Cycling

Cycling
Keyword Ability
Type	Activated
Introduced	Urza's Saga
Last used	Alara Reborn
Reminder Text	Cycling [cost] (Discard this card: Draw a card. / Discard this card: Search your library for a (object) card, reveal it, and put it into your hand. Then shuffle your library.)
Statistics	146 cards 20% 18% 14% 14% 11% Multicolor 9%, Land 6%
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keyword:"Cycling"

Cycling is a keyword ability that allows a player to pay a cost that includes discarding the card. When the activated ability resolves, that player draws a card. Cycling has been perennially popular and has been featured in more blocks than any other non-evergreen keyword, appearing in the Urza's, Onslaught, Time Spiral, and Alara blocks, the last of which introduced cards with hybrid cycling costs.

Typecycling

A variant of the ability, typecycling, allows the player to search his or her library for a card of a given subtype instead of drawing the top card of their library. The first cards with this ability appeared in Scourge and allowed a player to search for a land card with a specific land type. Future Sight then expanded the ability to search for cards with a specific creature type, but appears on only two cards: Vedalken Æthermage (wizard) and Homing Sliver (sliver). Conflux introduced basic land cycling.

Alara Reborn introduced the first cards with two landcycling abilities.

Basic Landcycling

Basic landcycling was introduced in Conflux.

• Unlike the normal cycling ability, basic landcycling doesn't allow you to draw a card. Instead, it lets you search your library for a basic land card. You don't choose the type of basic land card you'll find until you're performing the search. After you choose a basic land card in your library, you reveal it, put it into your hand, then shuffle your library.
• Basic landcycling is a form of cycling. Any ability that triggers on a card being cycled also triggers on a card being basic landcycled. Any ability that stops a cycling ability from being played also stops a basic landcycling ability from being played.
• Basic landcycling is an activated ability. Effects that interact with activated abilities (such as Stifle or Rings of Brighthearth) will interact with basic landcycling. Effects that interact with spells (such as Remove Soul or Faerie Tauntings) will not.
• You can choose not to find a basic land card, even if there is one in your library.

Artifact that reduces Cycling costs

• Fluctuator

External links

• New Features of Urza's Saga: Cycling
• Mark Rosewater (September 16, 2002). "Cycling Cycling". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.</ref>
• Mark Rosewater (March 22, 2004). "A Cycling Built for Two". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.</ref>
• Mark Rosewater (February 23, 2009). "Cycling Round the Track". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.</ref>
• Mark Rosewater (May 06, 2013). "New & Improved". magicthegathering.com. Wizards of the Coast.
• A Planeswalker's Primer for Conflux: Basic Landcycling
• A Planeswalker's Primer for Alara Reborn: Cycling and Landcycling
• Mark Rosewater. "#8 - Cycling". Drive to Work.