Flavor

Flavor is the concept of evoking a specific feeling and the intent of creating a universe and telling a story with the game of Magic. This provides a unique and distinguishable quality to the game and each individual card or product. Flavor is accomplished via non-functional parts of cards, such as the Illustration or flavor text, the card face, and other visual clues, but also outside information such as marketing, web-presence, books, etc.

Magic flavor should have both breadth (the broad scope of Magic, the sheer number of flavor elements) and depth (intensity of focus, growing investment in its core iconic elements).

On most Magic cards, the mechanics mesh incredibly well with the flavor. This is not always the case, though. Even the most evocative cards face flavor issues from time to time. A draft format that remedies this is flavor draft. It is drafted and played as normal, except for the fact that in-game flavor trumps the written text of the cards.