Magic The Gathering / Gameplay Tropes R To Z

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

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

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R

• Race Against the Clock: Darksteel Reactor is a indestructible artifact on which you can place one "charge" counter per turn. Once it gets to 20 charge counters, you automatically win the game. Given that most Standard format matches are over in about six turns, this would make Darksteel Reactor seem Awesome, but Impractical like so many other instant win condition cards. However, when paired up with other cards which can increase the number of counters on another card (such as Dismantle or Gilder Bairn), you can achieve this even quicker. It has also found new life in the Commander format, where the longer, drawn-out, multi-player games lend well to slow build-up cards like the Reactor.
• Rain of Arrows: Hail of Arrows, an Instant which can be pumped up with as much Mana as you're willing to use. That damage can be divided up among your opponent's creatures, making it a great anti-Weenie card, or focused onto one, allowing you take take something larger down via Death by a Thousand Cuts.
• Raising the Steaks: Extremely common in Black, with many types of undead creatures showing up. They're typically a bit weaker but easier to summon than "still living" versions of that same creature type. Additionally, many black spells (like the classic Animate Dead) can bring back nearly any creature from the Graveyard, ranging from various normal animals, to legendary creatures like Hydras and Krakens, up to full blown Eldritch Abominations.
• Random Effect Spell:
  • Magic The Gathering Online's "Vanguard" has several Vanguard avatars which pull random effects like these. Most prominently, Momir Vig allows you to pay X mana to make a copy of a random creature that also costs X mana, spawning an entire alternative format called Momir Basic, where players build a deck using only mana sources and a Momir Vig avatar and battle with randomized creatures from all over Magic. Jhoira of the Ghitu has a similar effect for instants and sorceries; likewise with Stonehewer Giant and equipment.
  • The Cascade ability from the Alara Reborn expansion allows you to cast a random spell from your deck for free. There are a variety of spells with similar randomizing effects.
  • Strategy, Schmategy has you roll a six-sided die to determine which of five totally unrelated abilities you'll get when you cast it. To up the ante, one of the options is "Roll the die two more times."
  • Unexpected Results has you reveal the top card of your library. If it's a land, you put it into play and recycle Unexpected Results. If it's a nonland, you cast that card for free, which can result in crazy Sequence Breaking. And just to ensure that you can't rig the result, your library is shuffled before you reveal the top card.
  • The original MicroProse video game tried to take advantage of the format, with several cards that were created that had effects that were random.
  • The Unstable set has a plethora of cards that require their player to roll six-sided dice to determine various outcomes. Usually it's the magnitude of a statistic, like power, toughness, or damage dealt, but some cards offer perks for particularly good results.
  • Urza, Academy Headmaster from the Unstable set is one of the more extreme examples. Every one of his activated abilities directs the player to a website which randomly picks one activated ability of a printed planeswalker in all of Magic's history thus far!
• Randomized Transformation:
  • Exaggerated by Chaos Warp, which shuffles a permanent back into its owner's library, then the owner looks at the top card of their library and puts it on the battlefield if it's a permanent card. This means that a creature hit by the spell may turn into a completely different creature, or a different card type altogether.
  • Tibalt's Trickery effectively takes a spell and turns it into a random spell from the library of the original spell's owner.^note The "Choose 1, 2, or 3 at random. Its controller mills that many cards." clause is there to keep the spell's owner from stacking their deck to be guaranteed to get what they want.
• Randomly Generated Levels: Used in the Micropose video game, which has a randomly generated map. Enemies are encountered randomly. Dungeons, where you get random cards, are generated randomly and appear in random locations. Enemies also attack towns randomly.
• Random Number God: Heavily influences the various Magic video games, including Online and Arena, to the point where players have started referring to it as "Grog, Goblin Shuffler". While it certainly happens in the physical game, the online iterations have always drawn heavy "Mana Screw" (not drawing enough mana producing cards) and "Mana Flood" (getting too many mana producing cards without getting anything to spend it on) criticisms. In reality, the algorithm is completely incapable of either, since it does not consider what type any given card is when performing the shuffle. The reason for the perceived dissonance between physical and online play is that having to physically shuffle a deck enough to provide a truly random distribution every time would be incredibly annoying, particularly given the number of times some decks end up being shuffled in a single game. At the end of a game, most people just take their land cards, which end up all in one pile, and put them into the deck at fairly even intervals to avoid there being giant clumps of nothing but land. For practical reasons, even in tournaments, it's accepted that the deck doesn't have to be truly randomly distributed — it just needs to be random enough that a player can't predict what comes next.
• Random Power Ranking: Experienced in several ways:
  • For creatures, everything about them comes down to mana cost, power, toughness, and whether or not they have any keywords or abilities. As such, Gameplay and Story Segregation as well as CCG Importance Dissonance are rampant. One of the most infamous examples is Gerrard Capashen, the hero of the Weatherlight saga which spanned across years of the storyline. When he was eventually printed as a card, it was laughably underpowered. His card would lose in a straight up fight to most if not all of the foes he defeated over the course of the storyline.
  • Improbable Power Discrepancy along with elements of Power Creep over the course of the Long Running series also contribute. As such, there are countless examples with respect to a creature's stats being disproportionately high or low in relation to other cards. A simple Horseshoe Crab can defeat a group of armed and trained elven warriors. A badass warrior of Ancient Grome would be defeated by a house cat.
• Rank Inflation: For the first 15 years of the game's existence, the rarity of cards went Common -> Uncommon -> Rare. In 2008, with the Shards of Alara expansion, a new highest rarity, "Mythic Rare", was added. One in every eight booster packs has its Rare card replaced by a Mythic Rare (late updated to one in every 7.4).
• 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".
• Razor Wings: Bladed Pinions is artifact equipment which gives these to any creature, along with Flying and First Strike.
• Read the Fine Print: Implied with many of Black's Deal with the Devil type cards. By adding it to your deck, its assumed that you've not only read the "fine print" (read: "drawback"), but are accepting it to use its power. Examples include:
  • Yawgmoth's Bargain, which causes you to skip your normal draw step, but allows you to draw additional cards by paying one life each.
  • Demonic Pact, which forces you to choose one of four options, but only once each. The fourth option is "lose the game", so you better win within three turns of playing it.
  • Dark Confidant, which allows you to draw an extra card, but costs you life equal to that card's converted mana cost.
• Readings Are Off the Scale: Certain combos allow you to generate more life, mana, and/or damage than you could ever possibly need. For example, A Magus of the Coffers taps at a cost of two mana to give you one Black mana for each swamp you control. You can then equip him with the Sword of the Paruns, which will let him untap for three mana. Pay two, tap the Magus for six black mana, pay three to untap him via the Sword, lather, rinse, repeat. Apply all of that mana to the variable cost cards, such as Exsanguinate, and you wind up with combos that can do 9999 damage to each opponent at the table and then let you gain that much life. Considering you start a standard game at 20 life and even the Commander's Arsenal Life Counter only goes to 99, it's certainly off all of the official scales.
• Reality Warper: Planeswalkers, of course. Being able to travel the Multiverse, summon creatures of massive power (including, as of the Theros set, gods), use ancient artifacts, and even create their own universe aside from rewriting others. You, the player, are a Planeswalker having a little scuffle with others. The cards represent creatures, spells, and artifacts you can summon into existence using Mana.
• Reclaimed by Nature: This is a fairly common trick for Green magic, due to its focus on nature and growths. Numerous Green spells and instants are themed around natural growth reclaiming article structures and artifacts and nature's eventual ability to wear down and overtake anything built within it. Notable examples include the often-reprinted card Naturalize, which can destroy any artifact or enchantment in play and symbolizes the byproducts of civilization being reabsorbed into the natural environment, or Creeping Mold, based on the idea of natural growth overtaking artificial structures.
  Garruk Wildspeaker: When your cities and trinkets crumble, only nature will remain.
• Recursive Acronym: K.O.T.H. for Koth of the Hammer.
• Red Is Violent: Red, represented by a fireball, is the most violently aggressive of the five colors. They have the most spells to deal direct damage to both opposing players and their creatures, their own creatures are most frequently Glass Cannons who hit hard (including suicide attacks), and they possess the most land destruction capabilities.
• The Red Mage: As each color has some fairly significant weaknesses, one strategy to cover for them is to add more colors to the deck. For example, if your mono-Green deck is getting trounced by your opponents "big" creatures, add in some White "removal" to take them out. However, adding additional colors requires adding mana sources (typically basic lands) for those colors as well, and a common result is not being able to play your spells reliably. (You might have the perfect White removal spell in your hand, but only Green-mana producing Forests on the field...) As such, it can be very tricky to find that sweet spot between predictable mono-colored deck and a cripplingly overspecialzed multi-color deck.
• Red Ones Go Faster: Red is the color with the second most creatures with the "speedy" abilities First Strike and Haste (after White). Further, many Red decks are designed to "go off" quickly, getting off to a quick start and burning through their hand to defeat their opponent before the enemy deck can bring out its powerful abilities.
