Lore & Story
What Is a Planeswalker?
A planeswalker is a person who can travel between worlds. Planeswalker is also a card type. Those are two different claims about two overlapping groups, and almost everything confusing about the word comes from nobody saying which one they mean.
The Short Answer
In the story, a planeswalker is someone born with a planeswalker spark: a rare, inherited spark of the Multiverse that lets them step off their own world and travel to another. Almost everyone in Magic lives and dies on one plane. A planeswalker does not have to.
On a card, Planeswalker is a card type. It enters with loyalty counters, it has abilities you activate once per turn by adding or removing loyalty, and it can be attacked like a player can. Those are rules, and they are covered further down.
The two groups overlap heavily and are not the same. That is the part worth holding onto, and the rest of this page is really about why.
What a Spark Is, and When It Lights
The spark is not something you study for. It is inborn, it is vanishingly rare, and until it ignites the person carrying it is an ordinary inhabitant of an ordinary world. What sets it off is usually trauma: mortal danger, grief, or a moment where someone loses everything at once. That is why so many planeswalker origin stories are the worst day of a person's life.
Magic Origins made this literal, and it is the clearest teaching tool the game has ever printed for it. Five cards, each a creature on its front face, each transforming into the planeswalker that person becomes. The front face is who they were.
Jace, Vryn's Prodigy ↗
A young mind-reader on Vryn. Flips to Jace, Telepath Unbound: the same person, one bad day later.
Kytheon, Hero of Akros ↗
Gideon before the name. A soldier on Theros whose spark lights as he is about to die.
Liliana, Heretical Healer ↗
A village healer on Dominaria, killed by the people she was treating.
Chandra, Fire of Kaladesh ↗
A pyromancer on Kaladesh, walking away from an execution she causes.
Nissa, Vastwood Seer ↗
An elf on Zendikar who sees the plane's future and cannot make anyone listen.
Igniting also throws the new walker off their home plane, usually somewhere they have never heard of, with no idea how to get back. A first planeswalk is an accident, not a decision.
The Mending, and Why Old Walkers Are Different
This is the single most important thing to know about planeswalkers, and it is the thing new readers most often miss: the rules of being one changed partway through the story.
Before the Mending, a planeswalker was closer to a god than a person. They did not meaningfully age, they were extraordinarily hard to kill, and the strongest of them could reshape worlds and build artifacts that outlived civilizations. Urza, Lord High Artificer spent three thousand years preparing for a single war. That was normal for what he was.
The Mending, at the end of the Time Spiral story, ended that. Dominaria was coming apart at the seams and sealing it cost a generation of planeswalkers their sparks and in some cases their lives. What was left afterwards was a smaller thing: post-Mending walkers are mortal, they age, they can be killed by an ordinary sword, and their power is closer to that of a very good mage than a god.
Modern planeswalkers are weaker than the old ones because the writers made them weaker.
They are a different kind of being, and the change happened on the page. Everything before the Mending is a story about gods with grudges; everything after is a story about powerful people who can die. Comparing Jace to Urza is not comparing two power levels, it is comparing two eras.
A handful of pre-Mending walkers are still active, which is why they loom so large. Nicol Bolas and Ugin are Elder Dragons who were already ancient before any of this. Teferi gave up his spark at the Mending and later got it back. Urza is dead, and the story keeps finding reasons to talk about him anyway.
The Card Type, Briefly
A planeswalker card enters the battlefield with a set number of loyalty counters. Once on each of your turns you may activate one of its abilities, adding loyalty, removing it, or in the case of an ultimate, removing a great deal of it. At zero loyalty it goes to the graveyard. Opponents can attack it, and in Commander that matters more than anywhere else, because there are three of them.
Two more rules are worth knowing. You cannot control two planeswalkers with the same name at once: the second one you play sends the first to the graveyard, the same way the legend rule works for creatures. And any damage dealt to a planeswalker removes that much loyalty, which is why a single large attacker so often kills one outright.
The Confusion Worth Clearing Up
"Planeswalker" as a character and "planeswalker" as a card type are not the same set, and the gap runs in both directions.
