Explaining the Card, Explains the Card | Magic's Most Ambiguous Designs
This essay is about Magic cards that need further explanation.
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The Power of Powerstones
At some point during our homemade prerelease of The Brothers’ War back in late 2022, I was instructed to create a tapped Powerstone token. I remember picking up the card and reading the textbox with a furrowed brow: “Tap, add colorless, this mana can’t be spent to cast a nonartifact spell…”
“Tap: add colorless. This mana can’t be spent to cast a nonartifact spell…”
“This mana can’t be spent to cast a nonartifact spell”
“The mana generated from Powerstones can be used for anything except nonartifact spells.”
“Well, you know what, I can use my Powerstone to cast an artifact, right?”
Powerstones can’t cast nonartifact spells. It’s written right there, clear as day. And as the saying goes,
“Reading the card explains the card.”
“Reading the card explains the card.”
Reading the card explains the card.
Most of the time, Prof’s catchphrase can serve as a reliable heuristic to guide you through the muddy waters of convoluted rules text. Most of the time, new cards can quickly be parsed and reduced to previously-experienced game states. Magic’s mechanics tend to rhyme with one another in the abstract. However, on the very rare occasion, you will find yourself stumbling over a linguistic speed bump. You’ll be caught tangled in the contradictions of a double negative or trapped in the maze of sequential conditions. Like Mark Gottlieb encountering Notion Thief on Inside R&D, you will one day come across a Magic card that stumps you and leaves you doubting if you know this game at all.
In that moment of humility and acute embarrassment, consider a new message in earnest. When reading only gets you so far, I insist: explaining the card explains the card.
High Concepts, Low Comprehension
“According to Richard Garfield,” wrote former Creative Director Brady Dommermuth in June 2009, “flying was the first mechanic conceived. ‘I knew right away that I wanted flying to have some meaning in the game,’ said Garfield…’Luckily, the first idea for flying turned out to be intuitive and elegant. We didn’t have to modify it at all.’”
“Flying also heralded the classification of early Magic mechanics as motif-based rather than mechanic-based,” continued Dommermuth. “Mechanics arose from visualizing how two armies of creatures would battle each other, rather than creating mechanics and then fitting them into the Magic world.” These two points of departure were later codified in design terms as top-down versus bottom-up. Dommermuth notes in his article that Legends came from a group of passionate roleplayers who wanted to translate tabletop themes into Magic, while sets like Mirage and Visions were led by wargamers and card players with more structure-based goals. Dakkon Blackblade, for example, is a top-down design that is reinforced by its flavor text, while the Buyback mechanic is bottom-up and doesn’t demand resonance from a high-fantasy setting.
Flanking, believe it or not, was a bottom-up effort to make lowly, 3-mana 2/2’s like Gray Ogre relevant in combat. Once the mechanic was well-defined, the creative team introduced the concept of horsemen leveraging their tactical advantage over foot soldiers to tie the idea together. Unlike the simplicity of flying, flanking often needs further explanation. It’s not as immediately intuitive.
In 2006, flanking returned in Time Spiral on nine creatures, eight of whom were knights. Most of them were relatively easy to understand, but Cavalry Master still to this day gives pause. The card reads:
“Flanking. Other creatures you control with flanking have flanking.”
That second line seems redundant and sounds a bit silly when read aloud. Without the italicized reminder text following in parentheses, it may not be clear that this a triggered keyword ability that stacks, while static abilities like flying, trample, and vigilance do not. Conceptually, it makes sense that a Cavalry Master would make the dragoons in his surroundings stronger, but it doesn’t exactly read well in rules text. Furthermore, the clarification that “flankers flank but only against nonflankers” is the sort of Seussical gobbledygook that pours out of players’ eardrums when navigating the complexities of combat. Say flanking one more time and it loses all meaning.
That reminds me of this old chap from Coldsnap:
“Remove target blocking creature from combat. Creatures it blocked that no other creature blocked this combat become unblocked, then it blocks an attacking creature of your choice. Play this ability only during the declare blockers step.”
