Everyone has their favorite bit of flavor text from Magic: The Gathering. For instance, the flavor text at the bottom of Wrench Mind is “What is the sound of one head snapping?” Diabolical. That said, if you look back at old Magic cards from the 1990s, some of them have entire paragraphs of flavor text. Even the words of William Shakespeare have popped up as flavor text, like Darkness including lines from Measure for Measure (“If I must die, I will encounter darkness as a bride, / And hug it in mine arms.”).
As much as we can get a kick out of seeing these blocks of text on old cards, they were a pain for the team to balance between world-building and game mechanics. At MagicCon Las Vegas 2026, a panel of R&D team members, past and present, discussed how flavor text originally ran wild and then was reined in over the years.
“I vividly remember in Zendikar, that was the first time where I, as the leader, was like, ‘I am putting a moratorium on how many words you can write on cards,’” Aaron Forsythe began. “This is insane. Take words off cards! What does this guy do? Big paragraph of text. Delete. Forest walk. That’s what he does.”
“And we still monitor it. I have what I call a flavor text metric where we monitor percentages of cards in sets that have to have flavor text of a certain length. We do this in service of the world-building team being able to do their parts of the job so that the game designers don’t fill the whole card up with text. We have found a pretty good equilibrium point. The game is more complicated than it was a few years ago, but it is at a level that we have found that the audience can engage with,” Forsythe concluded.
Being concise is a massively important skill, even within the world of Magic: The Gathering.