• Redshirt Army:
  • Weenie decks follow this principle, as your weak creatures take heavy losses but continue trying to swamp the opponent anyway. This is particularly true in the case of tokens; cheap, disposable creatures usually generate en masse from other cards. As an inversion, a particularly successful weenie or token attack with few casualties becomes a Zerg Rush instead.
  • A interesting example is the Eldrazi who use mobs of Eldrazi Spawn Tokens to provide the mana needed for summoning bigger creatures.
• Reduced Mana Cost: Countless examples with dozens of different criteria for receiving the reduced cost. Examples include Academy Journeymage who costs less mana if you control a "wizard" creature type, Ancient Stone Idol which costs one less mana to summon for each attacking creature, Arcane Melee which reduces the cost of Instants and Sorceries by two mana, and many, many more...
• Reduced to Dust: The Eldrazi focused All Is Dust, which destroys all colored permanents for each player.
• Retcon: The rules of Magic have undergone many changes, the largest having been the complete overhaul of the game's timing system with the release of Classic Sixth Edition. Cards are frequently given new official wordings ("errata") so that they continue to work properly after each change of rules.
• Reforged into a Minion:
  • The classic modus operandi of the Phyrexians. For example Old Phyrexia changed Ertai, Wizard Adept into Ertai, the Corrupted and Crovax, the Cursed into Ascendant Evincar, while New Phyrexia boasts changing Glissa Sunseeker into Glissa, the Traitor and Ezuri, Renegade Leader into Ezuri, Claw of Progress.
  • Black, due to the color's niche of easily interacting with any player's graveyard, is quite capable of this. An opposing Black player can destroy one of your creatures with Terror, then bring it back to use against you with Animate Dead.
• Regenerating Mana: Each turn starts with the untap step, where your tapped cards (such as lands that you tapped for mana, creatures you attacked with, etc.) get untapped and ready to be used again.
• Rescued from the Underworld: Rescue from the Underworld is a card, naturally. On one turn, you sacrifice a creature, then on the next, you get that creature back along with another from your graveyard.
• Reset Button: A number of cards essentially "reset" the game with a few other effects in place. Some notable examples:
  • Sway the Stars restarts the game, giving each player 7 life instead of the usual 20.
  • The ultimate ability of the Planeswalker Karn Liberated restarts the game after clearing the board, with the exception of any permanents exiled by Karn beforehand.
• Resurrective Immortality: A number of powerful creatures, including the three Eldrazi Titans from Rise of the Eldrazi and the three Corrupted Gods from Hour of Devastation, return to the library or your hand if sent to the graveyard. This might seem like an awesome ability, however, this is done to prevent you from avoiding their steep casting costs by cheaply bringing them into play from the graveyard.
• Ret-Gone:
  • Door to Nothingness causes a target player to lose the game instantly, with the implication that they are being erased from existence in this fashion.
  • Aether Snap does this to to all tokens currently in play.
• Retraux:
  • The Coldsnap set was designed in the style of the Ice Age and Alliances sets from a decade earlier, most blatantly the use of "slowtrips," the clunky, slow version of cantrips (cards which, in addition to their primary effect, allow you to draw a card, thus replacing themselves).
  • The nostalgia heavy Time Spiral set brings back the retired frame design to both evoke this trope and emphasize its time travel flavor.
• Revenue-Enhancing Devices: The nature of sets and expansions constantly growing the game, the randomization within booster packs, the "Standard" format which only allows cards from the most recent couple of years to be played... It is all optimized for generating the most revenue possible.
• Reverse Polarity: Reverse Polarity is a card which switches all damage done to you by artifacts into health gain instead.
• Revisiting the Roots: Magic 2010 marked a return to the flavor-driven design sensibility of the original Alpha and Beta releases.
• Rhino Rampage: Rhinos are a predominantly Green creature type, typically come with the ability Trample, and sometimes also include an ability making them outright unblockable. Crash of Rhinos and Siege Rhino are prominent examples.
• Riddling Sphinx: This is a standard mechanic for sphinxes:
  • The original sphinx, Petra Sphinx, had players guess the top card of their libraries. This same guessing game was also used for Conundrum Sphinx.
  • Sphinx of Uthuun gives your opponent choice of which cards to put into your hand. Unesh, Sphinx Sovereign does the same, but also does it again when you summon other Sphinxes.
  • Isperia the Inscrutable rewards you if you can correctly guess a card in your opponent's hand. Of course, since they have to reveal their hand if you guess wrong, the riddle is a lot easier the second time.
  • Sphinx Ambassador secretly chooses one of your opponent's creatures, and if they can't guess which one, you get to steal it.
  • Master of Predicaments forces your opponent to guess whether a card in your hand has a high or low mana cost. If they guess wrongly, you get that spell for free.
  • Even sphinxes who don't have riddle-related gameplay will often reference riddles in their Flavor Text, because hey, that's what sphinxes do.
• Ring of Power: Rings are very common artifact items and can grant immense power. The Sol Ring, being a powerful mana source, is on the banned list. Oblivion Ring is a favored white "removal" spell. Aladdin's Ring, despite providing the page image, is Subversion in that it's a terrible card. (Four damage for 8 mana is hilariously underpowered.)
• Robot Master: The Planeswalker Tezzeret frequently allows for the creation of or interaction with artifacts and artifact creatures, the game's equivalent of robots. For example, Tezzeret, Artifice Master's first ability creates 1/1 Thopter tokens and his ultimate ability allows you to search your deck for permanents every turn. Tezzeret the Seeker's first ability allows you to untap artifacts, essentially getting to use them twice, while his ultimate ability temporarily turns your artifacts into 5/5 creatures to be used as such.
• 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. Some notable examples:
  • Roc of Kher Ridges appeared in the very first set as a 3/3 flyer.
  • Steeple Roc, while large enough the card art to dwarf a church, is a Fragile Speedster 3/1 with Haste.
  • Aetherstorm Roc is a massive four-winged version who can boost other creatures.
• Rocket-Tag Gameplay:
  • The Vintage and Legacy formats are notorious for this as they allow for the use of nearly all cards from the games history, creating some virtually unbeatable combos. When players with two such decks face off, the winner is often determined by the very coin flip which determines who goes first.
  • This can crop up in Standard play, though the culprit cards are quickly banned to keep things fair. Perhaps the most notorious case came during the Urza's Saga block which flooded the format with obscenely powerful cards. It was a common joke that "early game" meant the coin flip to decide who went first, "midgame" was the decision to mulligan, and "endgame" was the first turn.
• Rodents of Unusual Size: "Rat" is a creature type and some have gotten quite large in the game's history. To note:
  • Plague Rats can potentially grow up to a 4/4, equivalent in size to some dragons and angels.
  • Relentless Rats are a 2/2 on their own, equivalent to armed human warriors and other creatures like grizzly bears. They also gain +1/+1 for every other Relentless Rats in play, and they specifically bypass the "four copies" limit of any other card, meaning you can have as many as you'd like.
• Rolling Attack: Armadillo Cloak is an enchantment which allows any creature to do this, gaining +2/+2 and Trample.
• Room Full of Zombies: Cellar Door implies this, generating Zombie tokens by discarding creatures from your library.
• Rule of Cool:
  • Both Johnnies/Jennies and Timmies/Tammies will play cards just because they do something cool, though for different reasons. Timmies/Tammies favor individual cards with impressive stats or abilities, while Johnnies/Jennies favor accomplishing feats deemed Awesome, but Impractical.
  • Also sometimes used to justify breaking the rules of card design. For example, Form of the Dragon does a lot of things that, in terms of game mechanics, Red spells don't normally do. It's okay, though, because the card TURNS YOU INTO A DRAGON!
  • This quote regarding Dragon Roost sums things up:
    "Is there a downside?"
    "It's pretty expensive."
    "Who cares? You're making DRAGONS!"
  • According to Mark Rosewater, the game has squirrels because the designers thought they were cool. On the flip side, the inherent silliness of squirrels has gotten them repeatedly vetoed by the creative team in later expansions.
• Rules Lawyer: Rampant, as encouraged by the game itself. Players constantly find unusual ways to twist the rules to win. While game-breaking combos will eventually be banned, Magic has no rule enforcing the spirit of the rules or prohibiting things that don't make sense according to the game's story (ie, a wizard duel). If you can figure out a legitimate loophole in the letter of the rules, there's nothing to prevent you from exploiting it until the rules are officially changed. That said, as described under Rule Zero, tournament judges can make brinding rulings on card interaction and what they determine is final. Further, tournament judges can impose penalties on players who push their rules-lawyering too far if they deem to be disruptive to the tournament or as stalling to run out the clock. Over the years the tournament rules have changed a lot to give judges a lot of leeway when handling stuff like this. A famous example of a judge cracking down on rules lawyers occurred at French Nationals when a few players discovered that the DCI (ruling body of sanctioned tournament Magic) made a mistake when posting updated card wordings on their webpage. One card was posted with an old, obsolete wording which allowed for an obscenely powerful combo. Since the wording on the webpage was considered to supersede any other wording, the players tried to use it in the tournament. The Head Judge disallowed the combo and when some of the players played it anyway, he expelled them from the tournament. The DCI backed him on it and upheld the penalties.
• Rule Zero: In tournaments, the head judge has the power to make any ruling he wants. If there is no precedent for how certain cards interacts, the judge's decision then gets added to the big list of errata/clarifications. His word is final, even if he turns out to be wrong (i.e. even if the decision was actually against the official rules of the game, whatever the head judge of a tournament says goes, and that's that). The only recourse a player has if they don't like what the head judge ruled is to make a complaint afterwards. And while these types of incorrect rulings do happen, such a thing is quite rare.

