Magic: The Gathering/Gameplay Tropes: Difference between revisions

* [[Card Battle Game]]: Most video game adaptations, including the Microprose ''Shandalar'' game and ''Duels of the Planeswalkers''.

* [[Cave Mouth]]: The card Howling Mine looks like this most of the time, [[Depending on the Artist]].

** Aside from the infamous Channel-Fireball combo, planeswalkers fall under this as well: Some of their ability require the removal of loyalty counters. These same counters effectively act as their life totals; once they're out of counters, they're gone. Most also invert this trope by having abilities that ''give'' them loyalty counters as well, as well as a few with abilities that do nothing to their counter totals.

** More recently, there are the cards that use Phyrexian mana symbols from ''New Phyrexia'': For each Phyrexian mana symbol in a cost, you can pay 1 mana of the specified color, or 2 life.

* [[Cute Is Evil]]: [[Played for Laughs]] with the ''Unglued'' card [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=9779 Infernal Spawn of Evil], along with its sequel from ''Unhinged'', [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=73981 Infernal Spawn of Infernal Spawn of Evil]. As a bonus, it's also a joke about [[Actor Allusion|card artist Ron Spencer only drawing hideous monsters]].

* [[Damage Over Time]]: Several cards deal damage during a player's "Upkeep" step, in contrast to most cards which can only deal damage once at a time.

* [[Death Is Cheap]]: Or rather, "being removed from the game is cheap". Most permanents and spells that are destroyed, discarded or otherwise gotten rid of go to the graveyard zone by default, but ever since the game was new a few abilities here and there send their targets or themselves to the "removed from game" zone. But such effects have slowly become more common over the years, and two cards were printed that retrieved any card that had been removed from the game, and variations on the effect like suspend have proved very powerful and popular. So in a 2009 rules change, the description of the "remove from game" effect was changed to "exile", to reflect the fact that there's a good chance it hasn't been "removed from the game" at all.

** Mocked by the unhinged card "AWOL", which first removes an attacking creature from the game, and then takes that creature from the "removed from the game" zone and puts it in a state called "absolutely-removed-from-the-freaking-game-forever".

** ...cards based on [[Public Domain Characters]] and stories, with flavour text quoting things like [[The Bible]] or [[William Shakespeare]] plays, as opposed to creating an original story and basing the cards around that. Even the first expansion was based entirely off of characters and themes from ''[[Arabian Nights]]''.

* [[Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors]]: The Color Wheel is probably the most well-known non-traditional version in gaming.

* [[Everything's Better with Chickens]]: ''Unglued'' had a lot of fun with chickens, which would be out of place in any normal expansion.

* [[Everything's Better with Penguins]]: ''Unhinged'' brings us the rather unusual [http://ww2.wizards.com/gatherer/CardDetails.aspx?&id=73956 Curse of the Fire Penguin], which turns a creature into a penguin. And it's contagious.

** There are a few blue cards, such as [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=247186 Fact or Fiction] and [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=194971 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.

* [[Samurai]]: Seen in the ''Kamigawa'' block.

* [[Scunthorpe Problem]]: The problem with Assault Strobe and Cumulative upkeep on the Gatherer site. Yes, they're going that far.

* [[There Is No Kill Like Overkill]]: [http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?multiverseid=134740 Shivan Meteor] is a prime example.

* [[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.

* [[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.

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[[Category:Gameplay Tropes]]