Magic: The Gathering/Flavor And Story Tropes

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


This page is for tropes that are represented in the flavor, art, and backstory of Magic: The Gathering (as opposed to tropes that appear in its gameplay).

See also Magic the Gathering Novels.


  • Abnormal Ammo: Akki Coalflinger, Fodder Launch, Mogg Cannon... the examples are endless (and mostly goblin-based). Deadapult is a zombie-based version that's no less hilarious.
  • Absurdly Spacious Sewer: Those in the city-world of Ravnica (they're Ravnica's swamps/black mana sources). They're so vast, they're called the "Undercity".
  • Actually a Doombot:
  • After the End: Several times. There's the downfall of the Thran, the sylex blast that started the Ice Age, the Apocalypse set, the coming of Karona, and finally, Time Spiral block, which is the closest to the trope. (Of course, it's Time Spiral, so it's before, after, and three seconds to the left of the end.)
  • A Glass of Chianti: Olivia Voldaren really loves her... "wine".
  • A.I. Is a Crapshoot: Memnarch, a golem left behind by the creator of Mirrodin to guard the plane, goes insane and tries to become a planeswalker itself.
  • Alien Invasion: Phyrexia is another plane rather than another planet, but Alien Invaders is a spot-on description of its role in the Invasion and Scars of Mirrodin blocks. They even have giant spaceships with laser beams and everything (seen fighting Urza's Powered Armor on Searing Rays, for example).
  • Alien Sky:
    • Mirrodin has four five moons -- which shine, and thus are also interchangably called suns. There's no indication that it has any normal suns, either...
    • Also, Dominaria has two moons (although one of them got blown up), and Esper's night sky is covered in a grid, making it appear like a huge star chart.
    • Esper gets even screwier when it rejoins the other 4 shards. Many cards from Alara Reborn feature skies with visible boundaries from what was once one plane and what was another.
  • Alternate Universe: Planar Chaos, which shows a hundred alternate Dominarias, such as one where bad guy Braids, Cabal Minion becomes helpful Braids, Conjurer Adept. Some of these cards were genuine "What If?" questions, others were "This card is functionally identical to a classic of a different color, and given the colors' general traits should/could have been printed in this color from the start." (And in the case of the aforelinked Pyromancer, would eventually be printed in the new color.)
  • Alternative Calendar: Dominaria has one--denoted as AR, for "Agrivian Reckoning," with year 1 being the birth of Urza and Mishra.
  • Always Night: Shadowmoor and Grixis.
  • Ambiguously Gay: Ertai and the Prodigal Sorceror got a lot of this joke in InQuest Gamer.
  • American Gothic Couple: Orcish Settlers
  • Anachronism Stew: Various minor examples. Any given expansion encompasses some length of time, so sometimes you have cards in the same set representing notably distant points in the time line.
  • And Man Grew Proud: In the Zendikar expansion, the Eldrazi once terrorized the plane, but were sealed away long ago. Now, they're remembered only in scraps of legends, and their true nature has been forgotten. Many believe them to be ancient gods who created the plane. Of course, in Rise of the Eldrazi, they get unsealed...
  • Animal Battle Aura: Rise of the Eldrazi's Totem Armor auras.
  • Another Dimension: The multiverse is full of them.
  • Anti-Hero: Urza. Destroying large landmasses, starting wars, and conducting a vast eugenics program just to breed a few warriors, for example.
  • Anti-Villain: Apparently, the Red Phyrexians of New Phyrexia. They are hardly good or kind people, but the influence of red mana remains strong, rendering them capable of independent thought, creativity, and even mercy and compassion. They even seem opposed to what they see as cruelty, which would include a lot of the actions other New Phyrexian factions have taken.
  • Appropriated Appellation: Tezzeret was never given a name by his father. Growing up in the slums, his peers gave him the nickname "Tezzeret", meaning 'a concealed, improvised weapon' after he won a fight with a bully by shivving him. The name stuck.
  • Apocalypse How: Spirit patrons raging over the kidnapping of one of their own? Kamigawa. A reconverting of five mini-planes into one singular plane? Shards of Alara. An unraveling of the strands of time? Time Spiral. How about the world changing every fifty or so years to a "dark" version? Lorwyn turns into Shadowmoor. Eldritch abominations emerge from their prisons into a living world that hates their alien magic? Zendikar. A relentless evil that is essentially The Corruption personified and has been growing and festering in the core of the Plane ever since its creation finally amasses enough military power to launch a full-scale invasion headed by the twisted, corrupted husks of the Plane's own legendary heroes from ages past up to and including the Plane's creator himself? Scars of Mirrodin Humans being exterminated en masse by zombies, werewolves, vampires, demons, possessed trees, and other unspeakable horrors of the night? Innistrad.
  • Arabian Nights Days: The very first expansion was called "Arabian Nights."
  • Arc Welding: No matter how isolated a particular storyline may seem... it will be tied into all the rest.
  • Arrows on Fire: Occasionally seen in artwork, e.g. Fire at Will.
  • Arson, Murder, and Jaywalking: Braids takes up petty extortion as a hobby.
  • Artifact of Doom: The Mirari, an artifact of vast power that warps and mutates reality around itself and drives the wielder to insanity.
  • Artificial Human:
    • The Metathran. Most were basically emotionless, loyal soldiers, but their commanders, Thaddeus and Agnate, were granted sentience to make them more effective planners and leaders.
    • Phyrexian Newts as spies.
  • Artificial Limbs: Commonly seen in both Esper and Phyrexia. Notably, the planeswalker Tezzeret's right arm.
  • Art Initiates Life: They don't call Ixidor "Reality Sculptor" for nothing.
  • Ascended Meme: The legend of a player who shredded their (expensive) Chaos Orb card to win a game (it destroys any card it touches when dropped onto the field) eventually got acknowledged in the Unglued set as Chaos Confetti, which instructs the player to shred the card for the same effect.
  • Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence: Planeswalkers start off mortal, and some traumatic or life-changing event causes them to ascend to planeswalkerdom.
  • Atlantis: The original Merfolk lord was Lord of Atlantis.
  • Attack! Attack! Retreat! Retreat!: Rather frequently used. [1]
  • Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: Common result of green pump spells, e.g. Might of Oaks's giant squirrel.
  • Back-to-Back Badasses:
  • Badass:
    • Toshi Umezawa, of Kamigawa block; a rare black-aligned protagonist. (This block also featured a white-aligned antagonist; this is perhaps made more understandable still when you consider Kamigawa is based loosely on the Japanese Shinto religion, and East Asian cultures tend to view white as the color of death.)
    • Dakkon Blackblade. The comics in particular focused on his exploits.
  • Badass Crew: The crew of the skyship Weatherlight.
  • Badass Family:
    • Seshiro of Kamigawa and his legendary family, among which are Sashi the shaman and Sosuke the warrior.
    • Also, the aforementioned Umezawas, Toshiro and his descendant, Tetsuo, one of the only, if not the only, person to defeat Magic's resident Big Bad Nicol Bolas one one one. Then again, Bolas only really became a God Mode Sue after he returned in Time Spiral.
    • Kamahl and his sister Jeska.
  • Badass Normal: Yawgmoth started out as one of these.
  • Badass Preacher: The priests of Innistrad join the fight against the dark forces.