To echo Gottlieb, “yeah what does this card do?” Well, it allows you to move a single blocker from one attacker to another. More often than not, you’re activating Balduvian Warlord on the offensive to tip the scales in your favor. On the defensive, it can serve to save your creatures from opponents’ combat tricks, but that’s far more narrow a use case. Like flanking, this card requires some game context to really shine – its applications go much deeper than its techy language might suggest. But it’s the exact type of card that I’m avoiding in a late-night, lobbycon cube draft following a long day at the convention. There’s just no way that reading this card could explain this card once your mind is reduced to tomato soup after hours and hours of socializing.
As a quick aside, I’m intentionally examining these cards in isolation. Scryfall’s notes and rules information showcase some examples of how convoluted these abilities become when combined with other cards, but that’s a project for another time. Calling judges for this video we are not.
Both Balduvian Warlord and Cavalry Master are relatively old designs, but the game’s earliest sets present many more sources of comprehension headaches. Takklemaggot, Ice Cauldron, and Illusionary Mask appear repeatedly on lists of Magic’s most confusing cards. Part of the struggle to understand these cards is due to phrasing that was not yet formalized in the official rules. “You can summon a creature face down so opponent doesn’t know what it is;” and “it serves to hide the true casting cost of the creature, which you still have to spend” is not how we would write these instructions now. But it does provide a glimpse at the author’s intent: the high-level concept of Illusionary Mask is in the card name. You give your creatures an anonymous disguise to keep your opponents guessing, then later you reveal their true form for maximum opportunity. The debut of Morph in Onslaught would eventually tighten up the screws on this idea and make it more functional in the rulebook.
The Hive is another old Magic card filled with a wall of text printed in tiny font, but this one can be summarized in a single sentence: “pay five generic mana and tap: create a 1/1 colorless insect artifact token with flying named Wasp.” The discrepancy between the Alpha printing and the streamlined oracle text is evidence of a game that has evolved in style and form across generations. The archaic language of the former is crafted and phrased as if torn directly from a spell book; the sterilized language of the latter is written exclusively as a guide for use. Between them are decades of time slowly eroding away the excess edges, like a jagged rock that tumbles into a gemstone.
As Dommermuth stated, early designers were twisting high concepts through an unratified game system made of still images and words. The intended ludonarrative experience was communicated through rules text: antiquated phrases and terms certainly built atmosphere but compromised clarity. Disputes were often settled informally between friends – Word of Command, more or less, allows you to play a card from your opponent’s hand. Don’t worry so much about timing and phases and permissions, just choose a card, any card, and put it on the table. This one is a rare example of the original text getting quicker to the point than the up-to-date ruling. That middle phrase is just so encumbered.
Sometimes, though, that bookish diction of old Magic cards was too easily misread, most infamously on a playtest card that reliably won the game on turn 2.
Those Linguistic Trapdoors
Starburst is a two-mana red sorcery that reads “Opponent loses next turn.” To Richard Garfield, this design was akin to playing a SKIP card in UNO. To the Magic playtesters, it meant instant victory. When the two parties converged and discovered the disconnect, they reformatted the wording and color-shifted the card to blue. We recognize Starburst now as Time Walk. “Take an extra turn” was the implicit text lost to a misinterpreted homonym.
Hiding within Magic’s most ambiguous cards are a series of morphological trapdoors. Relative pronouns like “which” and “that” and “whose” and “those” tend to create tracking problems. Breena, the Demagogue is one such card that often needs ironing out: “Whenever a player attacks one of your opponents, if that opponent has more life than another of your opponents, that attacking player draws a card and you put two +1/+1 counters on a creature you control.” Like the goad mechanic, this card encourages the other players at the table to attack between themselves and discourages them from attacking you; it just requires the extra step of comparing life totals to meet favorable conditions. As long as the player being attacked does not have the lowest life total among your opponents, you’re golden. If there are two Breena’s in play controlled by different players…I don’t know, good luck. Like I said, we’re not working in doubles, because,
Repetition leads to interpretation issues. The aforementioned Balduvian Warlord’s “blocking” clause is one example; Barrin’s Unmaking is another. “Return target permanent to its owner’s hand if that permanent shares a color with the most common color among all permanents or the color tied for most common.” Basically, if there are five blue permanents on the battlefield and three red ones, I can target and bounce the blue ones.
