Pattern Recognition #421 - Convoking

Features Opinion Pattern Recognition

berryjon

13 August 2026

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Hello Everyone! My name is berryjon, and I welcome you all to Pattern Recognition, TappedOut.Net's longest running article series. Also the only one. I am a well deserved Old Fogey having started the game back in 1996. My experience in both Magic and Gaming is quite extensive, and I use this series to try and bring some of that to you. I dabble in deck construction, mechanics design, Magic's story and characters, as well as more abstract concepts. Or whatever happens to catch my fancy that week. Please, feel free to talk about each week's subject in the comments section at the bottom of the page, from corrections to suggested improvements or your own anecdotes. I won't bite. :) Now, on with the show!

Hello again! This week is a subject I've covered before, but that was back in the ancient days of yore, so why not touch upon it again?

Convoke is an older mechanic in Magic, originating back in 2005 with the original Ravnica: City of Guilds. Yes, it's about 21 years old. Magic is ancient. Moving on. Convoke was the unifying keyword for the Selesnya Guild - - and like all the mechanics from that block, was intended to occupy and reinforce the design space between the two colours. In this case, Convoke emphasized that these were the two colours that embraced having the most creatures - often through tokens - and found a further use for them that wasn't just buffing them all with anthems like Glorious Anthem or Gaea's Anthem and swinging for the win.

To that end, Convoke allows spells to be paid for by tapping creatures to pay for the cost of either one or a colour in that creature's own mana value. Not in any activated abilities, but in the actual cost in the upper right. On the surface, this is pretty simple and easy to understand, but there is depth and complexity to this if you care to dig under the hood a little.

To start with, the initial set of Convoke cards from Ravnica were over priced. Their mana values were higher than an equivalent card even then. For example, Sundering Vitae was more expensive than Naturalize, Gather Courage was worse than Giant Growth - and I'll come back to this one later becuase it's not that bad? Conclave Equenaut costs more and is less capable than Serra Angel. You see, the initial run of cards with this mechanic assumed that you would be paying for them in part or in whole with the creatures you tapped as part of the Convoking and not just with straight mana.

This meant that if you didn't have the creatures to utilize, like say after a board wipe, they were often poor card and you would be wishing for something else to cast. Good luck hard-casting Autochthon Wurm without creatures to take up the burden. Or playing a very lucky deck with a lot of acceleration.

Which brings me back to Gather Courage, one of three - maybe four - Convoke cards in the set that I actually approved of and have played with anything approaching regularity. You see, because you tap the creature to reduce the cost of the card, if you block an attack with a creature, you can then tap that self-same creature to pay for the cost of this card, effectively making it a 'free' spell for your blocker to get a little bigger. Righteousness it is not, but it's still a viable tactic I have used in the past.

But here I need to step to one side and complain a little bit. Well, less complain and more point out a flaw in the mechanic that has never really been addressed, even as the game advances over time. The use of creatures as a mana source is exclusvely . Yes, there were a couple exception in the early game, but the preponderance of Llanowar Elves, Elvish Mystics, Avacyn's Pilgrim and Birds of Paradise styled cards took over and has stayed that way for decades now.

Note to self - article about how each colour cheats and accelerates mana.

What Convoke does is turn each creature you have into a mana source. Yes, for a specific spell. But there are cards like Chief Engineer, Invasion of Segovia  ^Flip (or rather its flipside), Party Thrasher and Eridu, Carrier of Dawn that grant the keyword to a selection of other cards. This is, again, something that is supposed to be the total domain of just , but here it is, across everyone except for .

This is especially egregious in the initial Ravnica set as if you were to look at it, it was just taking advantage of contributing more creatures (and tokens) to the cause. It wasn't an equal pairing of the two colours in my book and in my opinion. Which is what the Ravnica mechanics should be. And often didn't quite make it, but that's a story for another time.

Now another thing to consider about Convoke is that unlike Urza, Lord High Artificer, Convoke doesn't actually allow the creatre to add mana to the mana pool. Rather, it is an alternate way to pay a cost. Which means that cards like Nyxbloom Ancient or Kinnan, Bonder Prodigy won't actually generate you extra value. You're not creating mana in any way, you are not reducing the cost of the spell like you had Emerald Medallion in play. You are paying a cost through an alternate method. Heck, it's even one of the things that doesn't use the stack so you nor your opponent can react to the tapping of the creatures separately from the casting of the spell. And the it is the spell itself that enables the tapping, which means that creatures with summoning sickness can be used for it on something else. Which is where Sprout Swarm does its worst. Yes, that is a US$5 common. It's that powerful because of Convoke.

Convoke, as it turned out, was a very popular mechanic. It was, despite its flaws, a very simple mechanic to understand and it was easy for Wizards to develop cards around it and using it in different ways. So naturally, it came back! Well, it took ten years as a cameo in Time Spiral doesn't count, but in Magic 2015, Convoke came back as a regular mechanic across all colors. Although Chief Engineer didn't have it, it granted it to artifacts. This return and the reception to it - again being positive - meant that there was reason to keep it coming back. However, again we found that the these spells were still a little over-costed for what they did, but not as much as some of the original Ravnica cards. Stoke the Flames for example, would be perfectly reasonable without Convoke as a card. Maybe not perfect, but it would do its job.