S

• Sacrificial Revival Spell: Doomed Necromancer, which is sacrificed to bring back another card from the graveyard.
• Sadistic Choice:
  • Choice of Damnations, which calls for the target player to pick a number. You then get to choose whether the player loses that much life (most likely if they pick a high number) or is reduced to that many permanents (most likely if they pick a low number).
  • Cards like Skullscorch, Dash Hopes, and Lava Blister give your opponents the ability to jump in front of them to stop the spell's effect, taking heavy damage instead.
  • Perplex: if you want to keep your spell, you'll have to discard your hand...
  • Effects that cause your opponents to sacrifice a creature (Or any permanent, really). One of them must die...make your choice.
  • Played with in the card It That Betrays, which possesses an ability that forces your opponent to sacrifice two permanents whenever it attacks. While this is true of all Eldrazi, It That Betrays resurrects said permanents under your control. Now not only do they choose who they have to let go of, but also watch as it's reborn into your service.
  • A number of schemes in Archenemy allow the villain to offer an opponent a choice between "you take a big effect" and "each of your allies takes a smaller effect."
  • There are a few blue cards, such as Fact or Fiction and Gifts Ungiven, that invert this to an extent—instead of forcing your opponent to choose what they want to lose, it forces them to choose which of a selection of cards they want you to gain.
  • Even before New Phyrexia, the Mirrans had Painful Quandary, which, every time an opponent casts a spell, requires he either discard a card or lose five life. Remember, that's a quarter of your starting life.
  • Born of the Gods introduces the Tribute mechanic, which gives an opponent two options: Either buff your new creature or let it do something nasty.
  • Hour of Devastation has two different flavors of this. The first is a repeated bonus added on the end of a spell, where your opponent loses life unless they discard a card or sacrifice a nonland permanent, giving them the choice of losing a card in hand, card in board, or life. The other is the Afflict mechanic, where you either block it and take damage (and likely lose the blocker), or you don't block it, and take perhaps a little less damage, and probably let your opponent have some beneficial effect.
  • Conspiracy: Take the Crown presents the Council's Dilemma mechanic, where each player votes between two choices, with each choice having an incremental effect for each time it was voted for.
• Salt the Earth:
  • Rain of Salt, a classic Red land destruction which destroys two target lands.
  • Sowing Salt, another Red land destruction, targets only non-basic lands, but destroys not only the one in play, but any the opponent has in their deck as well.
• Sand Worm:
  • Thermopod is an icy version from Coldsnap, which gains Haste by using snow mana.
  • Trench Wurm and Saltskitter fit the classic mold, being fairly large, desert dwelling "Wurms".
• Savage Wolves: Red has some wolves as smaller creatures which tend to represent impulsivity and aggression, in contrast to Green's Noble Wolves, often gaining power when attacking. Examples include Assembled Alphas and Brazen Wolves.
• Scaled Up:
  • You can pull this off using Form of the Dragon, essentially becoming a 5/5 dragon with Flying in addition to being able to play other cards.
  • Dragonshift allows you to do this to any creature you control, turning them into a 4/4 dragon with Flying. For double the mana, you can cast this on all creatures you control.
  • The eponymous Scale Up is a single turn version, turning a target creature into a 6/4 Wurm. Like Dragonshift, you can also pay more mana to do this to all of your creatures.
• Scarab Power:
  • Nest of Scarabs creates 1/1 Black Scarab tokens every time you place a -1/-1 counter on another creature.
  • Scarab Feast exiles three cards from a target graveyard, implying that they've been eaten by scarabs.
  • Torment of Scarabs drains 3 life from your opponent each turn unless they sacrifice a permanent or discard a card.
  • Scarab God is a legendary creature which allows you to exile target creatures, then replace them with zombie tokens. Your opponent then loses life for every zombie you control.
• Scary Scarecrows: A standard creature type that often comes with Vigilance and extra effectiveness against Flying creatures. To note some specific examples:
  • The original Scarecrow prevents all damage done by creatures with Flying.
  • Heap Doll is a simple one mana 1/1 artifact creature which can be sacrificed to exile a card from a graveyard, making it quite useful for dealing with creatures that have Undying, Persist, Unearth, and the like.
  • The mighty Reaper King is a 6/6 which boosts other scarecrow creatures and can destroy a target permenent when any other scarecrow enters play. Its requirement of two of each color of mana makes it Awesome, but Impractical in most formats, but it found new life in as a "Budget Commander" in that format since its mana coverage allows for the use of nearly anything. It is also considered a "tribal leader" in that format, with its tribe being "scarecrows" since it both boosts them and gains the ability to destroy target permanents when one enters play.
• Scary Scorpions: Unlike most "regular" animals which tend to be Green, those of the "scorpion" creature type tend to be Black with Deathtouch or Poison as common abilities. Giant Scorpion and Serrated Scorpion are prominent examples, as is The Scorpion God.
• Scheherezade Gambit: The alternatively spelled Shahrazad, which forces both players to put their game of Magic on hold while they play another game of Magic, with the loser of that game losing half their life points in the first game. Given that each player could have up to four of these in their decks, this could make for some very long games...it's little wonder that its one of the few cards banned in all official formats.
• Schizophrenic Difficulty: The Micropose video game. Some lower-life opponents will walk all over you with their Aggro decks while some boss-level enemies won't even be able to scratch you under normal circumstances due to their decks being wildly mana inefficient.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: Along with Sealed Good in a Can, depending on whether you or your opponent is the one doing the "unsealing". A number of powerful creatures come into play "sealed" in some fashion, only becoming useful once the conditions to "unseal" them are met. Some notable examples:
  • Dark Depths is a legendary land which comes into play with ten ice counters. For three mana, you can remove one. Once all ten are gone, Dark Depths itself is sacrificed and replaced by Marit Lage, a 20/20 legendary creature with Flying and Indestructible. Naturally, players have found means to get around the length time and steep mana cost to summon Marit Lage, such as Vampire Hexmage, leading to bans and limitations.
  • Bottle of Suleiman has a 50/50 chance of either summoning a 5/5 Djinn creature to help you, or dealing five damage to you.
  • Tomb of Urami nets you a 5/5 Black Demon creature if you sacrifice all of your lands.
  • The mighty demon Withengar is sealed within Elbrus, the Binding Blade. When a creature equipped with Elbrus deals damage, Withengar in unsealed, netting you a monstrously large 13/13 demon with Flying and Trample who, in a multiplayer game, gains 13 +1/+1 counters when another player is eliminated.
  • Certain cards like Oblivion Ring allow you to seal one of your opponent's creatures in this fashion.
• Sea Monster: Blue has examples of nearly every single sub-type listed on the page. Leviathans, Krakens, Giant Crabs, Giant Fish, Giant Whales... Mechanically, they tend to be very large but more mana intensive to summon than similarly sized creatures in other colors. In the early days, they also had the crippling handicap of not being able to attack players who did not control an Island. There is also have the eponymous Sea Monster, who possesses each of the above tendencies.
• Second Place Is for Winners: A meta example occurred in 2015 when player Pascal Maynard made the top eight finals of the largest Grand Prix tournament in the game's history. In the top eight draft (where each player takes a card from a booster pack and passes the rest on), he was building a solid red/white deck when he opened his second pack to reveal a foil Tarmogoyf, worth $500 on the secondary market, but would not have fit his deck over the Burst Lightning that was also in the pack. He took the 'Goyf anyway and, though he lost in the semifinals, the publicity (both positive and negative) he got for picking the card enabled him to sell it on eBay for nearly $15,000... almost four times what the winner of the tournament won in prize money. He gave half the proceeds to charity.
• Self-Duplication: The "Populate" keyword, first utilized by the Selesnya Conclave in Return to Ravnica, creates copies of creature tokens already in play.
• Self-Parody: The Ungluded and Unhinged sets, which lampoon the hell out of the game's mechanics and meta in all sorts of bizarre ways. Neither set are legal in serious play, and are solely printed for the novelty.
• Sequel Number Snarl: Woo boy, where to begin... The tradition of creating "Core Sets" which contain all the cards Wizards of the Coast to be in Standard^note The game's most popular "format", or "supercollection of cards you're allowed to play with at one time". Standard consists only of cards that have been printed in the past two years. Theoretically, it is therefore immune to Power Creep. (Realistically, it has just as many problems as the rest). Their first intentional Core Set was 4th Edition — which was the fifth basic set after Alpha, Beta, Unlimited and Revised, but was justified as being 4th by claiming that Alpha and Beta were halves of the same edition. 'Classic' 6th Edition was the first base set to use an expansion set symbol on the cards; prior sets were identified by print quality, border size/color and date. The sets were printed every two years, using ordinal numbering, until 2007's 10th edition (10E), which then shifted to Title by Year (and annual Core Sets) with Magic 2010 (M10), anticipating the year the same way car models do. M16 was renamed with the odd-man-out title of "Magic Origins," the Origins Episode for a continuous Plot Arc concerning the "Gatewatch," the game's Super Team, which lasted until 2019. During this time, there were no Core Sets. Afterwards, Wizards resumed them; M19, M20 and M21 were released as usual, but M22 will be replaced with a Dungeons & Dragons crossover set.
• Sequence Breaking: The most fundamental "sequence" in Magic is the generation of mana. Each turn, you may play one basic land which generates one mana of its associated color when tapped. This generally limits the power of the cards you can get into play early on in the game. Certain cards other than lands sometimes allow for the generation of extra mana, but it is rarely a significant amount and they often have other drawbacks to balance them out. Many of the cards which make up Magic's banned list are cards which put a disproportionately high amount of mana into the game for a low cost. This includes the infamous Black Lotus, which brings 3 mana into play for zero cost (as well as it's numerous "watered down" clones like many of "Moxes" and Lion's Eye Diamond, which despite being weakened, were still unbalanced to the point of being broken). The extra mana allows you to play much more powerful cards much earlier than your opponent could reasonably counter.
• 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 center floors" would be more accurate). Of course, this trope often appears in full force even when there isn't a pile of cash at stake.
• Serial Escalation:
  • Early expansions made a game of one-upping each other, with every other expansion introducing a new "largest creature in the game." First there was the 8/8 Force of Nature in Alpha, then the 9/9 Colossus of Sardia in Antiquities, then the 10/10 Leviathan in The Dark, then Ice Age's 11/11 Polar Kraken, and finally the 12/12 Phyrexian Dreadnought in Mirage. The process was spoofed in Unglued's B.F.M. (Big Furry Monster), a 99/99 creature so big that he takes up two cards and wears "krakens and dreadnoughts for jewelry", and it was nostalgically revisited in Coldsnap, which introduced Jokulmorder, a 12/12, as a nod to the set's gimmick of supposedly predating Mirage.
    
