Every Damage Type in MTG

The Short Answer

If you came here from a game with elemental resistances, the honest answer is that Magic has no damage types in that sense. Damage is damage. There is no fire damage and no ice damage, no card that takes more from one than the other, and no creature that resists a type.

The damage types Magic does distinguish are four, and they are about where the damage came from and what form it arrives in rather than what element it is. They matter far more than an elemental chart would.

The fourth row is the one worth the price of admission. A large number of cards that look like damage are not damage, and everything you might use to stop damage does nothing about them.

Combat Damage vs. Noncombat Damage

Combat damage is dealt by creatures that are attacking or blocking, during the combat damage step, and it all happens at once. A 4/4 attacking an untapped 2/2 blocker does not go first: both deal their damage simultaneously, which is why trading creatures is a thing that happens. How combat works, step by step →

Noncombat damage is everything else: a burn spell, a creature's activated ability, a triggered ability, a planeswalker. It can happen at any point somebody has priority, which is what makes it so much more flexible and so much more expensive per point.

Lightning Bolt ↗

Noncombat damage. Three to anything, at instant speed, with no creature involved.

Colossal Dreadmaw ↗

Combat damage, with the cleanest printed reminder text trample has ever had.

Blasphemous Act ↗

Noncombat damage to every creature at once. Damage, not destruction, so indestructible survives.

Exsanguinate ↗

Not damage at all. Loss of life, which almost nothing in the game can prevent.

Those two are the damage types most cards care about, and three consequences of the split come up constantly. Only combat damage counts toward commander damage. Only combat damage can be stopped by blocking, or by a fog. And a lot of cards care about the difference explicitly, so it is worth reading whether a card says "damage" or "combat damage" before assuming.

Damage vs. Loss of Life

This is the distinction most worth learning on this page, because the two look identical when they happen and behave completely differently around every card that interacts with them.

Damage is an event. It has a source, it has an amount, and it can be prevented, redirected, doubled, or converted into life by lifelink. Loss of life is just the number going down. There is no source to point at and almost nothing to respond with.

Exsanguinate and Gray Merchant of Asphodel both say "loses X life". Neither deals a point of damage. So a Fog does nothing, protection does nothing, Deflecting Palm cannot send it back, and your lifelinking creature on the battlefield gains you nothing. That is not a loophole, it is why black is allowed to have these effects at all.

The same asymmetry runs through costs. Toxic Deluge asks you to pay life as a cost, which is neither damage nor really a loss of life you can prevent, and that is exactly why it kills indestructible creatures and costs three mana.

Read that carefully and the relationship is one-directional: damage causes loss of life, and loss of life is not damage. A card that cares about damage is not looking at the second.

What Can Be Damaged, and What It Does

Four things in the game can take damage, and every damage type above does something different to each of them.

Creatures are the interesting one because damage is marked on them rather than reducing anything. A 5/5 with three damage marked is still a 5/5, it just dies if it takes two more before cleanup. That is a genuinely different mechanic from a creature getting -3/-3, which reduces its toughness and can therefore kill it outright and cannot be undone by the turn ending.

Note also that damage is not destruction. An indestructible creature takes damage perfectly happily and simply never dies from it, which is why Blasphemous Act leaves indestructible creatures standing while Toxic Deluge does not.

Commander Damage

In Commander there is a second way to be killed by damage. If a single opponent's commander deals you 21 combat damage over the course of the game, you lose, whatever your life total says.

It is not a separate kind of damage. It is ordinary combat damage that is also tallied separately, so it takes your life total down as normal at the same time. Two rules follow and both catch people: only combat damage counts, so a commander that pings you for 20 with an ability has done nothing toward the 21. And the tally is per commander, so taking 12 from one and 12 from another leaves you alive with two tallies of 12. Commander damage in full →

Tracking it is the part people get wrong at the table rather than in the rules, because it is three separate running totals per player and a game runs two hours. How to track it without arguing →

Poison, Infect and Toxic

This is the closest Magic gets to a genuinely different damage type, and it is the one place the word type is nearly honest. It works by changing the form the damage arrives in rather than by having a different name.

Infect is the older keyword. A creature with infect deals its damage to players as poison counters instead of reducing their life, and to creatures as -1/-1 counters instead of marked damage. Ten poison counters and that player loses. It is still damage throughout, which means prevention and doubling effects work on it normally.

The creature half is nastier than the player half. Marked damage wears off at cleanup and -1/-1 counters do not, so an infect creature that fails to kill something has still shrunk it permanently. How counters work →

Toxic is the newer, milder version. A creature with toxic deals its damage normally and additionally gives a player poison counters when it connects, so it is additive rather than a replacement. Both feed the same ten counter threshold.

The Keywords That Change What Damage Does

These do not change how much damage is dealt or which of the damage types it is. They change what happens when it lands, and between them they cover most of the surprising outcomes in combat.

Vampire Nighthawk ↗

Deathtouch and lifelink on one three-drop. Any damage it deals kills, and gains you that much.

Basilisk Collar ↗

The same pair for one mana, on whichever creature you want it on.

Questing Beast ↗

Deathtouch, and its damage cannot be prevented, which turns off every fog at the table.

Phyrexian Crusader ↗

Infect: its damage is poison counters to players and -1/-1 counters to creatures.

Deathtouch makes any nonzero damage lethal, so a 1/1 with it kills a 9/9 in a trade. Trample lets excess combat damage carry through to the player once blockers have been assigned lethal damage. Double strike deals combat damage twice, in two separate steps, which is why it multiplies so well with everything else here.

Lifelink gains you life equal to any damage that source deals, combat or otherwise, and it is not a trigger you can respond to. First strike creates an earlier combat damage step, so a first striker that kills its blocker takes nothing back. And protection from a color prevents all damage from sources of that color, among several other things.

Deathtouch and trample together are the famous interaction: with both, one point of damage per blocker counts as lethal, so nearly all of the damage tramples over. That is a rule about damage assignment rather than about either keyword alone. The combat animations for each of these →

Preventing, Doubling and Redirecting

Because damage is an event with a source, other cards get to sit in front of it. There are three things they do.

Prevention stops the damage happening at all. Fog is the cheapest version and prevents every point of combat damage for a turn, which in a four-player game can undo an entire alpha strike for one mana. Protection and damage prevention shields are narrower versions of the same idea.

Redirection moves it. Deflecting Palm prevents the damage and then deals that much to whoever sent it, which has ended more Commander games than its mana cost suggests it should.

And some cards simply say no to all of it. Questing Beast states that combat damage dealt by creatures you control cannot be prevented, which turns off every fog at the table at once. That line is on the card precisely because prevention is such a reliable defense in multiplayer.

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