40 Laugh-Out-Loud Funny Cards in Magic: The Gathering

Last updated on July 30, 2026

Gorilla Titan | Illustration by Heather Hudson

Magic is a serious hobby for many of us. But let’s face it; it’s a fantasy card game, and it’s not all that serious. Magic’s game designers are self-aware enough to recognize this and not take themselves too seriously all the time.

Magic’s got a lot of humor packed into multiple decades of cards, and it shows in card names, rules text, and elsewhere. We’ve compiled our favorite flavor text in MTG elsewhere, so here we’ll focus on cards with funny names, clever abilities, or art that you can’t help but smile at.

Let's jump right in!

Honorable Mentions: The Un-Sets

Magic’s Un-sets are the biggest collections of joke cards in the game. Starting with Unglued back in 1998, these sets are full of cards that may look like Magic cards, but they barely even follow the rules of Magic. Jokes in this set range from Magic in-jokes like Look at Me, I'm the DCI, a joke about how seemingly random Magic’s banned list policy was, or Urza's Contact Lenses, poking fun at the fact that there are a lot of cards in the game that depict items that Urza once owned, to downright absurd cards like Charm School that tell you to balance a card on your head.

WotC printed these cards with a silver border to show that they weren’t tournament-legal under any circumstances, and this trend continued up until the acorn stamp was introduced in Unfinity.

Just to offer a few more examples: Aerialephant is a basically a flying elephant, though Dumbo took that joke long before Unfinity. The throwback on Icing Manipulator to Icy Manipulator just makes me laugh, and A Good Day to Pie is one of those awesome cards to say.

Unstable is a bit absurd in that several cards with the same name are actually rather different. The punchline on Extremely Slow Zombie is one you'll get, even if it takes four seasons to pay off.

Honorable Mentions: Mystery Booster Playtest Cards

We saw 121 “playtest cards” each in the 2024 Mystery Booster 2 and 2019’s Mystery Booster: Convention Edition, and they've been a part of various events at MagicCons. These are cards printed on the same blank card frame that WotC’s R&D uses when they’re playtesting cards for a new set.

Releasing these cards is another way for Magic’s designers to just create a bunch of weird card designs and put them out into the world to see how the public reacts. While they were all unique designs, some of them have in fact become real since the Mystery Boosters' releases.

Honorable Mentions: Holiday Promos

WotC prints special holiday gift promos each year. These are always distributed to local game stores as a gift for their contributions over the previous year. Each one is a top-down design of a traditional holiday trope, like the original Fruitcake Elemental. The brilliant puns and jokes work down to the details on Seasonal Sequels, Chaos Wrap, and Bog Humbugs.

My absolute favorite of these cards is Snow Mercy, a Magic card representation of a snow globe that you actually have to shake to activate its ability.

#40. Boldwyr Intimidator

“Cowards can’t block warriors” is a bit of a meme in the Magic community at this point, and it has shown up on multiple cards. But it started with Boldwyr Intimidator, and for that we salute this giant.

#39. Gingerbrute

“Run, run, run, as fast as you can. You can’t catch me; I’m the Gingerbread Man!” Someone took that line and literally ran with it on Gingerbrute, creating a cookie creature that can only be caught by other equally fast creatures.

#38. Morbius the Living Vampire

You know what time it is, right? It’s Morbin’ Time! Shouting that out is the only reason you’d play Morbius the Living Vampire, and it might be worth the hit to your win percentage.

#37. Holy Cow

Humor can be a little too on the nose sometimes, though Holy Cow can be forgiven. It’s an angel (Holy) and an ox (Cow), and explaining the joke definitely doesn’t ruin the joke.

#36. Feaster of Fools

The idea of a bunch of cultists being immediately eaten by the demon they just summoned is some good bit of storytelling in Feaster of Fools, which literally devours the creatures used to convoke it out.

#35. The Hobbit Creatures

MTG’s adaptation of The Hobbit gave the best names to use as insults since Sloppity Bilepiper. Old Fat Spider, Nasty Little Rabbit, Most Decrepit Old Bird, and Great Ugly-Looking Goblin are the best insults you can drop in your Commander pod outside Yo Mama jokes.

#34. Swooping Pteranodon

Swooping Pteranodon buries the lede on its humor, saving the punchline for the end. Your airborne dinosaurs pick up creatures, then it’s a land that deals damage to them, not the dinosaurs. In other words: SPLAT!

