Locations
When I’m not working, sleeping, playing Magic, or writing these articles, I’m generally found pursuing my university studies online. I’m doing a Bachelor of Arts majoring in history and politics, and this study period, I’ve been doing my first third-year unit, entitled “Sparta and Greece: Archaic and Classical.” Ancient Greece is far from my specialty, and I was surprised to find many of the modern historians frequently using Greek phrases in their articles. This practice seemed rather obnoxious, as I’d never studied any Greek and there was no language prerequisite for the unit. One of my fellow students expressed her frustration with these modern journal articles, full of untranslated ancient Greek, a language with not only different vocabulary and grammar but a different script. The reply of my tutor was brief and straightforward:
Until you have the chance actually to learn Greek, you could use Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon. We have copies in the library here, but better still, it’s available online in the Perseus project website.
Hang on a minute—until we learn Greek? Despite several attempts to diversify through schooling, I have remained stubbornly monolingual, with only a smattering of Italian, Indonesian, and Japanese nestled alongside English in my linguistic arsenal. For it to be taken as a matter of course that history students will pick up a working knowledge of another language as a prerequisite to engaging with the work of modern English-speaking writers is gobsmacking, and puts me off the entire historical period. If modern scholars want to debate the nuances, and word choice of Herodotus, Xenophon, and the rest that is their prerogative; give me an authoritative English translation any day.
Fortunately, there was a stopgap solution: Liddell and Scott’s Greek Lexicon, the equivalent of a bilingual dictionary between ancient Greek and modern English. Armed with this inanimate translator, I could muddle my way through articles quoting the odd word of Greek, though untranslated passages remained indecipherable.
Soon after this little incident, I was reading some Magic articles and was struck by just how many slang terms we use on a day-to-day basis in the Magic community. While the meaning can often be inferred from context, it must be very difficult initially for new players to figure out what the heck some of us are talking about. I asked my loyal followers on Twitter what they felt the most difficult terms to understand are, and added plenty of my own. Thus, I present the first edition of the Magic: The Gathering Slang Lexicon.
| 187 | A 187 creature is one with an enters-the-battlefield ability that allows you to destroy target creature. The name comes from the police radio code number for a homicide; Nekrataal, the original 187 creature, destroyed another creature as it entered the battlefield, and so could be said to commit homicide. Another example would be Angel of Despair. |
| Alpha strike | Attacking with all creatures, generally to end the game. Often used after a board stall. |
| Azorius | Ravnica guild representing Blue/White. Now used to describe any Blue/White card or deck. |
| Bad beat story | Complaining about losing a game, often with the implication that the teller of the story is trying to shift the blame for his loss to some external factor such as the opponent’s top-decks, mana screw, mana flood, etc. |
| Bant | Alara shard representing Blue/White/Green. Now used to describe any Blue/White/Green card or deck. |
| Barn | Short for barnacle, a kind of sea creature that sticks on to the hulls of ships. Used as a derogatory name for a lesser player who hangs out with pros trying to learn from them. |
| Bear | Generic term for a 2/2 ground creature for 2 mana. Comes from the core set stalwart Grizzly Bears. |
| Boros | Ravnica guild representing Red/White. Now used to describe any Red/White card or deck. |
| Bounce | Return a permanent to its owner’s hand. For example, Into the Roil and Unsummon are bounce spells. |
| Broken | Unreasonably good card, deck, mechanic, or interaction, such as Mirrodin-block Affinity or Umezawa's Jitte. Broken cards do not necessarily get banned, and the term is often used with some hyperbole. Cards can also be broken in a single context (i.e., format), such as Rolling Thunder in limited. |
| C | Used in typed mana costs to represent any colored mana. Gray Ogre is a 2C spell, and so is Quag Sickness. |
| Cantrip | A spell that has some effect and also draws a card. Also used for the act of drawing a single card from a spell, e.g., “He used his Mind Spring as a cantrip.” |
