gameplay, as many cards have effects that depend on creature types (e.g. "This card makes all Elves you control stronger. Voila, Our Elves Are Better"). Non-creature cards with the "Tribal" type can also have creature types, which can let them benefit from Enemy Summoner effects like "tap this Goblin to search your library for a (different) Goblin card and put it into your hand".
  • Planeswalkers have analogous but separate planeswalker types, which appear to be proper names; for example "Chandra Nalaar" and "Chandra Ablaze" are both "Planeswalker - Chandra". Only one planeswalker with the same subtype can be in play at any one time, since they represent a single character.
  • Auras: Auras are a special type of enchantment that are attached to a specific target, usually a permanent but possibly a player, a graveyard, etc. Unlike other enchantments, which stick around until they are explicitly removed from play, Auras automatically leave play when whatever they are attached to leaves play. Auras used to have a type of "Enchant ____" (e.g. "Enchant Creature", "Enchant Artifact"...) but the proliferation of complex types like "Enchant Dead Creature" prompted a naming generalization.

There are also supertypes, which can apply to any card type:
  • Basic: This supertype is only used for lands. The four-copy limit does not apply to basic lands, and basic lands are usually the only lands you need in your deck in order to play the game. Plains, Forest, Mountain, Swamp, and Island cards are basic lands, as are the snow-covered lands from Ice Age. Keep in mind that "Island", "Mountain", "Plains", "Forest", and "Swamp" are all subtypes, meaning that nonbasic land cards can have any of these types, without being considered a basic land.
  • Snow: The alternate "snow-covered" basic lands in the Ice Age block, as well as some other permanents from the Coldsnap block, are called "snow permanents." Many cards in the block are interested in snow permanents, specifically.
  • Legendary: Legendary cards depict figures that, in their own worlds, are spoken of in legends. They are usually more powerful than non-legendary cards, and only one legendary card of the same name can be in play at a time: if another comes into play, all are destroyed.
    • Legendary permanents used to be only creatures, of type "Legend", and lands ("Legendary Land"), all introduced in the Legends expansion set. The "Legend" type was later expanded to "Legendary <some other creature type(s)>" when creatures with multiple types appeared. "Legendary" later became a general-purpose supertype to allow for a few legendary artifacts and enchantments.
  • World: A defunct supertype, World only appears on some Enchantments (Enchant World) introduced before the Weatherlight block. They represented effects that are so game-changing that no more than one can be active at a time. If a new World Enchantment enters the battlefield, all other World Enchantments automatically leave play immediately.

Each player's deck represents the mind of the wizard, with cards representing spells in a Vancian Magic sort of way. As such, the deck being called your "Library" doesn't make too much sense... until you realize that the deck was supposed to represent a Spell Book, as suggested by the "front cover" motif on the back of the cards. The "graveyard" is where cards go when they're used up. Sorceries and instants go to the graveyard immediately after being cast; permanents go to the graveyard when destroyed or sacrificed. Some spells send cards directly to the graveyard from your hand or deck, while others can return cards from the graveyard to your hand or to play.

Cards are released in "blocks" of three sets, and each block has a story behind it. Most of them have involved affairs on Dominaria, the hub-world of the "core sets" of Magic cards, and specifically the life and times of the plainswalker Urza, his arch-nemesis Yawgmoth of Phyrexia, and the efforts he took to defend Dominaria from invasion by Phyrexian forces. In the meanwhile, the Kamigawa block takes place in a plane inspired by Japanese mythology, which is torn apart by a war between spirits, or kami, and mortals; the Ravnica block takes place in a world that has become a plane-wide metropolitan sprawl, where ten guilds struggle for supremacy during a magically-enforced truce known as the "Guildpact"; and the Mirrodin sets involved an artificial plane created by a planeswalker.

When 'Magic'' was first released, an "ante rule" was in the official books. This stated that players would add the top card of their deck at the start of the game to the "ante", and whoever won the game would keep the ante cards. Not wanting to turn games into Serious Business, most players just didn't follow the ante rule, and Wizards of the Coast made the smart decision to discontinue the rule early on; even the earliest officially sanctioned tournaments did not use ante, and as such banned the use of cards that manipulated the ante.

The complexity of the game comes from the fact that the cards themselves constantly alter the rules of the game: powering up creatures, drawing extra cards, disallowing attack or making it happen twice as often, and so on. The game's Golden Rule sums it up: when the cards and the rulebook contradict, the card takes precedence. Furthermore, many cards interact with each other in interesting (and sometimes unintentional) ways, leading a wide variety of strategies around which decks are built. Even worse, the game's dev team are constantly trying to tweak the game in new ways. (The "Tribal" keyword is a good example: Magic has "tutor" spells, which let you search your library for a single card of your choice, since day one. Most of these Tutors restrict you to a certain category of card: you can only fetch an Instant, or a Land, or an Elf, which is presumably a creature. ...Unless you have a non-creature spell has "Tribal - Elf" on it, because those count too.) Finally, the player is not required to restrict themselves to one color; there have been tournament-winning decks involving two, three, four, five or even no colors (all-artifact decks). Having said that, adding more colors to one's deck allows access to a greater variety of spells, but also makes you statistically less likely to, on any given turn, have spells cards in your hand that you can actually cast with the resources that are currently available to you.

The three basic deck types are:
  • Aggro, the Zerg Rush deck. These decks are carefully designed so that they draw a land to play every turn, cast as many creatures as they can every turn, and attack (successfully) every turn. The best designs in this strategy can secure a victory in four or five turns. Aggro's biggest flaw is that by turn six it has run out of steam. Red is the best at this strategy, followed by White, Green and Black; Blue can do it sometimes, but not often. Some of the most popular variants include:
    • Red Deck Wins (also named "Sligh" after the player who popularized it) seeks to overwhelm the opponent with fast, undercosted creatures and burn spells, using all the mana available to it every turn. It was one of the first decks to be designed with efficiency at the forefront: statistical analysis was used in choosing the combination of land and spells so that, no matter what your hand was, you could play a land every turn and spend every mana you controlled every turn. Its success made that sort of math necessary for successful tournament play; as such, it arguably represents the point when Magic first became Serious Business.
      • In modern times, "Blightning Aggro," named after its most prominent card, is a Red-Black deck that, while sharing some of Sligh's properties, tempers the loss of gas a typical aggro deck faces by forcing the opponent into card disadvantage as well (either through combat tricks or, well, Blightning.)
