"I already know what the phases are."

No you don't. Sure, you might think there are "four" phases in Magic, but there are actually more than that in terms of how cards trigger. There are things that trigger before your upkeep, things that trigger before passing the turn, things that trigger in-between phases, and so on.

"But isn't that just 'The Stack'?"

Yes and no. The key to truly mastering the mechanics are to learn exactly how interactions work and how cards can apparently break the rules in terms of when and how things resolve. To that end, I highly recommend utilizing "stops" and "full control".

Stops - Click on any of the phase icons in the bottom-right to place a "stop". This forces you to have control when it hits that phase. You can also set it to stop on your opponent's phase instead of your own.

Full Control - This option (Ctrl by default) overrides MTGA's automatic determination of control and allows you to have full control over your actions. For instance, Lands won't auto-tap.

Now why are these two things important? For one thing, you might be setting up a play that you want to ensure goes through at the right moment. Or you might want to tap specific lands to play a spell. Or, and this is perhaps most important, you want to psyche out your opponent. Believe it or not, even without a chatbox or seeing eye-to-eye, you can still mindgame people, especially if you're playing a control deck. Remember that priority only passes to you when you have a spell to play. By assuming full control or setting a stop, you get priority anyway, making your opponent think you might have a spell.

Conversely, you can auto-pass, which doesn't work as well as it should, but it can deceive your opponent into thinking you don't have a spell to play when you actually do.

I'm not going to give you any specific examples to illustrate what I mean. Aside from not wanting to explain my decks, there's a more important reason: You need to be able to figure this out for yourself. If you lack the critical thinking skills, or even just the patience, to work out how you can use and abuse these mechanics, then you might as well just play monored aggro. Which is a totally reasonable way to play and I do it too. But that kind of defeats the purpose of looking up a guide to begin with.

There are multiple formats in MTGA, but really only one that matters, and that's Explorer Play, Best of 1. But here are some explanations.

You can play Best of 1 or Best of 3. Play Bof1. Trust me. The last thing you want is to try a Best of 3 and realize you've been matched with a control-heavy Dimir deck.

What you'd see in your average tournament, using cards from whatever the current rotation is. Until you build up a collection of older cards, this is fine way to play.

No one likes it. Don't play it. It's stupid.

"Uses cards from all of MTG's history" actually means "All the cards currently in MTGA except the ones you can't use." This is a stupid format only because of MTGA's inherent limitations. Great if you're playing paper or MTGO, though.

The best way to play. It's Historic without some of the bulls**t cards available in that mode. Since Explorer goes back to 2012, well before where MTGA's collection cuts off, it's basically the same thing as Historic. The greatest part about it is running into people playing modern decks while you're still running decks from War of the Spark and earlier. It's honestly insane how much more powerful the decks I built in '19 and '20 are now.

Like Commander but not. If you don't know what Commander is, don't worry about it. If you do, I'm sorry for your wallet.

A waste of money.

There's literally no reason to play Ranked. If you take the game that seriously, you need to go outside. I wouldn't be so harsh if I didn't personally exploit the game's mechanics to blast to the top of the rankings without even thinking. To clarify since people either missed this section or didn't understand: I literally became a top-ranked player by doing nothing but mindless grinding with a deck that exploits the way the developers coded MTGA. I never would have gotten that far in paper Magic. The chances of losing an honest match are a lot smaller than losing to dumb bulls**t

Red is the most honest of colors. Red is aggression personified. It's possible to secure a victory in the first few turns with a Red Rushdown deck. The best defense is more offense. Play Red if thinking hurts your brain.

Green is the second-most honest of colors. Green is about beasts, green is about power, green is about ramping to Big Green Stompies. There are some really deceptive and shady things you can do with Green, but you shouldn't play those unless you're a real rat at heart (I see you, Scute Swarm). If you're a real man, you'll field big dinos and face up mano-a-mano. Picture mudamudamuda/oraoraora, or if you're not weeb trash, Arnold's "most epic handshake" meme.

White is the safest color. White has a lot of defense in the form of healing, Defender, Vigilance, and board wipes. It also has sexy Angels, cute little kitty cats, and adorable puppers. I guess it also has knights in shining armor but I don't know why you'd play with those. You're playing White, you clearly don't like actually playing the game.