#33. Multiple Choice

“All of the above” is text that should resonate with anyone who went through public school education, and it’s a great capstone to a modal spell alluding to a Multiple Choice exam.

#32. Shadowfax, Lord of Horses

Someone got real clever with Shadowfax, Lord of Horses, which deliberately spells out the reminder text for haste on a card that normally wouldn’t have that. As Gandalf said: “Show us the meaning of haste.”

#31. Eye Gouge

Eye Gouge proves you can make funny cards without resorting to Holy Cow levels of degeneracy. Of course taking out a cyclops’s only eye would functionally kill it!

#30. Shoot the Sheriff

The extra little touch that “everyone else is fair game” at the end of the reminder text on Shoot the Sheriff is a beautiful bit of MTG’s designers bending what they should be doing on Magic cards just to tell a good story.

#29. Tomik, Wielder of Law

Tomik, Wielder of Law is more of an easter egg than anything downright funny, but it’s too clever not to include. Affinity for anything seems strange on a card with only 1 generic mana in its cost, but Tomik’s one love is the planeswalker Ral Zarek, and the affinity ability is supposed to demonstrate that just one planeswalker is good enough for him.

#28. Witness Protection

The hills were alive with the sound of people saying “Legitimate Businessperson” just after Witness Protection was released. The gameplay implications are hilarious; like, just imagine Ulamog disguised with a vest and hat blending in with the rest of society. They repeated this joke on Honest Work, but it didn’t land quite the same.

#27. Haunted Screen

Back in my day, TVs were all in black and white. That’s what you get from the base version of Haunted Screen. But you’d need to pay to get those green/blue/red cables for color TV. Ignore the ghost in the screen.

#26. Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan

The “no maximum hand size” line on Ms. Marvel, Kamala Khan might feel like a throwaway, but it’s a fun nod to her powers, which let her “embiggen” her fists. Or, literally give herself no maximum hand size.

#25. Meandering Towershell

I dunno, there’s just something funny about the idea of commanding Meandering Towershell to attack, just to have the giant turtle amble away and show back up a whole turn later, maybe even after the fight’s already done. Big Snorlax vibes.

#24. Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar

This card was a really fun throwback to a segment of flavor text from Alpha’s Granite Gargoyle. The name was supposedly made to have a name long enough to span the length of a Magic card. Asmoranomardicadaistinaculdacar was particularly hard to design because its name removes the space for the mana cost, imposing an alternate cost.

#23. Athreos, God of Passage

Language is a beautiful thing. What sounds perfectly innocent in one language can be hilarious in another. This German translation of Athreos, God of Passage makes me know I don’t want to be standing downwind of it given that it’s apparently the god of the uber fart.

#22. Bearscape

The original art for Bearscape was pretty good already, but this incredible version for the Pride Secret Lair really knocks it out of the park. The name is a pun based on the awesome artwork and the flavor text manages to squeeze another pun in too. I absolutely love it. A+ to Wizards on the execution.

#21. Brushwaggs

I have no idea what a Brushwagg is supposed to be, but it’s a funny-looking creature that WotC has revisited on occasion with Almighty Brushwagg and Interplanar Brushwagg.

#20. Coercive Recruiter

Coercive Recruiter gives the vampire an absurd choice and makes you grin ear to ear. Pirates give goblins a run for the funny, but it sure helps to have a stone-white vampire on the receiving end of the joke.

#19. Descend upon the Sinful

Sometimes Magic’s translations go a little bit awry, such as with the French translation of Descend upon the Sinful. The French word for the sinful or for sinners is “pécheurs”. But the word as printed on this card has a different accent over the first ‘e'. This word, “pêcheurs”, actually means fishermen. So in French, Avacyn doesn’t care if you’ve committed any sins, but you’re screwed if you’re a fisherman.

#18. Exotic Pets + Lagrella, the Magpie

The text on Magic cards seems to be getting more and more complicated. Be honest, how many times did you need to read Exotic Pets and Lagrella, the Magpie before you fully understood how they worked? I’d consider myself pretty good at understanding card texts and these still took me a few tries.

#17. Goblin “Bum Specialist” Kaboomist

Another funny translation makes Goblin Kaboomist look like it knows quite a lot about bums.

#16. Goblin Snowman

You gotta love the creativity these Ice Age goblins put into their Goblin Snowman, and a blocker that shuts down your opponent's best attacker is almost a form of removal. Pretty good for silly art.

#15. Gorilla Titan

Gorilla Titan has one of the cringiest lines of flavor text, but that combined with the art make it a great addition to this list.

