Magic The Gathering / Flavor And Story Tropes P To Z

A to G — H to O — P to Z

P

• Parental Bonus: For a very brief time, Goblin Piker was going to be reprinted with the following flavor text: "Pike her? I barely even know her!"
• Passion Is Evil: In its early days, the game seemed to favour the wise, intellectual Blue colour over the passionate and excessively aggressive Red. Now, while Red still suffers from depictions as a bully (since the cards are essentially abstractions of magical duelling and the fuzzier emotions are tough to express mechanically in a non-violent way), it definitely benefits far often more from the portrayal of things like empathy and loyalty, while Blue has its more sociopathic and aloof characteristics emphasised.
• Peculiar Penguin: The Curse of the Fire Penguin card from the Unhinged set plays on the fact it is unusual for a penguin to be connected with fire.
• Perpetual Storm: Immersturm, on the plane of Valla, whose name translates into "always storm." Its magical storms cause its inhabitants to continuously wage war with one another.
  Listen to the roar! Feel the thunder! The Immersturm shouts its approval with every bolt of lightning!" (from the card Warstorm Surge.)
• Phlebotinum-Induced Steampunk: The plane of Kaladesh focuses on an industrial revolution caused by the harvesting of aether (essentially the essence of the cosmos itself, made workable thanks to the multiverse-shaking event known as the Mending) and is by Word of God the franchise's take on the steampunk genre, with rogue inventors, government oppression, and airships, albeit eschewing the traditional Victorian setting, clunkiness, and grime for a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of India, technology that values art as much as it does function, and a distinct touch of Solar Punk (thanks to aether being zero-emissions and ethically-sourceable).
• Physical Hell: Phyrexia was this. It was even arranged in a series of concentric spheres that Shout-Out the circles of Hell seen in Dante's Inferno.
• Pipe Maze: The third sphere of Phyrexia is described as an "impenetrable tangle of metal pipes"◊.
• Poison Is Evil: Deathtouch creatures (frequently depicted as poisonous creatures or assassins) and effects that give Poison counters to players both appear most often in black and green, and as such tend to be associated with unscrupulous people or sinister, dangerous creatures. Meanwhile, Pharika, a gorgon-like goddess in the Theros block, averts this by being a patron of healers and medicine alongside being a Poisonous Person — not that you'd want to get on her bad side regardless. Fittingly, she is the black/green god on Theros.
• Pooled Funds: Greed tends to depict people slouching on top of vast piles of golden coins.
• Poor Communication Kills: Millennia old Planeswalkers like Sorin have a hard time explaining things to their peers. In Sorin's case in particular, it caused Nissa (who distrusted him to start with because he was a vampire) to break the seal on the Eldrazi, and Nahiri to fight him until he sealed her in the Helvault for a thousand years, which came back to bite him when she got free and found the Eldrazi free on Zendikar.
• Power Born of Madness: The main idea of hellbent, dredge, and Madness decks, all of which allow you to gain some bonus from negatively affecting your current state of mind.
• Power Copy: Leshrac attempts this in Future Sight, using the Mask of Night's Reach to steal Jeska's dormant ability to corrupt anything she touches and Nicol Bolas's ability to cause madness with a touch. An epic duel with Nicol Bolas results.
• Power-Upgrading Deformation: A lot of Blue, Red and Black cards will mutate, disfigure or change creatures to make them stronger.
• Power of the Void:
  • The Eldrazi run on this. In addition to many of their cards directly referencing, "the void," one of their keyword mechanics is, "Devoid." Devoid marks a spell as colorless, even if it mechanically requires colored Mana, indicating the alienness of the Eldrazi and their existence outside the normal order of the universe.
  • Getting sucked into a Door to Nothingness is an automatic loss condition.
• Portal Network: During the New Phyrexian Invasion of the Multiverse, the Realmbreaker (the compleated sapling of the World Tree of Kaldheim) was used to open these throughout the Multiverse in the form of Omenpaths, allowing the Phyrexians to blitz no less than 36 different Planes simultaneously. After the Invasion, with the deaths of all five Praetors, and the fact that most Planeswalkers lost their ability to Planeswalk during the Great Pruning, the remaining Omenpaths now allow for interdimensional travel for all. The only catch is that unlike with Planeswalking, using an Omenpath allows only for interdimensional travel between two different Planes.
• Portal Statue Pairs: The card Guardians of Meletis depicts two giant statues of a past ruling couple flanking the river leading to the city they ruled.
• Prayer of Malice: As the leader of the theocratical white Phyrexian faction, Elesh Norn delivers friendly sermons like "May our blessings sever the tongues of the forsaken".
• Prestigious Player Title: You are a "Planeswalker".
• Primal Polymorphs: The Changelings of Lorwyn have no true society or culture of their own. Instead, they roam freely around the world, reflexively taking on the shapes and living the lives of the creatures that they encounter.
  Today it flies with the flock. Tomorrow it may wake to find them gone, its body in an unfamiliar form. —
• Psychic Link: Hive Mind, Psychic Possession, and Shared Fate, among others.
• Psycho Electric Eel: Electric Eel, which shocks you when you activate its pump ability.
• Punny Name: Yule Ooze, Nightmare. Also, Raiyuu, Storm's Edge. His name means "Playful Thunder," but it's also a play on the common Western mispronunciation of "Ryu."
• Put on a Bus:
  • After becoming a planeswalker, Jaya Ballard departs Dominaria to explore the Multiverse. She ends up missing the Phyrexian Invasion and the events of Time Spiral.
  • Karn in Planar Chaos. While sealing the time rift over Tolaria, he senses a corruption in himself taking hold and flees to an undisclosed location. He doesn't reappear in the storyline for another four years.
  • Likewise, Nicol Bolas in Future Sight. He was, apparently, too awesome to kill off like everyone else, so instead he just left, giving him the opportunity to come back again later. (Which, in Alara block, he did.)
  • After losing his spark during the events of Time Spiral block, Teferi remains on Dominaria and does not reappear in the storyline for eleven years when the plane is revisited.
• Pyrrhic Victory:
  • Most of Urza's various battles against Phyrexia.
    • The sylex blast at the end of the Brothers' War prevented Gix from gaining a foothold in Dominaria and sealed Dominaria away from the rest of the multiverse, but it also leveled most of the Terisian continent and completely vaporized Argoth.
    • The battle for Serra's Realm. Urza's forces defeat the Phyrexians, but the fighting causes the entire plane to collapse.
    • Basically the whole campaign in the Invasion saga. The coalition wins, but Dominaria becomes a postapocalyptic wasteland.
  • The Thran managed to defeat the Phyrexians, but afterwards, their civilization was too weak to survive, and collapsed.
  • In the Time Spiral block, every time Teferi's team manages to close a time rift, they stabilize that area at the cost of a planeswalker's power and/or life.
  • The conclusion of the Amonkhet block sees the survivors freed from servitude to Nicol Bolas. Unforunately, the magic barrier that kept the city of Nactamun as the last verdant place on a world of endless deserts has been destroyed, and four of the five gods are dead.
  • Pyrric Revival does this against death.
  • Barren Glory turns it into a win condition.

