Mental MagicSitting around waiting for the next round of your
Magic tournament to start? A game of Mental Magic is just what you need to get you through the time. All you need is an opponent and a stack of nonland cards to form both of your decks. Players start with seven-card hands, just like in a regular game of
Magic, but all players draw from the same library of cards.
Cards may be played in one of two ways:
1. Any card may be played face down as a basic land that's capable of producing any color of mana. Although these lands are basic, they have no subtypes (they're not Swamps, for example). Note that players may still play only one land on each of their turns.
2. A card may be played as any card in
Magic with the same mana cost as that card—except for the card it actually is! For example,
Fugitive Wizard (which has a mana cost of
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) could be played as
Cursecatcher,
Unsummon, or
Ancestral Recall, but couldn't be played as
Fugitive Wizard. In order to "mentally" play a card, a player must be able to accurately describe its card text with no outside help.
Once a card has been named, that card can't be named again for the rest of the game. In fact, if a card is returned to your hand and you want to play it again, you can't name the card you named before. You have to choose a different card with that mana cost.
There are some additional Mental Magic rules that you can play with or not as your group sees fit. Cards in your hand, graveyard, or anywhere else other than in play have no names—but they do have types and subtypes. If you play
Raise Dead or
Duress, for example, read what's actually printed on the card. Also, library-searching effects don't work. If you play a spell or ability that tells you to search your library, that part of the effect doesn't do anything. For a more in-depth discussion, see
Mike Flores's Mental Magic feature article.
Mental Magic challenges players' knowledge of
Magic and allows for a quick, fun way to pass the time between matches. It also challenges players to figure out whether the
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card in their hand is better played as
Ray of Command,
Phantasmal Forces, or simply as a rainbow land!