Then three years later, we got Guilds of Ravnica, and the mechanic came back. Every other Guild got something new to reflect how they had changed and grown over time, but Convoke stayed the same because again, despite its flaws, it worked. They didn't need to change anything, but in this set, they did start to push some boundaries with it. Venerated Loxodon was a test case, to see if cards could care about the creatures that Convoked it without and how the players would react. And they reacted relatively positively. The mechanic's third time back firmly established that Wizards considered it something that could be a permanent part of their toolbox, something that they can come back to and add into a set without it being disruptive or requiring a lot of support. To that end, it was spiced into supplementary products, like the Modern series and Commander products to ... not exactly rave reviews, but people didn't complain about them either.

March of the Machine brought Conovke back into Standard, but this time the focus colour shifted to and . These were the two that (in theory) cared least about the creatures they had, which is the opposite of the traditional Convoke colours. Yes, it still appeared in other colours, but the focus was on the two spell-slinger colours. The purpose of this was to see how using creatures to help offset mana costs worked when there was less creatures to use. Where there was no March of the Multitudes to fuel endless ranks of tokens.

Part of the reason that I was less concerned about these colours - especially getting convoke is because I can appreciate the Vorthos of it. Wizards chanting in a circle, performing some grand ritual spell that could never be attained by any single person and their resources? Yeah, that's a Convoke spell for you.

It was a nice experiment, one that was reinforced by the Kasla, the Broken Halo Commander precon (which I still need to find, damned limited supplies in rural Canada) which encouraged Convoke spells in general to provide additional benefits to them.

And earlier this year, Convoke came back for a fifth time to Standard with Lorwyn Eclipsed. This time, it found itself in the hands of the Merfolk to partly represent their growing sense of community and mutual support. At least that's what I'm told as there are only three Merfolk - plus Omni-Changeling - in the set that have or direclty care about Convoke. It's just in the colours. I wish it was the Kithkin that had this association, but I'll let the Prof have this win for his fave creature type.

Of course, Covoke doesn't end here - and I'm not talking about the keyword appearing in things like the recent Marvel set. No, there are a couple of parallel mechanics that look into the same design space, but from a different angle, or with a different goal.

Introduced in Kaladesh, Improvise was advertised as Convoke but with Artifacts. Instead of tapping creatures to help pay for a spell, you could tap any artifacts you may have had lying around that aren't doing anything to help offset the cost. This mechanic appeared in all colours, and my personal favourite was Herald of Anguish, which goes into my Treasures decks because I can use them passively to pay for the creature, then sack them for removal later on. Although most people would appreciate Whir of Invention or Inspiring Statuary more.

This mechanic worked, but it ran right into the Affinity problem. That being, artifacts tend to snowball out of control when you can use them to pay for other artifacts. The issue specifically is artifacts that have static abilities that don't matter if they're tapped or not - we're decades past the point where that matters.

History lesson! There used to be a rule (from Limited Alpha to just before 6th Edition) were artifacts were only 'on' when they were untapped, and if they were tapped, then they stopped working. If you wonder why Howling Mine is written the way it is, that is because it is a deliberate holdover from that era. And yes, people would use improvise cards just to tap their Mine to prevent their opponents from gaining an advantage from it.

And just like Convoke, Improvise doesn't care about summoning sickness!

The other new mechanic that occupies this design space is Waterbending, from Avatar. This mechanic allows you to pay for an activated cost on a creature by tapping creatures and artifacts to go into it. Much like how Convoke and Improvise can affect the casting cost of a creature, Waterbending is strictly for the activated abilities on a card. And it works with the same rules in that it doesn't care for summoning sickness (you can tap a creature or artifact to pay for its own Waterbend cost as long as the creature doesn't need to tap to activate the ability in the first place), it's not actually adding mana or interacting with the mana pool as its an alternate cost, and the abilities are over-costed for their effect because it's assumed that you're going to be tapping alternate costs to go with them.

These mechanics aren't that bad. The core conceit of using non-mana sources to help offset a card's mana cost isn't wrong, but it isn't right either. One of the core conceits and flaws to the game is the necessity of lands - something I've even addressed in the recent past when I poked under the hood of Duel Masters. Being able to cheat mana, cheat the costs of your cards (I'm looking at you, Omniscience and the flavor-of-the-week Resurrection) and just in general treating the MV of your spells as a vague suggestion does bad things to card balance.

Wizards does know this and their first experiments usually err on the side of caution, but it's when they start getting confident and then experimental that things get out of hand. Like Sprout Swarm. Dear god this card.

I know we'll be getting more Convoke in the future! Improvise... eh, we'll see. Maybe in an artifact heavy set. And Waterbending needs to be pulled out of Avatar or at least renamed. So I'll talk about it again in a few years, and all will be well!

Thank you all for watching and reading and I'll see you all next week! With what? I don't know yet. But it will be fun, I promise!

Until then, please consider donating to my Pattern Recognition Patreon. Yeah, I have a job (now), but more income is always better, and I can use it to buy cards! I still have plans to do a audio Pattern Recognition at some point, or perhaps a Twitch stream. And you can bribe your way to the front of the line to have your questions, comments and observations answered!