R

• Rainbow Motif: Foil cards have such a gradient alongside their respective color schemes.
• Rat Men: The Nezumi from the Kamigawa block, a race of Black mana-aligned rat man ninjas. They usually live in swamps or on the outskirts of human cities, which they often raid, and some of their shamans can summon and control swarms of insects, tying into this trope's association with vermin.
• "Ray of Hope" Ending: The Amonkhet block ends on this note. Nicol Bolas reveals his true colors to the people worshipping him as God-Pharaoh, activating his army of Eternals and using them to massacre both gods and men, all while handily defeating the Gatewatch and breaking their spirits. However, the survivors of Naktamun are able to escape into Amonkhet's desert, and despite the dangers ahead they have the guidance of Hazoret (the Sole Survivor of Amonkhet's gods) and Samut (a Planeswalker whose spark ignited at the very peak of the Hours). Despite the severe tragedy caused by Bolas' machinations, the denizens of Amonkhet are once again able to decide their own fate, no longer enthralled by lies of a God-Pharaoh.
  "What will happen to us?" they asked.
  The vizier paused. "I think... I think that's up to us now."
• Razor Wings: Bladed Pinions from Scars of Mirrodin.
• 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).
• Reduced to Dust: Many cards that remove artifacts, especially those that exile them depict their effect this way. The card "All Is Dust" gets special mention is it portrays this happening to every natural feature of Zendikar, as the emerging Eldrazi remake the plane in their inscrutable image.
• Regained Memories Sequence: The card "Flood of Recollection" depicts the formerly amnesiac Jace regaining all his memories at once, depicted in the card's art as phantoms of his backstory. Notably, this includes memories that he'd forgotten before his current Amnesiac Hero stint.
• Religion of Evil:
  • Phyrexia, particularly the White-aligned "Machine Orthodoxy" of New Phyrexia.
  • On Ravnica, the White/Black Orzhov Syndicate, being a Corrupt Church combined with The Mafia, probably comes closest to this trope, though there is also the Red/Black demon-worshipping Cult of Rakdos.
  • Amonkhet zigzags this trope. Five gods ruled the plane in the stead of the mysterious God-Pharaoh, with the population devoted to finding champions worthy of his favor. The God-Pharaoh turned out to be recurring Big Bad Nicol Bolas, who slaughtered and then reanimated four of the gods. The fifth now leads the survivors through the ruins of the plane.
• 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.
  • Coldsnap is essentially an entire set retconned onto the end of Ice Age block, which was published a long time before it.
  • The primary case is called 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.
  • Since it was a continuity and nostalgia heavy block, the Scars of Mirrodin saga retconned several parts of the original Mirrodin books and a few parts of the Weatherlight Saga, causing many headaches to fans. This would later happen to New Phyrexia during March of the Machine, going so far as to remove Glistening Oil's signature ability to grow a new Phyrexia as long as one drop remains.
• Rent-a-Zilla: During the Dissension tie-in novel, Ravnica is attacked by giant monsters. First there's some Nephilim that grow giant-sized and start smashing things, then the Izzet's dragon guildmaster Niv-Mizzet flies in to fight them off, and eventually Experiment Kraj and Rakdos the Defiler join the fray as a result of a Gambit Pileup. Widespread destruction ensues.
• Retired Badass: Liliana Vess made pacts with demons, dueled other Planeswalkers, killed her captors, and even had a brief stint controlling Nicol Bolas' army. As of Strixhaven, she's embarked a new career of teaching necromancy under an assumed name.
• Revisiting the Roots: Magic: The Gathering's 2009 core set, Magic 2010, marked a return to the flavor-driven design sensibility of the original Alpha and Beta releases.
  • 2018 saw a set simply called Dominaria, checking in on how Magic's original setting is recovering from the traumas of Apocalypse and Time Spiral.
• Ridiculously Cute Critter:
  • Beebles. Awww...
  • Brass Squire and the Myr in general.
  • The Infernal Spawn of Evil and the even more ridiculously cute Infernal Spawn of the Infernal Spawn of Evil.
• Ridiculously Difficult Route: The "Canyon Minotaur" card references this.
  "We'll scale these cliffs, traverse Brittle Bridge, and then fight our way down the volcanic slopes on the other side."
  "Isn't the shortest route through the canyon?"
  "Yes."
  "So shouldn't we—"
  "No."
• Robo Speak: The robots of Unfinity have their stilted speech rendered in all caps.
  Robo-Piñata: I AM FILLED WITH DELICIOUS CANDY. I AM NOT A TRICK.
• Roc Birds: Rocs have appeared throughout the history of the game as large and powerful Bird creatures. In later sets especially they tend to be depicted as enormous golden eagles.
  • The first roc, Roc of Kher Ridges, was released in the very first set ever printed.
  • Two cards, Rukh Egg and Roc Egg, depicted inert eggs (weak, 0/3 creatures in-game) that on dying and "breaking" open to create a much larger bird (a 4/4 and 3/3 creature with flying). The rukhs, also called "stonefeathers" and resembling bat-winged rocs, are supposed in-universe to descend from "a phoenix that sacrificed its flame for a body of stone".
  • On Ravnica, rocs were among the creatures that managed to endure the plane becoming covered by a single, endless city far in the past. In the modern day they perch on the world-city's spires instead, occasionally tearing off whole roofs when they forget to loosen their claws when taking off; many are also used by the Boros Legion as flying mounts and as a way of apprehending criminals by the simple means of snatching them up in their talons and carrying them off into the sky.
  • Rocs are also found on the plane of Kaladesh, where at least some have four wings.
  • Tarkir has its own native rocs, which after the altering of the timeline become competitors to the dragons.
• Rodents of Unusual Size:
  • This.
• Rolling Attack: Myr Battlesphere and Armadillo Cloak are prominent examples.
• 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.
• Rule of Symbolism: Urza ascends into (or even dies and is resurrected into, depending on your point of view) becoming a divinely powerful planeswalker after using the Golgothian Sylex. Golgotha, also known as Calvary, was in The Bible the place where Jesus Christ was crucified. To add to this, he bleeds into the chalice (which somewhat bears a resemblance to the Holy Grail) from a forehead wound. He'll then go on to be the primary opponent of a God of Evil who lives in Dante's Inferno-esque Hell-like realm.
• Runic Magic: Magic runes turn up on cards from time to time, typically as enchantments — that is, cards that create persistent magical effects — and usually as ones that must be assigned to a creature card in order to confer that effect to it.
  • Notably, only a small group of rune cards are actually typed as Runes — specifically, five depicting artifacts from the Viking plane of Kaldheim. These depict items marked with engraved runes that confer some magical ability to their wearers, and can be applied to either creatures or items — Rune of Flight is a necklace that lets its wearer fly, Rune of Might is a helmet that makes its wearer mightier, Rune of Mortality is a sword that lets its wielder kill anything it touches, Rune of Speed is a bracer that makes its owner faster, and Rune of Sustenance enchants a creature so that damage to it gives equal life to its player.
  • There are several additional enchantments named as and depicting runes, which often work in mainly the same manner, but they don't share the type. These include the Runemarks from the Fate Reforged set, which grant creatures they're given to a power boost and some additional abilities; the Runes of Protection from Urza's Saga, which ward against damage from specific sources; and Runes of the Deus, which make creatures they're inscribed on tougher and stronger.
• Running Gag: The flavor text of Lhurgoyf is one Saffi Eriksdotter, warning someone that the monster is approaching. It has been spun off into three different cards.
  • The first is the Silver Bordered Ach! Hans, Run!, alluding to the line.
  • The second is Saffi Eriksdotter herself, a Legendary creature who can sacrifice herself to save others.
  • The third is Hans Eriksson, released a staggering twenty-five years after Lhurgoyf. Fittingly, Hans finds creatures from his controller's deck, which then try to kill him.
• Russian Reversal: Grime Gorger, where the trash throws you out.

