@Luke Steiner So you can control the damage. If i attack with a trample banded with a 1/1 body, i can assign deathtouchers and other nasty blocking damage to the 1/1 and keep the trample or other things safe. It's all about the options.
Imagine some cursed Enchantment that lets you take a stack of mutated creatures and attack with them separately, but they all gain banding and all band together for that attack.
@@wolfdwarf BUT: They are also all regenerated. Which must both happen before they phase out or after they phase in since treated-as-non-existent creatures can't fight each other ...
Whenever I explain protection, I remind the player about DEBT Damage Equip/enchant Blocking Targeting This usually covers most aspects about it. However, I have had to explain to a progenitus player that protection from everything does not mean protection from boardwipes.
Protection From Everything. From From Players. Protection From Being Touched. Protection From Being Played. Protection From Being Printed. Protection From Existing.
Some of these mechanics are more confusing/unintuitive for other reasons that you didn't go into. Phasing used to trigger leave play abilities but not enter play abilities. Exile effects used to be "removed from the game" where it would be legal to wish for cards there. Mutate uses the copy effects layer which gets overridden with p/t defining layers. Banding actually works differently when blocking than when attacking.
Was thinking the same thing as these. Especially Remove from game -> exile, that would confuse old players with Wishes. Remind me: What’s the difference when blocking with banding?
When blocking with a band, only one of the banded creatures needs to have the banding mechanic (as opposed to all but one when attacking). Also, all creatures in the blocking band must individually be legally able to block the attacking creature in question.
I still remember during the mirrodin prerelease seeing A LOT of people equipping stuff to their opponents creatures. I am guilty of doing it atleast once.
Man...I miss regeneration. That was the good ole days. I'd say its on the same level as 'fight'. Really the only issue with regeneration was weather -x/-x was used or not in killing it...or weather it was damage used in killing...and the order if both were used as to weather it survived after being activated or not. Also, you used to be able to activate it AFTER damage was on the 'stack' instead of it being a dumb 'shield' (which doesn't make sense).
Actually, in MTGA the reminder text from Fight specifies that the creatures deal noncombat damage to each other, so it's not that confusing as usually it is. A nice touch from the developers
Oh god, regenerate. Played that one right in the beginning, then wrong for years. I see why they entered a "removes from combat" in that but the timing of that removal is basically rocket sience (seems difficult until you aquire the right frame of thinking, then you feel dumb for ever having made the mistake). XD
When I first read split seconds oracle text a long time ago I did not have a grasp of the concept of the stack. So I substituted the next best thing: the library because it is a physical stack of cards. Can you imagine my confusion when sat there like: As long as this card is in your library, players can't cast spells or activate abilities ... What?
@@zanderpxl581 In retroperspective: Yes. Very. Luckily, I only ever encountered it on magiccards.info so I did not build decks that "forbid myself from playing magic" XD
One slight correction about phasing. It actually used to do LTB effects but not ETB effects. This is because nothing really cared if something left the battlefield. That was until the set Torment had arrived years later in which we had a variety of nightmares with ETB and LTB effects. One of these was Wormfang Manta. It had an ETB effect of "Skip your next turn" and a LTB effect of "Take an extra turn after this one". So if you put something like a Vanishing on the manta and phased it out, you would always get extra turns, but you wouldn't lose extra turns except for the initial time you cast the Wormfang Manta if you couldn't pay an extra UUU for Vanishing. Wizards took notice of this and snipped the LTB from phasing. If you want to experience the best half of banding, the defensive half, get yourself a Defensive Formation card.
I remember having difficulty grasping Soulbond... but that's probably mostly due to the fact that I was just getting started playing MTG, and got the Blessed vs. Cursed duel decks to try the game out
Banding is not complicated. The rule set when banding was around had combat damage on the stack and creatures could attack in a group as opposed to how it’s now one at a time
Banding functionally reads: This creature may attack or block with another creature. You assign all damage from combat. It’s not that hard. The legalese in the rule book makes it feel complicated.