  • The Bad Guy Wins: The Phyrexian Guys Win in the Scars of Mirrodin block. Mirrodin is now New Phyrexia.
  • Bad Moon Rising:
  • Bald Women:
  • Baleful Polymorph: Seen on a variety of cards, typically blue. Examples include Snakeform, Pongify, Ovinize, and Fowl Play, among others.
  • Barbarian Tribe: The Gathans are the result of a super solder program gone awry upon the Keldon Barbarian tribes, resulting in a group of batshit barely sentient marauding murder machines.
  • Barrier Maiden:
    • Ashling in the Lorwyn storyline was supposed to take this role and help the flamekin transition from Lorwyn to Shadowmoor. She didn't go along with it, though.
    • Kyodai, the MacGuffin Girl you may know as That Which Was Taken, fused with her spirit-sister Michiko Konda to become the new protector and embodiment of the barrier between the mortal world and the spirit world.
  • Bash Brothers:
    • The Shadowmoor set had a cycle of five pairs of Bash Brothers. There's also Palace Guard, and the Brothers Yamazaki (who are literal brothers as well).
    • Also these channelers, who like the aforementioned Shadowmoor cycle, have two separate class types listed to reflect both participants.
    • Ajani Goldmane's unique brand of magic is the ability to bring out and manifest the best and strongest aspects of another person in physical form. His preferred brother in arms? His elder brother, Jazal Goldmane. Together they were said to be unstoppable.
    • Tibor and Lumia
    • These guys
    • Your choice!
  • Batman Gambit: In his mission to destroy Phyrexia, Urza deliberately included Tevesh Szat, a Token Evil Teammate, in his group because he correctly predicted that said teammate would betray them. Urza had invented a way to turn a soul into a Fantastic Nuke, but in order to use it, he would need to destroy the soul of a fellow planeswalker, and Tevesh Szat's inevitable betrayal would give Urza an excuse to kill him and power the bomb.
  • Bat Out of Hell: Vampire Bats, among others.
  • Battering Ram: Battering Ram
  • Battle Boomerang: Somewhat underwhelming unfortunately: [2]
  • Battle Cry: Used by the Mirrans in Mirrodin Besieged. They have a surprisingly deep variety of battle cries--Doug Beyer discusses it in great detail in his weekly column.
  • Bazaar of the Bizarre:
  • Beam-O-War:
    • In The Brothers' War, a young Urza and Mishra have a Beam-O-War battle between the green magical laser beams of Mishra's Weakstone and the red magical laser beams of Urza's Mightstone. When their mentor Tocasia tries to break it up, the resulting explosion leads to her death.
    • Double Negative
  • The Beast Master: Garruk Wildspeaker is the most prominent example, although there are others, usually one-of green rares like Master of the Wild Hunt, Keeper of the Beasts, or Beastbreaker of Bala Ged.
  • Beauty Equals Goodness: If Lorwyn's elves are to be believed...
  • Be Careful What You Wish For: Judgment's cycle of Wish cards, the flavour text of each of which is a variant on the following: "He wished for X, but not for the Y to [Verb that means use effectively] it."
  • Bee-Bee Gun: Hornet Cannon.
  • Bee People:
  • Berserker Tears: Tears of Rage. Also, they're on fire.
  • BFS:
  • Big Bad: There are two big contenders and several others:
    • The mechanical demon-god Yawgmoth in pretty much all of the storylines from Antiquities to the end of the Weatherlight saga was arguably the most powerful being in The Multiverse. And even long after his death, his creation, Phyrexia, lives on, and is now infecting Mirrodin.
    • Much later, during the Alara storyline, the elder dragon Nicol Bolas (a character from the game's early days) stepped in as the foremost threat to Dominia's stability.
    • There have been a few other, smaller Big Bads in between, including the vampire overlord Baron Sengir in Homelands, the golem wizard Memnarch in Mirrodin (himself a victim of the Phyrexian taint), and the corrupt human king Daimyo Konda in Kamigawa.
  • Big Badass Wolf: Most Wolves in Magic fall under this category. This one is 50% more badass than the most.
  • Big Creepy-Crawlies: Giant bugs are a staple creature type, especially in green and black.
  • Bigger Bad: Yawgmoth is the Bigger Bad to Volrath's Big Bad in the Rath saga.
  • Big Good: On Innistrad, humans looked to the archangel Avacyn for deliverance from the horrors of their plane...but she's not the Big Good. That would be her creator...Sorin Markov?!
  • Bio Augmentation:
    • The primary goal and identity of the Simic guild of Ravnica is artificially engineering superior life-forms. Their guild mechanic is "Graft", which is flavored as attaching cytoplast modifications to creatures.
    • In an odd example, Phyrexia biologically augments non-biological creatures.
  • Bizarro World: Lorwyn and Shadowmoor, to each other.
  • Black Cloak: Warlocks and wraiths are no strangers to dramatic cowls, and Magic's specters are literally nothing but black cloaks. And there's lots more.
  • The Blank:
    • Changeling magic can accomplish this.
    • Phyresis tends to end in this.
    • If a Zendikar Vampire drains someone completely of blood, they turn into a Null; basically a zombie without eyes or a nose.
    • Any of the brood lineage of Ulamog will have a pristine white skull-like plate over their faces. This is different from the other two eldrazi lineages because Ulamog's sires tend to have heads (whereas Kozilek's lineage have eyes, just elsewhere on the body, and Emrakul's Lineage all resemble sentient mushrooms).
  • Blinded by the Light: Blinding Mage, Blinding Angel, etc.
  • Blood Lust:
  • Blood Magic:
  • Blow You Away: Wind spells are common in both green and blue.
  • Body Horror:
    • What many mage-created Chimeras and Phyrexians endure.
    • Some of the card art features really gruesome stuff, particularly on black cards.
    • The Mirari does this to the peoples of the Otarian continent.
  • Bolt of Divine Retribution: A stock white spell. Divine Retribution invokes it by name, but there's lots.
  • Brainwashed and Crazy: Certain spell cards do this to creatures.
  • Breath Weapon: You do know that dragons are in this game, right?
  • Broken Angel:
  • Cain and Abel: Urza and Mishra.
  • Canis Major: Hollowborn Barghest is a very big dog. That's not dry grass it's standing in--those are trees.
  • Canon Immigrant:
    • The Viashino were originally introduced in the Tie-in Novel The Prodigal Sorcerer by Mark Sumner. The designers of the game liked them so much that they worked them into the game.
    • Jodah was created for Jeff Grubb's novelizations of The Dark and Ice Age cycles. He'd eventually return for Time Spiral block and get his own Avenger.
  • The Captain: Gerrard Capashen; although Sisay was the actual skipper of the Weatherlight, Gerrard filled the trope.
  • Catfolk: A number of cat races, including the cat warriors
  • Chain Lightning: Is a card.
  • Chainmail Bikini: Seen in some of the art. Hero of Bladehold is the most recent example.
  • Chekhov's Gun:
    • Ghostfire. Colourless damage basically got the reaction "hmm, interesting..." but it didn't become important until the Zendikar block, where it turned out Ghostfire was part of the key to the lock holding the Eldrazi in.
    • Subverted by the same block's Steamflogger Boss, which it was openly admitted was created solely as a joke--there are no riggers besides this (and those changelings that count as every creature type), "assemble" has no in-game meaning, and there are no Contraptions [1], and there supposedly never will be. (Admittedly, this is a bit hard to take seriously when one takes into account The Un-Reveal below and "Whenever a goblin with goblin goblins, etc.")
  • The Chessmaster:
    • Urza. The man spent 5,000 years influencing global politics in anticipation of a demonic invasion. In the end, Yawgmoth did him in, but he managed to save the world anyway.