    It didn't stop there. In Legions there was the 13/13 Krosan Cloudscraper, followed by the 9/14 Autochthon Wurm in Ravnica, and finally either the 15/15 Emrakul, The Aeons Torn in Rise of the Eldrazi or the 10/10-that-can-turn-into-a-20/20-if-you-pay-it-10-more-mana Colossus of Akros in Theros.
  • Unglued had cards with both the longest and the shortest names in the game at that time. Not to be outdone, Unhinged introduced a card whose name is so long it wraps completely around all four sides of the card and a card with no name at all.
  • Unglued also contained the card(s) with the largest mana cost, the aforementioned B.F.M., whose 15 black mana symbols stretched across the entire top line of the card. Once again, Unhinged decided to top it with Gleemax, a card which costs 1,000,000 mana. Yes, that's one million mana. I hope you brought your Mox Lotus.
• Set Bonus:
  • A set of three lands (Urza's Mine, Urza's Tower, Urza's Power Plant) first printed in Antiquities. If you control one or two of the set, they each produce one colorless. Control all three, and two of them produce two colorless and the Tower produces three.
  • The Empires artifacts in M12.
  • If you have all three Kaldra equipment in play, you can summon Kaldra to wield them.
  • From the Fifth Dawn set comes the four Stations (Blasting Station, Grinding Station, Salvaging Station, and Summoning Station), which can deal infinite damage when you have them all in play. According to Magic's R&D, it was the first "I win" combo they ever made intentionally.
  • Festering Newt, Bogbrew Witch, and Bubbling Cauldron. The Newt's effect is stronger with the Witch, can be fetched by the Witch, and can be specially sacrificed to the Cauldron... just like in a witch's brew.
  • If you use Maze's End to get all 10 different Guildgates on the board, you automatically win the game.
  • The ‘Module’ cycle of artifacts from Kaladesh, while not explicitly tieing into each other, apart from the names, do directly feed into each other. The Animation Module allows you pay mana to create a colorless 1/1 Servo token artifact creature whenever you create a +1/+1 counter while allowing you to pay mana to duplicate any counter on any card or player (including energy counters). The Decoction Module produces an energy counter whenever a creature enters the battlefield while letting you pay mana to return a creature to a player’s hand. The Fabrication Module creates a +1/+1 counter whenever you gain energy counters and allows you to pay mana to gain an energy counter. This can lead you to produce beefed up Servos and a store of energy counters in a near endless assembly line, as long as you have the mana and turns (or a repeatable untapping ability) to pay for it. And that doesn't include having multiple copies of each module. Even the cards' flavor text draws attention to the connection:
    Design leads to progress.
    Progress leads to inspiration.
    Inspiration leads to design.
• Shared Life-Meter: Featured in the "Two-Headed Giant" format, which pits two teams of two against one another. Each "side" has one shared 30 point life meter.
• Shattering the Illusion: Illusion type creatures tend to have relatively higher power and toughness for their mana cost, but are destroyed if they are targeted any spell, even beneficial ones. Illusionary Servant and Phantom Beast are prime examples.
• Sheathe Your Sword: "Mill" decks, whose entire strategy revolves around forcing the opponent to lose by decking. Some competitive mill decks are completely unable to directly damage the opponent at all.
• Shock and Awe: Common in Red, including the classic direct damage Lightning Bolt, as well as secondary in White where it tends to take the form of a Bolt of Divine Retribution.
• Shockwave Stomp: Seismic Stomp, which prevents non-fliers from blocking.
• Shoddy Knockoff Product: Counterfeit cards are sadly common. They can most readily be identified by looking for printing errors, incorrect wording, and missing foils.
• Shoehorned First Letter: When writing out the colors in shorthand, B is used for Black, R for Red, G for Green, W for White, and... U for blUe.
• Shop Fodder: In the Shandalar computer game, this is the only realistic source of early-game gold; always accept cards when winning a battle, then find the nearest town and sell the bad ones.
• Shoulder-Sized Dragon: Mechanically, typical dragons are at least 4/4. However, a number of cards depict diminutive dragons, whether as young specimens of larger breeds (such as Dragon Whelp, a 2/3, and Dragon Hatchling, a 0/1 that gains +1/0 with extra red mana) or as ones that get no larger than that as adults (such as Sprite Dragon, a 1/1 who can be buffed by playing non-creature spells).
• Shout-Out:
  • Nevinyrral's Disk is a direct reference to the "Warlock's Wheel" from Larry Niven's The Magic Goes Away series, up to and including using his name in reverse.
  • The unreleased Unglued 2 set was slated to contain a card called "Jeopardy", with this art◊.
  • The flavor text of the Tempest card Time Warp is "Let's do it again!"
  • Belligerent Hatchling is a dog with bees in its mouth and when it barks it shoots bees at you—referencing a memorable line from the Simpsons episode "Burns' Heir".
  • The card Creepy Doll is, by admission of MaRo, a reference to the Jonathan Coulton song of the same name.
  • Grave Bramble was inspired by Plants vs. Zombies. Its playtest name was "Tall-Nut." This also makes it a recursive Shout-Out: George Fan, head designer of PvZ, admits to taking some inspiration from MtG.^note Incidentally, it's also an example of the old Beam Me Up, Scotty! trope; Grave Bramble functions more like a Wall-nut, the main Stone Wall in a game full of Glass Cannons, than a Tall-nut, which can block as though it had flying.
    • M15's Genesis Hydra was designed by George Fan himself, and it shows. The creature is a plant hydra, that is seen devouring zombies in its art.
  • The Magic 2013 Core Set printing of Unsummon finally answers Hamlet's question.
  • The famous Black Lotus calls back to the original Conan the Barbarian stories, where in at least one the black lotus's pollen was described as used to revive a wizard's dark powers (as well as induce horrible nightmares).
  • The card Aggressive Mining was designed by Markus "Notch" Persson, and its art depicts a very blocky quarry.
  • Oathsworn Knight from Throne of Eldraine is a black knight that, instead of taking damage the usual way, comes into play with four +1/+1 counters. Every time it would take damage, it loses a counter instead, until all four of its counters are "chopped off" and it's forced to surrender.
• Show-and-Tell Antics: There's a card named Show and Tell that lets each player put something onto the board for free. Since cards are usually balanced around having a mana cost, things tend to get interesting.
• Sickly Green Glow: Necrogen, a blank mana mist associated with the Phyrexians, glows in such a way. Mechanically, as seen in cards like Necrogen Mists, it has a caustic effect represented by forcing players to discard from their hand.
• Signature Mon: The Commander in the eponymous format. The main gimmick of this format is that each deck has a "commander" card, which starts in a special "command zone" instead of the deck (so it can be cast immediately when the player has the mana for it, without needing to be drawn from the deck). If the commander would be destroyed or otherwise removed from play, the player can choose to place it back into the command zone to be replayed later (though every cast requires more mana). This makes a commander very difficult to remove permanently and most decks are built to revolve tightly around it. In the early days of the format (then known as "Elder Dragon Highlander"), the commander was always a Legendary creature, later on, some planeswalkers that can be commanders were also introduced.
• Silence, You Fool!: Weaponized as Swift Silence, which counters all other spells and allows you to draw a card for each one countered in this way.
• Silliness Switch:
  • The non-tournament legal Un- sets. Using them adds lots of silly mechanics that make the game fun but somewhat insane. How insane? With certain cards you can forbid your opponent from using his hands for the next few turns. In return, he can force you to sing on every turn or pay a hefty penalty. In return return, you can rip up cards and throw the mess onto your opponent's side, destroying every monster and spell the paper bits touch. The average game is less "magical demigods have a duel" and more "magical demigods have a prank war".
  • This can be invoked in the base game depending on deck construction. Sure, there are many awesome creatures and awe-inspiring spells...but it can be downright fun to Zerg Rush your opponent with squirrels or turn artifacts into creatures allowing you to defeat your opponent using animated buildings and jewelry.
• Simple, yet Awesome:
  • While the game has numerous big, flashy spells and humongous, powerful creatures, the very best cards tend to be low in mana cost with very simple effects such as "draw three cards", "add three mana to your mana pool", "take an extra turn after this one", or "deal 3 damage to target creature or player". Even creatures with no abilities at all can be awesome.
  • A general rule for the metagame, especially the Legacy format, is that the best spells are the ones with cheap costs and good effects. Due largely to the effects of Power Creep over the game's 20+ years of existence, this means that the vast majority of "playable" or "optimal" spells in Legacy cost either 1 or 2 mana. In all these cases, the effects are generally simple yet absurdly devastating: 1 Black Mana: Lose 2 life, look at your opponent's hand, and they discard any one non-Land card you choose; 2 Blue: Counter target spell; etc.
  • There is an entire deck archetype based on this principle: Mono-Red Burn. The deck contains exactly 17 Mountains, 3 Mountain-like lands that can burn, and no less than 24 effective copies the same card - spend 1 red mana to deal 3 damage to your opponent. Remember Lightning Bolt up there? The main reason Magic even has the four-copy limit for an individual card was to keep people from playing what was dubbed "The 40 Lightning Bolt Special" which is this trope taken to its logical conclusion.
  • The introduction of Quadrant Theory has led to another way of finding these cards. Quadrant Theory rates cards based on how they can impact the four basic game states of a match: Developing, Parity / Stalemate, Winning and Losing.^note It does not evaluate cards in context of combos, interactions or play environments. Any card that is valuable at all four stages is probably not some sort of jaw-dropping bomb, but rather a sleeper spell that turns out to pull more than its own weight. Vampire Nighthawk is the canon standard: it doesn't do much, but it's never not useful.
• Single-Use Shield:
  • The regeneration mechanic. Regenerating a creature gives it a single-use shield that saves it the next time it would be destroyed.
  • A more literal example with Shield Counters from Streets of New Capenna: they block one instance of damage or destroy effects before being removed from that creature, like a single-use Indestructible.
• Skill Gate Characters: Pre-packaged starter and event decks qualify. While they're perfectly functional when played against other such decks, they'll get absolutely crushed on the competitive scene, where custom decks rule the day.
• Sliding Scale of Objective vs. Subjective Games: Wizards makes every attempt to keep the game as close to the "objective" side as is humanly possible. However, subjective elements still sneak in once the sets are in the hands of thousands of players around the world. Abuses of loopholes and "Exact Words" are especially prominent. Essentially, actually breaking the rules would be cheating, but there is nothing to stop you from pushing your interpretation of the rules for an advantage.
• Solo Tabletop Game: The Theros Block has three self-operating Challenge Decks: Face the Hydra, Battle the Horde, and Journey into Nyx. These could be faced either co-cooperatively or solo.
• Spell My Name with a Blank: _____
• Splat: Magic initially just called its splats "subtypes", and that term is still in common use, but with 8th Edition it also instituted a more formalized system of "races" and "classes". Every creature card has a race subtype (Human, Goblin, Elf, etc.), and those printed before this rule have been errata'd to have a race; many also have a class subtype (Wizard, Warrior, etc.), but this is optional. Interestingly, some noncreature cards also have splats, such as tribal noncreature cards that have a creature type, or lands that have a land type (Plains, Island, Swamp, Mountain, or Forest).
• Stamina Burn: As part of the lore, "tapping" cards on the field (the phase that comes after attacking or activating the ability of a card, rendering it unable to act again, unless you have workarounds for this). There will be cards with abilities that can force them into this state before they can even get a chance to attack or be unable to be used to block enemy attacks.