Hellhole3927 It’s fairly complicated for experienced players. If someone who knows the ins-and-outs of the game really think about it, they can figure out how different scenarios play out with mutate, but it takes some reading and re-reading to really get the idea. But for less-knowledgeable players, yeah, it’s extremely complicated.
The easiest way to explain Banding is, "he who controls the band controls the damage to the band." If you control the banded creatures, you decide how the damage is received to those creatures, not the damage's owner.
I loved playing my Mirari's Wake deck from Odyssey Block. Back then, you could wish for cards that we now call Exiled because the Exile Zone didn't exist. It was like most control decks in that it was fun to play, not so much fun to play against. When I came back to Magic after a long break from the game I remember being quite disappointed when I found out about that rules change. I still had that deck together some place and I wanted to give it a try against whatever current standard deck my friend had at that time. That deck doesn't work nearly as well if you can't abuse Cunning Wish though.
Honestly I wish they would change the oracle text on wish cards to work on exiled cards. It was part of how they originally functioned and now for commander players wish cards are pretty much useless.
I remeber always having the most arguments with friends about regeneration and protection. No one was ever on the same page when it came to those mechanics.
Now that you mention it I'm surprised regenerate didn't make the list, due to the flavor it's extremely unintuitive that you need to regenerate something before it's destroyed. The mechanic itself isn't complex so if they just called it "Barrier" or something it probably wouldn't confuse anyone, but they didn't so it does.
@@TheSquareOnes was also the fact regeneration caused the creature to tap and be removed from combat, or that regeneration did not save the creature if an effect would bring its toughness down to 0.
@@Sweetguy1821 well in the latter case, if it _did_ save the creature from dying due to 0 toughness, you've prevent the death and the creature would stay on the board ... and then immediately die again, because it has 0 toughness for it to actually be able to do anything about 0 toughness, it'd need to have some form of interaction with stat-changing effects. which would just add _loads_ more complexity to it, especially since unless you made it, say, flicker the creature, you'd run into the exact same issue with -1/-1 counters unless you decided to also make it so that regenerating a creature removed those and not only would all of this add more complexity, but it'd boost the power of the mechanic significantly. it's one of those things where mechanics come together in such a way that one mechanic essentially ends up checkmating the other
Regeneration has two parts: First, when a creature regenerates, it gains a "shield" until end of turn. If that creature were to be destroyed while it has a "shield" you tap it and remove it from combat (if necessary) instead. It a creature would be destroyed multiple times, it will need that may "shields." Indestructible is similar only it is simply "if this creature would be destroyed, it isn't." It doesn't matter how many times it is destroyed. Note: When I say "destroy," I mean the MTG definition of destroy (cards that use the actual word DESTROY, lethal damage, and deathtouch.) Sacrifice, exile, 0 or less power are not destroy.
Originally, Wishes DID let you get cards from exile, as it was "removed from the game". They only changed that after a while because a) it gave them more power and b) it was not how they were meant to work. So they clarified that "removed from the game" was, in fact not outside the game, but instead another game zone. Changing its name to Exile during the M10 changes was quite the blessing for clarity, but older players may still be used to wishes grabbing things from Exile. The Fact that Karn tGC actually HAS that text makes it even more confusing.
The Untap symbol was considered confusing because a lot people did not realize that you couldn't just untap the card. By that same measure, when Madness first came out, many people did not realize that some external effect had to cause the discard to trigger Madness.
I remember playing Rampage as +X/+X when blocked with it growing with every additional creature blocking it, not realizing that the boost only starts after the first creature.
I got back into magic recently after MANY years, and I was definitely confused about wish effects and exile, since exile has replaced "remove from the game" effects.
I think it's really dumb that wishes don't hit exile. In fact I think it would be a really cool idea to have your sideboard begin the game facedown in exile. Not only would it streamline a mechanic normally completely outside the rules of play, your sideboard, back into it, it would increase the viability of both wish spells, and the incredibly niche cards that return a card from exile. I don't think either is so powerful that the two things blending together would be a detriment to the game, and it removes awkward moment where you shift focus away from the game to find your deck box and look through your sideboard mid game by streamlining it into the board state. Ultimately I don't think it would change much about how the game is played, but I do think it would be a quality of life improvement for the game, and would help introduce new best of one players to the idea of having a sideboard by making it less of this nebulous other thing you bring to change your deck on the fly into an actual element of laying out the board.
