Graveyard

The graveyard is one of the six main zones in the game of Magic: The Gathering.

Description

The graveyard is the pile into which you discard, where instant and sorcery spells go once they have resolved, and where permanents go when they have been sacrificed, destroyed, or "put into the graveyard" due to a state-based effect.

Cards in the graveyard are usually no longer relevant to the game, but some mechanics do interact with the graveyard. Examples are Flashback, unearth, dredge and delve. A notable creature type that often comes back from the graveyard is Zombies. The threshold and delirium mechanics also make use of the graveyard. Decks such as reanimator are built to use or re-use cards in the graveyard, often making it as useful a resource as a player's hand.

Flavor

Flavory speaking, sometimes the graveyard is regarded as a literal cemetery littered with bodies. In other ways, is regarded as a more conceptual past, a "place" where forgotten magics are hidden.

"Graveyard sets"

Weatherlight was the first set where the graveyard "mattered". Blocks like Odyssey, Innistrad, and Amonkhet gave graveyard strategies the center stage, and the graveyard played a huge part for the Golgari, Grixis, and Sultai in otherwise not-graveyard-focused sets.

Rules

From the glossary of the Comprehensive Rules (April 12, 2024—Outlaws of Thunder Junction)

Graveyard

1. A zone. A player’s graveyard is their discard pile.

2. All the cards in a player’s graveyard.

See rule 404, “Graveyard.”

From the Comprehensive Rules (April 12, 2024—Outlaws of Thunder Junction)

• 404. Graveyard
  • 404.1. A player’s graveyard is their discard pile. Any object that’s countered, discarded, destroyed, or sacrificed is put on top of its owner’s graveyard, as is any instant or sorcery spell that’s finished resolving. Each player’s graveyard starts out empty.
  • 404.2. Each graveyard is kept in a single face-up pile. A player can examine the cards in any graveyard at any time but normally can’t change their order. Additional rules applying to sanctioned tournaments may allow a player to change the order of cards in their graveyard.
  • 404.3. If an effect or rule puts two or more cards into the same graveyard at the same time, the owner of those cards may arrange them in any order.

Graveyard mechanics

"Graveyard order matters"

Twenty-one cards from Magic's early sets relied on the order of cards in a graveyard. The last of these, Volrath's Shapeshifter, was printed in Stronghold.

• Alms
• Ashen Ghoul
• Barrow Ghoul
• Bone Dancer
• Bösium Strip
• Circling Vultures
• Corpse Dance
• Death Spark
• Guiding Spirit
• Krovikan Horror
• Mistmoon Griffin
• Nature's Kiss
• Necratog
• Nether Shadow
• Phyrexian Grimoire
• Phyrexian Furnace
• Shallow Grave
• Soldevi Digger
• Spinning Darkness
• Volrath's Shapeshifter
• Zombie Scavengers

Cards that care about graveyard order were obsoleted after the Tempest block. Mark Rosewater is highly skeptical that they will ever return, seeing that that they cause a lot of aggravation for minimal design space. He rates the mechanic a 10 on the Storm Scale. R&D have talked about issuing errata on all “graveyard order matters” cards, but it would majorly change how those cards work. The general strategy now, as the list of cards doesn’t get played a lot, is to let players assume the default is it doesn’t matter unless someone speaks up at the beginning of the game that it does.

From the Tournament Rules (August 21, 2023—Wilds of Eldraine)

• 3.15 Graveyard Order
  In formats involving only cards from Urza’s Saga and later, players may change the order of their graveyard at any time. A player may not change the order of an opponent’s graveyard.

Cast spells out of graveyard

Black is the color most focused on the graveyard. thus the ability to cast spells out of the graveyard is primary in black. Blue occasionally can cast instants and sorceries out of the graveyard. Red is also secondary, especially in sets where it can grant flashback to instants and sorceries in the graveyard. White and green are tertiary because flashback is done with regularity.

Cast spells from the opponent's graveyard

The two sneakiest colors are the ones most likely to use the opponent's resources against them. Sometimes blue and black will make the player discard/mill the cards into exile where they can later cast them.

Bringing back from the graveyard

White, the color of mercy, is the color that saves things the turn they are destroyed.

Exiling from the graveyard

Exiling from the graveyard is used to get rid of cards that might have an effect/usable activation cost. Black does it most often, but white occasionally does it in sets that need it. Green has the occasional cards, such as Night Soil and Scavenging Ooze, though many cards with green also have black, such as Necrogenesis.