17

My understanding of Mana-Burn is that if you have any left over mana in your mana-pool at the end of your turn, you loose that many life. But why is this rule necessary? The only time I see it come into play is when you have cards that give you multiple mana like Dark Ritual and Black Lotus, and isn't wasted mana penalty enough? I can't think of many times when I would purposely want to have extra mana left over in the first place.

When and how does mana burn usually happen? Why was the rule added? How would Magic be different without it?

1
  • 10
    It should be said that the rule was never "added"; it was part of the rules since Alpha until it was removed with M10. Sep 12, 2011 at 13:55

3 Answers 3

33

Mana burn has been removed from the game in the magic 2010 rules update. From the comprehensive rules glossary:

Mana Burn (Obsolete)

Older versions of the rules stated that unspent mana caused a player to lose life; this was called "mana burn." That rule no longer exists.

When the rule was still in effect, you lost all unspent mana in your mana pool at the end of each step and phase (not turn), and you lost life equal to the amount of mana lost.

As for the reason why it was there: As you said, it was meant to punish anyone who didn't manage his or her mana well. Also, there were a few cards that had the mana Burn rule in mind. They would add Mana to a player's pool during on of his/her game phases. Some would reward you for being tapped out or punish the opponent for not being tapped out, mostly in the Prophecy edition.

Why was it removed? As you noted as well, it was practically irrelevant a rule as it only very rarely happened, and when it happened, it confused most players about the details of how it worked exactly.

4
  • Mana burn was removed on July 11, 2009, with the introduction of the M10 rules changes. wizards.com/magic/magazine/article.aspx?x=mtg/daily/feature/42a
    – Jadasc
    Sep 11, 2011 at 23:01
  • @Hackworth, What if you're not playing standard and need to deal with "mana burn" cards? E.g. i.stack.imgur.com/vM1dt.jpg How do we treat these cards then?
    – Pacerier
    Jul 4, 2015 at 12:33
  • 11
    @Pacerier When a card has a trigger for an event that never happens, that trigger obviously never goes off. But if you are playing with custom cards anyway, then you might as well reinstate mana burn as a house rule.
    – Hackworth
    Jul 4, 2015 at 13:35
  • 1
    @Pacerier The only cards (and someone can correct me if I am wrong) that were ever printed involving mana burn told you to ignore the rule, like Upwelling. Cards like the custom card you put out just don't exist, and thus the situation of cards like that no longer working don't exist either. Only cards like Piracy were really affected - since there no longer was a penalty for tapping your lands in response, people reacted to it differently.
    – Andrew
    Jun 4, 2020 at 3:51
28

Mana burn is no longer a part of the game as the other answers point out so well. However, I feel like I have a definitive answer to "Why was the rule added?"

In episode #4 of his game design podcast - Games With Garfield - Richard himself and Skaff Elias comment on the creation of mana burn.

transcript from 05:27 to 06:25

SKAFF: Mana burn really wasn't even in there in the beginning, for the first couple of years we played the game and it kind of crept in because we didn't want people to just go... We needed a mana pool to make sense out of casting... exactly how a card was cast, to try and formalize that, and then some people who were just trying to be jerks (maybe I was one of them) would just dump all their mana into their mana pool so that, you know, it couldn't be disrupted, cause certain things disrupted it back at the time. And, anyway, to sort of prevent that and to prevent people to ever wanting to do that, mana burn was introduced into the game. The clearing of mana out of the pools, and maybe that wasn't good enough so maybe actually take some damage from it. And then from there it took on a life of its own and actually became part of the play of the game.

And Richard Garfield adds:

transcript from 6:26 to 6:47

RICHARD: Certainly, back in the old days there was a point where you could technically, at the start of you turn, just tap all your land and then you'd have all your mana for the whole turn. And the only difference would be that your opponent couldn't tell how much it was, was a pain to keep track of and so forth and so... Mana burn eventually was an answer to that (...)