Another counterintuitive part of bestow is that, unlike every other Aura spell, if the creature that's been targeted is removed and no longer there, the bestow spell doesn't fizzle. It instead comes in as just a normal creature, essentially changing its spell type mid-cast.
This is what confuses me most of Split Cards: 708.4b The mana cost of a split card is the combined mana costs of its two halves. - Thats _doesn't_ count once on the stack. O_o. Also three in - I'm calling Banding (and bands with other) and Phasing.
Believe it or not, this is actually the simplified version of CMC for split cards. It used to be that the CMC of a split card when not on the stack was "both costs," which created a truly bizarre set of outcomes where if you cast a card that, say, caused your opponent to discard all cards with CMC 3, they'd discard a split card if either half had CMC of 3 (but NOT if the COMBINED CMC was 3), while if you cast a card that did damage to the opponent equal to the CMC of a split card, it WOULD see and damage them based on both combined costs (so if one half had a CMC of 2 and the other half had a CMC of 3, they'd take 5 damage). Needless to say, this caused a huge amount of confusion and judge calls.
When a spell is on the stack, it's CMC is what is being paid to cast the spell that is not an additional or optional cost (such as kicker.) This includes the cost of X which is 0 anywhere else. The CMC used to be each separate half, but there was a deck that used "Expertise" cards to cast split cards without paying their mana cost, but would choose the CMC half that was more than Expertise card's CMC or even both halves if it had fuse. The change was mostly due to those decks.
I didn't come into magic proper until Tarkir block and even then, I understood Banding better than other players in my playgroup and this made me build a Soraya EDH Banding Birds deck in an attempt to force other players to learn it, as it is one of my personal favourite keywords.
Well, that and banding only existed in an era where reminder text wasn't really a common thing at all. IIRC, none of the abilities introduced in Alpha were actually given reminder text until years after banding went extinct in Weatherlight.
I loved this video, magic is so crazy to me. I’ve played protection and banding cards since I first was introduced to mtg by my uncle when I was young so those aren’t complicated to me. I think another interesting one is stuff like nether shadow or other cards in the legacy format that actually make the order of the graveyard matter. It says something like as long as 3 creatures are above it in the graveyard you can return it to battlefield at upkeep but it’s just this complicated thing where when can you and can’t you decide what order things go into your graveyard. It’s probably simple to some people but I could not understand dredge when i was younger
another confusing thing about morph is when you cast a morph face down it counts as a colorless spell thus allowing you to cast it from the top of your library with mystic forge or spend less mana with shrine of the forsaken gods. niche but neat.
#1: the stack. I know it isn’t an ability per se, but the ability to understand it is. It’s the one thing that makes me have to hold back against some of my playgroup so much as I’m one of the few of my friends who understands how it works.
Ok two things about mutate: If a Gideon planeswalker becomes a creature for turn and you mutate on top of him, you get a planeswalker who can't be attacked or bolted to loose loyaltie. If you copy a mutated creature, you get all the text boxes as well. Intuitiv mechanics for the win 😎
Neoxym depends who you put on top. If you put the mutate card on top it would be a creature with all of Chandra’s planes walker abilities, if you put Chandra on top, end of turn she would change back into a planeswalker with the phoenixes text box which would be useless to a planeswalker.
@Neoxym also, if you mutate a creature with different stats than 4/4 she will still be a 4/4 because Sarkhan's ability defines those values until the end of the turn.
I was really confused by mutate because on the wiki explaining it, it had it classified as an activated ability so I was trying to wrap my head around that... I started building a deck with the companion that decreases the cost of activated abilities with a bunch of mutate cards and used a bunch of my wildcards on it then it wouldn’t let me use the companion with the deck lol...