S

• Sadly Mythtaken: In European folklore, a changeling is a fairy child left by fairies in place of a stolen human infant. The game instead uses the term to refer to shapeshifters capable of taking on any form.
• Sand Worm: Wurms, which are essentially giant serpentine dragons, come in all shapes and sizes — including some that tunnel through solid ice. Amonkhet and Ikoria explicitly have classic sandwurms, as represented by the card Greater Sandwurm, present in both sets.
• Savage Wolves:
  • Wolves are Green — the color of nature and animals — and Red — the color of impulsivity and aggression — most of the time. The pack aspect tends to get played up on wolf-related cards too, often with some ability to lead more wolves to join the fray, boost other wolves, or become more effective themselves if joined by other wolves.
  • A number of cards particularly emphasize the "wolves as savage, fearsome predators" aspect, such as Bloodrage Alpha, shown ignoring the arrows sprouting form its back in its urge to savage a human victim; Deranged Whelp, snarling madly at the viewer and implied to have been thrown out of its pack; and Primal Adversary, depicted as a shadowy shape with glowing eyes stalking ominously through a nighttime house.
  • This trope is especially emphasized on Innistrad, a place heavily inspired by Gothic Horror. Decks set on Innistrad tend to have a lot more wolves than other decks, and the flavor and rules of these cards tend to present them as a lot more aggressive and dangerous than wolves on other planes are written as. They also have a close relationship with the plane's vicious werewolves; while they don't actually spread lycanthropy as the plane's natives believe, they are noted to often hunt alongside their monstrous kin.
    Wolves and werewolves join together for the common cause of the hunt. — flavor text for Howlpack Wolf.
  • Innistrad is also home to the Wolf of Devil's Breach, a flame-shrouded beast halfway between this and Hell Hound and described in its flavor text as a true abomination.
    ''"How can werewolves be considered abominations next to such creatures?" —Arlinn Kord
  • Sarulf, Realm Eater is a huge, immortal wolf from Kaldheim that tore a swath of destruction through the World Tree's realms until imprisoned by the gods and dwarves, but has since escaped and resumed his endless hunt.
• Sapient Ship: The Skyship Weatherlight gains sapience towards the end of its storyline.
• Scenery Gorn:
  • Magic frequently visits settings that could easily described as hell on Earth, but they always make a point to have the cards showing off the landscape look incredible, even if that landscape is oh say, MADE OF DEAD PEOPLE.
  • Definitely the case in New Phyrexia. Some of the land art was based on what happened to the art in Scars block after Phyrexia got involved.
• Schizo Tech:
  • The game has power armor, a tank, and a machine gun.
  • Also, Rocket Launcher and a mech.
  • Goblin Brawler uses a rock.
• Schrödinger's Canon: As mentioned above, pre-Revision canon is canon, until it isn't.
• Scorpion People: The Amonkhet cycle includes the Soulstinger, a dual-typed Scorpion Demon resembling a gray-skinned humanoid with the lower body of a scorpion and grotesquely elongated arms ending in two additional stingers.
• Screwball Squirrel: Squirrels are one of the game's biggest Running Gags. They've become a recurring feature and symbol of the Self-Parody Un-sets, to the point where the wackiest cards (the ones that don't work in the normal rules) are currently identified by a symbol of an acorn.
  • Most of this is due to Mark Rosewater (Maro), the game's long-time head designer, who happens to be a big fan of squirrels. The one time he got to choose creature types for a set (Odyssey, released in 2001) it featured several squirrels, as well as the card Deranged Hermit which not only featured squirrels, but brought them into the spotlight by being a tournament-winning card. (It even helped Aaron Forsythe win a Pro Tour and get hired as a developer... he's currently Maro's boss!)
  • Afterwards, the creative team decided to stop putting squirrels in the regular sets, leading Maro to put the squirrel cards in the Un-sets instead, making them emblematic of the Lighter and Softer side of the game. Since about 2019, there's been a sing towards allowing a bit more silliness in the main sets, so squirrels have made a few more appearances, culminating in Modern Horizons 2 (2021) which has several powerful new squirrel cards forming the set's black-green archetype.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: The flavor of planeswalkers' loyalty counter system; if they take too much damage or perform too many big favors for you, they'll run out of loyalty towards you and leave.
• Sdrawkcab Name: Nevinyrral's Disk is a shout-out to the Warlock's Disc from The Magic Goes Away by Larry Niven.
• Seahorse Steed: More than a few merfolk cards have seahorses. These range from actual, if huge, seahorses to a full-on hippocampus.
• Sealed Cast in a Multipack: The Innistrad storyline features this. The Helvault, a giant silver mass, imprisons the legendary angel Avacyn, along with the demon she was fighting at the time, Griselbrand, and a whole host of other angels and demons. The Helvault eventually gets broken in the expansion called Avacyn Restored.
• Sealed Evil in a Can:
  • The main motivation behind Yawgmoth's Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • The card "Dark Depths" is your own personal can. If you can unseal it (either by pumping 30 mana into it in increments of 3, or by getting creative), you get a 20/20 indestructible flying monstrosity.
  • The Eldrazi are Sealed Evil In The Eye of Ugin. Yes, they get loose.
• Sealed Good in a Can: The angel Avacyn was dragged into the Helvault she made to seal away unkillable demons. Based on the mechanics of the Helvault card getting her out means freeing everything else inside.
• Sea Monster: Leviathans, krakens, sea serpents, Giant Enemy Crabs, assorted giant fish and whales... notably enough, they're often blue, absurdly huge and little more than ravening predators, despite the Blue color being anything but based on brute force. Of note is the Serpent-typed Sea Monster card.
  It's easy to believe the monster is a myth — until you feel three hundred thousand pounds of myth crashing down on your ship.
• Sea Serpents: Serpents are a creature type dedicated to this sort of beasts, and distinct from regular snakes. The vast majority are marine, but they can be found in swamps, lakes or rivers, typically in planes were seas aren't present — the Egyptian Mythology-inspired plane of Amonkhet, for instance, has serpents living in the mighty Luxa River. Notable examples of serpents include the lionfish-like Frilled Sea Serpent, the classic Sea Serpent and Serpent of the Endless Sea, which gets bigger and stronger the more Island lands you control.
• Selkies and Wereseals: There are three different selkie cards; all of them are green/blue merfolk.
• Shadowland: Shadowmoor, the dark reflection of Lorwyn, is a literal example.
• Shaped Like Itself: The flavor text for Lhurgoyf simply reads, "Ach Hans, run! It's the Lhurgoyf!"
• Shapeshifting Excludes Clothing:
  • Snakeform shows a snake that was once a mage slithering out of a pile of clothes.
  • Turn to Frog, which turns a target creature into a small frog for a turn, shows such an animal hopping out of a discarded suit of armor.
  • Ovinize depicts a sheep among discarded weapons and armor.
• Shedu and Lammasu: In the game's history, there have been only three lammasu creature cards:
  • Hunted Lammasu, depicted with a bull-like body, wings and a bearded and horned human head, appeared in the original Ravnica block. Lammasu ruled the world's prairies in the past, before Ravnica's urban growth covered it entirely, and now endlessly roam its skies as they flee ancient enemies.
  • Venerable Lammasu, from the Asian-inspired plane of Tarkir, resembles the former, but with a face covered by a black mask with four horn-like projections. Tarkir's lammasu roam far above the world on inscrutable errands of their own, and are known to appear on the eves of great events.