Plenty of story planeswalkers have never had a planeswalker card, and several of the most important ones are printed as creatures instead. Meanwhile some of the most dangerous beings in the Multiverse cross between worlds without a spark at all, which is a distinction the story cares about a great deal.
Urza, Lord High Artificer ↗
One of the most powerful planeswalkers who ever lived, printed as a creature.
Karn Liberated ↗
A planeswalker card, for a silver golem who was not born a person, let alone a walker.
Yawgmoth, Thran Physician ↗
Never a planeswalker at all. A man who made himself a god without a spark.
Emrakul, the Aeons Torn ↗
Travels between planes and is not a planeswalker. The spark is not the only way across.
So the safe reading is contextual. Someone talking about attacking a planeswalker means the card type. Someone asking who the planeswalkers are means the characters, and that list is longer and older than the cards suggest. The full roster, by story arc →
Planeswalkers in Commander
A planeswalker can only be your commander if the card says so. The line is printed right on it: "[Name] can be your commander". Without that text the card is a perfectly legal part of your 99 and nothing more. The first five that carried it were the Commander 2014 cycle, one per color.
Freyalise, Llanowar's Fury ↗
Green. Makes elves and, at her ultimate, refills your hand.
Teferi, Temporal Archmage ↗
Blue. His ultimate is the one that built a whole archetype in the command zone.
Nahiri, the Lithomancer ↗
White. Equipment, tokens, and a sword she makes herself.
Daretti, Scrap Savant ↗
Red. Rummaging and artifact recursion, in a color that normally gets neither.
Ob Nixilis of the Black Oath ↗
Black. Pay life, make demons, and pay a lot more life.
If what you actually want is a format where any planeswalker leads the deck, that format exists and it is not Commander. Oathbreaker: planeswalkers and signature spells →
Inside a normal Commander deck, planeswalkers are the cards most affected by the format's shape. Three opponents means three attackers, so a walker that would dominate a duel often does not survive a rotation of the table. That tension is the whole reason the superfriends archetype is built the way it is, around protection rather than around the walkers themselves.
FAQ
What is a planeswalker in Magic: The Gathering?
Two things that share a name. In the story, a planeswalker is a person with a planeswalker spark, which lets them travel between the worlds of the Multiverse. On a card, Planeswalker is a card type with loyalty counters and abilities you activate once a turn. The two overlap but are not the same set: plenty of story planeswalkers have never had a planeswalker card, and some of the most famous planeswalker characters are printed as creatures.
Can a planeswalker be your commander?
Only if the card says so. A planeswalker needs the line "[Name] can be your commander" printed on it to go in the command zone, and most do not have it. The first five were the Commander 2014 cycle. If you want a format built around planeswalkers as commanders, that is Oathbreaker, where any planeswalker leads the deck alongside a signature spell.
How many planeswalkers are there?
More have appeared in the story than have ever been printed as planeswalker cards, and the count moves with every set, so any specific number goes stale fast. The useful answer is that a few dozen matter to the story, most of those have cards, and the ones people mean when they say "the planeswalkers" are usually the Gatewatch and the handful of old, pre-Mending walkers still around.
What is a planeswalker spark?
The thing that makes someone a planeswalker rather than a very good mage. It is rare, it is inborn rather than learned, and it usually ignites under extreme stress, which is why so many origin stories are the worst day of someone's life. Before it ignites, a walker is an ordinary person on an ordinary world, and the five Magic Origins cards show exactly that moment.
Why are old planeswalkers so much more powerful?
Because they are from before the Mending. Pre-Mending planeswalkers were effectively immortal beings who could reshape worlds, which is why Urza and Nicol Bolas operate on a scale nobody since can match. The Mending, at the end of the Time Spiral story, turned the spark into something far smaller: post-Mending walkers are mortal, they age, and they can be killed by ordinary means. Comparing a modern walker to Urza is comparing two different kinds of thing.
Do planeswalker cards represent the character's real power?
Not reliably, and it is not meant to. A card has to be balanced against every other card in the format, so a walker's card strength tracks what makes a good Magic card rather than what they can do in the fiction. The story's most dangerous planeswalkers are not the ones with the best cards.
Story current through Lorwyn Eclipsed. Magic's story is revised as new sets are published, so anything here can be added to by a later release.
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