Part of the confusion surrounding wishing for exiled cards probably comes from the fact that you used to be able to do it. Back when "Exile" was "Removed From the Game" wishing for a card that had been removed from the game was both legal and a common tactic in decks that ran wishes (casting burning wish to re-buy Yawgmoth's Will for example).
I've always though Banding was super confusing, but then I took a second to read that oracle text and really tried to understand it, instead of just continuing the "banding is confusing" meme, and honestly it's not that confusing. Conplex sure, but it's very straight to the point. It only does 2 things you need to worry about, as opposed to something like Mutate. I really love mutate though
Regenerate was confusing to me when I first started playing. I thought I could sacrifice something with regenerate and regenerate it. It also didn't make much sense that it didn't work for-1-1 counters.
I started playing during RTR, and even though I also bought a decent amount of M13, one of the most confusing mechanics for my group was regenerate. It was so confusing, and not explained often enough, that we just took it literally for what it meant- pay the cost for a creature in the graveyard, and BAM! They’re back in play. As you can imagine, many kitchen games in my early years were played with an abundance of trolls, skeletons, and zombies until the revelation that regenerate wasn’t really that busted. Anyway, that’s why I would put it on my most confusing list👍🏻
Another thing with mutate - flicker effects. It really doesn't seem intutive that a mutated creature gets separated by them. Also, mutate's interaction with legendary creatures.
This, but not only flicker effects, basically everything that makes it so that a Mutated creature leaves play but doesn't go to the intended area. Bounce effects bounce all the stack back to hand, OK, killing it kills all the stack, that's logical, now how about a creature with a Mask counter from Athreos, Veil-Shrouded? I had a freind of mine in hysterics trying to work out what the fuck was going on when he attacked with a board of 3 mutated creatures with mask counters and I cast Settle the Wreckage.
I used to own a bunch of banding cards and an old Ice Age rule book that actually made the mechanic clear. The problem was actually making the deck since I had the worst cards with Banding, so it just wasn’t worth it compared to basically any other deck that I could have made at the time.
I love that you pronounced Taniwha correctly. I didn't know that was the right way to say it for *years*, and only learned it after watching an episode of Destination Truth. For those wondering, it's an actual mythological creature in Maori culture, so it has a definite, real-world pronunciation.
The fact that the command zone had to make an HOUR long video to explain all of the various interactions of mutate probably says enough to the difficulty of mutate. Phasing and most of the mechanics ahead of it in your list can be explained in 4 sentences or less.
Heck, even banding is mostly just "all your creatures attack/block together, your opponent can block if they can block any member of the band, BUT you control where all the damage goes" and the differences between how a band is formed on offense and defense and you've covered everything except mirror matches and corner cases.
I thought the same thing. I full expected it because of the reputation they have but I was still a bit annoyed to see that Protection and Banding, mechanics I was able to grasp just fine as a 7 year old back in the day, were ranked as more confusing than mutate. Mutate is easily in the top one or two most confusing mechanics. I think it is a combination of Nizzahon being primarily a limited player and the fact that most people haven’t been able to play mutate in paper due to the current situation. When non-rotating format players start playing it in paper people are going to start understanding how bad it is.
The worst thing about mutate is that it counts as a creature spell, but a mutating creature does not trigger creature ETB effects. It's like they want to have the weaknesses both ways where it acts like an enchantment entering the battlefield but interacts with creature based counterspells and creature based removal after it's mutated.
The first time I got confused by fight was when I was learning to play and my cousin had his deathtouch creature fight my Serra Angel. I didn't think it would work because Serra Angel had flying and his deathtouch creature didn't.