On the subject of checking colors, “Destroy two target nonblack creatures unless either one is a color the other isn’t.” Dead Ringers has been speaking in riddles since 2001, and not even an updated oracle text can offer hints at its effect. In essence, you destroy two creatures that share exactly the same colors. Neither of them can be black. Both of them can be colorless. Two red creatures, two red-blue creatures, two Bant creatures, two Eldrazi – all are good targets. But a Llanowar Elves and a Dryad Militant won’t pass – both are green, but one is also white.
The cycle of Mythos spells from Ikoria also care about colors, but only in the mana spent to cast them. It’s understandable to misread this clause as an alternate or additional casting cost rather than a condition check, but even then, all five of these cards are cognitively demanding. Mythos of Brokkos is probably the easiest to parse thanks in part to the line break between the two sentences. Mythos of Nethroi, on the other hand, still reads like it’s missing a phrase entirely. “Destroy target nonland permanent if it’s a creature spell or if GW was spent to cast this spell.” In contrast to the latest printing of The Hive, this card suffers from its brevity and its syntax. Essentially, you have two options here: spend 2 generic and a black to destroy a creature, or spend exactly GWB to destroy any nonland permanent.
The single line of text on Thromok the Insatiable also reads like it wants a follow-up phrase: “Devour X, where X is the number of creatures devoured this way,” reminds me of those John Jacob Jingleheimer Schmidt type of songs that loop infinitely back onto themselves. This card makes a strong case for example text rather than the italicized description of the Devour mechanic. Imagine if instead we had the Gatherer notes here: “if Thromok devours one creature, it enters with one counter. If it devours two creatures, it enters with two counters for each of them, for a total of four. Devouring three creatures will produce nine counters, and so on.” It doesn’t help that Devour is a niche mechanic appearing only on a handful of cards from way back in Shards block and with spotty support in supplemental sets since. As far as I understand, sacrificing five creatures with Thromok makes 25 counters, six makes 36, ten makes 100; it seems it just squares the number of creatures sacrificed. Like flanking, this one requires playing the card in a couple of games to stick.
Cauldron Dance is another wonderful Magic card that really clicks once you see it in context. Some folks claim this one is difficult to understand – it’s actually crystal-clear in its instructions, but unique in its application. The formatting reads like a three-step guide. First, you go to combat. Second, you simultaneously reanimate a creature from your graveyard and cheat a creature from your hand into play. Finally, at the end of the turn, you put the reanimated creature into your hand and the cheated creature into your graveyard. Conceptually, you’re swapping a dead guy for one who hasn’t yet been cast, and both get to attack in the time between. Or block, of course, if you choose to dance during your opponent’s turn. I love this card. There’s so much movement between the zones and it always punches above its weight. Casting it feels like performing Magic’s version of sleight of hand.
Other high-concept cards present apprehension difficulties in their rules text, but zooming out and considering the narrative ideas at play can help connect the dots. Bounty of the Luxa from Amonkhet gamifies the flooding of the Nile, a celebrated inundation cycle that sustained Nubia and Egypt in ancient times. The core idea is this: the river water overflows and nourishes the farmlands, the water recedes and the crops grow, the crops are harvested and nourish the citizens. Mechanically, I defer to Reddit user Ceondoc for a perfect explanation of this card’s tricky rules text:
“I actually had to explain this card to my friend today. He was confused by the "flood counter" part so I boiled it down to "on your first main phase, does the card have a rock on it? If no, put a rock on it and draw a card. If yes, take the rock off and get mana." That seemed to get through to him.”