• Status Effects: Many of the basics are covered appear as spells, ablities, or keywords including but not limited to Silence, the keyword "Fear" or "Menace", and the (primarily white) "Removal" cards.
• Star Power: A few "Star" artifacts offer this power in the form of mana. For example, Chromatic Star adds one mana of any color while North Star allows you to cast a spell by paying its cost with any type of mana.
• Stone Wall:
  • Creatures with the defender ability can't attack, and generally have low power and high toughness. Most examples from Magic's history are actual Wall creatures, and for a long time Wall of Stone was the most extreme example, having 0 power but a whopping 8 toughness.
  • Many, many decks use this method to win, much to the dismay of players forced to sit there and slowly get whittled. To note some famous examples:
    • "Mill" decks focus on defense while they for the opponent to draw, and draw, and draw until they're decked out. In the most extreme cases, these decks don't have any offensive capability at all in terms of damaging spells or attacking creatures. If you see Millstone enter play, odds are, you're up against such a deck.
    • This is also one reason Trinisphere is restricted in Vintage; turn 1 Mishra's Workshop, Trinisphere is practically a turn 1 kill, but it may take over a dozen turns to actually die.
    • A specific deck known as Spellbomb Control, which can endlessly recycle its inexpensive little artifacts, may sometimes be forced to grind their opponent down slowly through numerous attacks by 2-power creatures and 2-damage Pyrite Spellbombs, if the player is somehow unable to use the deck's inbuilt tricks to retrieve the big finishing creatures; games have been witnessed where the Spellbomb Control player just manages to kill an opponent using a Millstone-type deck at the last possible moment, during the last upkeep phase before they had to draw from an empty library.
    • Another specific deck which draws a lot of ire from casual players when it is dusted off for action is the Blue/Red Isochron Scepter deck, which can imprint and use its suite of counterspells and the split card Fire/Ice endlessly from its signature artifact. It is one of the definitive "Draw-Go" decks that rely upon the miniscule 2-damage-per-casting from Fire/Ice to kill an opponent in ten hits, often spread out over more than ten turns as the Scepter player has to establish a stranglehold over their opponent's ability to cast spells before they can start the slow burning.
    • The card Stasis prevents both players from reusing their renewable resources each turn, but gradually depletes the resources of the player who owns it. Chronatog allows a player to skip his own turn (normally a bad thing). Kismet prevents an opponent from using most cards in the turn that they're played. The three together allow a player to sit back and watch his opponent draw every card in his deck, one turn at a time, without being able to play any of them.
    • The Orzhov guild gained this ability in the Return to Ravnica block. Cards with their new signature ability, extort, simply drain the opponent for a single point of damage every time you cast any spell, bleeding them to death from a million tiny wounds.
• Straight for the Commander:
  • Built into the game. You cannot command your creatures to attack your opponent's at all. Instead, you can only attack your opponent (or planeswalkers) directly. Your opponent then has the choice to use their creatures to block your attack. Numerous methods exist to help you ensure that your creatures' attacks hit your opponent without being blocked by the enemy creatures. Even just for keyword examples alone, there is flying, landwalk, intimidate, trample, shadow, unblockable, and protection. And keywords are hardly the only options.
  • Defeating a player causes all permanents they own to cease existing, and anything they took with a "change control" effect would return to their owners. In large games with multiple opponents, sometimes the best way to deal with an oppressive board state to eliminate the player commanding them.
  • On the creature-level, this is the counter to so-called "tribal" decks - the "Lords" (creatures that give a boost to all friendly creatures of a given type, so-called because they used to have the type "Lord") provide stat boosts, cost breaks, special abilities, or some combination of the above to their allies. Eliminating them produces a meaningful reduction to the power of the remaining enemy creatures.
• Strategy Guide: Very common online; as the game constantly changes, it's essential for even the most basic Tournament Play.
• Strategy, Schmategy: This card is the Trope Namer.
• Sturdy and Steady Turtles: Turtles are classic low power/high toughness creatures which, unusually for most creatures, can be found as both Blue and Green with regularity. Horned Turtle is a classic example, while others include the plain ol' Giant Turtle and Giant Tortoise. The slowest turtle is the Meandering Towershell, which moves so slowly that whenever it attacks, it takes a turn to actually reach your opponent.
• Stylistic Suck: The Secret Lair Drop versions of Planeswalkers are written in the old card format circa Sixth Edition. As a result, they have gigantic walls of text explaining their abilities as well as Planeswalker mechanics instead of the simple bulleted list that usual Planeswalkers have, and their type line reads Planeswalker Legend rather than Legendary Planeswalker.
• Summoning Artifact:
  • Kaldra's equipment. When his shield, sword, and helm are brought together, they summon an avatar-equivalent of their original owner.
  • The Eye of Ugin acts as this for the Eldrazi.
  • A variety of minor artifacts like Summoner's Egg and Quicksilver Amulet fill this role.
• Summoning Ritual:
  • The cards Peer Through Depths, Reach Through Mists, and Sift Through Sands. Casting them all in one turn allows you to summon The Unspeakable. Each of the three spells even has an effect that helps you find the other two.
  • The card Dark Supplicant. With it you can sacrifice three Clerics and summon a Scion of Darkness.
  • Similarly, the herald cycle in Shards of Alara (Angel's Herald, Sphinx's Herald, Demon's Herald, Dragon's Herald, and Behemoth's Herald) allows you to sacrifice creatures from each of a shard's color to summon a specific large creature.
• Summon Magic:
  • This is what is represented when you play creature cards. Essentially, you are using mana to summon them into existence.
  • Specific cards can further summon additional creatures, usually in the form of tokens. For example, when Deranged Hermit comes into play, it further summons four 1/1 squirrel tokens.
• Super Smoke: Several examples:
  • Gaseous Form is a creature enchantment which prevents the target creature from taking damage, but also makes it unable to deal damage as well. This may sound like a bum deal, but its helpful to cast on creatures who you need more for their abilities than as attackers.
  • Urborg Phantom is a creature who can activate this ability at will.
  • Turn to Mist takes it to the next level, temporarily exiling the creature from the game and returning it at the end of the turn.
• Support Party Member:
  • Creatures with the "Defender" keyword cannot attack, but often have abilities that grant you bonuses or weaken your opponent. For example, see One-Eyed Scarecrow, Orator of Ojutai, etc.
  • Many of the very best commanders in the Commander format are this. They remain safely in the Command Zone, providing nothing offensively, but using their abilities to beef up your other creatures, your mana pool, your life total, etc. Some notable examples:
    • Atraxa, Praetors' Voice has great mana coverage (Green, White, Blue, Black) with several quality offensive abilities (Flying, Vigilance, Deathtouch, Lifelink), but these are outclassed in Commander by her "support" ability: Proliferate. Proliferate allows her to add additional counters to any creature who already has a counter, including the loyalty counters of Planeswalkers. By keeping Atraxa safe and using Proliferate, you can skyrocket their loyalty and have them use their Purposefully Overpowered ultimate effects much sooner.
    • Captain Sisay is a four mana 2/2 whose ability allows you to search your deck for another legendary creature and add them to your hand. Load up your deck with Green and White legendary creatures, use her ability, and because you get to select the specific card you want, it ensures you always have something suitable to play. Green and White also provide access to several counter-negating effects, helping you safely utilize your legendary creatures without worrying about being countered.
    • Oloro, Ageless Ascetic is designed to be this. He sits in the Command Zone, gaining you life, all game long. Actually casting Oloro is very low on the priorities list, especially as it leaves his signature life gain ability more vulnerable to being taken out of play.
• Surplus Damage Bonus:
  • Typically averted when attacking with creatures. No matter how much power your creature has, it can be blocked by any creature your opponent controls. The defending creature will be destroyed if it has lower toughness than your attacking creature, but the surplus damage is lost. Blocking particularly powerful creatures with low toughness creatures is known as "chump blocking" on the competitive scene.
  • One major exception are creatures with the "Trample" ability. Creatures with Trample deal surplus damage directly to their opponent's life.
• Symmetric Effect:
  • Symmetry is a common trait of White cards, as characters of this color are very community-minded and devoted to treating everyone fairly (or at least having the appearance of fairness). This often leads to effects like setting restrictions that apply to everyone or equalizing players' resources. Additionally, mass destruction effects tend to be white (though other colors occasionally get to mass destroy stuff they can remove).
  • Black also gets some symmetric effects, most of which punish everyone (to match the color's idea of winning at any cost). Notably, it's fond of making everyone discard cards or sacrifice creatures, when it's the color that likes to bring stuff Back from the Dead.
  • Wrath of God is an iconic mass destruction spell that destroys all creatures. Similar spells are nicknamed "Wraths" by the community, and are useful for resetting the board if your opponent has played a bunch of creatures. They can also be combined with effects that make your creatures indestructible. There are also conditional Wrath-like cards, e.g. Fell the Mighty which only kills creatures with high enough power. Similarly, some Wrath-like effects deal damage or decrease the toughness of creatures — these are survivable for creatures that are big enough. These Wrath-like effects can be played to minimize the damage to your own board.
  • There are also mass destruction effects for artifacts, enchantments and planeswalkers. These are more situational, but also give you more freedom to build your strategy to be minimally affected by them.
  • Mass land destruction like Armageddon removes everyone's mana sources (except for any mana-producing creatures or artifacts they may have) and slows down the game. They can be used to lock in a game if you're ahead and want to keep your opponent from catching up. Sometimes they can be an answer to players who manage play a ton of lands. They're also useful if you make your own lands indestructible before using them.
  • "Wheel" effects like Timetwister make every player lose their hand and draw a new one. Very nice if you just played a bunch of cards while your opponent still has a full hand.
  • Prison decks rely on making the opponent unable to cast their spells and/or use their cards properly. This involves effects that hinder both players on paper, but the Prison player has built their deck to work around. For instance, they may run Chalice of the Void and cast it for X=1 to shut down their opponent's 1-cost spells, while not running any 1-cost spells themselves.
  • Some cards give a boon to all players. For instance, Show and Tell lets both players play an artifact, creature, enchantment, or land for free. If you pack some huge, expensive threats, you'll probably get much more value out of it than your opponent. Similarly, Dictate of Karametra doubles everyone's mana. You can get more out of it than your opponent by bringing more expensive spells.
  • The Shroud keyword ability means that a permanent can't be targeted by any spells or effects — including your spells and effects. So your opponent can't use targeted removal against your Mist Leopard, but you can't target it with your buffs either. Protection is a broader effect that works similarly. (Though note that one part of protection — "this can't be blocked by creatures with the specified quality" is asymmetric because you can't block your own creatures.)
• Switch-Out Move:
  • The "Ninjutsu" mechanic, which lets you swap one attacker for another, mid-combat.
  • AEtherplasm does this whenever it blocks.
  • Creatures with the "champion" ability exile other creatures you control when they enter the battlefield. When the champion creature dies, the original critter is returned to the field.