    • Yawgmoth himself was a skillful chessmaster, even managing to Out Gambit Urza's original plan.
  • Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: Starke.
  • City in a Bottle: Is a card.
  • City Planet: Ravnica.
  • Classical Movie Vampire: Baron Sengir
  • Clingy Costume: Some cards, such as Living Armor, feature this.
  • Les Collaborateurs: Nicol Bolas's many minions in the Alara block surreptitiously working to spread paranoia and anarchy throughout their worlds -- the xenophobic Knights of the Skyward Eye, expansionist Seekers of Carmot, corrupt merchant Gwafa Hazid, and barbarian shaman Rakka Mar. As of Mirrodin Besieged, he's got Tezzeret helping him out in Mirrodin.
  • Corpse Land: The plane of Grixis is inhabited by dead things, undead things, demons, and the occasional desperate necromancer. Due to a lack of green or white mana it's incapable of producing new life.
  • Corrupt Church: The Orzhov guild.
  • The Corruption: Phyrexia. This is especially played up in the Scars of Mirrodin storyline.
  • Cosmic Horror:
  • Creative Sterility: Tezzeret, by his own admission, is lousy at coming up with his own plans and inventions. He prefers to adapt and improve on others' designs.
  • Creepy Doll: Creepy Doll. It's creepy.
  • Curb Stomp Battle: In the trailer for Duels of the Planeswalkers 2012, Gideon Jura exposits that he picked a fight with Nicol Bolas...the planeswalker Nicol Bolas. He gets summarily crushed.
  • Dark Is Not Evil: While Black often tends to produce villains, it has at least a few protagonists under it who don't fit on the worse levels of anti-hero, like Toshiro Umezawa and Xantcha. Some other protagonists are also half Black, half any other colour, like Teysa Karlov (Black/White).
  • Dark World: Lorwyn is based on the idyllic, fairy tails of the British Isles. Shadowmoor is its dark reflection and takes more after the Brothers Grimm...
  • Dating Catwoman: Ashnod and Tawnos are in love, despite being generals on the opposing sides of the Brothers' War.
  • Death World:
    • Zendikar, even before Cosmic Horrors started coming out of the woodwork.
    • Grixis, quite literally, due to the abundance of black mana (and the absence of green and white) making more life impossible, and death (and undeath) the only option.
  • Demonic Possession:
  • Diary: Venser has one.
  • Die or Fly: Severe physical or emotional trauma is the catalyst to a Planeswalker igniting their latent spark.
    • Old school, demi-God Planeswalker examples:
      • Urza Planeswalker, at the climax of the Brothers War, sets off the Golgothian Sylex, which sends all of Dominaria into a centuries-long ice age. His latent spark activated, allowing him to survive the blast.
      • Teferi of Zhalfir, while studying mind magic at the Tolarian academy, fell into a bubble of slow time that was filled with fire and got trapped there. The intense damage activated his spark half-way, so that he was able to survive until another student could get him out with water from a different slow-time bubble. She became his favorite companion (in the Doctor Who sense) when they found out that, because of the two different slow-time bubbles, she aged at a dramatically slower rate than a normal human, causing her to fall under the rules of Really Seven Hundred Years Old.
    • Post-mending ascensions:
      • Chandra Nalaar: Set fire to her village in a fit of rage after learning of her Arranged Marriage, and ran and hid. A local Knight Templar organization noticed, and not believing the villager's claims that the destruction was caused by a single child, rounded up the villagers and sealed them into the burning huts, punishment for harboring pyromancers. Chandra returns just in time to hear her family dying, and is quickly subdued by the soldiers. Just as they are about to behead her, her Spark ignites at the last possible second.
      • Sarkhan Vol was born onto a plane that had been a haven for dragons, which had been hunted to extinction by the local warlords, much to the dismay of the local shamans that worshiped them as the ultimate predators. Drifting back and forth between tribes and armies, searching for a purpose, making a name for himself in the process as a powerful warrior, Sarkhan enters into a trance after slaying an opposing commander, where he encounters the spirit of a dragon. So, inspired by the beast's majesty, he ascends killing his and the opposite army in the process.
      • Tezzeret, after being repeatedly denied entry into the Seekers of Carmot, breaks into their vault to prove his worth by crafting his own Etherium. He discovers the vault to be empty and that the Seekers' claims of the ability to craft new Etherium was a lie. Their plane is depleted, and they are merely recycling old Etherium. Caught in the act by the guards, they catch him and beat him half to death. The thought of his entire life's work being for naught was so harrowing that he ascended on the spot.
  • Don't Think, Feel: A core principle of red and green philosophy, and the main reason why they both hate blue.
  • The Dragon: Gix to Yawgmoth, Greven il-Vec to Volrath and later Crovax, Ertai and Tsabo Tavoc to Crovax, Phage (before the Patriarch died), Malil to Memnarch, Malfegor to Nicol Bolas.
  • Dragon Rider: Kargan Dragonlord
  • Dream Stealer: Lorwyn's Faeries harvest the dreams of the plane's other residents on behalf of their Queen.
  • Dropped a Bridge on Him: Poor Ertai. First he was our resident smug snarker, and then the plot for Nemesis turned him into a more heroic character and even put him into a tragic love story... and then immediately turned him into a horrible, Complete Monster bad guy and later killed him off in the most embarrassing way possible. Granted, his original personality did lend itself to a Face Heel Turn, but the way it came about and the extremes it went to were just weird.
  • Durable Deathtrap: Zendikar being the adventure world, there's tons of this.
  • Dying Moment of Awesome: Barrin knows how to leave an impression.
  • Easter Egg: Many, many different cards, but especially in comedy sets like Unglued and nostalgia sets like Time Spiral. See also Alternate Universe, above.
  • Eldritch Abomination: So many different creatures, and a few monsters in the stories. If you need a more particular example, the three major Eldrazi are the ones who qualify best. They are so alien to the laws of the multiverse, they are the only non-artifact creatures to have no color.
  • The Emperor: Daimyo Konda of Kamigawa.
  • Empty Piles of Clothing: Seen on Snakeform.
  • Endless Daytime: There are several places where this is the case.
    • The plane of Mirrodin has five suns. There is night time, but it's brief and exaggerated. Basically the only reason this is worth mentioning is the flavor text on Grasp of Darkness.
    • The plane of Serra is bathed in the light of a perpetual sunrise.
    • In Lorwyn "the sun never quite dips below the horizon".
  • The End of the World as We Know It: A particularly common trope. At one point, after several sets revolving around ever-bigger wars and cataclysms, the designers moved the action to Lorwyn, a new, rural-themed setting that scaled down the conflict: tribes battling neighboring tribes over land and prestige. Months later, yup, the whole world was wrecked. As in, the sun stopped shining (and few remember that it ever did!). So much for that.
  • Enemy to All Living Things: Phage the Untouchable. And we do mean all. Any organic material she touches instantly rots away. She wears only silk clothing and sleeps on a bed of stone.
  • Enemy Civil War: There are some major tensions growing between and even within the five Phyrexian factions that conquered Mirrodin, and the liberation of Karn might just be the spark needed to ignite a full-out war among the New Phyrexians.
  • Enemy Mine:
    • The coming of the Eldrazi has all the races and even the land of Zendikar uniting to fight a common threat.
    • Likewise with the races of Dominaria during the Phyrexian invasion.
    • Geth joining Glissa against Memnarch in the first Mirrodin cycle. They go back to hating each other in New Phyrexia.
  • Enemy Within:
    • Karn and the Phyrexian corruption in the Scars of Mirrodin block. His inner struggles are depicted on Distant Memories.
    • The Weaver King is an Enemy Within for Venser in Planar Chaos.
  • Energy Being: The malevolent Weaver King in Planar Chaos.
  • Engagement Challenge: In The Brothers' War, the Warlord of Kroog, searching for a powerful warrior to wed his daughter, decrees that whoever can move a giant jade statue from one end of the palace courtyard to the other will win the hand of Princess Kayla. Urza completes the challenge by building an automaton to lift the statue.
  • Eunuchs Are Evil: The expansion Portal: Three Kingdoms has a card called Corrupt Eunuchs.
  • Even Antiheroism Has Standards: One of Urza's first picks for his strike team of Planeswalkers to go to Phyrexia was a Planeswalker named Parcher. Urza rejected him for being insane.
  • Everything's Better with Dinosaurs:
  • Everything Trying to Kill You:
    • Jund (from Shards of Alara).
    • Kamigawa is a battle fought between humans and kami, who, due to the nature of Shinto, live in everything.
    • And taken Up to Eleven in Zendikar, where the "Roil" dramatically changes the landscape every few months, weird gravity wells cause floating islands of grassy plain that can drop at any moment, and the creatures that are not killed by the landscape are as hard as your average video game mid-boss. Rise of the Eldrazi then kicked that eleven up to twelve, because the usually unpleasant wildlife is being supplanted by Eldritch Abominations.
    • In Scars of Mirrodin, the entire plane is being taken over by the Phyrexian Glistening Oil. Metal becomes flesh, flesh becomes metal, and havoc and chaos ensue.
    • In Innistrad, humanity is the bottom of the food chain. Werewolves and vampires see humans as tasty snacks, ghoulcallers and stichers raise the dead for kicks, giests torment humans out of rage (or because they don't know any better), monsters lurk in the woods to snatch up the unwary, and demons lurk in the shadows, corrupting humanity to gain a foothold into their world.
  • Evil Chancellor: In Time Streams, Radiant's war minister turns out to be a Phyrexian spy, secretly working to subvert and corrupt Serra's Realm.
  • Evil Counterpart:
    • All over the place; look at White Knight versus Black Knight, for example. The entire Shadowmoor set, as a dark mirror of the earlier Lorwyn set, features many opposite counterparts to specific cards from the Lorwyn block.
    • To go with its theme of Mirrodin vs Phyrexia, Mirrodin Besieged has evil counterparts within the same set (Mirran Crusader and Phyrexian Crusader, Peace Strider and Pierce Strider), and also evil counterparts to cards from the last time we went to Mirrodin (Darksteel Colossus to Blightsteel Colossus).
    • The Northern Paladin has the Southern Paladin, and the Western Paladin has the Eastern Paladin.
    • The Predator can be considered this to the Weatherlight.
    • One of the terminologies of the game is "Mirrored Pair". These tend to be two cards who are polar opposites of eachother. Generally they tend to be this trope (although certain examples, like Hero of the Bladehold and Hero of Oxidda Ridge who are both "good", are exceptions).
  • Evil-Detecting Dog: Good dog.
  • Evil Sorcerer:
    • Lim-Dul, Heidar of Rimewind, Lord Dralnu, Memnarch, the Cabal Patriarch. Zur the Enchanter was definitely dangerous, but only self-absorbed, not outright evil.
    • Lesser Evil Sorcs include the Disciple of the Vault, one of the clerics who makes the Ravager Affinity deck into a fast-killing machine.
  • Evilutionary Biologist: Yawgmoth while he was mortal and Momir Vig.
  • Exotic Entree: Feast of the Unicorn.
  • Expansion Pack World:
    • Since the story details a different plane almost every block, the addition of new planes could be considered this to Dominia. Then again, in a theoretically infinite multiverse, it's justified.
    • Dominaria was also subject to this. While nowadays, the story just focuses on a new plane when a new theme for the setting is needed, as early as Fallen Empires and as recent as Odyssey while new continents would just be added to Dominaria to fit this purpose. This leads to Dominaria being so diverse - while most other planes are only themed around a single culture or gimmick, Dominaria has typical Medieval European Fantasy fare in Terisiare, Aerona, and Corondor; Reniassance-era technology in Caliman; wartorn Vestigial Empires in Sarpadia; Conan-esque Heroic Fantasy in Otaria; a Western Africa analogue in Jamuraa; and a Wutai in Madara, among others. And that isn't taking into consideration the areas from Rath that were fused with Dominaria in the Overlay.
  • Eyes Do Not Belong There: Very frequently. Kozilek and his lineage are the kings of this trope.
  • Eye Scream: Just look at the art on Deathmark.
  • The Fair Folk: Lorwyn's Fae are nasty little trolls who delight in making mischief and playing mean-spirited tricks on the plane's other races and harvest their dreams.
  • Fantastic Nuke:
    • The Golgothian Sylex was, functionally, a nuclear weapon. Its detonation ended the Brothers' War, vaporized Argoth, caused the Ice Age, and tore a literal hole in reality.
    • Yawgmoth repeatedly dropped "stonecharger" bombs on his enemies in The Thran which not only resembled nuclear weapons in their destruction, but also caused the same sort of horror real nukes inspire in at least one of the characters.
  • Fantasy Counterpart Culture: Kamigawa is feudal Japan. Naya is Mayincatec. The Ice Age block is Vikings. Jamuraa is Africa. Rabiah is Arabia. Innistrad is Renaissance Germany and Eastern Europe.
  • Fantasy Kitchen Sink: With some 11,000 different cards, it's hard to think of any fantasy concepts that aren't represented.
  • Female Angel, Male Demon: Nearly all of Magic's angels are visibly female. The overwhelming majority of Magic's demons are so freakish looking that the idea of having a gender seems a moot point. Though the gender of either is largely a moot point, as, being magically created avatars of their respective colors, neither reproduce in the traditional manner.
  • A Fete Worse Than Death: The signature of the Rakdos Cultists of Ravnica, as seen in the Flavor Text of Slaughterhouse Bouncer.
  • Fiery Redhead: Chandra Nalaar. Literally.
  • Flaming Sword:
  • Floating Platforms: Seen in both Zendikar and Serra's Realm.
  • Fog of Doom:
    • In the Apocalypse novel, when Yawgmoth himself appears on Dominaria, he takes the form of a giant black cloud that kills anything it touches.
    • Yawgmoth has a habit of making killer fog; in The Thran, his stonecharger bombs leave behind clouds of mist that that kill anything they touch.
  • Foregone Conclusion: The storyline of Coldsnap, released years after Ice Age and Alliances to give that block a "proper" block format (and conclusion). The press release teaser info explicitly said, "We know the Ice Age ended... but how?"
  • Forgotten Friend, New Foe: Volrath, villain of the Tempest block, was once Gerrard's adoptive brother before they bitterly parted ways in their youth.
  • A Form You Are Comfortable With: Old-generation planeswalker are also shapeshifters, capable of changing their appearances at will. Most of them generally opt to stay in the form they look like just before their ascension though.
  • Frankenstein's Monster:
  • From a Single Cell: Phyrexia is able to rebuild itself from just a single drop of oil, as seen in the tragic fate of Mirrodin. This is Lampshaded with Phyrexian Rebirth.