Explaining the card explains the card, be it with flavor or with function. Often, they are tied intrinsically together, like on this outstanding design from Murders at Karlov Manor. A recreation of the game theory paradox of the same name, Prisoner’s Dilemma puts players into a lose- and lose-more position. William Poundstone’s book from 1993 explains the thought experiment, which I will summarize here: two guys are in solitary confinement. They cannot speak to one another. The police don’t have enough evidence to convict them together, but they’re ready to sentence them individually to one year a piece. Unfortunate for them, the officers want more, so they offer each prisoner the same deal: if you testify against the other guy, you’ll go free and he will get three years. If the other guy testifies against you, he will go free and you will get three years. The catch? If both of you testify, you will both get two years, which is twice as long as just remaining silent. Pretend you are one of the prisoners: what do you do? Do you trust the other guy will stay silent, or do you potentially save yourself from jail and testify against him?
Well, this Magic card places you in that exact scenario. Using the same matrices that illustrate the original problem, I mapped out the potential payoffs here. If every one of your opponents cooperate and choose silence, they only take four damage. If all of them defect and choose snitch, they all take 8 damage. However – and this is the horrible outcome that transpires time and time again – if one person chooses silence and the rest choose snitch, then that person takes 12 damage and the rats take zero! What’s more is this card has Flashback, which adds a layer of metagaming atop the original voting. Remember: people don’t forget!
Hang on, the prisoners are telling me they don’t know what Flashback means. Oh, and there’s no reminder text on either of the card’s printings? I thought reading the card explained the card?
Who Really Knows the Rules?
Stalking Yeti, printed in 2006, is clear in language but vague in application. It reads, “When Stalking Yeti comes into play, if it’s in play, it deals damage equal to its power to target creature an opponent controls and that creature deals damage equal to its power to Stalking Yeti.” Once again, we have a seemingly redundant line that flows rather metaphysical. This conditional clause was somewhat necessary for its time period, when damage still went on the stack and players could abuse the gap between assigning and dealing it. Murkier is the line that follows. We may think to shortcut that phrase to “fight,” but technically speaking, it is a sequential-damage interaction. This means the creature deals its damage first and the other creature deals its damage second. Stalking Yeti swings the opening punch, and if it knocks out the opposition, it does not take a punch in return.
Stalking Yeti and its ilk fall into a category of lexically ambiguous Magic cards that exploit the comprehensive rulebook. They allow savvy know-it-alls to leverage subtle interactions against their opponents, which only creates disparity between those who study the corner-cases and those who take the card text at face value. Consider the legendary clip of LSV looping Oblivion Ring and crashing MTGO back in May 2012. It started with the opponent casting the first O-Ring on Elesh Norn. The opponent then casts a second O-Ring with hopes of exiling Luis’ Nihil Spellbomb, the only other legal target on the battlefield.
This mishap resulted in the second O-Ring forcibly exiling the first one, which brought back Elesh Norn. On the next turn, the opponent cast the third O-Ring, setting up Luis to commit to the bit and destroy his own Elesh Norn before it could resolve.
“So, can I draw the game here, or make MODO crash? Yeah, I have no idea what’s going to happen, but, I’ve always wondered, so… This was just too funny to pass up.”
This exact scenario was scribed into the rulebook in 2007, five years before this match took place. “If there are no nonland permanents on the battlefield other than an Oblivion Ring, and the card it exiled was another Oblivion Ring, casting a third Oblivion Ring will result in an involuntary infinite loop that will end the game in a draw.” The reason for this ruling is due to the line break between the “enters” ability and the “leaves” ability, which puts two separate triggers onto the stack. Oblivion Ring expresses clear authorial intent, but Magic players are hard-programmed to find cracks in all the seams. Veterans usually take the common play-pattern of permanently dispatching stuff by removing their own Oblivion Ring in the window between the two abilities resolving. Sitting on the receiving end of this exploit has become a Magic rite of passage, but it doesn’t feel any less disarming to endure.
In December 2024, Parker LaMascus published an article titled “When Trivia Beats Strategy” for Lucky Paper. He makes a case against trivia checks in cube, which are “decisions that hinge on memorized rules rather than strategic or probabilistic thinking.” Parker highlights the Protection mechanic as one of the game’s greatest offenders – the high-level concept made flavor sense to designers in the early 90’s, but the many layers of minutiae developed in the decades since has muddied this mechanic beyond its original intent. Parker argues that rules-heavy cards punish more than they reward, leading to dissatisfying game states. In my experience, pausing to call a judge or to look up rules on Scryfall breaks immersion and flow. In a game with hidden information, it can also spoil a combat trick or give an opponent a heads-up on potential cards in hand.
