Talk:Keyword ability

Keyword List

I would like to make a list of the keywords of the form

{{CR|Khans of Tarkir|*'''702.''' Keyword Abilities **'''702.1.''' (Text of 702.1) **'''702.2.''' [[Deathtouch]] **'''702.3.''' [[Defender]] **'''702.4.''' [[Double strike]] **'''702.5.''' [[Enchant]] ... }}

Any objections? Murgatroid99 (talk) 23:32, 24 October 2014 (UTC)

Seems to be a good idea (the page needs some reworking anyway). Go ahead! --Hunter (talk) 04:22, 25 October 2014 (UTC)

This page needs further work; the old text got me scrambled and I had to check the CR myself to straighten my brain! I'll continue to hammer this and related pages over the next couple of days. Corveroth (talk) 08:10, 19 June 2015 (UTC)

Proposal: Keyword Tags

I think the keyword ability list is rather difficult to parse meaninful information from and that putting them into a sortable table with additional columns dedicated to tagging common trends could, done correctly, could strike a balance between offering more information and over-loading the page with too much specific information.

For example:

Descriptive • Deathtouch, trample, and lifelink all interact with and change the way damage functions. They could be tagged with 'Damage'. • Delve and Affinity both reduce costs. They could be tagged with 'cost reduction' • Kicker and it ~10-20-odd variations (exaggeration, but only just) are additional costs. They could be tagged as such.

Purpose • Dredge, buyback, and flashback are all used to get a second, third, or additional use out of cards. They could be tagged with their purpose as 'recursion'. • Several keywords like Bushido and Rampage trigger when a creature is blocked to give a buff: These could be tagged 'trigger', 'blocked', 'buff' or any combination of the three.

Affectivity • Different keywords take affect when the card they are printed on are in different zones representing different kinds of game objects. Flash, Madness, Transmute, all affect the cards as cards, while Storm affects spells, and (probably most) mechanics only function when a card is a permanent on the battlefield. These difference could be all be categorized and tagged. The rare mechanic like companion affects cards before the game even begins.

Means • Some abilities make use of +1/+1, time, or other types of counters, they could be tagged 'counters' or 'proliferatable'. • Some abilities make use of tokens, and could be tagged 'token'.

The chief difficulty for moving forward with the propose would be deciding on a succient and meaningful set of tags to work with. The second difficult would be deciding, to everyone's satisfaction, how to tag each of the, at time of writing 183 keyword abilities, because this proposal by its nature would be a somewhat arbetrary categorization. Consider the hypothetical tag 'evasion' as a potential point of contention. Is trample an evasion ability. No, it doesn't prevent blocks, but it does make effectively blocking more difficult: No by letter but yes by spirit. These sorts of questions would pop up and need answered to effectively move forward with this proposal.

I know there's been some talk about this and other growing navboxes. For this one, I'm inclined to say that the best choice would be to list the evergreen keywords, and offer a link to the rest. It's an objective criteria, it's not overly complicated, and it highlights the most common topics. Corveroth (talk) 18:59, 18 June 2025 (UTC)

Woops, sorry, I thought we were on the navbox, not the CR quotation page. This list is directly from the Comprehensive Rules as published by Wizards. It will be a massive list for as long as they publish it like that. That's not something we have a lot of direct control over... hypothetically, the module that breaks the rules out to individual pages could be modified to change the styling (say, a 4-column layout, so that it takes less vertical space), but the kind of thematic breakdown you're asking for isn't in the CR, and there's not a great way to add it. Corveroth (talk) 19:14, 18 June 2025 (UTC)