    • Though Sligh is the most famous version of aggro, "White Weenie" is the oldest and most popular. It swarms the opponent with cheap creatures with evasion abilities, often pumped up by enchantments. "Stompy" is a similar archetype built around Green rather than White. They are not nearly as fast as Sligh, but have a lot more staying power.
    • Suicide Black decks have a "win at all costs" philosophy, utilizing powerful creatures with big drawbacks and hoping they win before they self-destruct. Winning with 1 HP is the same as winning with 20, so why not use those 19 life as a resource? Suicide Black does exactly that. With a couple of life-stealing spells on hand, it can even succeed.
    • Black also has a variant called "Reanimator," which uses cheap spells that bring dead creatures back from the graveyard. This allows the player to get around the usual requirement of "hard-casting" their Awesome But Impractical 8-mana Bad Ass creature; he can instead find a way to put his creature card directly in his graveyard, with the express intention of bringing it into play for cheap via zombification. Players using the most successful Reaminator decks do this long before their opponent has 8 mana of his own for an effective defense. And, even if he does manage to kill your creature, well, you can rez it again! However, there are some ways to get rid of a creature forever.
  • Control, the Stone Wall deck. Control decks focus around limiting the opponent's options and gradually establishing a complete lockdown; the bulk of the deck involves control spells, whereas winning is left to a few (very large) creatures which can just stroll over and mangle the opponent at their leisure. Because Control decks are frustrating to play against, Wizards have been watering them down in recent years, and only "normal Control" sees much play anymore.
    • "Pure" Control is almost exclusively Blue, sometimes with help from White, and relies on "counterspells," which create a Phlebotinum Breakdown in a spell your opponent is in the process of casting; his spell fails and his mana is wasted. These are called "Permission" decks because your opponent feels like he only gets to do something when you let him. However, don't try to play this unless you're Genre Savvy to the Metagame; you need to know which of his spells to counter, which means knowing what his deck does.
    • Board Control decks are almost always Black and/or White, and rely primarily on destroying creatures using Kill Em All-style apocalypses, with the logic that that's how most decks win. They tend to be good at that particular job, but are slow and have a hard time dealing with big splashy spells or combo decks, making them almost the opposite of Blue Control. Many decks have successfully hybridized these strategies though.
    • Land Destruction destroys lands in play, on the theory that, if the opponent has no mana, he can't do anything. Most such cards are Red, though Black and Green have a few options as well. Again, this is not particularly fun—either you're winning, or he is, with neck-and-neck races unlikely—and Wizards has discouraged its popularity.
      • Prison decks accomplish the same thing but by different means. Instead of blowing up your opponent's land with spells like Stone Rain or Wildfire, Prison decks usually use artifacts with permanent or recurring effects, such as Winter Orb or Smokestack, to make their opponents' lands useless.
    • Discard is almost exclusively Black, because only Black has spells which force the opponent to discard cards from their hand. It strikes even lower on the food-chain than does Land Destruction; after all, if your opponent has no hand, he can do even less. Because the point of Discard is to take cards from your your opponent's hand and put them in the graveyard, it is essentially immune to Permission: even if he counters your discard spell, a card from his hand has still gone to his graveyard!
    • "Milling" or Library Destruction forces the opponent to discard cards from their deck. Though an artifact card, Millstone, gave the deck its name, Blue now has the ability to do it inherently. Remember, if ever a player has to draw a card from their library, but they can't because it's empty, they immediately lose. That's exactly how this deck seeks to win.
  • Combo, or the A Simple Plan deck. A combo deck is one that relies on a combination of cards, that, when used together, produce an extremely powerful and hopefully game-winning effect. Because Magic has so many different cards, all of which can be played in the same deck (assuming the tournament format you're playing hasn't restricted or banned some of them), combo decks go Beyond The Impossible in ways that other decks can't hope to match. On the other hand, combo decks often end up being Awesome But Impractical, because there are many ways to stop a combo from coming together: use Anti Magic on a critical component, or Kill It With Fire if it's a creature; or even Just Shoot Him while he's putting his IKEA Weaponry together. If you don't, then you deserve to be stuck with the Overly Long Fighting Animation your opponent puts on while firing his Wave Motion Gun.
    • Because there are Over Nine Thousand Magic cards, trying to list every type of combo that has ever been used in a deck would be futile. However, here are some of the most famous:
      • Magic's oldest combo was Channel and Fireball, both of which were in Magic's very first set. Channel lets you turn life into mana, and Fireball does damage equal to the amount of mana you spend. Together, they result in one really big Fireball and one dead opponent. Notably, you could do this on the first turn using the infamous Black Lotus, an absurdly rare and absurdly powerful card that also appeared in Magic's first set. (Today, Black Lotus is illegal in almost every tournament format; the only exception is Vintage, which restricts it to one copy per deck.)
      • Decks using the combo of Illusions of Grandeur and Donate once dominated the tournaments where it was legal. "Grandeur" gives its controller 20 life when it comes into play, but when it leaves play, its controller loses 20 life - and it will leave play, because it has an upkeep cost that gets larger every turn. So, cast it yourself, to gain the 20 life, and then use "Donate" to make your opponent its controller. You get to keep the 20 life you gained, and your opponent gets to worry about losing 20 life (and the game) when s/he runs out of mana.
      • Many combo decks have been built around cards with the "Storm" ability, especially Mind's Desire. When you play a spell with Storm, it creates an extra copy of itself for each spell played earlier in the turn. Each copy of "Mind's Desire" lets you play a random card from your deck for no mana, so if you play a bunch of spells and follow them with Mind's Desire, you get to play even more spells. If those spells happen to make mana or draw extra cards, this can get out of hand really, really quickly. When it's time to actually end the game, either Tendrils of Agony or Brain Freeze can do the job pretty well.

Additionally, there are two common hybrid types that draw on both Aggro and Control:
  • Aggro-Control is based around playing a few fast creatures while using control elements to protect your resources and take out your opponent's. For instance, the "U/G Madness" deck archetype (not to be confused with a webcomic named after it) uses Blue counterspells and removal to keep the board clear while Green creatures press the attack. This style is sometimes also referred to as "Countersliver", which replaced the Green creatures with a Swarm-style family of creatures called "slivers." (Slivers have the additional useful quality of making themselves stronger with every copy you play.) The Faeries archetype is the most recent example of a powerful aggro-control deck.
