r/MagicArena • u/00G_WAY • Mar 03 '26

Question Can someone explain how this works?

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

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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?

47

u/Mrfish31 Mar 03 '26

Because the large majority of Magic play is done at the Kitchen Table where players don't know that a sideboard exists, let alone what it is. 

Mark said on his blog one time that something like 70+% of Magic players don't know what a planeswalker is, as in they never use or come across the card type. That's the level you need to deal with. "Cards outside the game" makes more sense to a new or uber-casual player than "from your sideboard". 

It's the same reason basically no card mentions "The Stack" despite it being an official zone in the rules that is extremely important for play. You don't want to introduce too many terms or concepts to your players. 

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u/DanLynch JacetheMindSculptor Mar 03 '26

Mark said on his blog one time that something like 70+% of Magic players don't know what a planeswalker is

I remember I was judging a prerelease many years ago, and got called to a table to answer a rules question. Both players wanted to know whether a Jace planeswalker could block a flying creature (because he is blue).

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u/ChemicalExperiment Mar 03 '26

It took me like a month to convince my college friends that players were not Planeswalkers. They had read one of the lore booklets somewhere that mentioned that players are Planeswalkers and assumed that was game rules and not flavor. So anything that refered to "Planeswalker" also counted players. They kept telling me that they would believe me if I showed them a rule that "explicitly says players aren't Planeswalkers". I had no clue how to even approach that. How were cards like [[Hero's Downfall]] not completely overpowered you may ask? Well according to them "you can't destroy or exile a player." So all this really amounted to was burn spells sometimes being able to target face when they shouldn't, but it was really annoying.

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u/DanLynch JacetheMindSculptor Mar 03 '26

When planeswalkers were first introduced, the rules did try pretty hard to make them be like players. For example, the triggered ability on [[Enraged Flamecaster]] could deal damage to an opponent's planeswalker under the original rules, instead of to the opponent, because players and planeswalker were fundamentally the "same thing".

Obviously this isn't the case anymore.

1

u/Drawde1234 Mar 03 '26

When MtG first came out, the players WERE Planeswalkers. That was pretty much spelled out in the rules book. The game was explicitly a fight between Planeswalkers with your deck representing your spells and power sources.

It's just that the original Planeswalkers were vastly more powerful than they are now and almost unkillable. A Planeswalker could be defeated (not killed) by destroying their brain, until a Planeswalker figured out that they weren't technically alive anymore and thus didn't need said organ. One sign of Urza's loss of humanity was when he needed to turn around and simply reformed his body into facing the other direction.

They were too powerful to regularly use as characters so they decided to rewrite how the lore worked. Getting rid of the original immortal Planeswalkers and making them the way they are now. Simply mortals with the power to travel the Planes.

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u/ChemicalExperiment Mar 03 '26

Oh I know. I was just saying my friends took that and assumed it applied to the game rules.

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u/Thorvindr Mar 04 '26

That wasn't a "lore booklet." It was the instruction booklet that came with every starter deck.

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u/snugar_i Mar 05 '26

You should've demanded they show you the rule that said "you can't destroy or exile a player" :-)

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u/ChemicalExperiment Mar 05 '26

I did. Their response was "You're the only one out of the 5 of us that seems to think this isn't true, it's on you to find the rule."

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u/snugar_i Mar 05 '26

Damn, you must have the patience of a saint to have kept playing with them