MTG Keywords: Scry!
Magic is a complex game (and that’s why we love it). These ScryFox Keywords articles will help you make sense of the 150+ keywords you’ll find on Magic cards. These articles are designed for players just starting out with Magic, and are hopefully useful primers for more experienced players too.
Naturally, for our first keywords article, we’re starting with Scry!
Seeings as this is our first article, let’s first explain what keywords are.
Keywords are short “action words” that you’ll find on Magic cards in the rule text area. Not all Magic cards have these keywords, some don’t have any at all. A keyword, like ‘Scry’, tells you to do something — it’s an instruction.
Let’s take a look at an example card with some keywords.
Mana cost: 1U
Type: Creature — Bird
Effect of card: Flying
When Augury Owl enters the battlefield, scry 3. (Look at the top three cards of your library, then put any number of them on the bottom of your library and the rest on top in any order.)
When Augury Owl enters the battlefield, scry 3. (Look at the top three cards of your library, then put any number of them on the bottom of your library and the
rest on top in any order.)
Power/Toughness: 1/1
From these instructions, we know the following: the creature has the Flying ability (another keyword), and that when it enters the battlefield, we can perform this ‘scry’ action. We can only ‘scry’ after the creature enters battlefield, so if (for example) Augury Owl was countered by a counter spell, we wouldn’t be able to scry.
In some ‘reminder text’, the card then explains how to ‘scry’:
To scry 3, look at the top three cards of your library, then put any number of them on the bottom of your library and the rest on top in any order.
The most important thing to remember is that ‘Scry’ will always be followed by a number, in this case, 3. It’s also important to remember that scry 3, and scry 1 three times are very different. If you scry 3, you can look at 3 cards all together. If you scry 1 three times, you have to look at each card and decide one by one whether to put it on the top or bottom of your library.
Let’s look at another card using scry, one of my favourite red combat tricks.
Mana cost: R
Type: Instant
Effect of card: Target creature gets +3/+1 until end of turn. Scry 1. (Look at the top card of your library. You may put that card on the bottom of your library.)
Titan’s Strength gives us two effects — it powers up a creature, and lets us scry 1. It may not seem important, but if a card has more than one effect like this, you should do them in the order they’re written. If we cast Titan’s Strength, we should first pick a target creature to get pumped up, then second do our scrying.
Why Scry?
Scrying is one of those keywords that doesn’t seem very powerful when you first see it, especially compared to some of the other keywords and abilities we’re going to talk about. However, it can very often be the difference to winning and losing a game, as scrying allows you to move cards you don’t want to bottom of your library, and bring you closer to drawing the cards you do want to draw. You might see scry paired with other effects, such as:
With Gimmer of Genius, getting to scry before drawing those two extra cards makes a big difference — even if you scry the top two cards to the bottom, you’re now four cards deeper into to your deck than you were before.
Attaching the scry ability to creatures, like we saw with Augury Owl above, means that even if the creature dies in combat (or to a removal spell), we’ve still gotten some ‘value’ from spending our two mana by getting a look at our top 3 cards. These kinds of small effects are often the building blocks for winning games of Magic.
Keyword Types
Scry is an evergreen keyword, meaning (like evergreen trees that don’t drop their leaves in winter) it will stick around, and be used on cards in future sets, rather than just being used once. We’ll look at the different types of keyword in another episode.
Want to read more about where scry came from? Check out this great article from Mark Rosewater called ‘The Scrying Game’ from 2007:
http://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/scrying-game-2007-05-14
That wraps it up for our first Keywords episode — we hope you found it useful!