T

• Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors:
  • Present in the three standard categories of tournament decks: aggressive, combination, or control (aggro, combo, and control). Sometimes decks can play as either of two roles, but not as well as a deck truly dedicated to that role. The three roles fall into a rock-paper-scissors scenario: Aggro decks play multiple redundant threats to keep the pressure on and overwhelm Control decks. Combo decks use cards that are individually relatively weak but synergize to create powerful effects that can overcome even the strong threats from an Aggro deck. Control decks focus on defense foremost and use card-removal effects to dismantle combos — if a Control deck removes one part of a three-card combo, it cripples the whole combo, while removing one of three Aggro deck cards will leave the other two to continue attacking. So basically: Control < Combo < Aggro < Control.
  • Distinct from the "roles" of the tournament decks are the metagaming nature of the decks, which similarly fall into three categories. Despite steps taken toward balance with each block, there always arises one or two dominant "tier 1" decks. As they become dominant, "counter" decks are created with the specific goal of defeating the dominant decks. As these two balace each other out, there then arises "rogue" decks which will be beaten by the dominant decks, but can defeat the counter decks which are so specialized for countering the dominant decks that they cannot adapt to the new threats posed by the rogue deck. So basically: Rogue < Counter < Dominant < Rogue.
• Taking You with Me: Any spell that deals damage to both you and an opponent such as Earthquake or Pestilence can be used for this. Additionally, there are creatures which can kill themselves to take out other creatures, or to hurl damage directly at an opponent.
• Team-Based Tournament: A long-lasting game variant is "Two-Headed Giant", where teams of two play against each other. Each team has a combined life total instead of two separate ones.
• Technician/Performer Team-Up: Competitive decks tend to follow a Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors breakdown into Aggro, Control, and Combo decks. On one end, Aggro decks are the ultimate "Performer", forgoing any sort of complex strategy in favor of overwhelming opponents with creatures, be they a Zerg Rush of "weenies" or "big stompy" behemoths. On the other end are Control decks, which use complex tactics of countering, removing, and otherwise disrupting whatever their opponent tries to do, while having either no creatures or weaker ones played for their added abilities rather than their raw power. Combo decks combine the two strategies, utilizing the more complex strategies to beef up their individually weaker but more synergistic creatures to more easily defeat Aggro decks, but opening themselves up to their combos being dismantled by Control decks. The metagame is constantly shifting around these primary archetypes.
• Technopath: A common trait of "artificer" creatures, whose abilities typically allow them to manipulate, modify, and/or create artifacts using magic. Mishra, Artificer Prodigy and Slobad, Goblin Tinkerer are notable examples.
• Tech Tree: The Level up mechanic from Rise of the Eldrazi functions as a Tech Tree, allowing you to invest additional resources into one of your creatures to upgrade it with new abilities.
• Teleportation Sickness: Summoning sickness, which prevents creatures from tapping and attacking on the turn they're summoned. The story justifies it as a form of great nausea. Averted by creatures with Haste.
• Tentacled Terror: Mark Rosewater's description of the origin of Lorthos, the Tidemaker (the legendary Octopus from Zendikar) fits the trope quite well.
• Terraforming: Gameplay revolves around putting Land cards on the field to pay for various spells or to summon creatures and to use their abilities, so basically you are terraforming the field into a hospitable place for you to do battle. The color that is king of this however, would be Green, as it has a lot of effects that revolve around searching out lands, and either putting them into your hand or onto the field (usually tapped), which makes sense considering that Green absolutely loves summoning ridiculously high-powered creatures with fittingly high mana costs.
• There Is No Kill Like Overkill:
  • Shivan Meteor is a prime example.
  • Star of Extinction goes even further.
• Time Stands Still: Time Stop. Some versions of blue's Extra Turn spells work like this as well.
• Title Drop: Zig-Zagged. Cards with the names of sets do occur, such as Time Spiral or Future Sight, but several examples either pre-date or post-date the sets. To date, cards who Title Drop the set they're in include Conflux and All Will Be One, which was the subtitle for the set that returned to New Phyrexia.
• Too Awesome to Use: The very first edition included the ante system, which allowed the winner of the match to take some of the loser's cards. This made players very reluctant to add very rare, powerful cards to a deck.
• Too Dumb to Fool: Players usually keep mana unspent for instants which can be used to react to the opponent's plays. For instance, two untapped islands typically means the player's saving mana for a counterspell. Experienced players who are aware of this would typically play more cautiously, and those who know it can deliberately keep mana unspent to fake having a response in reserve. This bluffing tactic can fail against beginners, who are too inexperienced at the game to know what to be wary of.
• Took a Level in Badass: Flip cards, Figure of Destiny, and leveler creatures turn it into a game mechanic. Double-faced transform cards in Innistrad also fit the bill.
• Totem Pole Trench: The "Mystery Booster" set is something of an in-joke from Wizards, as all its cards are graphically formatted to look like they are rough drafts being evaluated by R&D. One of them, "Five Kids in a Trenchcoat," is a 1/5 that counts as 5 creatures when being targeted by any effect.
• Touch of Death:
  • Hand of Death, naturally. It allows you to destroy any non-black creature.
  • Touch of Death subverts it, as it is unlikely to actually kill anything.
  • The Awesome, but Impractical Phage the Untouchable has this. Anything she attacks is not only destroyed, but also cannot be regenerated.
  • Any damage done by a creature with the keyword "Deathtouch" is automatically destroyed, no matter how tough it is.
  • The keyword "Wither" is a downplayed example. Creatures with Wither don't deal damage normally. Instead, any damage they deal is delivered in the form of -1/-1 counters on the target creature. For example if a 1/1 creature with Wither attacks a 2/2 creature, that 2/2 creature has a -1/-1 counter placed on it.
• Tournament Play: Sponsored by the game's creators.
• Transformation Is a Free Action: The Morph capacity. Free in term of timing as it don't use the stack so one can't do anything to respond its use.
• Turned Against Their Masters: Endrek Sahr, Master Breeder allows you to easily produce large numbers of Thrull tokens. However, if you have too many at once, they revolt and kill him.
• Turns Red: Dark Ascension features Undying (for creatures), and Fateful Hour (for players).

