The Roots of Evergreen Tree

Written by Mikkjal

Ah, keywords. The focal points of every set since time immemorial. A word or two with a string of rules text attached, dictating the way you interact with a set, giving it texture. Solid, thought out keywords can really make the set pop and in extreme cases, make us reconsider the way we think about Magic as a whole… And so can a really bad one, after being banished to the nether part of the Storm scale, for now very obvious reasons. Or until the next Modern Horizons set. But there are also others, ones that do come back every time, doing the unthankful job of running games smoothly. The evergreen ones.

Breaking the Solid Rock Foundations

If you are reading this at any time in the twenty-first century, which you most likely are, as time travel only exists in WHO set, most games of Magic the Gathering, live and die by creature combat. Magic combat plays out by very defined rules of conduct. And here is the main, perhaps painfully obvious, but hopefully still worth saying out loud thesis for this article:

Evergreen keywords break the basic rules of Magic combat

Let’s walk through the most basic combat scenario. Fret not, I’m not the type who will bring up exact numbers for CR rulings here. I trust you already internalized how combat works.

Say, three creatures attack into three untapped creatures. Normally, the rules say any untapped creature can block any of the attacking ones, maybe they trade, maybe they don’t, a curtain falls, overall pretty dull affair, no?

Let’s see what happens when we put some restrictions on that scenario and send one of them flying. Flying creates a disparity. Now no longer can any creature block a creature with flying unless it has flying itself (or reach. I know). We added a new layer to combat and made things more interesting for both players. Let’s create more of those disparities.

Say one of the attacking creatures was a 10/10 Gigantosaurus, blocked by a 1/1 Saproling. The rules say all this monstrous damage is absorbed by the meager blocker. But what if there was a keyword that said it wasn’t?

Say one if the attacking creatures was a 10/10 Gigantosaurus, blocked by a 1/1 Saproling. Saproling will take all this damage and die. Gigantosaurus can attack safely, for it will leave the combat with but a scratch, but what if there was a keyword that said any damage is deadly?

Say one of the attacking creatures was a 10/10 Gigantosaurus, blocked by a 1/1 saproling. Rules say this one meager baby Groot is enough to block the Shin Godzilla. Doesn’t that feel unfair? What if there was a keyword that said you need more than one creature to block my monstrosity?

The Search For Izzet Keyword

Perhaps you looked at the list of evergreen abilities before. Maybe you did just now. Maybe you did this while looking at the list of two color pairs at the same time and wanted to, I don't know, assign a keyword to each one of them. Some pairs will be easy like red/green and trample. Some will be more problematic than others. Maybe you can make compromises. Force the green/white Lifelink. Maybe for blue/black you can use Flash— it’s not a combat keyword, but it works on the same basis as the others, just regarding turns, phases and casting speed instead. The real problem starts with Izzet, the color pair often defined not by its creatures but by its spells. We now approach the Prowess problem.

Or not. With the underlying rule for evergreen keywords defined in the previous chapter, let’s try a new approach for finding the Izzet keyword. There isn’t much design space left here, but what if I looked at the unblockable part of blue’s color pair and hasty part of red’s?

In 2022, Dominaria United introduced the keyword Enlist, which was considered a modern take on banding. By trying to fix one of Magic’s earliest mistakes, it formally introduced summoning sickness into the card boxes. Yet another relic of a bygone era, from when creature cards were called summons, now official. Let’s see if we can do something with that.

A creature with summoning sickness cannot attack or use activated abilities, if it has not been continuously controlled by a player since the beginning of that player's most recent turn. 

Now, this rule says nothing about not being able to use them for blocking, piling up the advantages the defending player has over the attacker. Let’s change that. 

Let’s make some creatures faster than others. Not like, hasty type of fast, but fast enough that freshly summoned, dizzy blockers can’t quite catch them yet. Let me introduce you to Fleet, a keyword I recently put into one of my own sets.

One Last Thought

Have you ever played with one of those Welcome Decks? Which for some ungodly reason were discontinued for years and in extremely timely fashion, are supposed to come back somewhere around the time I publish this. Those decks are supposed to teach new players the basics of the game and one solid way to do it is by dropping some of the evergreen keywords on cards. There are good odds you can reverse engineer the rules of magic from them. If, thanks to vigilance, attacking doesn’t cause this Serra Angel chick to tap, it must cause the ones without such keyword to do so. If this Ogre with haste can attack right away, it means creatures without it cannot… and so on.