  • Midrange or Midgame is sort of like Aggro-Control's reciprocal: it plays defense for the first few turns, uses some control elements to stall the opponent while building up a lot of mana, and finally unleashes some huge creatures that dominate combat. White and/or Green are the best colors at this strategy. A popular deck of this archetype that was the other dominating deck of the Mirrodin era is the mighty Tooth and Nail archetype, which focuses on accelerating rapidly to nine mana to unleash the signature spell, but can also win simply by hard-casting its powerful suite of creatures, thus playing both combo and midrange.

Nowadays, it's rare to find a deck that focuses on only one strategy without wandering into another strategy's territory at least a little. Most Aggro decks have a few cards which help them control enemy threats, most Control decks keep creatures around just to be safe (or to finish off a now-helpless opponent), and most Combo decks use elements of one or both for defensive purposes while it puts its Wave Motion Gun together. This is especially true as the game gets older and cards get, on average, more powerful and flexible. When Avalanche Riders came out in '99, it was a big deal that it combined Stone Rain and Wild Colos into one card. Today, due to what's commonly called "power creep," such two-for-one cards are the norm, which helps blur the lines between deck archetypes.

The official Magic website is startlingly useful for a corporate website, with years upon years of articles about the game from a bevy of different perspectives; the game's designers and developers, the Tournament Players, the casual gamers, the people behind the game's story, and more. One should check out "Magic Academy" if one is new to the game and wants information beyond the scope of this wiki, or "Making Magic" if one wants a deeper understanding of how the game as we know it comes to be. As well, it contains Gatherer, a searchable database listing every Magic card that's ever been printed.

This game includes examples of:

  • A Planeswalker is You
  • Animate Dead: Animate Dead. Just so.
  • 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 and your opponent doesn't have a counterspell or some other cheap, efficient answer.
    • A lot of combos are like this: they'll win spectacularly, but only if you can play four different cards on the same turn that require three different colors and no counterspells from your opponent. Guess the odds on that actually happening.
    • Three words: Coin Flip Deck.
    • One word: GLEEMAX.
  • Bigger Is Better: personified by Timmies, who love their large creatures.
  • Breast Plate: Mostly averted, because the WOTC artists have specific "no chainmail bikinis" corporate guidelines.
  • Broken Base: Different people like and hate different things about Magic. They argue endlessly about it on the Internet.
  • Bribing Your Way To Victory: Magic is expensive. Prices for popular, in-print single cards routinely exceed $20. Some of the oldest and rarest out-of-print cards are worth hundreds if not THOUSANDS of dollars, even though they're not usable in most tournaments. But the ones they are usable in? Practically Game Breakers. Which is why they're expensive.
    • The most golden example of this trope is the Black Lotus from the earlier sets, a card so rare and valuable that denting its edge even slightly will provoke gasps of dismay.
  • Collectible Card Game
  • Contest Winner Cameo: Each winner of the Magic Invitational (the game's most exclusive tournament) got to design a card and appear in its artwork.
  • Crack Is Cheaper: Magic is nicknamed "Cardboard Crack" for a reason.
  • Critical Existence Failure: A common adage among players is that the only life point that matters is your last one. Some of the most broken cards in the game were created because the designers failed to recognise this.
  • Dangerous Forbidden Technique: Applies to a few combo decks, especially combos that are Cast From Hit Points. (Channel-Fireball is a good old-school example.) 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.
  • Development Gag
  • Discard And Draw: the Trope Namer.
  • Elvish Presley: Or rather Elvish Impersonators.
  • Everythings Better With Dinosaurs: Apparently there were Allosaurs around to be ridden during their Ice Age.
  • Evil Counterpart: All over the place; look at White Knight versus Black Knight, for example. The entire Shadowmoor set, as a dark mirror of the earlier Lorwyn set, features many opposite counterparts to specific cards from the Lorwyn block.
  • Exactly What It Says On The Tin: the enchantment cards Fear, Lifelink and Vigilance give the enchanted creature the abilities Fear, Lifelink and Vigilance respectively.
  • Expansion Pack: In a sense; each set is an expansion to the ever-widening game, though each block can be played independently as well.
  • Fan Speak: Magic players have created an extensive vocabulary of slang terms and technical jargon. It's gotten to the point where "Magic-ese" has nearly become a language of its own. This troper, whose foreign language experience is limited to four years of high school Spanish, was able to read and understand match coverage written in French.
    • Mise (a stroke of luck, such as drawing a card you need exactly when you need it) is one of these terms, as is tempo (being able to play better cards faster than your opponent), hard-cast (paying the mana cost of a spell instead of casting it some other way) and card advantage (having more cards than your opponent during a game, usually achieved by drawing more cards than your opponent does, or by killing many of your opponent's cards with only one of your own).
      • Some of these work their way into the game—for example, the text for kicker effects was recently changed from "If the kicker cost was paid..." to "If [card name] was kicked..."
    • And let's not even get into the Fan Nicknames for deck designs...
      • Dr. Teeth for Psychatog, 'Fish' for a combo-disrupting aggro-control hybrid that temporarily hit the big time in Vintage, And the thousands of names for the hundreds of varied Affinity decks, from Broodstar Blue Skies to the Black/White Whacko Jacko.
    • This wiki page lists 120 slang terms and 50 card or deck nicknames, if you're curious.
    • There's also Oracle-ese, which is the formal phrasing used for the rules. Older cards have all had their originally somewhat informal text officially updated in the online database, and custom card designers generally try to word their cards 'properly' by using the same style of writing.
  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink: With some 10,000 different cards, it's hard to think of any fantasy concepts that aren't represented.
    • Probably Deadlands-style Wild West Fantasy, but that's deliberate on the designers' part, since they don't think modern firearms would fit in Magic.
      • There are several instances of lasers, power saws, and near-cybernetics in the Invasion block, culminating in the mighty Legacy Weapon.
  • Follow The Leader: Inspired some of the later card games.
  • Freaky Friday: Some spells and abilities can inflict this effect, exchanging player's cards-in-hand, permanents-in-play, or even life totals, the last one being a popular trick in combo decks.
  • Fridge Brilliance: The purpose and potential of a number of cards are easily overlooked at a glance. A good example is 'Goatnapper' which allows you to gain control of an opponent's goat. A quick glance through the archives reveals two goats, neither in print, and both useless...until you remember the block it came out with contained the very useful changeling race, who count as every creature type...including goat.