Speaking of not actually playing the game, Black is about destruction. Murder, Cast Down, Vraska's Contempt, Thoughtseize, Duress, etc. Black is about "removal" which is a fancy term for "I know I can't beat you honestly so this card makes your card go away." Where Red would beat you into submission and Green would flex its muscles to make your cards explode, Black just says "throw your deck into the graveyard." Black is for rats, which is fitting, given that Rat Colony exists.

And then there's Blue. Blue is for terrible people. Blue is for people who have no friends. Blue is for people who hate the game. Why? Because Blue has "control", meaning counterspells, milling, and all manner of horsesh*t to make your day miserable. See the attached video for an example of an honest and upstanding Green player having his day ruined by a Blue/Black rat.

So now that you know about colors, here is a quick summary of each color combo. I'll be using abbreviations of single colors to make typing easier. B is Blue, K is Black. And don't tell me it should be U and B, that's retarded. You're going to tell me my LED strip is RGU and my printer is CMYB?

For quick reference, you can find a full list of color combos here.[humpheh.com]

If you see someone playing zero colors, respect them for playing the game on hard mode.

See the other section for a detailed explanation of each of these.

• W - Defense
  
• G - Power
  
• R - Aggression
  
• B - Control
  
• K - Death

The lore gives each dual-color combo a "guild", and each combo has a distinct theme that usually makes sense based on the component colors.

• Selesnya (WG) - Ramping Life
  
• Azorius (WB) - Safe Control
  
• Boros (WR) - Righteous Fury
  
• Orzhov (WK) - From Death, Life
  
• Simic (GB) - Merfolk
  
• Gruul (GR) - UNLIMITED POWER
  
• Golgari (GK) - Infestation
  
• Izzet (BR) - Rules For Thee, Not For Me
  
• Dimir (BK) - I Am a Bad Person
  
• Rakdos (RK) - From Death, Rage

It's not common to see tri-colors nearly as much as mono or dual, so most people don't know their names. I can barely remember. The names are from some older lore that people don't talk about much but it's there if you're interested.
I can't give a simple descriptor for each combo because there's too much variation. You might play a Jeskai deck that has a couple of Red spells thrown in among an otherwise Azorius deck, or it could be a primarily monowhite deck with a couple of B and R thrown in for flavor, or it might be evenly split.

• Bant (WGB)
  
• Naya (WGR)
  
• Abzan (WGK)
  
• Jeskai (WBR)
  
• Esper (WBK)
  
• Mardu (WRK)
  
• Temur (GBR)
  
• Sultai (GBK)
  
• Jund (GRK)
  
• Grixis (BRK)

If you're insane, you can try running four colors. Trust me, it's usually a bad idea because of how easy it is to get mana-screwed.

• Ink (WGBR)
  
• Dune (WGRK)
  
• Witch (WGBK)
  
• Yore (WBRK)
  
• Glint (GBRK)

The Thanos of MTG lore is a dragon named [redacted]. His goal was to utilize all five colors to take over the multiverse. He was defeated and had his name stripped from him after the War of the Spark arc so he could never be summoned again. Unfortunately, you still run into people playing him. If you see someone with a Nicol Bolas avatar, Nicol Bolas sleeves, and playing Nicol Bolas, rest assured that you're a better person than that player. Blue players might be friendless rats, but Bolas players are tryhard fedora-tippers.

Each color has a few cards that I consider to be "signature" cards. In all my games, these are the cards that have either saved my butt on countless occasions (i.e. Cleansing Nova), cards that trigger me to instantly concede rather than deal with them (i.e. Blue counterspells), or cards that would have been the answer to my own deck if the opponent had bothered to stock them in his deck (or knew they existed) (i.e. Vraska's Contempt).

Everyone knows about Shock, no one seems to know that Play with Fire is literally just a better Shock. Same cost, same effect, plus you get to Scry. Light Up the Stage lets you whip out cards faster. Lava Coil is an exile and exiling is always extra rude.

Llanowar is obvious, it's a super old card, insanely good, every Green deck should have multiple copies. Carny T is my favorite card ever, and the only one I ever purchased to own physically (I got a foil copy too because I love it that much). I genuinely considered not mentioning Gaea's because no one seems to know it exists or how powerful it really is, but it makes you immune to milling and recycling your graveyard into your deck is something that's usually reserved for Black, so that's fun.