Wishes used to actually target what is now an in game zone labeled exile prior to M10 because cards were just considered removed from game and thus really outside the game
Living weapon (0/0 germs?), manifest (especially for people that aren't already familiar with morph), and cycling (it's not casting, it is discarding, it is an activated ability).
other complicated mechanics are Regenerate and madness. Regenerate was replaced with temporary indestructible and for some good reasons. Regenerate says that you tap it and remove all damage from it and remove it from combat. It gets more complicated though since abilities like wither and infect replace damage with -1/-1 counters which we see regenerate in both blocks with those mechanics. So confusion can happen. Madness is a bit of an odd ability and seems intuitive enough. but how it functions is strange. When you discard a card with madness you put it into exile and decide if you want to pay for its madness cost. If you do it goes onto the stack from exile not from your hand. So if you wanted to cast your fiery temper on someone's Dranith Magistrate for its madness cost you couldn't because you're casting the spell from exile. This was put on reminder text later but it wasn't for either Torment or time spiral.
After having played magic since Time Spiral-ish, I only just now learned that Core Sets have more reminder text than "Expert-level" sets. I guess I just always assumed that the "expert" on sets was mechanic related?
I would've put Regeneration on here. Wizards stated a while ago that they wouldn't have it in standard sets anymore because of how counterintuitive it is.
Yeah, like what happens when you band a creature without flying and a creature with flying and attack with the group. I think, from what I've gathered, your opponent can block the group with a creature without flying even though one of your creatures has flying. It's strange.
I would have put mutate higher on the list, while in standard and limited it is easy to get use to how it works when you look at how it interacts with other mechanics across magic history it is insanely complicated.
As for the wishes... pre-Magic 2010 you could wish for exiled cards as they were "removed from the game". I suppose this adds more confusion when some of us still remember wake decks that could cunning wish with a mirari copy for a card and another cunning wish that had already been removed for pretty much infinite fogs or whatever else was required to win.
I'll be honest; since I started playing Magic just prior to Revised, i never found Banding that complicated. It seems relatively simple after playing it a bit. Certainly a bit less complex than Mutate.
It also was quite a powerful mechanic in the right hands, and I feel that the mechanic gets a bad rap on how GOOD it actually is. Theres a reason why Mishra's War Machine was such an expensive card to play and use. A 5/5 bander could deal a ton of individual damage while chumping all or most of the damage off to a 1/1 without losing the bander.
The reason morph cant use the stack is, that when the card is flipped the information becomes known to all players and if it were still its back side while you see the front side (until morph would be resolved) would be so much less intuitive.
YOU CANNOT HAVE Mutate and Bestow back to back Bestow literally is what it says in the card while mutate makes you think "WTF" when you first read its reminder text!
One word : Regenerate. It is perhaps one of the worst offenders of dissonance between flavor and gameplay in the entire game, leading directly to a lot of players not actually realizing they were playing it wrong. Lack of reminder text certainly didn't help either.
Protection was best explained way back around 1995 on the old mtg listserv. Remember, protection prevents DEBT: -Damaging -Enchanting -Blocking -Targeting
I think the key word for mutate is "into" not "onto." 1) Mutate "into" target creature. 2) If there is no creature to mutate into, Starrix resolves, but does not successfully mutate.
Well, got 5 out of the 10 predicted. I'd predicted Planeswalkers, Vehicles, Manifest, Sagas, and Convoke in those spots. Totally forgot about Phasing though, or I would have had that there instead of Convoke.
You didn't mention that people try to fetch exiled cards with the Wishes because they used to actually be able to do that. Before the they coined the term "Exile", it was just "removed from the game", which counted as "outside the game" at that point. The old Mirari's Wake decks would use Cunning Wish (or Burning Wish in some versions) with Mirari to copy it and fetch the card they wanted + another Wish they had already RFG'd to get effectively unlimited value. It definitely made me a little sad when they made that change.
You missed one of the bigger confusing things with protection: It causes enchantments and equipment to "fall off." You can give your opponent's creatures protection from a color it is enchanted/equipped by as a combat trick. Side Note: Curse of the Fire Penguin is the most confusing card but it is Unhinged.
Mutate should be way higher on that list. There are so, so many special cases. How mutate interacts with blinking, bouncing, cloning, removal one the mutate target is the easy stuff. There is also mutating commanders, mutate on undying creatures, mutating on vehicles, mutating on flip cards, mutated creatures becoming another card type, ... The command zone made a video in which they spend half an hour talking about how mutate works: ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-vHNqIjxMYhQ.html (They got at least one interaction wrong. Creatures are only tokens, if the top creature is a token.)