  • Funny Animals: From the more conventional Nacatl (cat people) and Leonin (lion people) to the somewhat more creative Loxodon (elephant people) and Rhox (rhino people). So, in other words, Magic has them in droves.
  • Fur Bikini: One of the Elvish Ranger cards had this on the artwork. The fact that it was also a decent creature card guaranteed it some Tournament Play.
  • Game Breaker: Cards that are considered too powerful are placed on a banned list; each format, which has a different list of legal cards, also has a different list of banned cards, since a card that dominates one format may have several countermeasures in a larger group.
    • Vintage is a format that allows you to play almost every (tournament-legal) card; instead of banning, it restricts decks to one copy of a card. Thus, it's absurdly powerful, with lucky draws resulting in turn-one kills. Despite this, there are a few categories of card that are banned in Vintage for breaking the tournament format. These include ante cards, which make Magic more like gambling; manual dexterity cards, which involve flipping the physical card with your hands, and Shahrazad, which can stretch out a game by going into a game within the game.
    • Special mention must be given to a card called "Memory Jar", which holds the distinction of being the only card to be banned/restricted in all formats before the card was even put into circulation.
  • Gameplay And Story Segregation: Early sets tried to avert this to a degree with mechanics such as islandhome, which stopped sea-based creatures from attacking opponents who don't control an island, and causing them to cease to exist if their controller controls no islands. This was a rather clumsy and unpopular solution, and R&D's current policy is to ignore moments of Fridge Logic in favour of gameplay.
  • Glory Seeker
  • 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.
  • Gradual Grinder: Many, many decks use this method to win, much to the dismay of players forced to sit there and slowly get whittled.
  • Hair Raising Hare: the Vizzerdrix card.
  • The Hedonist
  • 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 also have these (in the form of toughness), but theirs reset each turn as long as they take less-than-fatal damage.
  • I Knew It: Usually rare due to the many rumormongers who try to spoil each upcoming set, but the "priceless treasures" promotion from the Zendikar set qualifies.
  • Joke Character: Variation: each block typically contains at least one entirely awful card, deliberately put there just for the people who love to try and make it work. The game is such that they usually can.
  • Lampshade Hanging: The Magic 2010 reprint of Lightning Bolt (A very popular card that hadn't seen print for a decade) has flavor text about a wizard who is surprised to have called upon such power as he hadn't seen since his youth.
  • Lethal Joke Character: Completely awful cards can turn into Game Breakers with later releases.
    • Case in point: Grindstone. It started as an oddball Millstone variant. Many years later, Wizards printed Painter's Servant, and a turn-one Vintage or turn-two Legacy combo-kill was born.
    • People have attempted to pull off the card Dark Depths for a long time with little results. In the most recently set, "Zendikar", Vampire Hexmagewas released and within weeks, Vintage and Legacy players discovered the ridiculously overpowered second turn combo in the opening hand (when combined with Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth) that netted a player an indestructible, flying 20/20 creature that could win the game for them the following turn. "Dark Depths", by the way, was a $3 dollar card before "Zendikar"'s release, and currently is sitting at a pretty $30 average.
    • As well, cards from the silly, silver-bordered sets Unglued and Unhinged aren't tournament-legal, but can be surprisingly effective at the kitchen table.
    • While goblins have always been useful cards, they are also one of the most consistently silly kind of cards. In addition, whereas most cards requiring a creature sacrifice have a disturbing flavor to them, cards requiring goblin sacrifice are often hilarious.
  • Made Of Indestructium: Darksteel, just Darksteel. Any card with Darksteel in it's name says right on it that it is outright indestructible. The only way to deal with these cards is to counter them before they get into play or remove them from the game.
    • Or you know, in the case of creatures, get the creature's toughness to zero.
    • Also, Spearbreaker Behemoth, which can also make other creatures indestructible.
    • And, finally, Progenitus: "Protection from everything." Even if you manage to send it to the graveyard, he will just get shuffled back into your opponents deck. Exile is the only permanent way to deal with him, and you'll have to use a spell that doesn't target him. Because he'll have protection from it. (Possibly, the opponent could play his own copy of Progenitus and, since they are both Legendary creatures, cause them to self-destruct... but does Progenitus have protection from state-based effects?)
      • In the case that was a real question - no, he doesn't. Protection only protects against Damage, Enchantment/Equipment, Blocking, and Targeting. (mnemonic: DEBT)
  • Metagame: Probably the best-known instance; decks that dominate one tournament can get curbstomped the next due to metagame changes.
    • Generally, Combo decks beat Aggro (completing the combo is faster), Aggro beats Control (raw damage is difficult to outrace), and Control beats Combo (too much disruption).
    • Sometimes this triangle reverses itself: the Aggro deck is faster than the Combo deck, the Control deck ruthlessly suppresses the Aggro deck's Zerg Rush offense, while the Combo deck overwhelms the Control deck with a slower threat that is much more difficult to stop.
  • Mind Rape: The flavor behind Discard spells suggests they do this to your opponent.
  • Mook Maker: plenty of cards. Just, a few examples.
  • Multiple Demographic Appeal: The minds behind Magic R&D have actually created three psychographic profiles — "Johnny", "Timmy", and "Spike" — representing three different demographics for the game. See Timmy, Johnny, and Spike and Timmy, Johnny and Spike Revisited. Simply put: Timmies love to play cool cards, Johnnies love to design cool decks, and Spikes love to win.
    • Vorthos and Melvin measure a second axis. Timmy, Johnny & Spike have different reasons to play. Vorthos & Melvin have different design appreciations: Vorthoses like cards with an emotional impact, whereas Melvins like cards with interesting structure and function. (As such, Vorthoses are most likely to be Timmies, but not always.)
    • Compare and contrast MMORPG players in Richard Bartle's classic article, 'Players Who Suit Muds'. Magic might as well be a massively-multiplayer game...
      • "Magic Online" exists and is practically the MMO version of Magic.
  • Non Elemental: Once all Artifacts, now merely many of them. Also some rare Red spells.
  • One For Sorrow Two For Joy: Thieving Magpie.
  • Over Nine Thousand: The number of unique Magic cards that have been printed. (No, literally. There's over 11,000.)
  • Painting The Fourth Wall: The players are Planeswalkers, immensely powerful wizards who summon monsters and cast spells in battle with other wizards. There are actual planeswalker cards, which are treated like another player, with their own life count and unique "spells".