As long as one drop of the oil exists, the joyous work continues.

From the behind-the-scenes point of view, the prevalence and variety of humans does a couple of good things for the game. First, it lets us put a human face on every color of Magic. That helps the look and feel of all the colors stay appealing to a wide variety of players. Our market research shows that we have a lot of human beings among our consumers, and having human beings in the art gives those players a familiar face that they can identify with. [...]



Second, humans play an important role as a point of comparison in every color. You get to see how tall or tough or magic-inclined goblins are compared to humans, for example, since you get to see them next to red-aligned humans that live in similar environments and have similar color values. You get to see what role griffins or pterons or leonin play in a given setting, because you get to see white-aligned humans riding them or hunting them or making alliances with them. We can afford to get more exotic with our nonhuman races, in part because there are plenty of examples of humans next to whom you can see similarities and differences—and we like that.

  • Humongous Mecha: Darksteel Colossus.
  • Hybrid Monster: Quite a few; most are of the Undead variety, but there are some like mutant elves.
  • An Ice Person: Heidar, Rimewind Master
  • The Igor: Seen in Innistrad with Oglor (a mad scientist's assistant represented on Stitcher's Apprentice and in the flavor text of Rooftop Storm) and Garl (the Deranged Assistant).
  • Incendiary Exponent: Things on fire are often stronger or faster than things not-on-fire. For example, Fiery Mantle.
  • Involuntary Shapeshifting: The Changelings from Lorwyn block reflexively take the form of whatever else is nearby.
  • It Got Worse:
    • Zendikar is a Death World in Zendikar. Then it ramps up in Worldwake. By Rise of the Eldrazi, the whole plane is under attack by Planet Eater Eldritch Abominations.
    • Innistrad's Gothic Horror setting was scary to begin with; when the guardian angel Avacyn mysteriously disappeared, the monsters got more powerful.
  • It's Probably Nothing: Invoked by name in the flavor text of Steady Progress, Feeling of Dread and Bump in the Night.
  • Jekyll and Hyde: Civilized Scholar/Homicidal Brute, inspired directly by the original Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
  • Jidai Geki/Medieval Japan: A combination of these, plus elements of traditional Japanese fantasy and Shinto are the basis of the Kamigawa block.
  • Kangaroo Court: The card Twisted Justice is styled after creating such a situation, and the flavor text is from the perspective of the judge as he's being manipulated to send an innocent man to his death.
  • Kill'Em All: The Weatherlight saga had an extraordinarily high body count, especially among named protagonists.
    • Rofellos died fighting demons quite early on.
    • Mirri made a Heroic Sacrifice to save Gerrard from Crovax.
    • Belbe, despite ultimately turning good, was killed by Eladamri for being made of parts of his daughter.
    • Crovax and Ertai both fell to Phyrexia and died in its service.
    • Starke was killed by Volrath.
    • Hanna contracted the Phyrexian plague and died during the invasion proper.
    • Lin Sivvi and Eladamri both killed themselves rather than be consumed by Yawgmoth's death cloud.
    • Gerrard and Urza were both consumed in the completion of the Legacy weapon.
    • Squee was killed by the fallen Ertai. A lot. However, he kept getting better because Ertai had made Squee immortal so he could torture and kill him repeatedly.
    • In the same storyline, a similar thing happens with the Nine Titans, Urza's team of planeswalkers leading the attack on Phyrexia:
      • Daria and Kristina were killed by Tevesh Szat.
      • Tevesh Szat was killed when Urza made his soul into a bomb, as he had been included on the team for this purpose all along.
      • Taysir attempted to knock some sense into Urza after he joined Yawgmoth's side, only for Urza to kill him in self defense.
      • Bo Levar and Commodore Guff were absorbed by Yawgmoth.
      • Urza was consumed in the completion of the Legacy Weapon.
      • Freyalise and Lord Windgrace manage to survive the Phyrexian Invasion...only to later perform Heroic Sacrifices in order to seal the time rifts.
  • Knight Errant: Elspeth, literally. Though Gideon Jura is the one with the messiah complex.
  • Knight in Shining Armor:
    • The Cathars of Innistrad.
    • Elspeth.
    • Lots of various cards with the Knight creature type evoke this trope.
  • Last Stand: The forces of the Coalition make a Last Stand in Apocalypse, as depicted on the card (of course) Last Stand.
  • Laser-Guided Amnesia: The in-game flavor of your deck is that of your memories, and a number of cards have the ability to search opponent's decks for cards and remove them from the game.
  • Late Arrival Spoiler: In The Teeth Of Akoum, the Zendikar block novel, goes out of its way to avoid revealing that Sorin Markov is a vampire, which is pretty much his defining characteristic everywhere else he appears.
  • Legions Of Phyrexia: The Invasion block storyline has Dominaria defending itself against the invading forces of Yawgmoth.
  • Light Is Not Good: While White has several protagonists, it has occasionally proved to be oppressive, tyrannical and horribly misguided:
    • Takeshi Konda is the primary example of a White Big Bad.
    • Also from Kamigawa is the Myojin of Cleansing Fire, another White villain. Although he doesn't get much "screen time", he is clearly fighting on the side of the kami, and is implied he destroyed his own mortal followers with his sacred flames.
    • Another evil White kami is Kataki, who, according to this side story, is pretty much insane.
    • In Dissension, Augustin IV of the Azorius (a guild of blue-white Obstructive Bureaucrats) is the bad guy.
    • As Phyrexia shows (more specifically, Elesh Norn and her servants), White can be quite scary too...
  • Living Shadow: This is generally the flavor of the 'Shade' creature type.
  • Living Ship: The Weatherlight. Also, Living Airship.
  • Lizard Folk: The Viashino.
  • Loads and Loads of Characters: Literally thousands, made more confusing by the fact that many of them have the same or similar names.
  • Long Game: Nicol Bolas works this way all the time.
  • Looks Like Orlok: The original Sengir Vampire art draws from this. The current depiction even more so, aside from the fact that he has hair.
  • Loose Canon: The game's original dozen spin-off novels were published by HarperPrism. When the Weatherlight saga began and Wizards of the Coast started its own novel line, the continuity was revised (This is commonly referred to as "The Revision"). Any material in the old novels is considered Canon unless new material directly contradicts it.
  • Losing Your Head: Urza in Apocalypse. His severed head was last seen relaxing in a hot tub with the missing creature from AWOL.
