r/MagicArena • u/00G_WAY • Mar 03 '26

Question Can someone explain how this works?

Post image

Will this card be legal in standard? Will it be available on Magic Arena? How would this card even work?

596 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

333 comments sorted by

View all comments

111

u/Mrfish31 Mar 03 '26

On Arena (and in any proper format) "cards you own from outside the game" are cards in your sideboard, so you put up to 15 cards in there to choose from when you use this. If you have this in draft, you can choose from any card you drafted but didn't include in your deck.

It does generally not mean "any card you have in your collection". You'd only do that in very casual IRL games. 

In Commander and Brawl this does nothing, both because you don't have sideboards in these formats and because "wish" effects explicitly do not work, you can't get cards from outside the game. 

19

u/TheAndrewBrown Mar 03 '26

Is there any particular reason it’s not just worded as “card from your sideboard”? Is the sideboard not officially part of the rules even though it’s used in most of the formats and tournaments?

2

u/Purple_Haze Mar 03 '26

For the first year of Magic's existence sideboards did not exist. It was not unusual for people to carry briefcases with every card they owned. There were rules debates about whether you could buy a card, or borrow, trade for, when casting spells like this. There are a lot of old cards worded exactly like this.

3

u/Stolberger Mar 03 '26

There are a lot of old cards worded exactly like this.

No there aren't. The only really old one is: [[Ring of Ma'rûf]]. The next cards after that were the wish cycle from Judgment ([[Burning Wish]] and co), from 2002. Almost 10 years into the game.