  • Quad Damage: Most combat-oriented instants, especially Giant Growth and variants.
  • Rated M For Manly: They tried to do this by kicking Rebecca Guay, one of the artists who draws the portraits for the cards because her art was "too girly". After widespread criticism from fans they reinstated her. This was lampshaded in the unhinged joke set with the cards "Persecute Artist" and "Little Girl".
    • A fair portion of this comes from the fact that, despite Magic's Dungeons And Dragons roots, a lot of the art has shifted towards more of a sci-fi fantasy feel; Rebecca Guay, on the other hand, sticks very, very heavily to a true "high medieval fantasy" motif, with notable Celtic, Arthurian, and Norse themes in her work. In short, she pleases the Vorthos fans more than any other.
  • Rescued From The Scrappy Heap: Atog gained a Hatedom from being the most printed card other than basic lands for a few months after Revised, but by the time Mirage made atogs an iconic race, not only had the haters disappeared in a puff of apathy, but the people who liked the atogs' goofily-large toothy grins and power in decks built to feed them were more plentiful than ever.
    • Numerous 'useless' cards derided for having seemingly massive flaws were turned into Game Breakers as deckbuilding theory and strategies improved. Case in point: Necropotence, which taught players (and Inquest magazine) two important lessons: one card is worth more than one life point, and the only life point that actually matters is your last one. See also Lethal Joke Character, above.
    • It's worth keeping in mind that, when that Inquest article was written, everyone was running 4 Black Vises in their decks, which severely limited the viability of Necropotence.
  • Ret Con: The rules of Magic have undergone many changes, the largest having been the complete overhaul of the game's timing system with the release of Classic Sixth Edition. Cards are frequently given new official wordings ("errata") so that they continue to work properly after each change of rules.
    • Also, certain staple cards have been Nerfed by printing inferior versions. The reason this works is that a card's legality in tournament play depends on how recently it was printed. The aforementioned Lightning Bolt, one of Red's most iconic Kill It With Fire spells, deals 3 damage for 1 mana. From '98 to '09, Shock, which deals only 2 damage for 1 mana, had replaced it in all expansions (and thus most tournaments). Likewise, the 2-mana Counterspell is being phased out in favor of the 3-mana Cancel.
  • Ruined Forever: The occasional reaction to horribly overpowered blocks. Mirrodin and Urza's Combo Block come to mind. Especially Urza's, due to the Combo Winter that resulted.
    • Mark Rosewater, one of the long-time designers of Magic, admitted in one of his articles that Urza's Block was in fact the only block that got the entire Design Team dragged up to the top office and yelled at, collectively. Seems that they should've paid more attention to a card that can generate 'X mana equal to the number of Permanent Type X'...
    • Depending on who you talk to, Lorwyn can be considered to be the most recent of these blocks due to Faeries.
      • ...after the rotation, Jund Cascade is being played more than Faeries ever was. Perhaps two spells for the price of one (the Cascade mechanic) is a little too good...
      • The difference, however, is that Jund Cascade is only (seriously) played in Standard, and there isn't much to fight it; more veteran formats like Extended and Legacy find JC laughable; Faeries, however, are more viable, and there isn't a format that doesn't consider Tolarian Academy and Gaea's Cradle just broken.
  • Rule Of Cool: Both Johnnies and Timmies will play cards just because they do something cool, though for different reasons.
    • Also sometimes used to justify breaking the rules of card design. Form of the Dragon does a lot of things that, in terms of game mechanics, red spells don't normally do. It's okay, though, because the card TURNS YOU INTO A DRAGON!
  • Scapegoat Creator: Mark Rosewater is the head of Wizards R&D and is essentially the public face of Magic design and development. If something goes wrong, as it inevitably will, it's his fault. Even if he had nothing to do with it, it's always MaRo's fault. The game's inventor, Richard Garfield, seems to have escaped this.
  • Scrub: As always, in contrast to the Stop Having Fun Guys: any card that the Scrub's deck can't deal with is "cheap", and anyone using it is trying to ruin the game for everyone who wants to play real Magic. It's common for people seeking casual games in Magic Online to put something similar to the following in the description:
    No blue, no land destruction, no goblins, no elves, no nonbasic lands...
  • Serious Business: Tournament Play. This makes sense, because Wizards of the Coast provides some serious prize support. A single tournament can net the winner upwards of $40,000, and they've given away over $25 million in total cash prizes since they started running major tournaments. Several players have lifetime winnings in excess of $100,000, and that doesn't count minor tournaments or free plane trips to exotic foreign locales (though admittedly, you're there to play Magic, so perhaps "dreary foreign convention centre floors" would be more accurate). Of course, this trope often appears in full force even when there isn't a pile of cash at stake.
  • So Bad Its Good: A handful of cards, particularly from early sets such as Legends, are so thoroughly useless that they're regarded with a degree of affection by players.
  • Stop Having Fun Guys: A common breed that seemed to appear with the first official tournament. If you weren't playing to win at any cost and by strict tournament rules, even at the kitchen table, you were a scumbag out to ruin it for everyone who wants to play properly.
  • Strategy Guide: Very common online; as the game constantly changes, it's essential for even the most basic Tournament Play.
  • Ted Baxter: Scornful Egotist.
  • The Artifact: On the back of every Magic card that will ever be printed, players will find the word "Deckmaster." The Deckmaster brand ceased to exist in the mid '90s, but because every card has to be indistinguishable from the back, Wizards has to keep printing it.
  • The Scrappy: in terms of sets, this applies to the Homelands expansion. Almost all of the cards were too weak to see any play, even outside of tournaments, giving it a reputation as a set consisting of nothing but useless junk. Packs of Homelands cards were still available in stores for next-to-nothing long after it had "officially" gone out of print.
    • Fallen Empires, too, for about the same reasons. It was considerate enough not be jammed in the middle of the first semi-real block.
      • Fallen Empires' big problem was that all the good cards were common.
      • Fallen Empires was also massively over-printed, with almost six times as many cards printed as any expansion set before it (approximately 350 million cards, compared to the 62 million of the preceding set, The Dark) and almost as many as the then-current base set, Revised Edition (estimated at 500 million cards over its lifetime.)
    • After the overpowered Urza's Block, Mercadian Masques looked weak and underpowered in comparison.
    • Likewise, Kamigawa block, coming out hot on the heels of Mirrodin. It was followed by Ravnica to boot, a reasonably powerful set that's been a fan-favorite since printing (even the less powerful cards are considered fun).
