Magic: The Gathering is a massive trading card game with players from all corners of the world. Over the years, it’s built up a dizzying roster of cards and has become one of the most complex games out there, with a comprehensive set of rules to match.
While these rules have been fine-tuned over the years to accommodate the new cards, new mechanics, and new sets, these guidelines do have some (often hilarious) implications. These come in large part from conflicts between the story of what’s happening lore-wise during a game and the rules governing play. Here are 10 ways that the game of Magic: The Gathering makes no sense.
10 Displaced Creatures
Very briefly, the lore of any given game of Magic is that players are Planeswalkers (powerful beings who can travel the multiverse) who summon Creatures from various planes to aid them in battle. This justifies playing Creatures from different planes alongside each other, but it raises another problem.
Why would these Creatures fight for you? You’re just some random wizard who pulled them out of their home to fight a duel that they don’t personally care about. They have no reason to fight for you and actually should be motivated to fight against you.
9 Four Card Limit
One of the rules of Magic is that a deck can have no more than four copies of a single card. This makes a lot of sense when you think about balancing the game, but it falls apart when you consider the actual story of what’s going on.
If a Planeswalker discovers that they can summon a very powerful Creature from a plane, why wouldn’t they summon more than four? Why not bring forth an army of Gray Merchants, or a whole host of Fervent Champions? No rational Planeswalker with seriously consider acting otherwise.
8 Displaced Planeswalkers
Besides displacing creatures, players can actually also displace other Planeswalkers if they play a Planeswalker card. These cards have loyalty abilities and go away if their loyalty is depleted, representing that they don’t actually die when damaged.
But again - why would another Planeswalker help you in your duel? One would imagine that most would be rather upset about the sudden abduction, such as Elspeth as journeys through Theros’s Underworld, or Nicol Bolas as he tries to conquer the multiverse. Rightfully, they should turn against you instead of helping you.
7 Seeing Double (Legendaries)
Magic has the rule that if you play a card with the Legendary supertype, playing an identical card causes you to sacrifice one of them. The logic behind this is that Legendary cards represent significant figures from the planes - there isn’t more than one of them, so you can’t control two at once.
But there’s nothing to stop your opponent from playing their own copy of the exact same Legendary permanent. This causes some mind bending paradoxes, such as the Gods of Theros facing off against their clones, or Teferi the time manipulating Planeswalker encountering himself.
6 Unlikely Allies
The story of Magic is rich with intrepid heroes and dastardly enemies, characters whose diverse worldviews lead inevitably to conflict. This all goes right out the window when a an actual game of Magic starts as these characters somehow decide to set aside their differences and work together.
Imagine Elspeth willingly working alongside Ashiok, the Planeswalker who tormented her in the Underworld. Or think of Nicol Bolas working with - well, literally anyone else. Regardless of their deep seated animosities, these mortal enemies will band together during games to help you win.
5 Replaying Legendary Cards
Returning to Legendary permanents for a moment, let’s say you play one like Admiral Beckett Brass or Kenrith, the Returned King. Your opponent responds by killing it, sending it to the graveyard. That should be the end of it, right?
Wrong - you can, as mentioned before, have four copies of a card in your deck, including Legendaries. This means you can play the same character again, regardless of whether or not they were killed before. This breaks the logic of Legendary permanents even more, as they’re supposed to be wholly unique and irreplaceable.
4 War Of The Spark Absentees
Let’s talk about the Magic community for a moment - specifically, how massive it is! Magic remains the biggest trading card game on the planet, with roughly 35 million active players, each of them taking on the role of Planeswalker.
So where were we supposed to be during the recent War of the Spark set? The story of that expansion revolved around Nicol Bolas summoning all the Planeswalkers in the multiverse to Ravnica and trapping them there. However, it certainly doesn’t seem from the story or the cards like there was an influx of Planeswalkers numbering as many as 35 million.
3 Summoning Land
Land cards in Magic are fairly simple - you play them, and they give you mana, the resource that allows you to cast spells and play the game. Drawing power from the land is all well and good and actually has a strong basis in real world mysticism.
However, players literally play land cards for free - summoning these lands out of the aether, from nothing. Do new landscapes just spring from nothingness during a Planeswalker duel? Are they plucked from their home planes without warning? It’s a disturbing question to consider.
2 Exile
A card that dies in Magic is sent to the graveyard, but that isn’t the end of the story. There are many mechanics that allow for these cards to return. Exile, on the other hand, sees the cards removed from the game entirely.
Canonically, this means that the cards are cast into the Blind Eternities, the space between the planes, adrift on a sea of nothing for eternity. It truly is a fate worse than death - and it can be applied to a variety of lore significant figures, such as Chandra Nalaar, Nicol Bolas, and others. We know that these characters haven’t been exiled in canon, though, so it raises a few questions.
1 I Block With 15 Squirrels
Finally, our last thing that doesn’t make sense is a bit of a running joke in the Magic community and has a humorous comic by cardboard-crack regarding it. Imagine you’ve just played Emrakul, the Aeons Torn - an Eldrazi Titan, a harbinger of the end times, one of the most powerful creatures in the game. You attack, and then . . .
Your opponent blocks with 15 squirrels, killing Emrakul. This works mechanically because each squirrel has one power and Emrakul has 15 toughness, but lore-wise, it just seems a little odd - unless we’ve been seriously underestimating squirrels all these years.
NEXT: Magic The Gathering: 5 Best New Cards From Theros Beyond Death (& 5 Worst)