  • Absolving Lammasu, another Ravnican lammasu, from the set Murders at Karlov Manor.
• Shock and Awe: Much less so than one would expect, most red elemental magic tends to use fire. Though there are plenty of shocking cards, such as the original damage spell.
• Shoot the Dog: Pretty much Urza's whole hat. He does awful things in the name of protecting Dominaria from Phyrexia and Yawgmoth. At the end of the story, Dominaria ends up in shambles, but ultimately in better shape than Phyrexia. A pity that, however slowly, Phyrexia can regrow from a single drop of Glistening Oil.
• Shoot the Shaggy Dog:
  • During the Mirran-Phyrexian war, Venser, Koth, and Elspeth try to free Karn from Phyrexian influence. They even manage to free him from the taint via Venser's Heroic Sacrifice. And then Karn leaves Mirrodin and the Phyrexians win anyway.
  • Elspeth's entire life is just one long string of these, ending with her being betrayed and murdered in a fit of jealous spite by the God she served.
• Short-Lived Organism: The aetherborn of Kaladesh are humanoids who spontaneously form in areas where magic gathers. They're "born" as fully aware adults, but the solidified aether that makes up their bodies isn't stable and, from the moment of their birth, begins to dissolve back into the environment. Average aetherborn lifespans range from four years to as little as four weeks. Culturally, they're split into two camps about this: some accept their short lives and strive to savor and enjoy each moment that they have, while others vampirically drain life from other beings to sustain their crumbling bodies.
• Shout-Out:
  • Aggressive Mining was made by Markus Persson, the creator of Minecraft, so the card shows a very cubical and blocky mine.
  • The story "Sacrifice" is about the Gitrog Monster, a giant, evil frog. Said frog hypnotizes people with its pulsating black eyes that play a horrible droning noise.
  • Theros' included a card name Loyal Pegasus. Well, Wizards is owned by Hasbro...
  • One story for the Guilds of Ravnica block features what is implied to be a planeswalking baby. Said baby vanishes and then returns holding a mysterious, purple, star-shaped fruit.
  • The Jonathan Harker alternate art from Crimson Vow resembles Keanu Reeves in the role.
  • The original printing of Disrupt has the flavor text "Oh, I'm sorry, did I break your concentration?".
  • The Murders at Karlov Manor set is inspired by Detective Fiction, Film Noir, and Crime Fiction, has numerous nods to famous entries in the genre.
    • The setting's Great Detective, Alquist Proft, from his name and eidetic memory, is probably a nod to Hercule Poirot
    • The card "The Case of the Gateway Express" — Murder on the Orient Express, even making a nod to the murder method of the novel.
    • The cards "The Case of the Filched Falcon" and "Coveted Falcon" both reference The Maltese Falcon.
    • "Tenth District Hero'' is a Hardboiled Detective.
    • "Meddling Youths" is a nod to Scooby-Doo.
    • Thinking Cap is based on the famous Deerstalker cap of Sherlock Holmes.
    • Several of the cards feature detectives of various species dressed in trench coats and fedoras, like many Private Investigators, making them likely members of the Trenchcoat Brigade.
• Sinister Minister: Almost any black creature of the Cleric subtype fall under this trope.
• Sirens Are Mermaids: Averted: Merfolk and Siren are separate creature types in Magic, with the latter typically having features of birds like the original Greek sirens. Spanish Magic cards have the two types as Tritón and Sirena (usually, mermaids are called sirenas in Spanish and tritóns are mermen).
• Small Name, Big Ego: Ertai's entire schtick. Even after his transformation:
  Altered by Phyrexian science, corrupted by black mana, and twisted by rage, Ertai still looked in the mirror and saw only glory.
• Smash the Symbol:
  • The Flavor Text of Victorious Destruction is a quote by a Phyrexian leader ordering the destruction of structures the Mirran refugees were rallying around.
  • The Innistrad printing of Ancient Grudge shows a werewolf angrily smashing an Avacynian icon.
• Snakes Are Sexy: Deadly Allure shows a woman lounging in a skimpy outfit and a snake wrapped around herself.
• Snake Versus Mongoose: Both of the cards that depict a mongoose, Blurred Mongoose and Nimble Mongoose, show the creature in the act of killing a snake.
• Soul Jar: Phylactery Lich has you choose an artifact you control as this, and dies when that artifact is destroyed.
• Space Whale:
  • The Sky Whale variant turns up from time to time, with creatures such as Aethertide Whale, Ethereal Forager and Long-Finned Skywhale making striking additions to their native worlds as they drift serenely through the clouds.
  • A true Star Whale, depicted with an anglerfish-like lure and "swimming" in front of a ringed planet, appears in thr Doctor Who crossover set.
• 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.
• Spike Shooter: Various creatures are shown or implied to have this ability.
• Staking the Loved One: In the Dissension novel, when one of the protagonists' friends is converted into a Ragamuffyn zombie.
• Standard Fantasy Races: The primary races associated with the five colors of Mana, which are well-represented in almost every world, are the civilized but fractious humans for White, the forest-dwelling and mystical elves for Green, the chaotic and aggressive but none-too-bright goblins for Red, various forms of The Undead for Black, and reclusive and sorcerous merfolk for Blue. Other recurring races include dwarves, Red/White mountain-dwellers skilled with crafts and fierce in war; Red/Black orcs, usually found as raiders, warriors and barbarians; powerful, ferocious and destructive dragons; and wise and ancient treefolk whom only the elves have regular contact with. Alliances and enmities change from setting to setting, but tend to fall along color lines — most factions get along with ones aligned with the same color or allied ones, but are opposed to ones from enemy colors (humans and elves are usually opposed to the undead, for instance).
• Stealth Pun: The M13 set's Mark of the Vampire. Markov, the vampire.
• Stellification: The gods of Theros, as their Greek inspirations, will sometimes immortalize particularly impressive heroes and monsters among the stars. One With the Cosmos shows this happening to a gorgon, whose flesh is being replaced with darkness and stars.
• Strapped to an Operating Table:
  • The Vedalken Anatomist is depicted with a goblin victim in the background◊.
  • In the Invasion block, Metathran general Thaddeus is captured by the sadistic Tsabo Tavoc and is strapped down and vivisected before his twin brother Agnate arrives to deliver a Mercy Kill.
  • Venser and Koth, when they're captured by Phyrexians in the "Scarred" comic. (They get away.)
  • The Innistrad version of Curiosity features a werewolf strapped to an operating table as a human sorcerer prepares to do magical research on it.
• Sturdy and Steady Turtles: Meandering Towershell, a very large turtle creature, is notable for having its slowness written in as a mechanic. Instead of attacking normally on the turn when it's activated, like most creatures do, it's removed from battle for a turn, and in the next turn it returns into play and deals damage to its target, representing the slow process of the Towershell plodding over to its foe and attacking.
• Sugar Apocalypse: Arguably the Great Aurora that changed the fairy-tale land of Lorwyn into the dark, bleak Shadowmoor.
• Sugar Bowl: Lorwyn, except for the arrogant, beautiful, evil elves and arguably the short-lived, insectoid, tricksy fae.
• Swords to Plowshares: The "Swords to Plowshares" card exiles a creature in exchange for life points equal to the creature's power, representing the repurposing of a combat unit to a more utilitarian function.
  "The arc of my blade has carved a path of light for the peace that will follow."