  • Lost Technology: Thran technology in the Brothers' War.
  • Love It or Hate It: Invoked with Schismotivate, which works by inciting strong positive and negative emotions in two target creatures. The happy creature gets powered up; the sad creature gets powered down.
  • Love Redeems: Belbe, in Nemesis, leading to Redemption Equals Death. Spoiled somewhat by the romance being with Ertai, who went over to the side Belbe abandoned...before her body had actually cooled.
  • Loves the Sound of Screaming: Braids.
  • Luke, I Am Your Father: Volrath was Gerrard's adoptive brother, Vuel. This was never a huge secret, though.
  • Lunacy: All over the place in Innistrad block; both the church and the werewolves seem to draw power from Innistrad's silver Moon.
  • MacGuffin Girl: In Saviors of Kamigawa, That Which Was Taken (the MacGuffin that started the spirit war) takes the form of a girl.
  • Machete Mayhem: Trusty Machete
  • Macross Missile Massacre:
  • Magically-Binding Contract: The Guildpact in Ravnica block.
  • Magic Carpet: Magic Carpet. Also seen on Flying Men.
  • Magic Meteor: See Macross Missile Massacre above. Also this.
  • Making a Splash: Stock blue ability, although it's occasionally appeared in other colors as well.
  • The Man Behind the Man:
    • Yawgmoth behind Volrath, and in general Phyrexia for Rath.
    • Phyrexia behind Memnarch as well.
  • Mary Sue: A rare in-universe example; Akroma was created by Ixidor, a mage that could turn his fantasies into reality, as an idealized homage to his dead lover, and existed primarily to lay waste to his enemies. Her card reflects the concept, with its over-the-top amount of abilities.
  • Meaningful Name:
    • Glissa Sunseeker discovered (as far as the surface races are concerned) not only Mirrodin's fifth sun, which she also named, but also the mana core at the heart of the plane, meaning she's essentially found two suns.
    • Nicol Bolas. See Names to Run Away From Really Fast.
    • Gideon Jura. Gideon translates to 'Powerful Warrior' and he is consistently portrayed as this, being one of the only planeswalkers who isn't a straight mage; he's more of a paladin instead. One of his card abilities also turns him into a 6/6 human soldier temporarily, making him quite powerful indeed.
    • Garruk Wildspeaker's specialty is that once he defeats a wild animal, he can commune with it and summon it to his aid at a moment's notice.
    • Ajani Goldmane was born with a rare genetic defect that gave him startlingly pale fur.
    • Rafiq means "friend" in Arabic. He is the most decorated paladin on his plane, and renders his services as a peacekeeper and mediator of sorts, trying to solve would be duels with both participating parties leaving satisfied.
    • Very literally on the plane of Lorwyn. The local giants live large in every conceivable way, including how they sleep, sometimes decades at a time. During this sleep, which they call the 'namesleep' they have any number of dreams where they imagine themselves in some sort of epic poem all most. They take this as a sign, and when they wake up they take on that persona and name themselves appropriately. Such as a wandering drifter named Rosheen Meanderer, or a peacekeeping arbiter named Galanda Feudkiller.
    • "Pyrexia" is a medical term for a fever. The Phyrexians, in addition to not being a very pleasant lot, use genetically engineered plagues. In fact, Yawgmoth started out making such plagues. Their name is also derived from the Greek letter Phi, which is commonly used to represent the "perfect" golden ratio (and is itself commonly used as their sigil), reflecting their collective superiority complex.
  • Meat Moss:
    • The ground itself is Meat Moss'd in Grixis.
    • The interior of the compleated Lumengrid in New Phyrexia is covered in organic tissue.
  • Mechanical Horse: Bronze Horse, Clockwork Steed, Workhorse, and Chrome Steed. Hero of Bladehold and Hero of Oxid Ridge can be seen riding Chrome Steeds as well.
  • Mechanical Evolution: Phyrexia. Kind of.
  • Mechanical Lifeforms: The greater part of Mirrodin block falls under this, as does the world of Esper from Shards of Alara, the metal demons of Phyrexia, and various artifact creatures.
  • Mega Manning: Leshrac attempts this in Future Sight, using the Mask of Night's Reach to steal Jeska's dormant ability to corrupt anything she touches and Nicol Bolas's ability to cause madness with a touch. An epic duel with Nicol Bolas results.
  • Mentor Occupational Hazard: Tocasia, Urza and Mishra's teacher in their youth, falls victim to this trope.
  • Mercy Kill: In the Invasion block, Agnate to Thaddeus, and later, Grizzlegom to Agnate.
  • Messianic Archetype: Though very far from The Messiah, Urza went through a whole lot of awful things to destroy Phyrexia.
  • Meta Guy: Commodore Guff. Didn't work out.
  • Mind Control Device: The Mindslaver
  • Mind Rape: The flavor behind Discard spells suggests they do this to your opponent.
  • The Mirror Shows Your True Self: Inverted with Lich's Mirror.
  • Mirror Universe:
    • Lorwyn becomes its own Mirror Universe in the Shadowmoor block.
    • And there is an actual card called Mirror Universe, which allows you to swap Hit Point totals with your opponent.
    • Mirrodin is being corrupted into its reflection.
  • Monster Lord: Zendikar vampires and their nulls.
  • Mordor: Grixis.
  • Morphic Resonance: The werewolves of Innistrad all have distinctive visual cues to make it clear that the wolf and the human are the same creature. When this isn't done through a repetition of the setting[3], it's done with Morphic Resonance, copying a physical detail on both sides. For example, Reckless Waif's distinctive pink hair, or Mondronen Shaman's single glowing eye.
  • Mugging the Monster: Tormented Pariah.
  • Names to Run Away From Really Fast:
  • Nature Hero: Various green-aligned characters, but especially Kamahl post-transformation.
  • A Nazi by Any Other Name: Lorwyn's Elves believe that anything that is ugly is an affront to nature. Naturally, they believe this gives them the right to systematically hunt down and murder ugly lesser races.
  • Negative Planar Wedgie: Either the cause of, or caused by, a large amount of the plot.
  • Nice Job Breaking It, Hero:
    • In the novel for the Nemesis set, the Phyrexian Belbe was deliberately sabotaging the plans for Rath to overlay Dominaria. Until Eladamri killed her because she was constructed from his daughter's body.
    • In the Ravnica series, the Dissension novel has the Azorius Guildmaster explaining that things have gotten a lot worse because the main characters arrested the first book's Big Bad, who was put on trial and killed. How is this a bad thing? The magically-enforced government of Ravnica demands that group/entity exist, for the sole purpose of doing Big Bad things. Because it could no longer act as an opposing force, the magic of the Guildpact was weakened and could no longer protect the city.
