Quick Links
- What Is Convoke?
- Rulings With Convoke
- Giving Cards Convoke
- What Colours Work With Threshold
The popular tabletop trading card game Magic: The Gathering, has an overwhelming amount of cards, sets, and formats you can play. Each card is unique and has abilities and mechanics that separate them from other cards, and it can be easy to get lost and forget how some specific cards and mechanics work.
Related: Magic: The Gathering - What Is Threshold?
Some card mechanics like flying are used in just about every set, but others like convoke are rarer to find but can still be played in multiple formats across a wide range of cards. This means it is useful to understand how the mechanic works and what situations they are best for.
What Is Convoke?
First seen in the set Ravnica: City of Guild, convoke allows you to tap your creatures to help pay for the cost of a card.
More specifically, you can tap any of your creatures and use them to cast one colourless mana towards the cost of the convoke card or one of any coloured mana that the creature is.
For example, the card Impervious Greatwurm has a massive mana cost of seven colourless mana and three green mana. However, using convoke, you can tap a couple of your smaller creatures and heavily reduce the mana cost.
To begin with, convoke was predominantly used for green cards, but with so many sets released after the Ravnica block, there are plenty of good convoke cards for most colours.
Rulings With Convoke
The main thing with ruling for convoke is that it is done on the stack, so you will have to determine what the mana cost of the card is first and then tap your creatures.
This is something that is only really important for cards that have an X in their mana cost.
An example of this is with Chord of Calling. You would decide what mana value X is and then tap the appropriate creatures and pay the rest of the mana cost with your lands. Then, when the card is on the stack, you wouldn't be able to change your mind and tap another creature to increase the cost of the card.
When it comes to mana dorks or other cards that can tap to activate a mana ability, you will not be able to tap them for the abilityand then use them for convoke; you can only choose one.
Something that works well with convoke is that you can tap creatures with summoning sickness to help pay for the cost.
Giving Cards Convoke
There are a select few cards that will give your cards convoke, which can open up a lot of possibilities for combos.
Chief Engineer will give all of your Artifact Spells convoke, which can work incredibly well with commander decks that like to run colourless artifact spells allowing you to play them a lot more.
Another card that is powerful for certain commander decks is Fallaji Wayfarer, allowing you to once again create some interesting opportunities much earlier than your opponents will be able to.
What Colours Work With Threshold
In total, there are 87 convoke cards.
Overall, the best cards are green and white.
They are both good at creating a lot of early weak creatures, which can be used effectively to pay for a convoke card.
However, there are some highlights from other colours, such as black with Lethal Scheme. Like a few cards with convoke, the card gives an additional bonus to the creatures you have used to help pay for the cost.
Along with the benefit of it being a solid removal spell, Lethal Scheme will allow you to connive for every creature that is convoked.
In white one of the standout cards is Devouring Light, working as a powerful removal spell to use in combat to get an advantage over the opponent.
In green, there are the cards already mentioned, such as Chord of Calling and Impervious Greatworm.
Of course, the more creatures on the battlefield, the more powerful convoke can become, and running a card like Sprout Swarm in a deck that already creates a lot of green tokens will allow for some very powerful plays.
Whilst black doesn't have that many convoke cards, there are opportunities to use them effectively in certain decks, like with Endless Obedience, which doesn't necessarily have to rely on convoke to make it good in a zombies deck that brings creatures back from the dead.
You could draw this with no creatures on the battlefield and still make use of it, and it is made a lot better by tapping just a few extra creatures you have.
Next: Magic: The Gathering - The Best Green Signature Spells For Oathbreaker