T

• Tele-Frag: In Time Streams, this is how Urza kills K'rrik/Kerrick, by Planeswalking into him thanks to some advice from Multani.
• Telepathy: A standard blue ability. Cards that invoke it typically involve revealing hidden information, such as the aptly-named Telepathy card.
• Temporal Paradox:
  • It's more than possible to have multiple versions of the same specific thing from various points in the storyline in play at once; for example, there's nothing stopping you having both the Tolarian Academy and its ruins in play together.
  • When they created the original planeswalker rules, they planned ahead that these storyline characters would get several cards and decided that two planeswalkers of the same type (usually their first name) cannot be in play together. However, Nicol Bolas, Venser of Urborg, Karn the silver golem and Samut of Amonkhet all exist both as a legendary creature and a planeswalker, and can be in play under both their identities. A later change to the rules made planeswalkers legendary instead, letting you have multiple versions of the same planeswalker in play at once.
  • It's also possible to send mana into the past to play certain spells from the Future Sight expansion. If you fail to send mana into the past on your next turn, you cease to exist. Clock Roaches indeed.
• Tenuously Connected Flavor Text: A few, from multiple sets, all quotes:
  • Mudhole: Apparently referencing a quicksand-like location, with its effect "Target player exiles all land cards from their graveyard.":
    "Doing okay back there, Tarv? Tarv?"
  • Silver-bordered cards, a.k.a the [%22Un%22]'>"Un"-set cards, which are deliberately silly:
    • Bosom Buddy, an Elephant Townsfolk, where the flavor text is a reference to Alcoholics Anonymous:
      "Step 1: I believe in a power and toughness greater than myself . . . ."
    • Chaos Confetti: Noting how it's an Ascended Meme of a story usually by that name: a tourney player used the card Chaos Orb, which dictates that you toss the card into the air and anything it ends up touching when it lands gets destroyed. Instead, this guy tore it into pieces and sprinkled it onto the field, destroying pretty much everything his opponent had.
      And you thought that was just an urban legend.
    • Collector Protector: Referencing part of its effect cost, "Give an opponent a nonland card you own from outside the game" obliquely. Mudhole being a nonland card:
      "Here-have a Mudhole."
    • Double Header: Self-referential, and not connected to the depicted monster:
      "Players that don't read flavor text aren't too bright, sorta smell, and dress funny. But let's just keep this between us, okay? They can get kind of violent."
    • Flavor Judge: Possibly the judge's words, but not clear.
      ". . . and now they're trying to make a brick wall on my property fight a dinosaur to the death."
• That Satisfying "Crunch!": Frequently mentioned on cards that destroy artifacts.
• Theme Park Version: Zigzagged. Many of Magic's planes are a Fantasy Counterpart Culture of one flavor or another and the attention to detail varies. For example:
  • Amonkhet is very much a Theme Park Version of ancient Egypt, covered in pyramids, mummies, and crocodile demons.
  • Kamigawa, on the other hand, has received praise for the measured amount of Westernised trappings of feudal Japan (for example, Ninjas only appear in one of Kamigawa's three sets), and for concepts core to Shinto being the actual basis for the setting.
• There Is No Rule Six: An unusual non-(intentionally)-comedic example once appeared in the game's comprehensive rulebook: "Rule 502.9d: Ignore this rule". It was originally a rule involving assigning trample damage that became obsolete but kept to avoid renumbering the rest of the rules. It was finally removed when Eighth Edition was released.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Phyrexian Newts.
• Thieving Magpie: Thieving Magpie card.
• Third Act Stupidity: In Phyrexia: All Will Be One the few surviving Planeswalkers make it to the Realmbreaker to set off the Sylex and put an end to Phyrexia once and for all. Suddenly Kaya and Kaito are very concerned that the blast will be enough to destroy the entire Multiverse, ignoring that historically it destroyed one continent and caused an ice age, so they fight to stop Jace from using it. Then Elspeth, who had been elsewhere while the two came to this conclusion, drops in and "somehow, in that moment" understood that Jace needed to be stopped, killed him and finalized his Compleation in the process, stole the activated Sylex, and planeswalked away with it to detonate it somewhere where it would accomplish absolutely nothing. All of this just serves to allow the Phyrexian invasion for the March of the Machine set.
• The Thunderdome: The Grand Coliseum in the Onslaught block.
• Tiger Versus Dragon: The ending of Alara block's storyline is this. Ajani Goldmane (a lionman, yes, but possessing tiger stripes) driven by rage and revenge, fights against Nicol Bolas, a time-tempered Dragon of renowned patience and planning.
• Time Travel:
  • This is how Vodalia wound up surviving at least to the time of the Phyrexian invasion, when every other Sarpadian empire got obliterated by this or that crisis — they propelled themselves several centuries into the future and relocated to another ocean for good measure.
  • The Tarkir block is heavily predicated on this trope. In the first set, Khans of Tarkir, Sarkhan Vol searches his home plane for Ugin the Spirit Dragon... but dragons have been driven to extinction after a revolution some thousand years ago. He finds Ugin's corpse, but also a time portal Ugin created before his death. The second set, Fate Reforged, sees Sarkhan using Ugin's Nexus to return to the distant past. He changes history so that the extinction—including Ugin—never happens. The third set, Dragons of Tarkir has Sarkhan return to the present, discovering that the tyranny of dragons was never thrown off and Tarkir remains under their control... but this time, Ugin is alive. This crosses over into gameplay as well: Khans and Dragons are explicitly Alternate Timelines of each other, featuring the same characters in different conditions, and cards from both sets are not supposed to be played side-by-side.
• To Be Lawful or Good: Gideon has a Heroic BSoD over this when Chandra reveals that the supposedly good organization he was a part of executed her entire village for harboring a pyromancer when she was a child.
• Token Evil Teammate: Liliana Vess, black's iconic Planeswalker. She's a card-carrying member of the Gatewatch (even if Oath of Liliana makes it clear that she's not particularly enthusiastic about it). She's also a master necromancer whose storyline revolves around the four demons she sold her soul to in exchange for her power. Oh, and she stole her iconic tiara from an angel she killed with a horde of zombies.
• Too Many Mouths: The All-Devouring Oni in the Kamigawa storyline was this taken to its logical extreme: a swarming cloud of mouths with dagger-like teeth.
• Torches and Pitchforks:
  • Innistrad has torches and pitchforks, inspired by this trope.
  • After several failed experiments, Ludevic managed to create a monster that fed on torch-wielding mobs.
  • Mob Mentality, Unruly Mob, and Vindictive Mob all depict torch/pitchfork-wielding mobs, as does the classic Angry Mob.
• Toxic Dinosaur:
  • Frilled Deathspitter is a Dilophosaurus-like dinosaur with a large neck frill, depicted in the act of spitting out a glob of liquid, implicitly venom.
  • Ornery Dilophosaur is depicted with a pair of enlarged fangs and possesses the Deathtouch ability, which instantly destroys any creature it attacks, which is traditionally associated with venomous creatures.
• Trapped in Another World: Toshiro Umezawa's punishment from the Myojin of Night's Reach. And she took his eyesight.
• Traumatic Superpower Awakening: Typical for Planeswalkers. Sometimes, igniting a planeswalker's spark is the result of an epiphany born of years of meditation and preparation. More often than not, its the result of physical, emotional, or psychic trauma.
  • Kiora? Eaten by a Sea Monster while trying to protect her sister. Gideon? Accidentally killed all of his friends due to his own impulsivity and hubris. Chandra? Watched her father die and was sentenced to death due to her magical abilities as a child. Venser? Ground zero for a Battle in the Center of the Mind between a planeswalker and a telepathic monster. Urza? Continent-sinking, ice-age-inducing, reality-shattering magical explosion to the face.
  • The Spark can also be ignited by extreme happiness, as proven by Samut in the Hour of Devastation storyline. In her immense happiness and relief that her god and people have managed to take down one of the corrupt gods and escape the fallen city, her Spark suddenly ignites.
• Treasure Room: Hoard-Smelter Dragon, Greed, etc.
• Treetop World:
  • The Skyshroud was an immense mangrove forest floating over the waters of a small sea on the plane of Rath. The forest reached immense heights, enough so that the elves living within its canopy could go their entire lives without approaching its root system — a good thing too, as the merrows living in the flooded maze of roots beneath the forest proper were quite hostile to them.
  • Murasa, one of the continents of the plane of Zendikar, is covered by thick canopies of vegetation so large that regular-sized forests can grow on their branches. These trees cover the continent so deeply in places that Murasans can go their whole lives without ever setting foot on the ground.
  • Pyrulea is a plane in the shape of a hollow sphere around a central star, with its inner surface entirely covered by towering rainforests of trees so huge that their individual leaves are large enough to build a small house on.
• T. Rexpy: Dinosaur cards have included a large number of big, heavy-headed, small-armed and aggressive apex predators modeled more or less directly on T. rex, such as the scythe-armed tyrannaxes of Mirrodin's biometallic jungles, the imperiosaur of Muraganda and the Ixalani feathered tyrannosaurids alternatively referred to as dreadmaws, monstrosaurs, regisaurs, swordtooths and the like.

U

• Überwald: Innistrad, the Gothic Horror-themed plane, home of vampires, werewolves, ghosts, zombies, mad scientists, demons, and all kinds of traditional horror tropes.
• Ugly Cute: Pests, the Witherbloom mascot from Strixhaven.
• Uncanny Valley: The trope is discussed In-Universe in Fleshmad Steed's flavor text:
  More disturbing than the unknown is a distortion of the familiar.
• Unscrupulous Hero: Urza. Destroying large landmasses, starting wars, and conducting a vast eugenics program just to breed a few warriors, for example.
• Unwanted Rescue: After Starke sabotaged Vuel's coming-of-age ritual, Gerrard saved Vuel from death. Vuel resents him for it, for death would have been preferable to him after his failure. Starke stokes Vuel's hatred to make him Volrath, evincar of Rath.
• Unwanted Spouse: Urza's wife, Kayla bin-Kroog. He won her hand in marriage by winning a contest of strength with an automaton he built. He was more interested in the relics in her father's vault than her.

V

• Vampires Are Sex Gods: Innistrad's vampires play closest to the trope, being gorgeous, aristocratic and generous with fanservice suiting all tastes. Which is not to say they aren't monsters, nor are they reluctant to use their personal charm to attract victims. Interestingly, Sorin Markov, vampire planeswalker from Innistrad, has been neither shown as nor implied to be involved with anyone, despite (because of?) his six thousand years plane-hopping. There's a very vague reference to "hedonism" in one of the earliest pieces describing him, but that's it.
• Verber Creature:
  • Generally, a lot of creature cards are named this way — considering how many cards the game has by this point, it doesn't come as a surprise that this one is among the many Naming Conventions that MTG has utilized. Examples include Firescreamer, Gloomhunter, Skinrender, Tombstalker, and many, many more.
  • This is a particularly common theme for the elementals of the dual world of Lorwyn/Shadowmoor, such as thunderblusts, stenchskippers, shinewends, floodchasers, cloudthreshers, faultgrinders, woeleechers and mulldrifters, which embody concepts and emotions rather than physical elements and substances.
• Villain Forgot to Level Grind: The skyships Weatherlight (the heroes) and Predator (the villains). When the two battle in Rath, the Weatherlight is outgunned and the heroes only escape through dumb luck. By the time of the Rathi Overlay in the Planeshift storyline, however, the Weatherlight had a more experienced crew and upgraded weaponry, and when the two skyships battled again, the Predator was thoroughly trounced.
• Villain of Another Story: This trope crops up frequently. There are numerous villainous characters who only ever show up in flavor text or on a single card without making any notable appearances in the main storyline. Tibalt in Avacyn Restored and Vraska in Return to Ravnica are especially prominent examples, as villainous planeswalkers who never actually show up in the plot. Tibalt doesn't even have a short story to his name.
• Villainous Rescue: Geth rescues Glissa and Slobad in the first Mirrodin Cycle by dropping a huge swarm of nim zombies on Memnarch's head. Literally.
• Violence Really Is the Answer:
  • Karn was an actual pacifist for most of the time he spent with the Weatherlight and its crew, to such a point that the way Volrath tortured him was by locking him in a flowstone prison cell with a few dozen goblinoids and shifting the ground to make him kill them with nothing but his bulk. The trope appears in Invasion when Karn realizes that remaining pacifist in the face of the Phyrexian invasion could cost him everyone he cares about, resulting in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
    "Enough! If I must kill the guilty to save the innocent, then I will kill!"
  • Happens once again at the end of the New Phyrexian invasion storyline, where Karn once more relents on his pacifist vows to execute a wounded Elesh Norn, both to make sure she does not return and to make up for his unwitting mistakes that created New Phyrexia in the first place.
• Visual Pun: Rod of Spanking shows a monkey being spanked. Soul Bleed depicts a woman with an hourglass figure.
• Voluntary Shapeshifting: Any creature of the Shapeshifter type. Most of them have effects to become copies of other creatures in various ways, while those with the "changeling" ability are treated as every creature type at all times.
• Voodoo Shark: The explanation for how the Phyrexians managed to gain a foothold on Mirrodin... and indeed, how Mirrodin was even populated since the plane was emptied at the end of the first story.