I always tell new players to look at protection as D.E.B.T. Creatures with protection cant be Damaged, Enchanted, Blocked, or Targeted by that particular color. It usually helps them understand boardwipes.
When I saw mutate at number 7, I knew this would be good! On the other end of the spectrum, I wish they would bring Rampage back. It's super simple and would be a nice Core Set keyword.
Hell yeah, rampage was awesome, and also pretty straightforward, though you would probably need a second ability (like trample or creature cannot be blocked by creatures with power less than 2 or something) in order to make it useful (enter Craw Giant).
I expected mutate to be the top, some of the interaction with mutate is far less intuitive than any of the other mechanics. For instance, in commander when your mutate stack dies with a commander, undying or persist within a mutate stack. Cloning mutate stacks. Mutating doesn't actually have a creature enter the battlefield, but does count as casting a creature, that targets the creature... So you can't mutate on shroud etc. Banding is simple.
I think banding is more of a meme about being complex than it actually is. It took me a while to learn how Mutate works, and TIL that Morph doesn't stack. For some reason.
Wish cards actually used to be able to get cards "exiled" from games before exile and the exile zone existed. That is because those cards did not move did at one point "Remove" the target from the game. When the term Exile and the exile zone were created and added this interactions ended, now exile zone is inside the game. Before things like Plow removed the card and you indeed could wish it back.
Banding was confusing when I started playing back in middle school. But after that? I thought banding was actually pretty simple. There are a lot of abilities I find more confusing than banding.
@@CalvinMcMurray Banding is simple, I think it's just too old and people who never knew how it worked made it a meme so it's obligatory #1 on lists like these.
The wish exile element is especially frustrating because exile wasn't really a thing then the wishes were first printed. Things were just 'removed from game' i.e. outside the game now. Then exile came in and straight up changed how the cards worked.
I think hideaway is an honorary mention because it's a single word that could never go without it's reminder text. A permanent with hideaway always enters the battlefield tapped for some reason.
Back when I played in the mid 90's and I started with the awful Fallen Empire set I used to cheese Banding. It's actually a cool mechanic and helps keep your creatures alive. Bring Banding back!
Did we just get a vote for banding to return to magic. Strange times we live in. I started playing in the Revised era, and I can say with confidence I have never personally seen anyone play a card with banding.
That's bc there rly aren't any good cards w/ banding on them. I'm guessing WotC thought banding would give small creatures evasion bc there's only 42 cards that either have banding or give banding, and only about a dozen have more to their textbox than just banding, not to mention there's only like 4 that are higher than a 2/2. The bulk are like Benalish Hero
@@bstachutheuneatable1727 umm excuse me. No good banding cards? Camel protects all creatures in its band from deserts. Wizards has continued to print deserts cards occasionally because Camel keeps them in check due to its raw power.
@@bstachutheuneatable1727 There is no ruling on Camel itself. But there is a ruling on Desert, which itself is of the Desert land sub-type. In regards to the Desert sub-type, it reads "Other cards may care about which lands are Deserts." Other cards printed more recently that reference Desert meaning the land sub-type, do so as a proper noun like Camel.
I'm gonna have no end of questions about mutate. Currently I been thinking about building Snapdax in commander, so what happens when I mutate all my creatures onto the scorpion god? Would they all return to my hand when they're sent to the graveyard?
before the keyword exile was introduced to the game, the cards read "remove * from the game" could you have wished for cards back then, or was there a "removed from the game" zone in the game? thats probably why many people think you can wish for cards in exile.
I think tribal as a mechanic is fine, but alot of people, including Maro, think its complecated. Which is why we havent seen it in a standard set since the original zendikar block with eldrazi conscription. It is a card type and should be printed more often, especially since mutate and companion have been printed, we we can makd those in standard, we can make tribal
Even after your video I still don't understand phasing? That card seems to suggest that your lands will stay phased out until something can phase it back in. Were there cards that phased cards in?