So, to sum up, it seems that mana burn was created as a game design mechanical fix to avoid memory issues and to avoid some weird situations in the original spell timing rules.

6
  • Cool find! It sounds like a combination of memory issues and some of the weirdness related to mana-denial tricks under the batch system ("cause certain things disrupted it back at the time").
    – Alex P
    May 9, 2012 at 20:35
  • @AlexP I only highlighted the memory issues fix, but I'll edit the answer.
    – rahzark
    May 9, 2012 at 20:40
  • 2
    I'm curious as to what that weird disruption trick actually is. (Well, was.)
    – Alex P
    May 9, 2012 at 21:33
  • 4
    Say you have two islands untapped, and I cast stone rain on one of them with mana left over. Do you tap one before it hits to store the mana to counterspell a creature I cast later? You risk manaburn if you do, as I might not cast the subsequent spell letting you take the damage.
    – Nick
    Jun 13, 2012 at 10:44
  • 1
    @Pacerier No, mana empties at the end of every step and phase. Please have a look at the basic rulebook, and post new questions if you have new questions.
    – Cascabel
    Jul 6, 2015 at 23:15
14

The short answer, is "it doesn't happen", as Hackworth has already correctly noted. MaRo wrote a good article about why it was removed, which you can read here.

Why was it in the game in the first place? Well, it does make a difference. Check out cards like Mana Drain and Eladamri's Vineyard. Mana Drain is less powerful (though only marginally - it's still a beating) with mana burn; without mana burn, it now has no downside over Counterspell whatsoever. Eladamri's Vineyard is considerably less good than it was - the fun in the old days was giving a non-green deck mana it would have trouble using, hopefully causing burn. Now the card is much more symmetrical, with very little downside even for a nongreen opponent.

Also look at spells like Branded Brawlers, which "can't block if you control an untapped land". At the time Prophecy was an interesting set which rewarded you for mana management and tapping out every turn. Now it's a lot easier to tap out - it doesn't cost you life if you don't have something to do with your mana! Prophecy as a set is full of cards which look pretty pointless these days.

But really, it was a pretty fiddly rule, which almost never had a significant impact on gameplay, and wasn't really worth the extra bookkeeping it involved. Most Magic players I think don't really miss it.

6
  • It should be noted that a lot of cards that look like they'd be useless without mana burn still have a role to play - usually a smaller niche than what they had before, but they're also easier to include without having to build around them. A player can tap lands freely to avoid the damage from Citadel of Pain, for instance, but it still nicely punishes instant-happy decks that need mana to mess with your turn.
    – Alex P
    Dec 30, 2011 at 17:44
  • @thesunneversets, What if you're not playing standard and need to deal with "mana burn" cards? E.g. i.stack.imgur.com/vM1dt.jpg How do we treat these cards then?
    – Pacerier
    Jul 4, 2015 at 12:33
  • 4
    @Pacerier That's not a real card. If there were a real card that referenced mana burn, you'd just look at the oracle text of the card (that's the text in Gatherer). Whatever it says there is what you do. As this answer says, that does mean some cards have effectively changed. But I'm not sure there are any real cards that ever explicitly referenced mana burn, except to say that it doesn't happen (like Sakiko).
    – Cascabel
    Jul 6, 2015 at 23:08
  • 7
    @Pacerier Per the M2010 rules update only six cards mentioned mana burn: Upwelling; Mindslaver; Mark of Sakiko; Sakiko, Mother of Summer, Sakura-Tribe Springcaller; and Shizuko, Caller of Autumn. All of them are simply saying that certain mana doesn't cause mana burn. The oracle text changes were therefore trivial, just removing that reference. So there are no "mana burn" cards - even if you do have one of those cards that says "mana burn" on the physical card, all you have to do is ignore it.
    – Cascabel
    Jul 6, 2015 at 23:24
  • 3
    Mana Web would be another good example of a card influenced by mana burn.
    – NibblyPig
    Feb 4, 2016 at 11:20

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .