Well that’s a very good question, and I’m glad you asked. When you’re playing Magic: The Gathering, there are steps to a turn. Steps are very important because they dictate when you draw your cards, when you untap your cards, and when you end your turn.

Lets start with the first step, Upkeep. During upkeep you first untap all your cards. This means any lands which you may have tapped are now untapped. This also goes for any creatures, artifacts, or even enchantments that are tapped. Basically anything that’s tapped before you started your turn is now untapped unless it says that it stays tapped. (Read the card, it says what it does.) Then you draw a card, unless it’s the first turn of the game. If it’s the first turn of the game, you don’t draw a card, and you go straight from untap, to first main.

What’s first main? It’s the first main step of you’re turn. (Woah) This is usually the only time you could play sorcery spells, and creature spells. There is one exception for creature spells, and that is if they have the ability flash. You’ll see this ability near the very top of the middle box of the card. Lets look at Ashcoat Bear.

If you look right under the art, you’ll see Creature – Bear. Lets ignore that for now, and talk about the flash under it. It says that you can play the spell any time you could play an instant. When can you play an instant? Whenever! You could play it on your turn, (not reccomended) or play it on your opponents turn! So, I got off topic. Or did I?

So we’ve learned one thing about turns: They’re not all about you!

Just because it’s your turn, doesn’t mean I can’t play a super flashy bear. Now, after main phase where people usually play creatures and such, it goes to the combat phase. This is the phase where you can attack with whatever creature you want to attack with. Except if your creature has summoning sickness. What’s this terrible sickness, and how do you avoid it? Should I talk to my doctor about this??? Don’t worry. You can’t get it, only your creatures can. Summoning sickness happens when you play a creature. Basically, when you summon your creature, it can’t attack right away, unless it has haste. What’s haste? It’s another ability just like flash, except instead of letting you play your creature whenever, you can now attack right away, or tap right away. (This is only important if the creature has tapping abilities OTHER than attacking.)

There are also lots of sub phases that only really become useful in the combat phase. The first combat step is declare attacks. This is where you can decide to attack with your small squirrel, or your Eater of all worlds, and all knowing. Once you’ve decided to send both of them right at your opponents stupid face, they get a phase aswell. They get to declare blocks. Lets just say they don’t have any creatures they can block with, and we hit our opponenets in their stupid face. This would be the end of the combat phase.

Now onto the second main. What do you do on the second main phase? Well I bet you couldn’t have guessed. It’s like your first main phase, but again. After your second main, we go to the end step. During the end step, not much happens. You end your turn, and your stupid opponent with their stupid face gets to do all the things you did. They’re obviously copying you because they can’t seem to think of their own ideas, but we won’t talk about that.

What did you think of the phases? Were you confused at all? If you were, please comment on this post, and if you play Magic and feel as if I didn’t explain enough, please tell me in the comments as well.

Boy, what an interesting title, huh? Well today, I’m gonna teach you about mana, the Magic equivalent of money. Why should you care about mana? Well mana is the main way people cast spells. Some spells obviously have different ways of casting them, but for now we’ll just talk about using mana.

The first card played is usually a land. (Notice how I said played instead of  cast, as lands aren’t spells.(We’ll talk about types of cards in another post.)) Let’s use a forest as an example.

Now, this card doesn’t say it, but you can tap it (turning it sideways) to put one green mana into your mana pool. What’s a mana pool? It’s this imaginary area in space and time where you put all your money. Mana in a mana pool can “float” until the end of your step. What is a step? I’ll link a blog here that explains that when I finish it.

Of course, how do I spend my mana? If it’s such an important part of the game, what do I even do with it? Well if you look at the top right of the next card, you’ll see it has a aand a .symbol.

What do they mean? Well the 1 means it costs one mana of any mana. Also known as colorless. This means you can use any type of mana. Such as red, blue, green, black, or white. Now the little tree symbol also known as green mana, costs one mana. This means if you tap a forest, you can use that mana to pay for it. Lets say we tap two forests. We then have 2 green mana floating. We can pay the two green mana to summon the bear. Of course there are other cards than the bear, and then have different costs, and different color.

Lets try one more card.

So, this is a lightning strike. As you can see in the top right of the card, it costs one red mana, and one colorless. That means we need something that can tap for red mana and then one of any other color.

Lets us this mountain. Lets also say we have one other mountain. We can then tap them both to float two red mana. We could then use those two red mana to cast the lightning strike.

If you’re confused about anything, or feel that I should explain more about mana, please tell me in the comments.