U-V

• Unblockable Attack: The "fear" and "intimidate" keywords cause this. Fear, most common on black creatures, prevents non-black and non-artifact creatures from blocking its attacks. Intimidate works similarly, preventing creatures other than those who share a color with the attacking creature (and, again, artifact creatures) from blocking.
• Underrated and Overleveled: Psychatog is a mere uncommon, three mana, 1/2 creature...who can also quickly become one of the devastating creatures in the game. By discarding cards from your hand, removing cards from your graveyard, or a combination thereof, you can beef Psychatog up with +1/+1 counters. Its superb offensive and defensive potential let it assert aggressive pressure all by itself, which frees up space for more reactive cards to shut down an opposing deck before it can get rolling—and since it synergizes well with card draw and mill, it also fits well into decks designed to "go off" very quickly. Further, since it can consume an entire graveyard and hand, it can easily reach 20/20 late in the game. Drop an Upheaval, as the dominant deck of the 2002 World Championship did, and you have a One-Hit KO on your hands. Finally, if all of that power potential alone doesn't do it for you, its abilities to discard and/or remove at will benefit all sorts of decks, including those built around the Madness keyword or Animate Dead, just to name a few.
• Unexpected Gameplay Change:
  • Chaos Orb and Falling Star are unique cards which involve literally dropping the cards onto the playing field to damage/destroy what they fall onto. Nothing else in the game involves physical dexterity (besides parody or joke cards, some of which are based on these) and online play with these cards is difficult at least. For this reason they were banned in all official formats.
  • One card from the Arabian Nights expansion, Shahrazad, makes everyone play a whole subgame of Magic where players have to abandon the main game, find a new space and use their libraries as decks for the subgame and cannot re-enter main game until the subgame is decided. With the possibility of having several copies of this card and even summoning subgames within subgames, it's no wonder this card was banned in all official formats.
• Unholy Nuke: Numerous black spells qualify. Damnation is the most straightforward example, being the black Evil Counterpart to the white Holy Hand Grenade Wrath of God. Plague Wind is similar, but destroys only your opponent's creatures (and thus costs a lot more mana).
• Uniqueness Rule:
  • The legend rule: you can't control multiple copies of a legendary permanent on the battlefield. This rule has changed throughout the years; at one point you could only have one copy in your deck, and there was also a time where both players could only have one copy on the battlefield in total. The main justification for this rule is flavor (these cards portray unique individuals, items and places), but in some cases it's also a balancing mechanism. Some cards interact with this rule, such as Leyline of Singularity making every nonland permanent legendary, and Mirror Gallery lifting the rule.
  • The now-lifted planeswalker uniqueness rule, which says that you can only have one planeswalker of each planeswalker type. Currently, planeswalkers are just treated as normal legendary permanents.
  • The retired "World" supertype shows up on some symmetric enchantments and brings the restriction that only one World enchantment can be in play at a time. If you play a new one, the old one goes away. Flavor-wise, they represent mutually exclusive global changes to the battlefield.
  • In the Commander format, each card in your deck has to be unique. The only exceptions are basic lands and cards with the very rare effect of explicitly allow you to go above the normal limit. Moreover, you can only have one commander unless the cards explicitly say otherwise.
  • The Vintage format almost never bans cards, instead restricting them cards to let players use a single copy of them in a deck.^note The last normal ban for power level reasons was in 1996. Later, Lurrus of the Dream Den had to be banned because the Companion mechanic meant that players were guaranteed access to it anyway and restricting it was pointless. This gives players a chance to use very powerful cards without making things as broken as they'd be if you could go up to 4 copies.
  • The Companion keyword lets you start with a creature outside the game, available to be put in your hand if you pay 3 generic mana, as long as you meet the deckbuilding requirement. This keeps you from using multiple copies of the same companion, which would lead to balance issues (there's no reason not to run the theoretical maximum of 4 if your deck meets the restriction anyway), as well as removing the silliness of trying to meet two different companions' deckbuilding requirements at once.
  • Certain activated abilities and triggered abilities have the clause that they can only trigger once per turn to keep them from being used too much. A tapping cost can also be used as a soft "only once per turn" restriction, though there are quite a few ways to get around it.
  • Some spells exile themselves as part of their effect, all but ensuring that you won't get to use them again. Generally used for effects that could lead to infinite loops or otherwise be obnoxious if repeated.
• 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.

  This is what it actually says

  Rise of the Eldrazi is going to be a set built around the Eldrazi creatures, all of which have no color and are giant. For example, there are two Eldrazi at common, the smaller of which is 7/7. All of the Eldrazi have a new keyword called annihilator. Creatures with annihilator have a number; whenever a creature with annihilator attacks, the defending player must sacrifice that many permanents. The Eldrazi are very expensive but there are cards that can create 0/1 tokens called Eldrazi Spawn that can be sacrificed to add one colorless mana to your mana pool and will help you be able to cast the Eldrazi. In addition, the set has a new ability called level up. You may spend mana on creatures with level up to improve their stats and abilities. This Limited environment is much slower than the one in Zendikar.
• Unskilled, but Strong: Possible to build "raw power" decks in this fashion. They're typically full of strong creatures but little else. If allowed to get up a full head of steam, they can be surprisingly difficult to counter.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • A fake card called "Throat Wolf" made the rounds on the game's Usenet forums in the early days of the game, before cardlists (not to mention the internet) were available. After a user namedropped the nonexistent creature in a post as a joke, other users playing along resulted in rumors about an ultra-rare card with ridiculous abilities like "attacking on an opponent's turn" or "dealing damage before first strike". It got to the point that when a Wizards employee attempted to explain that Throat Wolf isn't real, he got accused of trying to cover up the truth. More than 20 years later, [1] the card was Defictionalized in the "Mystery Booster" set, a gimmick set wherein all cards have visual design which makes them look like prototypes being tested by Wizards R&D. A full dive into the legend's history can be found here.
  • A joke article in Inquest Magazine offered some crude mock-ups of "purple mana" cards. This didn't stop people from calling card stores demanding to buy them. (Wizards would later flirt with the idea of purple cards as part of a special set, but it never got off the drawing board.)
  • The guy who tore up his Chaos Orb, inspiring the Unglued card Chaos Confetti.
• Uriah Gambit: Abyssal Persecutor prevents its controller from winning the game as long as it's in play, so you'd better have one of these planned.
• Utility Party Member: The creatures in most "Combo" and "Control" decks qualify. Rarely are they chosen for their power and toughness. Instead, they are included for the abilities they possess to synergize with the other cards in the deck.
• Vanilla Unit:
  • There are plenty of creatures with no rules text, and a few cards that explicitly grant bonuses to creatures with no abilities. With that said, vanilla creatures became rarer as the game progressed and players wanted more interesting cards. 9 September 2022 marks the first time of there being no vanilla creatures legal in Standard. However, there are still plenty of virtual vanillas, French vanillas and virtual French vanillas.
  • "Bears" are an extremely popular vanilla card archetype named after the ever-popular original Green Grizzly Bears. They are two-mana 2/2 creatures with no abilities, which offers a great mana/power balance for this purpose and are typically considered the "weakest" creatures to be playable in a competitive deck. Creatures in this mold now exist for every color except Blue (which has creatures as one its biggest weakesses). As the game progresses, they fall well behind the power curve, but still have their uses as chump blockers and sacrifices.
  • Gigantosaurus is notable for being a big vanilla creature with a high stats-to-cost ratio — you get a statline of 10/10 for five green mana.
  • Quite a few Hydras are virtual vanillas whose only effects only come into play as they're cast.
  • Darksteel Relic is the closest the game gets to a vanilla artifact — it's indestructible, but it does nothing. The only reason it isn't a Joke Item is that many cards synergize with artifacts.
  • The Mystery Booster set added How to Keep an Izzet Mage Busy, which is kind of a vanilla sorcery — it has no effect other than returning itself to your hand when you cast it. It can be abused with effects that care about spells being cast.
  • The basic lands are the simplest lands. They can tap for a single mana of one color. That's it. No bonuses and no drawbacks. Lands with additional utility or better mana abilities come with drawbacks like entering tapped.