#14. Hot Soup

Take your biggest creature and hand it Hot Soup. Watch it run crazy and end in a mess. If your opponent has no pingers, this is decent equipment. This feels like it could've been the reskin for Tragic Slip, but they went with something else for Kevin's Chili.

#13. Loxodon Eavesdropper

WotC just casually dropped Loxodon Eavesdropper into the murder mystery set. I guess there are investigations where you just need to listen to what's going on around you. Imagine this detective shaking its head considering the latest clue.

#12. Lhurgoyf: A Saga

Starting with an innocuous piece of flavor text back in Ice Age, Lhurgoyf and “Ach! Hans, Run!” ended up inspiring card versions of both Saffi Eriksdotter and Hans Eriksson, the named characters in that text, even though it took us 25 years to finally see Hans printed.

#11. Most Valuable Slayer

I played my share of sports and first person shooters so Most Valuable Slayer is a great play on words. Torain might be the MVS, but it's first strike that does it for me.

#10. Myr Sire

Another funny translation from the Spanish version of Myr Sire. “Señor myr” sounds so much more formal than what this card actually is.

#9. Narcomoeba

There’s a rule in the Magic Tournament Rules stating that you can’t display inappropriate or offensive imagery while participating in a tournament. Bear with me…

At one particular Modern GP about seven years ago, a dredge player made it to an 8-0 record and the coverage team naturally wanted to see them on camera. They were playing out their game and then the coverage team noticed that their Narcomoebas looked a bit odd. Upon further inspection, they realized they’d been altered to be a little more… phallic in nature.

Somehow the player had managed to get to round nine without a judge noticing it, but it resulted in a penalty on coverage. That story still makes me laugh.

#8. Nevinyrral's Disk

A popular Commander card that dates all the way back to Alpha, but did you know that “Nevinyrral” is Larry Niven spelled backward? Larry Niven is the science fiction author who first coined the term “mana”, referring to a magical resource drawn from the land around you.

Richard Garfield used this to design the game’s mana system and left this fun little credit to Larry Niven on Nevinyrral's Disk in the game’s original set. While not exactly a funny card, it is a fun piece of trivia that I always like to share.

#7. Oko, Thief of Crowns

I mean… seriously? Oko, Thief of Crowns is easily Magic’s biggest joke. How could this have possibly been printed? How is it that in all the time they spent playtesting this card, they never thought to try using its +1 on their opponents’ permanents? Unbelievable.

#6. Squirrel Mob

Squirrels have a long history in Magic. Mark Rosewater had apparently been trying his best to create squirrel cards despite a lot of resistance from other members of R&D. His efforts must have paid off, and the fans have spoken because they’re big players in Unstable, Modern Horizons 2, and Bloomburrow.

Squirrel Mob in particular has always been frightening in a comedic sort of way, but this Secret Lair printing is especially goofy.

#5. Storm Crow + Crow Storm

Storm Crow quickly became one of the most memed cards across social media for whatever reason when it was printed. It resulted in this Secret Lair printing and the brilliant Unstable card, Crow Storm.

#4. Toggo, Goblin Weaponsmith

Toggo, Goblin Weaponsmith is a decent partner commander that puts tools in your hand and lets you trigger all sorts of fun payoffs, but rock throwing aside, look at the presentation from this commanding artificer. Here's a goblin that is funny with no need for flavor text.

But if it did need flavor text, I'd submit this to Wizards amid a flash of lightning and a crash of thunder: “Ahh… Behold, I've crafted a new weapon!

#3. Uktabi Orangutan + Uktabi Kong

I guess we now know why Magic has a 13+ age rating. It must be for “mature” content.

#2. Void Winnower

Here's an official Gatherer ruling for Void Winnower:

Yes, your opponent can't even. We know.

Source

#1. Walking Sponge

Did you know that sponge is an official Magic creature type? Remember Walking Sponge next time you have to pick a creature type and it doesn’t matter what you choose.

Even Spongebob is a human wizard….

Wrap Up

Squirrel Mob | Illustration by Rudy Siswanto

That's it for the funniest cards in Magic's history! Do you have any fun stories about ridiculous cards or flavor text? Maybe your favorite joke card didn't make the list and you need to complain? Whatever it is, you can let me know in the comments down below or find me hovering around our official Discord server. And check out The Daily Upkeep newsletter to stay up to date on all the latest MTG memes!

Until next time, stay safe and have fun!