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- What Are Powerstone Tokens?
- How To Use Powerstone Tokens
- How Many Powerstone Token Cards Are There?
Magic: The Gathering’s infamous Brothers’ War was fought between the brothers Urza and Mishra over the Powerstones. As sources of endless energy, both brothers wanted control over the legendary Mightstone and Weakstone to ensure they could fully defeat the other, leading to a conflict that spanned decades and the entire plane of Dominaria.
While we had seen Powerstones on a few cards before it, The Brothers’ War was the first set that made Powerstones a key focal point. Though their rules can be confusing, these artifacts can be much more powerful than they first seem. Here’s everything you need to know about MTG’s Powerstone tokens.
What Are Powerstone Tokens?
Powerstone tokens are a type of artifact token, much like Treasure, Clue, Food, Gold, and Blood. Like any other kind of token, Powerstones aren’t cards that go into your deck, but are just game pieces that other cards can produce.
As a ‘predefined token’, all Powerstones do the same thing, though the actual rules text for it throws lots of players off: “Tap: add one colourless mana. This mana can’t be spent to cast a nonartifact spell”.
This doesn’t mean Powerstones can only be used to cast artifact spells. It means they can be used to do anything but cast a nonartifact spell (creature, enchantment, planeswalker, instant, or sorcery). As well as casting artifacts, Powerstone mana can be used to pay for activated abilities on any kind of card (such as equip or unearth), or pay for taxes like cumulative upkeep, ward, and commander tax.
Tapping a Powerstone token to produce mana is a mana ability, and therefore doesn’t use the stack like sacrificing a Treasure. It’s also important to remember the mana a Powerstone token produces is colourless, not generic. Colourless mana can be used to pay generic costs, but it can also be used for any colourless costs that specifically use the diamond colourless symbol, such as an activated ability on an Eldrazi Drone creature.
Powerstone tokens follow the same rules as any other kind of tokens, in that they only exist while on the battlefield. If they move to any other zone, such as the graveyard or your hand, they will immediately exile themselves on arriving there.
How To Use Powerstone Tokens
While not being able to use Powerstone tokens to cast nonartifact spells is a fairly big drawback to them, this is offset but just how easy it is to make them. Effects that make tokens are relatively cheap, such as Horned Stoneseeker costing two mana and making one as an enters-the-battlefield effect, or Gix’s Caress giving you one as an incidental bonus.
If you’re playing a deck with lots of artifacts, having ways to produce Powerstone tokens might prove to be more efficient than the ever-popular Treasure. The fact you can reuse Powerstone tokens instead of sacrificing them is also a big upside of Treasures, as you can quickly build up a huge cache without needing to be stingy with how you use them.
Powerstones also have inherent benefits thanks to being artifacts. They can contribute to affinity and improvise, and are a low-impact artifact to sacrifice to cards like Arcbound Ravager or Atog. They could even be animated with a card like Rise and Shine, turning all those easily made tokens into a terrifying attacking force.
How Many Powerstone Token Cards Are There?
For this count, we are only counting cards that can produce Powerstone tokens. This means we are not including the nontoken The Mightstone and Weakstone, nor cards with Powerstone in their name that have nothing to do with the tokens, such as Worn Powerstone and Powerstone Shard.
As of The Brothers’ War, there are 32 cards that mention Powerstone tokens. There are two green, four white, four black, five red, and six blue mono-coloured cards. In multicolour, there are four: two Rakdos (black/red), and two Gruul (red/green).
The remaining seven cards are all colourless, including one planeswalker (Dominaria United’s Karn, Living Legacy), and one land (Hall of Tagsin).
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