W

• Walking Ossuary:
  • Boneyard Aberration is a quadrupedal skeletal construct with three necks formed by spines tipped with human skulls. When killed, its remains reassemble into three weaker, randomly-structured skeletons.
  • Dread Osseosaur, the reverse side of the artifact Visage of Dread, is a hulking skeletal dinosaur with three heads. Since you need to use two of your creatures (living or dead) to "craft" the Osseosaur, it's implied that two of the heads come from the skeletons of those creatures, with the third being the Visage itself.
• Walking Wasteland: The Eldrazi, whose mere presence warps and destroys everything around them (the flavor of their "Annihilate" ability). This is illustrated nicely in Disaster Radius and All Is Dust.
• War Elephants: In addition to the assumed implication that cards represent creatures the player has summoned to fight for them, some elephants (and mammoths, and mastodons, and the like) are explicitly trained for this role in-universe — Trained Armodon is one such examples, while the Abzan Houses of Tarkir include elephants and mastodons among the giant creatures they use as beasts of battle and to pull their moving fortresses.
• Warrior Undead: The Undead are a staple of Black Magic, and those that aren't undead mages or giant monstrosities are usually shown armed and armored, serving as part of large undead armies.
  • Skeletons are a fairly common undead creature type, and are some of the ones most commonly seen taking up arms. In fact, the majority of humanoid skeletons are show wielding weapons of some sort, from ornate swords and helmets to chain flails and rusty and decayed blades and shields. There is also a skeleton archer, implied by its flavor text to be aided in being a Cold Sniper by its undeath.
  • Zombies, despite being the most common type of undead, are usually not shown with armor or weapons to reflect their typical status as weak and expandable cannon fodder, but exceptions exist. The most prominent ones are the skaabs of Innistrad, Frankenstein's Monster-type things that often have weaponry and heavy armor grafted onto them during their creation, and the eternals, an army of elite super-zombies created by Nicol Bolas from the bodies of the greatest fighters and champions of an entire world, all of which are plated in blue mineral and armed with weapons they can use extremely well.
• Was Once a Man: The werewolves, vampires, undead, and spirits of Innistrad were all once human.
• Waterfall into the Abyss: The islands on the plane of Kamigawa float and are surrounded by waterfalls.
• Water Source Tampering: Poison the Well and Tainted Well, which can mess with your opponent's lands.
• Western Rattlers: The Wild West-themed plane of Thunder Junction has rattlesnakes as a recurring animal motif. The local wurms and hydras both resemble rattlesnakes, while some of the plane's mounts are rattlesnake-horse hybrids.
• Wham Episode:
  • Oh no, the Phyrexians are back and they're attacking Mirrodin! Surely this invasion will be fought off — there's no way the story team would allow the good guys to experience such a catastrophic failure! Right? Right? Well...
  • Also related to the Phyrexians, the appearance of the Praetor Vorinclex in Kaldheim with little to know foreshadowing. This meant that when Jin-Gitaxias, another Praetor, appeared in Kamigawa for Neon Dynasty it wasn't a wham because there was precedent...but what truly shocked people was the conclusion of the story where he and Tezzeret not only kidnap Tamiyo, but successfully compleat her.
• Wham Line:
  Sorin Markov: Avacyn, my angel... what has befallen you?
  • After the Weatherlight escapes from Rath, someone quickly closes the portal the crew used. As depicted in the card Mind Over Matter:
  Lyna turned to the figure beside her. “They’re gone. What now?” “As ever,” said Urza, “we wait.”
• What Could Have Been: The Planar Chaos expansion is an in-universe example.
• 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 Discusses Magic's -mancers here.
• Wheel of Pain: Distinctly, it causes mental pain rather than physical pain: [1]
• White Wolves Are Special: Sacred Wolf, unlike the predominantly black, grey and brown wolves in other cards, has a pure white coat.
  "I raised my bow, and the wolf stared at me. Under its gaze, my finger would not release the string." — Aref the Hunter
• Will-o'-the-Wisp:
  • Will-o'-the-Wisp is a Spirit creature that doesn't do much beyond fly, but it's Black — the color associated with swamps, and its card indeed shows the wisps drifting in a dark mire — and its flavor text references will-o-the-wisp myths of various sorts. Its original text consist of lines from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner describing ghost-fires on the sea, while its modern one references an in-universe myth of the ghost of a deceased woman wandering the moors at night with a lantern in hand, trying to find her lost brother and dooming the living who meet her to join in her endless search.
  • Withering Wisps are a Black enchantment that damages creatures once for each swamp card you have in play.
  • The Shadowmoor set includes a group of five cards — Aphotic Wisps, Cerulean Wisps, Crimson Wisps, Niveous Wisps and Viridescent Wisps — depicted as clusters of floating, ghostly lights, which whisper indecipherable messages to the living and show omens and visions in their glow.
• 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.
  • Urza started slipping into this in his plans to defeat Phyrexia.
• Wizards' War: The Brothers' War was an apocalyptic war between Urza and Mishra, brothers and artificers who did not realize that they were doing magic. They began as artificers for warlords that craved power, and due to the death of the two separate warlords they each became the de facto rulers of their sides, increasing the use of magical constructs against each other and, in Mishra's case, allying with otherworldly demons. Their battles would leave devastation across the plane of Dominaria, and concluded when Urza detonated a Fantastic Nuke which killed Mishra, annihilated a continent, and plunged Dominaria into an ice age that lasted for more than two millennia.