    • Once you've got a good deck, any new set is potentially The Scrappy when it includes magic bullets against your deck. (This troper distinctly remembers Rebel and Rising Waters decks getting their asses kicked by Voice of All.)
  • That One Rule: "Banding" and "Bands With Other," were so complex that they are among only a stark few keywords that they simply stopped printing entirely.
    • There's also the rules about continuous effects and layers, which are relevant in every format and even more complicated.
  • There is No Kill like Overkill: Shivan Meteor and Wrath Of God.
  • They Changed It Now It Sucks: Too many times to count. The most recent example (as of mid-2009) are the rules changes introduced here, but the game has to tweak itself a little every year, and each year brings a plethora of complaining, along with the beeping of cash registers to drown them out.
    • Perhaps the biggest Internet Backdraft occurred in 2003, when they made some rather drastic changes to the cosmetic layout of the cards.
  • Tournament Play: Sponsored by the game's creators.
  • Unpleasable Fanbase: Every aspect of Magic has someone that complains loudly about it. Fans are for/against foil cards, faster/slower metagames, and more/less split cards/gold-bordered cards/legends/artifacts/whatever... If Wizards put hundred-dollar-bills in packs of Magic, people would complain about how they were folded.
    • Longtime head designer Mark Rosewater once assured his critics everywhere that he's still got "destroy Magic forever" on his to-do list. After all, he wouldn't want them to be unhappy just because they've always been wrong so far.
  • The Unreveal: Mark Rosewater loves to do this. For example, he once replaced most of the words in a spoiler laden paragraph with the word "goblin".
    Goblin of the Goblins is going to be a goblin built around the Goblin goblins, all of which have no goblin and are goblin. For example, there are two Goblins at goblin, the goblin of which is 7/7. All of the Goblins have a new goblin called goblin. Goblins with goblin have a goblin; whenever a goblin with goblin goblins, the goblin goblin must goblin that many goblins. The Goblins are very goblin but there are goblins that can create 0/1 goblins called Goblin Goblin that can be goblin to goblin one goblin goblin to your goblin goblin and will help you be able to goblin the Goblins. In addition, the goblin has a new goblin called goblin goblin. You may spend goblin on goblin with goblin goblin to improve their goblins and goblins. This Limited goblin is much goblin than the one in Goblin.
  • Urban Legend Of Zelda: Throat Wolf, a creature that supposedly had "firstest strike". This was before cardlists were available...
  • Zerg Rush: As mentioned above, aggro decks, especially "weenie" decks. Most (in)famous are Goblins (the Little Red Men), White Weenie (soldiers, knights, and birds of prey), and the Mirrodin block's Ravager Affinity (a rapid-fire Game Breaker-laden deck which can inflict sudden death very rapidly on a good opening hand).

This game's storyline includes examples of:

  • Abnormal Ammo: Akki Coalflinger, Fodder Launch, Mogg Cannon... the examples are endless (and mostly goblin-based).
  • Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Those in the city-world of Ravnica.
  • Adaptation Decay: The mid-90s comics.
  • After The End: Several times. There's the downfall of the Thran, the sylex blast that started the Ice Age, the Apocalypse set, the coming of Karona, and finally, Time Spiral block, which is the closest to the trope.
  • A God Am I: Several of them. Some are just delusional about their supposed godhood, and some are very much not delusional about their actual godhood...and are total jerks about it.
    • Lets not forget Planeswalkers, who in terms of magical ability tend to fall roughly somewhere between Merlin and Jesus God. Many of the oldest black-aligned planeswalkers, for example, end up becoming eldritch abominations.
      • Nicol Bolas. Not only the oldest and most powerful planeswalker but also one of the most cunning and intelligent and, on top of it all, a freaking enormous DRAGON.
  • A Handful for an Eye: Blinding Powder
  • AI Is A Crapshoot: Memnarch, a golem left behind by the creator of Mirrodin to guard the plane, goes insane and tries to become a planeswalker itself.
  • Alien Sky: Mirrodin has four moons — which shine, and thus are also interchangably called suns. There's no indication that it has any normal suns, either...
    • Also, Dominaria has two moons (although one of them got blown up), and Esper's night sky is covered in a grid, making it appears like a huge star chart.
  • Alternative Calendar
  • Alternate Universe: Planar Chaos, which shows a hundred alternate Dominarias, such as one where bad guy Braids, Cabal Minion becomes helpful Braids, Conjurer Adept. (Some of these cards were genuine "What If?" questions, others were "This card is functionally identical to a classic of a different color, and given the colors' general traits should/could have been printed in this color from the start."
  • An Ice Person: Heidar, Rimewind Master
  • Another Dimension: The multiverse.
  • Apocalypse How: Spirit patrons raging over the kidnapping of their own time? A merging of five mini-planes? An unraveling of the strands of time? How about the world changing every fifty or so years to a "dark" version?
  • Badass: Toshi Umezawa, of Kamigawa block; one of the only black-aligned protagonist in the history of Magic. (This block also featured a white-aligned antagonist; this is perhaps made more understandable still when you consider Kamigawa is based loosely on the Japanese Shinto religion, and East Asian cultures tend to view white as the color of death.)
    • Except, you know, Michiko is white. And also the hero of Kamigawa.
    • Dakkon Blackblade being one of the others. The comics in particular focused on his exploits.
  • Badass Universe: Zendikar. See Everything Trying To Kill You, below. Wimpy planeswalkers strongly advised to keep out.
  • Bee People: Slivers behave like a hive species, led by the Sliver Queen. Also, the faeries of Lorwyn/Shadowmoor block are all born from Oona, Queen of the Fae.
  • Big Bad: The mechanical demon-god Yawgmoth in pretty much all of the storylines from Antiquities to the end of the Weatherlight saga was arguably the most powerful being in The Multiverse. Much later, during the Alara storyline, the elder dragon Nicol Bolas (a returning character from the game's early days) stepped in as the foremost threat to the Multiverse's stability. There have been a few other, smaller Big Bads in between, including the vampire overlord Baron Sengir in Homelands, the golem wizard Memnarch in Mirrodin, and the corrupt human king Daimyo Konda in Kamigawa.
  • Body Horror: What many mage-created Chimeras and Phryexians endure.
  • Cain And Abel: Urza and Mishra
  • The Captain: Gerrard Capashen; although Sisay was the actual skipper of the Weatherlight, Gerrard filled the trope.
