Card type

Card type is a characteristic of every Magic card and some other game objects, including tokens. Card type dictates many of the rules regarding when and how a card may be played, as well as its role during combat. Card type is listed in the type line, between any supertypes and subtypes that card might have.

Seven card types are evergreen, appearing in every set or almost every set: lands provide mana, creatures engage in combat, artifacts and enchantments provide ongoing abilities, instants and sorceries create one-shot effects, and planeswalkers wield loyalty abilities. The less frequently used card types are battle, kindred, and several exclusive to nontraditional cards or casual variants: conspiracy, dungeon, plane, phenomenon, scheme, and vanguard.

Cards may have more than one card type, such as artifact land or enchantment creature, and types may be changed during gameplay. A card may possess any supertype, regardless of its card type, and can gain any subtype that corresponds to a type on that card.

"Token" and "emblem" are not card types, despite appearing in the type lines of some printed tokens and emblems.

Permanents

Cards with the artifact, battle, creature, land, enchantment, and/or planeswalker type can exist on the battlefield as permanents. With the exception of lands, these cards can be cast as spells, and they can only be cast by the active player, only during a main phase, and only when the stack is empty. All permanent card types except battle are evergreen.

Land

Lands represent locations under the player's control. Most lands can repeatably produce mana. Because mana is needed to use almost any card or ability, most decks need a high proportion of mana-producing lands (typically between 33-50% of the total deck) to function effectively.

Each player may play a land during their own main phase when the stack is empty, by default only once per turn. This is a special action, colloquially known as a land drop, which does not use the stack and can't be responded to.

Although many lands generate specific colors of mana, lands themselves lack a mana cost and are therefore colorless.

Creature

Creatures represent warriors, minions, beasts, and monsters that serve the player and fight on their behalf. Because almost all creatures can attack each turn to reduce an opponent's life or block the opponent's attackers, creature cards are fundamental to most deck strategies.

When a creature enters the battlefield or changes controllers, it has "summoning sickness" until the beginning of its controller's next turn. A creature with summoning sickness cannot attack or use an activated ability with the tap () or untap () symbol in its cost, but it can block and use any other abilities it has. A tapped creature can neither attack nor block. Declaring a creature as an attacker causes it to become tapped.

On the bottom-right corner of each creature card is that creature's power and toughness, respectively. Power is the amount of damage a creature deals to an opponent or other creatures in combat, and toughness is the amount of damage a creature can survive. A creature with damage equal to or greater than its toughness has "lethal damage" and is destroyed. Similarly, a creature whose toughness is reduced to zero or less will go to its owner's graveyard. Any damage a creature takes will accumulate until the end of the turn when all damage is removed from all creatures.

Artifact

Artifacts represent magical items, animated constructs, pieces of equipment, or other objects and devices. Broader than the normal definition, the card type is used to represent physical (tangible) objects that can be either natural or man-made. The artifact card type has no inherent characteristics distinguishing it from other permanents.

Enchantment

Enchantments represent persistent magical effects. Most enchantments have continuous effects or triggered abilities, but some have activated abilities. The enchantment card type has no inherent characteristics distinguishing it from other permanents, except in the case of some enchantment types such as Auras.

Planeswalker

Planeswalkers represent powerful spellcasters with the ability to travel between planes. They are defined by their loyalty, which fluctuates as they use abilities and take damage. Like players, they can be attacked. A planeswalker that reaches zero loyalty is put into the graveyard. Planeswalkers are always legendary, usually mythic rare, and usually pushed for Constructed viability.

Planeswalker cards premiered in the 2007 expansion Lorwyn and were a wildly popular success. Every non–Universes Beyond premier set since Magic 2010 has included at least one. In 2023, R&D decreased the average number of planeswalkers per set; the current default is two. Planeswalkers have been designated a unique feature of the Magic intellectual property and are excluded from Universes Beyond products as a rule.

Battle

Battles are horizontal cards currently unique to March of the Machine. Battles can be attacked like players, and a battle's protector may block creatures attacking it. Every battle has a defense value, which is tracked using counters. It enters with a number of defense counters equal the number printed in its lower right corner in a box. Damage dealt to a battle causes it to lose that many defense counters. When its defense reaches 0, it is defeated.

All existing battles are double-faced cards with the subtype Siege. When a Siege resolves, its controller (the player who cast it) chooses an opponent to protect it. When it's defeated, its controller may cast it transformed.

Instants and sorceries

Instants and sorceries, sometimes colloquially called "spells", represent one-shot or short-term magical effects. They are cast as spells, similar to nonland permanents, but they are never put onto battlefield. Instead, when an instant or sorcery resolves, it takes effect and is then immediately put into its owner's graveyard.

The two cards types differ only in when they can be cast. Sorceries share the timing restrictions of nonland permanents: they can only be cast during a player's own main phase, and only when nothing else is on the stack. By contrast, instants can be cast by any player with priority, including during other player's turns and while another spell or ability is waiting to resolve.