| Card advantage | Many very fine strategy writers have committed plenty of column inches to the idea of card advantage, which at its heart is very simple—in the words of Ted Knutson over on Magic Academy:
Card advantage at its most basic simply means having more cards than your opponent over the course of a game. This can mean simply drawing more cards with something like Divination, using one of your cards to eliminate two of your opponent’s with Mind Rot, or destroying multiple creatures with one of your cards with something like Day of Judgment. This is one of the basic building blocks of Magic strategy—spells that can generate card advantage are highly valued by the top players, and a bit of quick searching on GatheringMagic and other strategy sites will furnish you with plenty of other definitions of “card advantage.” |
| CC | An abbreviation for casting cost, or the total amount of mana it costs to cast a spell disregarding what color the mana is. Overgrown Battlement and Squadron Hawk are both 2CC spells. See also CMC. |
| CMC | An abbreviation for converted mana cost, or the total amount of mana it costs to cast a spell disregarding what color the mana is. Cudgel Troll and Jace, the Mind Sculptor are both 4 CMC spells. See also CC. |
| Counter | An unfortunate term in Magic in that it refers to two completely unrelated but frequently used things. The first use is as a noun—a counter or counters (from the Comprehensive Rules): “A marker placed on an object or player that modifies its characteristics or interacts with a rule or ability.” Counters may be placed on an object, like the +1/+1 counters placed on Hada Freeblade or the charge counters on Tumble Magnet. They may be placed on players, like poison counters. The second use is as a verb—to counter a spell. Again, from the Comprehensive Rules: “To cancel a spell or ability so it doesn’t resolve and none of its effects occur.” (Note that “Cancel” is the quintessential counterspell and is a word that appears in the definition of what countering is.) |
| Dimir | Ravnica guild representing Blue/Black. Now used to describe any Blue/Black card or deck. |
| Durdle | ChannelFireball slang terms for a poor player. Origin unknown; evidence suggests it may have originated in World of Warcraft. See also burdle. |
| Burdle | ChannelFireball slang terms for a poor player. Origin unknown; evidence suggests it may have originated in World of Warcraft. See also durdle. |
| Esper | Alara shard representing Blue/White/Black. Now used to describe any Blue/White/Black card or deck. |
| EV | stands for expected value, which is a statistical term most often applied in Magic to financial situations—people talk about the expected value of a pack quite frequently, meaning that if you open that pack of cards, you will expect to get a certain value of singles from it. See Kelly Reid’s article for more information on EV in financial discussions. Strategy writers also talk more abstractly about the EV of a given play or deck-building choice—when they say one line of play has positive EV compared to another, they mean that the outcome of the first line of play is expected to be better. I don’t fully understand how actual EV works, but this guy seems to, if you’re into that sort of thing. |
| Fish | Similar to a durdle, a fish is a player of minimal skill whom the pro believes he can beat without much difficulty. The opposite of a fish is a “shark.” |
| French vanilla | A French vanilla creature is one with only one, keyworded ability, such as Flying or First Strike. See also vanilla. |
| Goldfish | Playing a deck against no opponent—simply drawing and making plays to get a feel for how the deck works. Generally the first step in testing a new deck. Both a verb, “to goldfish,” and a noun for the imaginary player you are playing against, “to play against the goldfish.” |
| Golgari | Ravnica guild representing Green/Black. Now used to describe any Green/Black card or deck. |
| Grixis | Alara shard representing Blue/Red/Black. Now used to describe any Blue/Red/Black card or deck. |
| Gruul | Ravnica guild representing Red/Green. Now used to describe any Red/Green card or deck. |
| Izzet | Ravnica guild representing Red/Blue. Now used to describe any Red/Blue card or deck. |
| Jank (n.)/janky (adj.) | Terrible card or deck, as in “Why’d you pick that jank?” or “These cards are janky.” |
| Jedi mind trick | From the movie Star Wars: A New Hope. Like Obi-Wan, clever (some say dishonorable) Magic players can use body language, double-speak, and amateur psychology to subtly convince their opponent to make a bad play, or even to make a major move, such as conceding the game. |