    • Another one happened in In The Teeth of Akoum, Zendikar's novel. Upon reaching the eponymous location, Sorin Markov, a vampire planeswalker, tries to activate a strange device. Nissa, his unwilling partner, is a Zendikar native elf who hates vampires. When Nissa notices the device reacting to Sorin's ritual, she promptly uses a spell to destroy it. Unfortunately for her, and Zendikar, that device is the final lock which holds the Eldrazi, and with no more lock to hold them, they break free. Sorin, annoyed, leaves afterwards.
    • Earlier, in another example, Jace's, Chandra's and Sarkhan's shenanigans some time prior weakens the rest of the locks keeping the Eldrazi imprisoned, just as Nicol Bolas wanted.
    • Memnarch might not have been a nice guy, but he was fighting back the mycosynth corruption in Mirrodin's Core and preventing Phyrexia from taking hold there. When Glissa and her friends defeated him, the mycosynth grew unchecked and Phyrexia could grow unimpeded, dooming the plane.
  • Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: Mistform Ultimus which has every creature type, such as Ninja, Pirate, Zombie, Construct, Mutant, Ninja, and Turtle. Years later, Lorwyn block introduced nineteen more creatures like this, as well as several non-creature cards.
  • Not So Different: Urza and Mishra.
  • Obake: Kamigawa has oni and kitsune; indeed, the entire Kamigawa block is one big Obake-fest, its setting heavily inspired by Japanese folklore and mythology.
  • Oculothorax: There are two.
  • Older Than They Look/Really Seven Hundred Years Old/Time Abyss: Old generation planeswalkers are generally immortal; Urza, as an example, lived for at least 5000 years, while Nicol Bolas is even older. That's before counting some people who live long despite being otherwise mortal: Jodah aged slowly because he fell into a fountain of youth in his youth; Jhoira, unlike her planeswalker boyfriend Teferi, used slow-aging potions; Liliana Vess made a contract with demons (in her case, despite being a planeswalker, she is not normally immortal due to the Mending) and so on.
  • One for Sorrow, Two For Joy: Thieving Magpie.
  • One Steve Limit: Enforced for gameplay reasons -- all planeswalkers which appear or may appear on cards are required to have different names.
  • Our Dwarves Are All the Same: Dwarves are basically all blacksmiths and miners with large beards. If they're warriors, they wield axes. Even in Shadowmoor, whose Duergar dwarves have a radically different appearance, they're still primarily miners.
  • Our Elves Are Better: There are many different elf tribes in the setting, but the recent Lorwyn elves are a sharp departure from the previously base-green elves into green/black to show their arrogant destructiveness. (Shadowmoor flipped it so they became the plane's only protagonists, with even white turning paranoid, insular, and Hive Mind-ish.)
    • Lorwyn, of all sets, deconstructs this. In a nutshell, if you aren't as beautiful as them, you don't deserve to live. And nobody's as beautiful as them. And some of Lorwyn's inhabitants are just deliberately being ugly at them. They call these unfortunate souls "eyeblights," and they actively hunt them down and kill them.
    • In Magic's debut set, elves were portrayed as feral and vicious, in startling contrast to the conventional concept (although those showed up in most other sets).
    • Also, the Elves of Deep Shadow of the classic set The Dark, later reprinted as part of the Golgari guild in Ravnica: City of Guilds, were green but produced black mana instead of green when tapped, and dealt damage to their controller each time they did.
    • Mirrodin's elves are basically cyborg elves. Mind you, everything on Mirrodin has a high metal content one way or another.
  • Outscare the Enemy: The Exodus version of Raging Goblin has as its flavor text: "Volrath has bred them to fear only him. Are they charging to battle or merely fleeing his wrath?"
  • Organic Technology: Phyrexia. They invoke this trope, subvert it, divert it, avert it, deconstruct it, reconstruct it, and ask it out for dinner. Their entire purpose is to blur the line between 'organic' and 'technology' to the point of irrelevance. In the most nightmarish ways possible.
  • Our Monsters Are Different: Very, very common, especially in later blocks.
    • The Lorwyn block is a smorgasboard of this trope, featuring philosopher giants, Nazi elves, badass halflings, and monstrous-looking faeries.
    • The Shadowmoor block, a Bizarro Lorwyn, carries on with this trope, as the kithkin/halflings become paranoid castle-dwellers and merfolk become murderous fish-faced monsters.
    • Most of the races in Shadowmoor became personifications of their worst qualities: the giants become so lazy and mindless that they are mistaken for landmass, the goblins have degenerated from being impish tricksters to being wild animals, the treefolk have become utterly apathetic to the other races, and the cinders lost all of their passion and fire, and now want to make all the other races suffer like they do. The two exceptions are the elves, who have been humbled into nobility by being hunted and persecuted, and the faeries, who are protected by Oona's magic.
  • Our Vampires Are Different:
    • Each setting that has vampires that are quite recognizable as vampires, as with other typical fantasy species, they tend to make subtle little differences between one plane's vampires from another plane's:
      • Ravnica has psychic vampires like Szadek, some of which look extremely feral.
      • Zendikar's vampires have a very strong 'venomous' motif and had fang-like protrusions from most of their joints.
      • Rath's vampires are basically giant bats, and the villainous Evincar has a pack of vampire dogs as pets.
      • Mirrodin's vampires have their fangs in their fingers, which are basically foot long syringes, and their bowels are visible from the outside.
      • Innistrad's vampires come in both black and red. The red vampires tend to be more feral, but overall they mostly fit the Classical Movie Vampire trope.
    • A major plot point in the Zendikar block novel In the Teeth of Akoum. The elf protagonist, Nissa Revane, doesn't realize one of her traveling companions, Sorin Markov, is a vampire until very late in the novel. This is due to the fact that since he's from Innistrad and not Zendikar, he has none of the staple characteristics of her world's vampires. This is unintentionally hilarious, as when the character was first teased by Wizards of the Coast, quite literally, the first thing the fan base learned about him was that he was a vampire.
  • Our Werebeasts Are Different: Includes werebears, wererats, and Werewolves.
  • Our Werewolves Are Different:
  • Our Zombies Are Different: There's pretty much every single kind but Type R zombies. Innistrad even combines two different kinds, as it has mad science monsters in blue coexisting with Romero-style hordes of the flesh eating dead in black.
  • Outside Context Villain:
    • The Eldrazi.
    • Phyrexia in the Scars of Mirrodin storyline:

"Their forces are unknown to us. The Moriok or the nim that emerge from the necrogen bogs—those we understand. These horrors which pour out of the canyons use weapons, tactics and magic that are alien to even our most capable generals and seasoned warriors. Our armies are scattered. We have no choice but to hide and survive."

Altered by Phyrexian science, corrupted by black mana, and twisted by rage, Ertai still looked in the mirror and saw only glory.

"The refugees look at these structures with hope. We must relieve them of this burden."
—Juex, Tormentor Exarch

"Enough! If I must kill the guilty to save the innocent, then I will kill!"

Sorin Markov: Avacyn, my angel...what has befallen you?

  • What Could Have Been: The Planar Chaos expansion is an in-story example.
  • Whatevermancy: Magic has more than its share of -mancers, both of the classical divination kind and the modern "control whatever it is" kind (some, like Retromancer, are a bit shaky on what their name actually is supposed to mean). Matt Cavotta Discusses Magic's -mancers here.
  • Wheel of Pain: Distinctly, it causes mental pain rather than physical pain: [3]
  • With Great Power Comes Great Insanity:
    • Many Planeswalkers go mad when they first awaken to their true potential. In more mortal matters, many mages in Dominaria's history have gone on rampages while drunk on their newly-developed creations or power sources.
    • Urza started slipping into this in his plans to defeat Phyrexia.
  • The World Is Always Doomed: Not always, but surprisingly often, and more so since the story got into the habit of moving on to a new world as soon as the current one stops being doomed.
    • In the Time Spiral block, the near-apocalypse that was the main storyline of the block was caused by so many near-apocalypses on the same world that time, space and magic were unraveling. When a planeswalker who sat out part of a previous interdimensional war returns to Dominaria, he tries to bring with him two continents that he had taken to another dimension with him. This doesn't help.
  • World Half Empty:
    • Shadowmoor. It's the Mirror Universe of Lorwyn, and where that world represented a fairytale land, Shadowmoor represents the dark side of those tales. The fiery Flamekin have guttered into Cinders, the helpful Merfolk have become cruel pirates, and the tight-knit families of the Kithkin have become insular and xenophobic.
    • Grixis, one of the Shards of Alara, is a dark world, filled with undead and demons and slowly falling apart. Most of the magic in the plane is dependent on draining the life, blood, and memories from the living, and there isn't quite enough left... Arguably, all the Shards are this, as two of the colors of magic are gone from each, but Grixis is the most dystopian.
    • Rath, a plane created by Phyrexia to eventually be superimposed on Dominaria. The World Half Empty aspect was highlighted in Nemesis.
    • There's also an obscure factoid that one of the 1001 Rabiahs is just as bad as Phyrexia.
  • World of Badass: Zendikar. See Everything Trying to Kill You, above. Wimpy planeswalkers strongly advised to keep out.
  • World Sundering:
    • Zendikar's Hat is that of adventure, this is caused in large part by 'The Roil' which reshapes the landscape of even entire continents on a regular, though unpredictable basis. Making maps nigh useless, and permanent settlements few and far between.
    • Sunder.
    • Sundering Titan.
    • Maelstrom Pulse.
    • Soulquake.
    • Worldpurge.
    • Fault Line. You get the point. There's a lot of these, with a number of different flavor applications.
  • World-Wrecking Wave: The Eldrazi cause these for Zendikar, as seen in All Is Dust.
  • Wrench Wench: Hanna
  • Xanatos Roulette: Nicol Bolas' ploy to free the Eldrazi certainly counts. To release the Eldrazi, he required the presence of three different planeswalkers at the Eye of Ugin, as well as having one of them use Ghostfire to trigger the failsafe mechanism. He could only be certain that his own minion (Vol) would be there, but to lure the other two, he combined elements of his own meticulous planning, as well as a simple stroke of luck. He even said so himself!

Bolas: I didn't send you to ensure no one entered the Eye. I sent you to ensure they did. Do you think it a coincidence that two planeswalkers arrived there when they did?
Vol: You sent me to fester? As a helpless proxy? You knew they would come?
Bolas: I knew the girl would come. The other-I had to play the odds.

  1. ↑ although Contraption is a recognized Artifact subtype in the comp. rules
  2. ↑ Plus two that can turn the somewhat more common relatives Islandwalk, Forestwalk, Mountainwalk, and Swampwalk into Plainswalk or vice versa
  3. ↑ a la Tormented Pariah
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