Lagrella, the Magpie is a card that creates distrust and suspicion between those who know the rules and those who don’t. She reads, “When Lagrella, the Magpie enters the battlefield, exile any number of other target creatures controlled by different players until Lagrella leaves the battlefield. When an exiled card enters under your control this way, put two +1/+1 counters on it.” That first line may have you believe that you can exile any number of your opponents’ creatures with her ability, just as it says on the card, but that’s not quite right – the follow-up phrase adds another cross-checking condition per target. In practice, you can only exile up to one other creature per player, including yours. Four players, four creatures, simple as that, but so easily misread.
The Cascade mechanic can be notoriously tricky in this regard, too. Its best case scenario is on a card like Apex Devastator, which enters as a 10/10 hydra and triggers four times, once for each of its extra heads. The card’s normal printing spells out exactly what the mechanic does and reminds the reader that multiple instances of Cascade each trigger separately. The alternate printing sacrifices the italicized text for a bit of flair – you can get away with playing this version in a group of longtime players who don’t need clarification. Either way, this is a stylish, 10 mana creature that encourages some setup and closes games with fireworks.
Cascade feels grimiest when taking advantage of the technical nitty-gritty associated with mana values. The worst case scenario was any deck running Violent Outburst during its run in Modern. Prior to February 2021, players could curve the rulebook and cast huge spells from split cards and MDFC’s, even if they cost more than three mana. After a long-needed rules update, the goalposts then shifted toward hitting Crashing Footfalls for free off a spell that otherwise did nothing. Violent Outburst was banned in Modern in March 2024, but Cascade still persists as a bug in the system.
The semantic difference between “play” and “cast” is also ripe territory for confusion. Consider Chandra, Pyromaster’s middle ability, which reads “exile the top card of your library. You may play it this turn.” Colloquially known as “impulse drawing,” “playing” allows you to put a land onto the battlefield if you find one. Chandra, Dressed to Kill’s middle ability reads “exile the top card of your library. If it’s red, you may cast it this turn,” which does not allow you to put lands onto the battlefield, because a) you do not “cast” lands and b), even if you did, lands do not have colors despite producing colored mana. This red Mountain is not red; learning that rule is another Magic rite of passage.
Layered onto all of this is a matter of timing: if you hit a red creature from either of these abilities, you still have to wait until the stack is empty to cast it. Unless it has Flash, of course, but regardless: playing and casting are a bit like squares and rectangles: “play” is the square, “cast” is the rectangle, and neither are immediately intuitive until you’re conditioned into discerning the nuance.
Dredge (the Instant from Invasion, not the mechanic from Ravnica, and now we’re really speaking in misdirection), is a card that punishes enfranchised players who shortcut rules text. For one black mana, you sacrifice a creature or land and draw a card. Ah, but that first ability is an effect, not a cost! Bone Splinters, this card is not – if you forego sacrificing a creature or land, perhaps because you don’t have one, you still draw a card. If you’ve been playing Magic long enough, my bet is that you parsed the first phrase into a requirement.
Appearing repeatedly in the Reddit discussion about Thromok was a suggestion to keep a printout of the Gatherer rules on hand. While such a gesture may run the risk of being facetious, it was more or less a prerequisite when playing with cards like White Plume Adventurer. This headache took Legacy’s lunch money for a while and forced players to deal with the taxing Initiative mechanic before being banned in March 2023. Far worse was Seasoned Dungeoneer, which took the initiative, gave protection, and triggered explore. I believe it was a tweet that has since been lost to entropy where I read something like, “there are more words written on the accompanying tokens and rules text describing the mechanics than on the card itself.” Tales of Middle Earth then introduced the Initiative’s doppelgänger, The Ring Tempts You, which also required a supplementary flowchart of a token. Reading these cards could never explain these cards, and for my money, that’s a design step too far.
