For Magic players in the know, the very word “layers” conjures all sorts of horror stories of weird rules interactions that don’t look like they should work. For aspiring judges, layers can be among the more difficult rules to...
Read moreOne turn they’re here, and then poof they’re gone! Magic’s vanishing mechanic puts a time limit on your permanents and forces you to use time as a resource. But what makes vanishing unique, and how did it come about?
Read moreEvery time we return to Ravnica, it seems like one of the guilds gets the short end of the stick, as far as effective and thematic mechanics go. Forecast isn’t bad, per se. It just lacks a certain splashy-ness that other mechanics have, and...
Read moreSoulbond is a keyword that caused a bit too much confusion, taking its place alongside abilities like flanking or banding. What is soulbond, how does it work, and are any of the cards worth playing still? Let’s take a look at the mechanic, its...
Read moreOffering lets you cast big bad creatures at flash speed… but, as it turned out, it wasn’t exactly a smash-hit of a mechanic, and there are only about half a dozen cards with offering. It’s a cool keyword ability, so let’s find...
Read moreOver the years, Magic has accrued quite the collection of keyword abilities. Some of these like flying or trample have stuck around and probably won’t be going anywhere. However, some keyword mechanics fall off as quickly as they pop up. A prime...
Read moreEvery once in a while you’ll be looking through cards and discover some niche mechanic you really like. Maybe you like how it works, or maybe it fits well with other things you like playing.
Read moreUniverses Beyond allows WotC to introduce different franchises to MTG. With The Brothers’ War and its artifact theme, the Transformers IP got its own Beyond treatment on 13 new cards.
Read moreMagic is well-known for designing creatures that fall into one of two camps: either the weaker, more expensive card with a great ability, or the cheaper, over-statted creature with a drawback. Decayed falls into that latter category...
Read moreRecover probably belongs to that group of Magic: The Gathering mechanics that sounded better in the designers’ minds. It’s still a quintessentially Magic-al mechanic, though, since it’s all about using your graveyard as a resource.
Read moreIf you ask an MTG player if the liked a random MTG set or not, chances are that they’ll tell you about the set’s mechanics. “Sure, I remember Ravnica. Populate was cool, and cipher was total garbage.” In this example, cipher is a keyword ability...
Read moreClash is a mechanic often remembered as a failure, if it’s remembered at all, more than a dozen years after the last clash cards were printed. But Mark Rosewater’s elegy for the mechanic is more nuanced: “I consider it a noble but failed...
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