| Johnny | A player psychographic who enjoys the way cards interact mechanically, from Mark Rosewater’s seminal article. |
| Jund | Alara shard representing Red/Black/Green. Now used to describe any Red/Black/Green card or deck. |
| Lucksack | Lucky player. Used as a derogatory term when you feel your opponent beat you more due to chance than due to his or her superior play skill. Can also be used affectionately when your friend gets extremely lucky to get out of a bad situation. |
| Mana curve | The mana curve is another basic building block of Magic strategy; it comes from the graph of the number of cards at each converted mana cost in your deck. A deck can be said to have a low curve if it is full of cheap spells, or a high curve if it has more expensive spells. The first deck to use a mana curve was the Sligh deck, which you can read about here. |
| Mana flood | Drawing more lands than is useful, or drawing lands when you need to draw spells. See also mana screw. |
| Mana screw | Not having enough lands to cast your spells, or drawing spells when you need to draw lands. See also mana flood. |
| Metagame | The metagame is the game outside the game—in the context of Magic, the metagame is the collection and hierarchy of popular strategies for a format—so for pre–New Phyrexia Standard, the metagame was Caw-Blade, Red/Blue/Green ramp, Valakut, B/r Vampires, and so on. Metagaming is choosing or designing a deck for a tournament based on what decks you expect other people at the tournament to be playing. For a fuller explanation, check out Jeff Cunningham’s Magic Academy article. |
| Milling | The act of moving cards from the top of your opponent’s library into his graveyard; from the card Millstone. |
| Mise | Short for “might as well,” used to describe a lucky top-deck. “Mise” is both a verb and a noun; a player can mise, and also be a mise. The term has been corrupted from its original meaning; see Urban Dictionary for more: Originally derived from the expression “might as well,” as in “you might as well draw a disenchant.” It was then shortened through excessive use to “mise” and used in reference to a lucky draw: “I mised a disenchant.” Now it is simply used to describe anything good. |
| Naya | Alara shard representing Red/White/Green. Now used to describe any Red/White/Green card or deck. |
| Orzhov | Ravnica guild representing Black/White. Now used to describe any Black/White card or deck. |
| Ping | To deal a small amount of damage from a repeatable source. Cunning Sparkmage, Spikeshot Elder, and Rod of Ruin can all “ping,” and are called “pingers.” Note: Prodigal Sorcerer, a quintessential pinger, was nicknamed “Tim” after Tim the Enchanter from Monty Python and the Holy Grail—and the nickname expanded to refer to any pinger, so “pinger” and “Tim” are essentially synonymous. |
| Pro | A skillful and well-known player, short for “professional.” |
| Punt (v./n.) | (v.) To make a mistake, or to lose a game due to your own incompetence. As in “I almost top-eighted, but I punted in the last round.” (n.) The mistake or loss resulting from punting. Admitting a punt is taking responsibility for your losses and trying to learn from your mistakes. Here, Richard Feldman contrasts the punt to the bad beat story. |
| Rakdos | Ravnica guild representing Red/Black. Now used to describe any Red/Black card or deck. |
| Ranched | As in, “I got ranched,” meaning “I was defeated.” ChannelFireball slang term apparently created by Conley Woods. Luis Scott Vargas explains:
Lest you think I’m being arrogant, let me explain some terminology we developed in San Diego. After Owen was asked who won between him and Gabe in a draft round, Owen answered “I won very easily,” since he seemed to have Gabe’s number that whole week. So, whenever someone asked one of us if we won or lost and we won, we would invariably answer “I won very easily” or some variant of that. It doesn’t matter if it was easy or not (and my third draft round was a tight three-game match), the answer was always “I won very easily.” Of course, if you lost, there was also an expression for that: “I got ranched.” Conley was the inventor of that turn of phrase, so feel free to ask him about the origins. |
| Ringer | An unknown player of unexpectedly high skill level; the traditional definition is “a contestant entered in a competition under false pretenses.” The term has degenerated in Magic-speak to the point that Paolo Vitor Damo da Rosa recently said,
“Ringer” has become a term that means “someone I know.” Tournament report writers often describe their friends as “a bunch of ringers” even if they are all well-known pros. |