W

• Walking Wasteland:
  • Phage the Untouchable is a prominent example. Bringing her into play by any means other than casting her from your hand causes you to lose the game immediately. Whenever she deals damage to a creature, even if said creature would have enough toughness to survive, it is destroyed and cannot be regenerated. Finally, if she deals damage to a player, that player automatically loses the game.
  • Cabal Patriarch adds -2/-2 counters to target creatures, which is activated by sacrificing creatures or by exiling cards from your graveyard.
  • Creatures with the keywords "deathtouch" and "wither" also qualify. Those with deathtouch automatically kill any creature they damage. Those with wither add -1/-1 counters to creatures they damage on top of whatever damage they do.
• 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 shown 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 expendable 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.
• Weak, but Skilled: Some of the best, most useful creatures in the game are this. They may have low power and low toughness, but have abilities (draw extra cards, add additional lands to the field, search your deck for specific things, etc.) which make them invaluable.
• Weaksauce Weakness:
  • The reason that most large creatures ultimately fall under Awesome, but Impractical is because they can easily be dealt with simple, cheap, and ubiquitous spells like the one-mana Unsummon. A great specific example is Marit Lage, an ancient Eldritch Abomination summoned from Dark Depths: at 20/20, this creature is capable of killing a planeswalker in a single hit, and requires 30 mana to summon under normal circumstances... and can be undone with that simple Unsummon.
  • The entire concept Phlebotinum Dependence on Lands, which must be drawn and played, is the source of great conflict within the fandom. It levels the playing field: if you draw the wrong hand, you cannot win; and the cards necessary to guarantee that you can't draw a wrong hand, like Dual Lands or Fetch Lands or Tutors... well, they're the reason Crack is Cheaper. Besides, you still might not draw them. The result is that every deck, no matter how well designed or funded, is obliged by the Random Number God to lose a certain percentage of games. Player attitude towards this fact tends to be affected by some combination of "player skill" and "which end of the forced loss am I on".
• Weapon of X-Slaying: The Hedron Blade grants its wielder the Deathtouch ability in combat with colorless creatures. Flavor-wise this is likely meant to deal with the Eldrazi, but in practice it works just as well against the vast majority of artifact creatures (Eldrazi and most artifact creatures are colorless).
• What Kind of Lame Power Is Heart, Anyway?:
  • Shelkin Brownie's special ability is to remove the "Bands with other" ability from creatures. In the history of Magic, there are two cards with the "Bands from other" ability: the 1/1 tokens created by Master of the Hunt, and the Unhinged card Old Fogey, which is illegal in every format and only has the ability as a joke (the only creatures he can band with, aside from creatures that have the regular Banding ability, are other copies of himself). Oh, plus a cycle of lands that are serious contenders for "Worst card in the game" and probably shouldn't count. Good old Shelkin Brownie, keeping the world safe from four-mana 1/1s and legendary lands that don't produce mana!
  • The infamously bad card Great Wall is an enchantment that stops creatures with the Plainswalk ability. At the time of its printing, this included exactly two cards, both of them craptastic: Righteous Avengers, a 3/1 for 5 mana with no other abilities; and Giant Slug, which could only gain Plainswalk by paying 5 mana a turn. Good thing we built that wall, right?
• When I Was Your Age...: The Unhinged Parody set has Old Fogey and its accompanying flavor text.
  These kids today with their collector numbers and their newfangled tap symbol. Twenty Black Lotuses and 20 Plague Rats. Now that's real Magic.
• White Magic: A specialty of white magic, naturally. Many white cards are geared toward healing and protection, without the nasty side-effects or drawbacks other colors have for the same effects, as well as non-fatally disabling or pacifying opponents (typically referred to as "removal"). It also contains its fair share of Holy Hand Grenades to eliminate threats.
• Wooden Stake: Wooden Stake adds +1/0 to the creature equipping it, and also allows it to One-Hit KO vampire creatures.
• The Worf Effect: On a metagame level. When new sets are released, they frequently contain cards which exist to counter the dominant strategies of the previous set. A player trying to use the old strategy against a player with the new cards will quickly find that their strategy has become a Worf Barrage.
• Wound That Will Not Heal: Often inflicted via -1/-1 counters. After battle, creatures that survive will regenerate at the end of the turn; not so if they have -1/-1 counters, as that damage and damage debuff will stick around as long as those counters are on the creature. Put enough of them on a creature, and they'll be reduced to 0 toughness, thus killing them.

X-Z

• Xanatos Gambit:
  • Rhystic Study / Mystic Remora: If they pay the mana, they have that much less. If they don't, well, you get another card.
  • Standstill: They play spells, you draw a whopping three cards. They don't play spells, you get an advantage provided you built your deck around this being beneficial.
  • Choice of Damnations: Your opponent chooses a number, and you then decide whether he loses that many life points or keeps that many permanents, while the rest is sacrificed. (A low number would mean that your opponent loses almost all of his cards, and a high number would mean a large life loss.)
  • Mass creature removal, such as Wrath of God: Control decks use these mostly against aggro, so aggro players will find themselves having to restrain their use of creatures, lest they all be wiped by a single card. But if he doesn't Zerg Rush, he may be heading for a long game, which is when control decks excel.
  • Various creatures have effects if they're blocked, punishing the blocking player. Of note is Slith Strider, which has an ability that triggers when it's blocked, and one that triggers when it deals combat damage to a player.
  • Ichorclaw Myr: Take the attack and gain a poison counter (possibly more if it gets buffed), sacrifice a low-toughness creature to absorb the attack, or have a big beastie suffer a sizable, permanent power/toughness loss.
  • Phyrexian Obliterator cruelly employs this trope. While its earlier counterpart, Phyrexian Negator, actually encouraged the opponent to deal damage to it so that the controller would have to sacrifice something, Obliterator turns that around and makes it so that whoever's responsible for the damage has to sacrifice permanents. It can be a pain for your opponent to get rid of without causing its ability to go off. Oh—it's also an undercosted trampler, so they'll have to block it and/or destroy it, or it'll destroy them in 4 turns flat.
  • Vexing Devil gives the enemy player a choice of either being punched in the face by a uber-lightning bolt, or having to face down a 4/3 on turn 2. For the record, a creature was considered tournament-worthy if it could get down as a 3/2 on turn 2.
  • Zulaport Cutthroat is popular for its ability to create these, especially during the final stages of the game: Either your opponent blocks your creatures and takes lethal damage from Cutthroat's effect or they don't block and take lethal damage from attacks. Of course, one can Take a Third Option by killing Cutthroat with a removal card before combat.
• "YEAH!" Shot: Used in a photo◊ from the official coverage of Day 3 of the Pro Tour: Dark Ascension tournament; it's a group shot of the Top 8 all in mid-jump.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: Cards like Act of Treason enable you to gain control of one of your opponent's creatures for a single turn, but that opponent doesn't neccessarily have to get that creature back. You can always sacrifice it, for example by using it to cast Bone Splinters.
• Your Mind Makes It Real: The entire point of the Illusion tribe of creatures. They can kill other creatures and deal damage to players and planeswalkers just like any other creature, but if they are targeted by anything, they die.
• You're Nothing Without Your Phlebotinum: Some cards, such as the Primalcrux for example, have variable power and toughness which change based on things like the power of the other cards you have on the field or the amount of lands you have played.
• Zerg Rush:
  • As mentioned above, aggro decks, especially "weenie" decks. Most (in)famous are Goblins (the Little Red Men), White Weenie (soldiers, knights, and birds of prey), and the Mirrodin block's Ravager Affinity (a rapid-fire Game-Breaker-laden deck which can inflict sudden death very rapidly on a good opening hand).
  • Kuldotha Red. Capable of (potentially) producing as many as seven creatures in turn one.
  • Single-card examples include Swarm of Rats, among others.
  • Token-based decks revolve around cards that create multiple creatures at once. After gathering a large enough army, the little minions are usually either given a mass buff or sacrificed for a positive effect in order to finish the opponent.
  • Relentless Rats. Not only do they gain power and toughness for every other Relentless Rats card in play, you can have as many of them in your deck as you want. With ten of these things, that's enough to completely overwhelm most opponents.
• Zombie Gait: Evoked with some of the Innistrad zombies. Diregraf Ghoul is a good example—it comes into play tapped to represent its slow gait. M11's Rotting Legion does the same thing. Parodied with Extremely Slow Zombie, which is so slow that it suffers from an inverse Action Initiative — nearly anything can hit it before it hits back, and its flavour text is spread around 4 different printings.
• Zombify the Living: The card Skeletonize burns away a creature's flesh and (assuming three damage will kill it) leaves behind an undead skeleton under your command.

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