Kindred

Kindred (formerly called tribal) is an infrequently used card type first introduced in Future Sight and expanded upon in the Lorwyn block. The creature and kindred card types share the same set of subtypes. Thus, the kindred type exists to allow creature types to be given to noncreature cards, something which is otherwise not possible under the Comprehensive Rules. In this way, cards referring to specific creature types may also be able to interact with kindred spells and/or permanents if they have the relevant creature type(s).

Kindred has been coupled with instants, sorceries, enchantments and artifacts. It has never been coupled with the creature card type, which already has access to all creature subtypes.

Nontraditional cards and casual variants

Some card types are associated with nontraditional cards or casual variants. Their rules keep them from entering normal game zones, and cards from outside those sets and formats don't interact with them. The only such type to appear in a Standard-legal set and to be legal in eternal formats is dungeon (from Adventures in the Forgotten Realms). Most of the other currently supported card types are exclusive to casual variants and the supplemental products that support those formats.

Phenomenon and plane cards are exclusive to the Planechase format. Scheme cards are used by the player designated as the archenemy in the Archenemy format. Vanguard cards are used in the format of the same name.

The conspiracy type has appeared only in the Conspiracy and Conspiracy: Take the Crown products. While most casual play-oriented card types have appeared only on oversized cards, cards with the conspiracy type are printed at the normal size, to allow them to fit into booster packs. Because this would allow those cards to be mixed into a normal deck, cards with the conspiracy type are explicitly banned outside of Limited.

Obsolete types

Some older cards were printed with card types that have since been renamed or rendered obsolete by rules updates. Those cards have received errata and are still playable according to their Oracle text.

Interrupt and mana source were created for older versions of the game's timing system. Originally, most spells were played in a batch rather than the stack, but interrupts functioned similarly to how instants work with the stack now. Mana sources were a short-lived type intended to be "even faster than interrupts", similar to a mana ability of today. When the batch was replaced by the stack in Sixth Edition, those types became obsolete, and cards that had those types were given errata to be instants, one of the most significant functional changes in the history of the game.

In the same release, the word summon in the type line was renamed to creature to remove any confusion resulting from the lack of the word "creature" on cards representing that type. This update did not cause any functional changes.

With 9th Edition, the phrase "enchant [quality]" stopped being used in the type line to identify local enchantments. The normal enchantment type, until then only used for global enchantments, was paired with the the new Aura subtype and enchant keyword to preserve the previous functionality.

The Tribal type was renamed to Kindred with no functional changes with the release of Khans of Tarkir on Magic: The Gathering Arena. New printed products began using Kindred starting with Modern Horizons 3.

Non-eternal cards

Some cards printed for special purposes are not supported in the Comprehensive Rules and may have card types defined elsewhere.

• The Hero's Path event run during the Theros block used hero cards, which are unplayable outside of that event (e.g. The Hunter).
• Elemental was introduced as a card type on the Mystery Booster playtest card Trial and Error.

Type icons

The Future Sight futureshifted card frame supported type icons for each card type then in the game. These icons were a set of claw marks for creatures, a flame for sorcery, a lightning bolt for instant, a sunrise for enchantment, a chalice for artifact, and a pair of mountain peaks for land. Cards with multiple card types were indicated by a black and white cross. There was no type icon for the planeswalker type, as it did not yet exist.

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  Artifact "chalice".
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  Creature "claw mark".
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  Enchantment "sunrise".
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  Land symbol.
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  Instant "lightning bolt".
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  Sorcery "flame".
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  Multi-type symbol.
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  Unused Future Sight Planeswalker symbol.
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  Planeswalker symbol used in Magic Online and Magic: The Gathering Arena.
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  Battle symbol used in Magic: The Gathering Arena.

Rules

From the glossary of the Comprehensive Rules (June 19, 2026—Marvel Super Heroes)

Card Type

A characteristic. Except for abilities on the stack, each object has a card type, even if that object isn’t a card. Each card type has its own rules. See rule 205, “Type Line,” and section 3, “Card Types.”

From the Comprehensive Rules (June 19, 2026—Marvel Super Heroes)

• 205.2. Card Types
  • 205.2a The card types are artifact, battle, conspiracy, creature, dungeon, enchantment, instant, kindred, land, phenomenon, plane, planeswalker, scheme, sorcery, and vanguard. See section 3, “Card Types.”
  • 205.2b Some objects have more than one card type (for example, an artifact creature). Such objects satisfy the criteria for any effect that applies to any of their card types.
  • 205.2c Tokens have card types even though they aren’t cards. The same is true of copies of spells and copies of cards.

From the Comprehensive Rules (June 19, 2026—Marvel Super Heroes)

• 300. General
  • 300.1. The card types are artifact, battle, conspiracy, creature, dungeon, enchantment, instant, kindred, land, phenomenon, plane, planeswalker, scheme, sorcery, and vanguard.
  • 300.2. Some objects have more than one card type (for example, an artifact creature). Such objects combine the aspects of each of those card types, and are subject to spells and abilities that affect either or all of those card types.
    • 300.2a An object that’s both a land and another card type (for example, an artifact land) can only be played as a land. It can’t be cast as a spell.
    • 300.2b Each kindred card has another card type. Casting and resolving a kindred card follow the rules for casting and resolving a card of the other card type.