| Scoop | To concede the game, from the action of picking (scooping) up your cards that immediately follows a concession. |
| Selesnya | Ravnica guild representing Green/White. Now used to describe any Green/White card or deck. |
| Ship it | Pass it. Can be used in a game context; “Ship the turn,” meaning pass the turn. Can also be used externally, often when discussing new or secret deck lists or tech—“Nassif shipped me his new Blue/Black list.” |
| Sick rip | Similar to the top-deck, but with an unambiguous implication that the player pulling the sick rips is a lucksack. |
| Signals (draft) | Simply put, sending a signal in booster draft means passing a card of high quality because it is good in an archetype you are not interested in drafting. For example, in an M11 draft, if you are passed a Quag Sickness late, that is a signal that the player passing to you does not want to be in Black. It is possible to send signals accidentally, or confused signals, as you are relying on the next player to correctly interpret the pack you are passing. There are many strategy articles that take this concept beyond the purview of a lexicon; as always, a good place to start is Magic Academy. |
| Simic | Ravnica guild representing Green/Blue. Now used to describe any Green/Blue card or deck. |
| Slow-roll | Slow-rolling is deliberately delaying a play, either for dramatic effect or for straightforward material benefit—after top-decking a Lightning Bolt with your opponent at 3, you might slow-roll him by waiting to kill him while he goes through the motions of his turn. You might also slow-roll a Day of Judgment while waiting for your opponent to commit more creatures to the board. |
| Snidd | Generic term for a 3/3 Flyer for 5 mana, from Planeshift’s Sea Snidd. |
| Spike | Player psychographic who plays primarily to win. From Mark Rosewater’s seminal article. |
| Swing | Attack. |
| Tech | A previously undiscovered improvement to an existing strategy—for example, players who recently put Mortarpod in their Caw-Blade decks had an advantage over those who didn’t; before Mortarpod was widely acknowledged as a standard improvement to Caw-Blade, it was said to be “tech.” |
| Tilt | From the pinball term, where “tilting” the machine triggers an alarm that disqualifies you. Going on tilt means getting emotionally upset about something, whether in or out of the game, and not playing as well as you can due to the distraction. You can also tilt your opponent; this means putting him in that same emotional state, by forcing an error, blowing him out with a trick, or, for example, reminding him that his girlfriend just dumped him. |
| Timmy | Player psychographic who enjoys doing impressive, exciting things, and has a predilection for expensive spells and powerful creatures. From Mark Rosewater’s seminal article. |
| Top-deck (v./adj.) | (v.) To draw a card that you need from the top of your deck. Often used to imply the opponent was lucky to escape some situation that your skillful play had put him in—“I stabilized at 3 life, but he top-decked a Lightning Bolt to win.” (adj.) A related term is “top-deck mode.” A player can be said to be in top-deck mode if his hand is empty and his only options are coming from the card drawn from the top of his deck each turn. |
| Train | Short for the “gravy train”—when pros talk about “getting on the train,” they mean reaching a level high enough in the Pro Players Club that Wizards will pay their way to major events and they don’t need to play Pro Tour Qualifiers any more. |
| Troll Shroud | Also known as super-shroud, this ability—first seen on Troll Ascetic—prevents your opponent from targeting—but doesn’t prevent you from targeting—your permanent. Obviously, this is a better version of normal Shroud. Can be granted to your permanents by effects such as that generated by Asceticism. |
| U | Used in typed mana costs to represent Blue mana. The other colors are self-explanatory (WBRG = White/Black/Red/Green), but Blue takes “U” because Black already has “B”. |
| Vanilla | A vanilla creature is one with no abilities, such as Grizzly Bears or Hill Giant. Such creatures are usually found in core sets, and at common rarity. See also French vanilla. |
So, there we have it! I’m sure there are plenty more obscure slang terms that I haven’t picked up on, so please share your definitions in the comments. Thanks to everyone on Twitter who suggested terms; I couldn’t have done it without you (well, I probably could have, but it would have taken a lot longer). Please share this with your new player friends so they, too, can experience the joy of mises, barns, punting, and tech.