Saruman of Many Colors, though, was among the most egregious cards from that set. This thing is a real mess of confusing excess, a paragraph of words written in tiny font with repetitive lines and six commas that feel unjustified by theme. How exactly does this evoke the character’s betrayal and moral descent? In an ongoing era of wordy Magic cards, reading this text box just feels like work, and explaining it to a table of other players more so. I suppose it could be worse – or better, if you like deceiving your friends. Hell, in that case, the Borderless Poster version of Saruman is the perfect Commander, a true flavor win in a meta sense. And just look at all those many colors.
Reading the Card…?
In 2004, for Magic’s self-referential joke set Unhinged, Wizards made a card called Ambiguity. It reads, “Whenever a player plays a spell that counters a spell that has been played or a player plays a spell that comes into play with counters, that player may counter the next spell played or put an additional counter on a permanent that has already been played, but not countered.” Although it’s obviously tongue in cheek, I appreciate this card as an admission statement, or rather, a concession against the inevitability of using unclear language in the game. Every Magic card provides a tiny instruction manual for use, but those instructions must be compatible with the binding legal document that is the comprehensive rulebook. Long gone are the days of finding those extra little clauses from R&D expressing their ideal use cases for their designs, or spotting snippets of worldbuilding blending into rules text. As far as I know, this card is technically functional if you’re willing to untangle the jargon.
In researching the game’s most confusing cards, I found this comment from Reddit user Stiggy1605: “I wasn’t proposing a wording, I was explaining how it works…” This sentiment is at the crux of the issue between reading the card and explaining the card. If you’ve ever sat down to a board game with friends who have never played before, your role becomes that of the translator, someone to decode the script and restate it in familiar terms, often with examples and common scenarios that come up during gameplay. Before long, you realize it’s easier to show than to tell, and you delay further explanation until the hypothetical becomes real. Tossing rulebooks at confused players is not a winning recipe for their return. I think the same applies to Magic, and we can do better as stewards of the game.
So with that, let’s go back to the top.
Powerstone tokens say “Add one colorless. This mana can’t be spent to cast a nonartifact spell.” In other words, you can use Powerstones to pay for activated abilities, or even to pay for triggered abilities. Most obviously, you can use Powerstones to cast artifact spells, like the retro version of Scrap Trawler from the Brothers’ War bonus sheet, which reads,
“Whenever Scrap Trawler or another artifact you control is put into a graveyard from the battlefield, return to your hand target artifact card in your graveyard with lesser mana value.”
Wait, lesser mana value…lesser mana value than WHAT?
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Floral Spuzzem May Choose
Diligent Farhmand is a curious Magic card from an era long removed. Its rule text references, by name, another Magic card from the same set, presumably as an attempt to create synergies between two otherwise unrelated cards. This one came up in the research, and I see it more as an oddity than a linguistically confusing card.
The same goes for Floral Spuzzem, which showcases another large disparity between the oracle text and the original printing. “If Floral Spuzzem attacks an opponent and is not blocked, then Floral Spuzzem may choose to destroy a target artifact under that opponent’s control and deal no damage.” That second phrase there, “Floral Spuzzem may choose,” has become a bit of a meme and in-joke between Magic players of a certain age. The idea of some strange forest elemental making existential choices has a certain mystical coolness to it. We should pass priority to our creatures more often, I think.
A couple other difficult-to-parse cards of note are Timesifter and Sphinx of the Second Sun, mostly because they disturb turn orders. Magic is complex as hell, and rearranging its phases creates ambiguity of a different nature. Also try out Soul Echo – this one reads pretty weird, but synthesizes in the mind rather quickly. Thanks TommiElonen for putting this card on my radar. By all means, have fun with these in Commander if you wish, but good luck keeping the table in line with your machinations.
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Sources
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/wy54xa/what_are_the_most_ambiguously_worded_cards_you/
https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/9axted/ever_read_a_cards_text_multiple_times_after_which/
https://www.reddit.com/r/EDH/comments/14t6jrv/how_can_i_explain_to_other_players_how_thromok/
https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/magic-general/332136-ambiguously-worded-cards
https://luckypaper.co/articles/when-trivia-beats-strategy/
https://markrosewater.tumblr.com/post/54689018904/flankings-problem-is-it-was-self-referential