• The Worf Effect: "Hm, so, we have this group of planeswalkers called The Gatewatch, and we want to show the audience how powerful they are. How do we do that? Oh, I know! We'll have them kill two of the Eldrazi titans in their first story! You know, those colossal, would-devouring monstrosities we've told the audience time and time again are nearly unstoppable and totally unkillable." Although there are implications that the consequences are far more dire.
  • In turn, they go to confront Nicol Bolas despite Ajani's wisdom for the story of Amonkhet. Despite all the hyping of how freakishly powerful the Chain Veil and their inborn talents are compared to most other mages with their specialties, they're all soundly defeated — Nicol Bolas even penetrates Gideon's impenetrable shield for good measure!
• 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.
  • In the Time Spiral block, the near-apocalypse that was the main storyline of the block was caused by so many near-apocalypses on the same world that time, space and magic were unraveling. When a planeswalker who sat out part of a previous interdimensional war returns to Dominaria, he tries to bring with him two continents that he had taken to another dimension with him.
• World of Badass: Zendikar. See Everything Trying to Kill You, above. Wimpy planeswalkers strongly advised to keep out.
• World of Pun:
  • Such as ''He exercises his right to bear arms''.
  • There are also the cards "Crashing Boars" and "Apes of Rath".
  • "Over-Soul'd Cemetery".
  • "Wheel and Deal". See, it makes your opponents get the effects of "Wheel of Fortune" and gives you a card draw...
  • Unglued and Unhinged are about 50% puns (the other half is a mixture of cardpaper and in-jokes that only players of the game will get). Unhinged had Donkey Folk, which only existed to make puns on "ass". There are Smart Ass, Dumb Ass, Fat Ass, Cheap Ass, Bad Ass, and City of Ass.
  • There are also the Clay Pigeon (a 1/1 flying bird that has an effect when thrown), the Rock Lobster (it isn't a rock, and many take it for granite), the Paper Tiger (who burns bright and folds easily), and the Scissors Lizard (who has a lot of shear power).
  • Fowl Play turns things into chickens.
  • The Man of Measure is better at offense or defense depending on whether you're measured as taller or shorter than an opponent.
  • The Standing Army doesn't tap when it attacks, because they're always standing... but only as long as you are too.
• World Pillars: The Underworld of Theros is usually depicted as dominated by immense pillars looming over its landscapes, implicitly holding up the world of the living that lies far above it.
• World Sundering:
  • This has happened to Dominaria on a number of occasions, most notably when Urza used the Golgothian Sylex to create a powerful explosion on the island of Argoth. This completely destroyed the island and shattered the plate beneath it, creating a colossal deep-sea tech stretching almost from pole to pole, which allowed the cold water-loving homarids of the southern polar oceans to migrate into the northern hemisphere, and create large-scale climate shifts that culminated in a global ice age.
  • Zendikar is periodically wracked by the Roil, a magical event that reshapes the landscape of even entire continents on a regular, though unpredictable, basis. This makes maps nigh useless, and permanent settlements few and far between.
  • A number of cards, such as Sunder, Sundering Titan and Worldpurge, destroy all or a specific section of lands (or permanents in general) in play, representing cataclysmic disasters that reshape entire landscapes.
• World-Wrecking Wave: The Eldrazi cause these for Zendikar, as seen in All Is Dust.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks: Gold to the Returned from the underworld of Theros, where literally everything is made of gold. Their currency is the far-less-common-in-the-underworld clay, as used to carve funeral masks.
• Wrench Wench: Hanna from the original **Weatherlight**, and the rebuilt one has Tiana.
• Wretched Hive: Keyhole Downs in Ravnica, as exemplified by Conjured Currency and Seller of Songbirds.

Y-Z

• Year Inside, Hour Outside: In the novel Time Streams, a temporal explosion results in a group of Phyrexians getting stuck in a pocket of this kind of temporal anomaly, which makes them a much more dangerous threat to Urza and his allies and results in plenty of unusual strategies from both sides.
• Yin-Yang Bomb: Ravnica's Boros Legion (red/white), Golgari Swarm (black/green), Orzhov Syndicate (white/black), Izzet League (blue/red) and Simic Combine (green/blue).
  • The Izzet League also uses Weirds, elementals/golems created from opposite elements (like fire and ice, or electricity and earth).
• Your Brain Won't Be Much of a Meal: Seen in the flavor text of Synapse Sliver.
  "Species XR17 feeds upon the mental energies of its victims. This explains why the goblins remain unaffected."

  —Riptide Project researcher
• Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: Essentially the core conflict in The Purifying Fire. The Order of Heliud values order above all else and views the pyromancers of Keral Keep as dangerous uncontrollable individuals.
• Your Universe or Mine?: After ascending, Elspeth wanders the Blind Eternities looking for a new home. She finds it in Bant, which is everything she could have ever hoped for. When the inevitable apocalypse comes to Bant, she decides to leave the plane thinking that it's for the best if they learn to fend for themselves rather than rely on her considerable power.
• 0% Approval Rating: In-universe, Planeswalkers are this to people before the mending, especially in Dominaria — largely because they either went mad with power or proved to be manipulative assholes, and on occasion both, or one and then the other.
• Zombie Apocalypse:
  • Grixis. 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 no longer an option.
  • Invoked in the Archenemy deck Bring About the Undead Apocalypse
  • Zombie Apocalypse is a card in Dark Ascension.

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