  • Chekhovs Gun: the Ravnica block introduced a race of creatures called the Nephilim. Head Magic Designer Mark Rosewater is on record as saying that these beings will be important in a future expansion.
  • The Chessmaster: Urza. The man spent 5,000 years influencing global politics in anticipation of a demonic invasion. In the end, Yawgmoth did him in, but he managed to save the world anyway.
  • Cosmic Horror: Yawgmoth is darn close.
    • And of course, there's also a card actually named Cosmic Horror.
    • There's also Dark Depths which releases Marit-Lage when the ice finally melts. The art is reminiscent of Cthulhu lurkiing underneath the sea.
  • Crowning Moment Of Awesome: When Nicol Bolas fights Leshrac in Future Sight
  • Dark Is Not Evil / Light Is Not Good / Yin Yang Bomb: All five colors of mana have had a hero and a villain (though green has never had a pure villain):
    • White: Many heroes; Konda in the Kamigawa Block as a villain.
    • Blue: Ertai, both as hero and villan. Memnarch and Heidar are pure blue villains, as is Ambassador Laquatus. The protagonist Teferi is associated with blue, but because he eventually becomes a planeswalker he may not count as having a color. Barrin is another blue heroic character.
      • Having been printed as a blue card, Teferi definately counts as blue.
    • Black: Toshiro Umezawa is an antihero, but pure black. Chainer is something of an antihero to start with, but is corrupted. Listing the villains would take too long. Yawgmoth is probably the most prominent.
    • Red: Starke and Tahngarth as heroes; Maraxus as a villain. Kamahl is a red hero; he eventually shifts to green.
    • Green: The Elves of Lorwyn are at least partially green, and the villains of the plane. (They turn into heroes when it turns into Shadowmoor, aligned with white.) For heroes we've got Kamahl, for starters; ironically, he started life as a Red Blood Knight before Character Development set in.
  • Death World: Zendikar is looking to be this.
    • Also, Grixis, quite literally, due to the abundance of black mana (and the absence of green) making more life impossible but more death (and undeath) the only option.
  • The Dragon: Gix to Yawgmoth, Greven il-Vec to Volrath and later Crovax, Ertai and Tsabo Tavoc to Crovax, Phage (before the Patriarch died and she became the Big Bad), Malil to Memnarch, Malfegor to Nicol Bolas.
  • Easter Egg: Many, many different cards, but especially in comedy sets like Unglued and nostalgia sets like Time Spiral. See also Alternate Universe, above.
  • The Emperor: Daimyo Konda of Kamigawa.
  • The End Of The World As We Know It: A particularly common trope.
  • Enemy To All Living Things: Phage the Untouchable. And we do mean all. Any organic material she touches instantly rots away. She wears only silk clothing and sleeps on a bed of stone.
  • Everything Trying To Kill You: Jund (from Shards of Alara) and Kamigawa. Kamigawa is because it's a battle fought between humans and kami, who, due to the nature of Shinto, live in everything. Jund, on the other hand, is just overrun with deadly creatures of all kinds.
    • and taken Up To Eleven in Zendikar, where the "Roil" dramatically changes the landscape every few months, weird gravity wells cause floating islands of grassy plain that can drop at any moment, and the creatures that are not killed by the landscape are as hard as your average video game mid-boss.
  • Evil Sorcerer: Lim-Dul, Heidar of Rimewind, Lord Dralnu, Memnarch, the Cabal Patriarch. Zur the Enchanter was definitely dangerous, but only self-absorbed, not outright evil.
    • Lesser Evil Sorcs include the Disciple of the Vault, one of the Game Breaker clerics who makes the Ravager Affinity deck into a fast-killing machine.
  • Evilutionary Biologist: Yawgmoth while he was mortal and Momir Vig (although he's a Well Intentioned Extremist).
  • Foregone Conclusion: The storyline of Coldsnap, released years after Ice Age and Alliances to give that block a "proper" block format (and conclusion). The press release teaser info explicitly said, "We know the Ice Age ended... but how?"
  • Gentle Giant: Karn, a huge golem made of pure silver who dedicated himself to pacifism. And not technical pacifism, either. Many green creatures can also be considered gentle unless you offend them or their controllers.
  • Harmony Versus Discipline: The philosophy behind the conflict that pits Red/Green against Blue.
  • Hollywood Cyborg: Phyrexians, extra-dimensional, bio-mechanical demons whose machine parts are grafted onto them upon birth.
    • Esper, one of the Shards of Alara, has this, as well. It's less grotesque than the Phyrexians, and is basically a way to transcend nature.
  • Holy Hand Grenade: White sometimes seems more like the Old Testament than anything else.
  • Hybrid Monster: Quite a few; most are of the Undead variety, but there are some like mutant elves.
    • (And then there's literal hybrid cards...)
  • It Got Worse: The vast majority of storylines.
  • Jidai Geki/Medieval Japan: A combination of these, plus elements of traditional Japanese fantasy and Shinto are the basis of the Kamigawa block.
  • Les Collaborateurs: Nicol Bolas's many minions in the Alara block surreptitiously working to spread paranoia and anarchy throughout their worlds — the xenophobic Knights of the Skyward Eye, expansionist Seekers of Carmot, corrupt merchant Gwafa Hazid, and barbarian shaman Rakka Mar.
  • Loads And Loads Of Characters: Literally thousands, made more confusing by the fact that many of them have the same or similar names.
  • Luke I Am Your Father: Volrath was Gerrard's adoptive brother, Vuel. This was never a huge secret, though.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Yawgmoth, whose original, human incarnation is best described as "Hitler, but sexy."
    • Nicol Bolas, the oldest known planeswalker and the last Elder Dragon, is one of these. He's over 30,000 years old, has ruled empires, and is the Big Bad in more than one story.
  • The Man Behind The Man: Yawgmoth behind Volrath, and in general Phyrexia for Rath.
  • Mechanical Lifeforms: The greater part of Mirrodin block falls under this, as does the world of Esper from Shards of Alara and the metal demons of Phyrexia.
    • And various artifact creatures.
  • Meta Guy: Commodore Guff. Didn't work out.
  • Mirror Universe: Lorwyn becomes its own Mirror Universe in the Shadowmoor block.
    • And there is an actual card called Mirror Universe, which allows you to swap Hit Point totals with your opponent.
  • Nature Hero: Various green-aligned characters, but especially Kamahl post-transformation.