Life gain always has a place in a White deck. Otherwise, play a different color. You need a way to clear the board, so Nova will help you with that, and no one ever seems to expect a Settle.

No matter what you're doing, you need these cards. If your opponent happens to have Indestructible creatures, the only way to deal with them is exile. If you can't answer Flying, just kill the Flying thing.

F**k Blue. Essence Scatter and Negate can cover for you while you build up mana for Sinister Sabotage and Devious Cover-Up. Hornswoggle is a lot of fun. And by "fun", I mean "makes you a bad person". There's a reason my Jeskai deck is called "Stage 3 Cancer".

Not all expansions are created the same. If you want an edge, buy the older expansions. Around the time MTGA was released back in 2019, the cards available skewed heavily in the direction of cancerous control decks. WOTC literally released a box-topper card (Nexus of Fate) that has since been banned in all formats for being busted as hell, and the champions of paper magic were both control decks (Monoblue Vs Dimir, if memory serves).

The Phyrexian sets utilize a mechanic called "Toxic" which is just as bad as it sounds. The God-Eternal cards from War of the Spark are stupid and not fun to deal with. Planeswalkers range from absolute trash in some sets, to absolute S-rank in others. For instance, a lot of versions of Teferi are mediocre, but "Teferi, Hero of Dominaria" from the Dominaria set is objectively one of the most powerful Planeswalkers in MTGA, and the definitive "f**k you" card now that Nexus of Fate is gone.

Not all cards are the same, either. "Play With Fire" is literally a better "Shock", as they are both 1-cost Red Instants that deal 2 damage to any target, but PWF also lets you Scry if you hit a Player with it.

Because of how set rotation works, there are combinations that were never intended to work together that end up being absolutely insane if you're playing Historic or Explorer. I'm not going to explain any of mine, but you should try to find your own.

I've picked up a lot of helpful things along the way that I will now share with you to my own peril. Honestly, I would rather hoard this knowledge to myself, but what the hell, let's do it.

No one realizes this, but your starting hand isn't random, at least not exactly. Your deck has a ratio of lands to non-lands. The shuffler deals three random hands, then gives you the one that most closely matches that ratio as your starting hand. This means you can exploit the absolute hell out of it with MonoRed. 13 Mountains and 47 spells means you're looking at an opening hand of 2 Mountains and 5 Spells. Make all your cards super cheap, and you've got the ability to blast out the gate with more damage than your opponent can handle. Using a specific setup, I was able to blast to the top of Ranked League without really using my brain.

Mulling is when you have a bad starting hand, so you shuffle it back into your deck and get a fresh seven cards, then throw one under your deck for each time you mulled. In other words, you start at a significant disadvantage. So just don't mulligan. Either rethink your deck so you never have to mulligan, or curse RNG and try again. Yet another reason to not play ranked.

I spent five whole dollarydoos on this game back in 2019 in order to get... actually I don't remember what I got. But that's all I ever spent. I did buy some Hot Pockets once in order to get an in-game reward that I never redeemed because it required me to submit a photo of my Wal-Mart receipt and honestly that's just too inconvenient. The Hot Pockets didn't even taste that good, and they burned my tongue. In any case, spending money on this game isn't worth it. Just play games to earn gold and cards and free packs and eventually you'll have enough to buy more packs. Plus, you get wildcards, which can be redeemed for basically anything, including box-toppers. Impervious Greatwurm is a beast and you should get it because you should play Green and he's the biggest and greenest of the stompies.

Obviously. You thought there would be a multiplayer game in the modern era where chat's enabled? This means two things:

1. You can permanently mute opponents, but still spam the "Oops" emote.
   
2. Your opponents are effectively just bots.

When you don't have the ability to chat with someone, you may as well just treat them like an AI. There's no way I'd ever play my decks against an actual human being because I'm not a sociopath. But in MTGA? Of course! I would apologize if you ever get matched up against me, but honestly, I don't care.

MTG was the first TCG ever, so it made all the missteps that other card games learned to avoid. Sadly, it never got any better. I honestly don't know why I play so much, or why I invested the time into writing this guide. But ultimately, it's a very bad game, so that means that you should not take it seriously. Genuinely, there are people who get so wrapped-up in this game that they allow it to influence their personal happiness and attitude. Don't be that guy. This is a very dumb card game that we play for fun. If you find that a bad string of matches ruins your day, it's time to uninstall.