  • Negative Mana Wedgie: Either the cause of, or caused by, a large amount of the plot.
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Mistform Ultimus which has every creature type, such as Ninja, Pirate, Zombie, Construct, Mutant, Ninja, and Turtle. Years later, Lorwyn block introduced nineteen more creatures like this, as well as several non-creature cards.
  • Obake: Kamigawa has oni and kitsune; indeed, the entire Kamigawa block is one big Obake-fest, its setting heavily inspired by Japanese folklore and mythology.
  • Our Elves Are Better: There are many different elf tribes in the setting, but the recent Lorwyn elves are a sharp departure from the previously base-green elves into green/black to show their arrogant destructiveness. (Shadowmoor flipped it so they became the plane's only protagonists, with even white turning paranoid, insular, and Hive Mind-ish.)
    • In a nutshell, if you aren't as beautiful as them, you don't deserve to live. And nobody's as beautiful as them. And some of Lorwyn's inhabitants are just deliberately being ugly at them. They call these unfortunate souls "eyeblights," and they actively hunt them down and kill them.
    • In Magic's debut set, elves were portrayed as feral and vicious, in startling contrast to the conventional concept (although those showed up in most other sets).
    • Also, the Elves of Deep Shadow of the classic set The Dark, later reprinted as part of the Golgari guild in Ravnica: City of Guilds, were green but produced black mana instead of green when tapped. (And dealt damage to their controller each time they did. Happy treehugging elves these are not.)
  • Our Monsters Are Different: Very, very common, especially in later blocks.
    • The Lorwyn block is a smorgasboard of this trope, featuring philosopher giants, Nazi elves, badass halflings, and monstrous-looking faeries.
    • The Shadowmoor block, a Bizarro Lorwyn, carries on with this trope, as the kithkin/halflings become paranoid castle-dwellers and merfolk become murderous fish-faced monsters.
    • Most of the races in Shadowmoor became personifications of their worst qualities, the giants become so lazy and mindless that they are mistaken for landmass, the goblins have degenerated from being impish tricksters to being wild animals, the treefolk have become utterly apathetic to the other races, and the cinders lost all of their passion and fire, and now want to make all the other races suffer like they do. The two exceptions are the elves, who have been humbled into nobility by being hunted and persecuted, and the faeries, who are protected by Oona's magic.
  • Plucky Comic Relief: The goblins almost always fill this role—though they're also usually Screaming Warriors.
  • Pooled Funds: Greed (all versions).
  • Put On A Bus: The Time Spiral sets brought a major shift in the game's fiction. Many planeswalkers surrendered their powers or their lives in order to stop space-time from falling apart, thanks to all the cataclysms they themselves were often responsible for. The new batch of Planeswalkers are considerably less powerful then the nigh-omnipotent beings of the previous generation (which the game's players still represent).
  • Reasonable Authority Figure: Sidar Jabari from the Mirage storyline, King Darien from the Ice Age saga, Commander Eesha in the Odyssey arc (but only in comparison to her two predecessors).
  • Retcon: In addition to the game changes mentioned above, there have been changes to the game's story and background:
    • Summoned creatures were originally presented as being actual creatures from another universe, pulled across and enslaved by the caster; now, they're essentially magical copies.
    • The story of Coldsnap, essentially an entire set retconned onto the end of Ice Age block.
    • Then there's the "Revision". In the early days of Magic, the novels and comics where done by outside companies. Eventually (around the time of the Weatherlight Saga), Wizards of the Coast decided to publish their own books. They took this point to clear up and change some aspects of the canon, and said that, henceforth, the pre-revision books would be canon unless a post-revision book contradicted them.
  • Royally Screwed Up: Lord Konda, the mad king of Kamigawa. To gain immortality, he abducts an entity from the Spirit World, instigating a devastating war between mortals and spirits.
  • Squishy Wizard: the "player character", such as it is. You're an all-powerful planeswalker who can teleport to other realities and summon vast armies of creatures and spells to do your bidding... but if a monster hits you, you can't hit it back by yourself.
  • Spell Book: The cards themselves represent pages in your Spell Book. Certain artifacts, such as Jalum Tome, give you access to more spells (that is, let you draw more cards) each turn.
    • And the actual card Spellbook removes the 7-card limit on your hand, letting you hold as many cards as you can... hold.
  • Start Of Darkness: The Thran, for Yawgmoth.
  • Squee: But not that kind.
  • Sugar Apocalypse: Arguably the Great Aurora that changed the fairy-tale land of Lorwyn into the dark, bleak Shadowmoor.
  • Well-Intentioned Extremist: Heidar, Rimewind Master; Momir Vig, visionary Evilutionary Biologist.
  • Whatevermancy: Magic has more than its share of -mancers, both of the classical divination kind and the modern "control whatever it is" kind (some, like Retromancer, are a bit shaky on what their name actually is supposed to mean). Matt Cavotta gives us the scoop on Magic's -mancers here.
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity: Many Planeswalkers go mad when they first awaken to their true potential. In more mortal matters, many mages in Dominaria's history have gone on rampages while drunk on their newly-developed creations or power sources.
  • The World Is Always Doomed: Not always, but surprisingly often, and more so since the story got into the habit of moving on to a new world as soon as the current one stops being doomed.
  • World Half Empty:
    • Shadowmoor. It's the Mirror Universe of Lorwyn, and where that world represented a fairytale land, Shadowmoor represents the dark side of those tales. The fiery Flamekin have guttered into Cinders, the helpful Merfolk have become cruel pirates, and the tight-knit families of the Kithkin have become insular and xenophobic.
    • Grixis, one of the Shards of Alara, is a dark world, filled with undead and demons and slowly falling apart. Most of the magic in the plane is dependent on draining the life, blood, and memories from the living, and there isn't quite enough left... Arguably, all the Shards are this, as two of the colors of magic are gone from each, but Grixis is the most dystopian.
    • Rath, a plane created by Phyrexia to eventually be superimposed on Dominaria. The World Half Empty aspect was highlighted in Nemesis.
    • There's also an obscure factoid that one of the 1001 Rabiahs is just as bad as Phyrexia.
  • Zombie Apocalypse: Grixis again. Given that there are a good chunk of zombies on the plane, and everything is going to hell, it certainly fits the end trope. A bit more Romero in that the zombies aren't the source of the plane being messed up, but that magic is out of balance so that Black Magic overtakes everything and regrowth is very hard no longer an option.

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